CloudCruise (YC W24)

Today’s Vendor Spotlight is… CloudCruise (YC W24) What CloudCruise does (Elion’s take): - Offers an automation platform that creates APIs for automating healthcare tasks typically done through a user interface, such as filling out forms, data extraction, and document downloads.  - Leverages AI to maintain and monitor workflows, providing automatic error correction and alerting. - Supports deployment on virtual machines or local environments. Founded: 2024 Total Funding: $1M Leadership: Adrian Ziegler, Felix Eckert Core Differentiators (according to CloudCruise (YC W24)): - CloudCruise is an API to automate operations in payor web portals like IV & claim status updates.  - It enables RCM teams to save cost on operations teams, and scale flexibly with demand.  - CloudCruise is simple to integrate with, with a single, customizable schema across hundreds of payors. Learn more about CloudCruise at https://lnkd.in/ejxNRhKx (And if you’re a healthcare vendor and want to get featured, claim and update your Elion profile today.)

Browser automations are notoriously hard to maintain. Are you fighting fires all the time? Build on top of CloudCruise! Our goal is to make browser automations as reliable as calling an API. Here's our first step: The "suggest fix" feature. In case one of your automations is broken, simply navigate to our dashboard to get an error analysis and a suggestion for the fix. If that looks alright you can directly deploy to production! LLMs are a key enabler here: We use them for multi-modal error analysis and code generation of the fix. And yes we had too much fun with video editing for this one 😅

Traditional APIs aren't cutting it for automating knowledge work in software Here's why: 1) APIs are designed for batch data ops 2) They gradually evolved to record-level manipulation 3) They're trapped in a REST/database schema mindset The problem? They’re not built to trigger complex, human-like workflows in software. Why is this happening? SaaS companies prioritize human users, making APIs an afterthought. This results in a consistent feature gap between UI capabilities and API functionality. The Result: Companies are hitting a wall when trying to automate human work in software. At CloudCruise, we're bridging this gap by: 1) Making actions in web-based software programmable 2) Allowing customers to define workflows as a human would do 3) Enabling API-triggered execution on our hosted browsers Think: AI hands that can navigate any UI, triggered by simple API calls.

AI “hands” are the missing link for AI workers During the last YC batch, we met 100s of other AI startups. Many of these companies market themselves as autonomous AI workers, a drop-in replacement for a human employee. These companies need to build two things: 1. A reasoning engine that can take decisions like the human would (e.g. processing text, booking appointments). 2. A way to interact with all the software tools that the human would. It’s counterintuitive, but we found that AI companies often struggle more with the latter than the former. A lot of the software that’s used for knowledge work don’t have APIs that are complete enough for an AI agent to operate it autonomously. At the same time, interfacing via the UI requires a whole separate stack and comes with lots of maintenance worries. That’s why many of our customers are also AI companies. We’re building them the hands that their AI brains can use to operate software without APIs.

Describe a workflow, and we generate it for you! 🤖 We are dedicated to building a capable and modern browser automation tool, going beyond simple, linear click and input steps, but also supporting nested loops and conditions. For our recently released drag and drop workflow builder we received the feedback that it can be overwhelming to get started. As our first step to make building workflows easier, we just published our description to workflow feature. Describe what you want to do, wait for the generation to finish, and execute it as many times as you want.

Feature highlights that we released this week on CloudCruise! *New actions*:  - Extract List is a new option in Extract actions, which lets you extract long lists of data from the page. This builds on our 'List Grabber' feature and increases the accuracy and speed of extracting long lists of information from a page. Demo below to see it in action :) - Delay is a new action type, for when parts of the page load slowly. *New models*: - Extract actions now support GPT Vision, to extract information not only from text but even images. *15+ UI Improvements* focused on simplifying the workflow creation. Stay tuned for more progress here to make automations easy & fast to create. Let us know which features you'd like to see next week!

Super excited to open access to our no-code web automation platform. It’s free to test out up to 200 browser actions a month. We think web agents are the future but zero-shot planning is still too unreliable for business applications. CloudCruise lets you build a graph of AI-actions the agent needs to take in the browser. That gives you more control and increases the reliability. Our early users use us to automate tasks like: 1. Find the contact information of fire department chiefs in the US 2. Check the HR information of all employees registered on Gusto 3. Automate background research on people they have meetings with in Google Calendar We’d love your feedback. You can find the link to the extension in the comments 🙂

Looking back on some of our highlights from Y Combinator W’24. The magic first moment we watched CloudCruise (YC W24) take over and start controlling our browser with AI. Presenting live in front of Garry Tan, who titled it “the mother of all demos”, despite (or maybe because of) the creative detours of our 3-week old product. Getting our first customers and the jaw-dropping experience when one of them told me, 'I've never been more happy to pay an invoice - this has saved me so much time'. Its been a transformational experience both for me and for the company. The learning curve has been equally steep and rewarding. Thank you YC!