Why a Y Combinator startup tackling AI brokers for Home windows gave up and pivoted

A startup referred to as Pig.dev that participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch was engaged on a possible revolutionary concept: AI agentic tech to regulate a Microsoft Home windows desktop.

However in Might, the founder introduced he was abandoning the tech and pivoting his firm to one thing completely completely different: Muscle Mem, a cache system for AI brokers that permits them to dump repeatable duties. 

An early-stage YC firm pivoting is nothing out of the abnormal, after all. What’s attention-grabbing — and what sparked a dynamic dialog on Thursday’s Y Combinator podcast — is that Pig was engaged on pc use, one of many massive areas that must be solved for brokers to be really helpful within the workforce. One other firm – and one other YC alum – that’s tackling that for the browser is named Browser Use.

Browser Use surged to reputation when Chinese language agentic instrument Manus, which relied on it, went viral. Browser Use basically scans the buttons and components of a web site to show them right into a extra digestible, “text-like” format for brokers, serving to the AI perceive how one can navigate and use the web site.

Throughout the Y Combinator podcast, launched Thursday, associate Tom Blomfield likened Pig because the Browser Use for Home windows desktops. The podcast featured Amjad Massad, the founder and CEO of standard vibe-coding startup Replit.

Massad, Blomfield, and YC associate David Lieb have been discussing how long-term pc use of hours, quite than minutes, was nonetheless a stumbling block for brokers. Because the context window for reasoning grows, an agent’s accuracy wavers whereas LLM prices improve.

“The recommendation I might give founders at present is taking both Browser Use or Home windows automation with Pig and making an attempt to use that into enterprise, right into a vertical trade,” Blomfield steered. 

Massad agreed, “The second that know-how works, these two corporations are going to do actually, rather well,” he stated.

However alas, Pig’s founder Erik Dunteman has already given up on the concept. In his submit in Might he defined that he at first needed to run a cloud API product (a typical manner of delivering AI tech). However his clients didn’t need that. So he tried promoting it as a dev instrument. And so they didn’t need that both. 

“What customers within the legacy app automation house truly need is at hand me cash, and obtain an automation,” he stated. Basically, they needed to rent a marketing consultant to make their desired Home windows robotic course of automations work for them. 

However Dunteman didn’t need to do one-off tasks. He needed to construct improvement instruments. So he deserted Pig and began engaged on an AI caching instrument. Dunteman declined additional remark about his choice to ditch Home windows automation, though the Pig.dev web site and Github paperwork stay accessible. 

Nevertheless, Dunteman did inform us his new instrument was impressed by the pc use downside. It’s chipping away at it from one other angle. The concept is to permit the agent to dump repeated duties to the Muscle Mem service, so the agent can deal with reasoning for brand new issues and edge instances.

“What we’re engaged on now’s straight impressed by and relevant to pc use, simply on the developer tooling layer. I stay very optimistic for pc use as ‘the final mile’,” he informed TechCrunch.

That’s to not say that nobody is engaged on Home windows automation.

In all probability the corporate farthest alongside on that’s Microsoft itself. As an illustration, in April Microsoft introduced it added pc use tech to Copilot Studio for graphical consumer interfaces like Home windows. That tech was launched as a analysis preview.  Plus, earlier this month, Microsoft introduced an agentic instrument in Home windows 11 that helps finish customers handle settings.