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Congratulations on being a part of the Momentum 10, the elite top 10 startups who demonstrated truly exceptional drive and progress in the year 2024. The Momentum 10 Interview Series will delve into the unique journeys and powerful foundations propelling your startups to the top in the 2024 Startups of The Year campaign!
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:::tip Share the link to your City Award/Industry Award here
https://hackernoon.com/startups/industry/ai-wrappers
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https://hackernoon.com/startups/north-america/north-america-portland-or-usa
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How did Hedy AI evolve?After 20 years of running a digital product agency and helping countless SaaS companies build their products, I noticed a fascinating opportunity at the intersection of real-time speech recognition and frontier AI models. The technology had finally evolved to a point where we could provide genuinely intelligent, real-time conversation support right on your phone.
\ Hedy AI is your AI-powered conversation coach that helps you become the brightest person in the room. Whether you're in a business meeting, medical appointment, or interview, Hedy analyzes your conversation in real-time and provides intelligent suggestions, answers, and insights through a discrete interface. It's like having a brilliant advisor by your side, helping you contribute more effectively and stay on top of every conversation.
\ The opportunity was so compelling that I sold my share of the agency to focus entirely on building Hedy. Six months later, we have over 10,000 users with more than 6,000 monthly active users, the majority of whom are paying customers.
How is Hedy transforming the way professionals communicate?Hedy is transforming how people communicate by democratizing access to real-time AI support across multiple languages. In a world where effective communication is key to professional success, we ensure everyone can contribute their best ideas and understand complex conversations, regardless of their background, native language, or level of subject expertise.
\ What makes this approach powerful is how it works in the moment – not just after your conversation is over. Our speech recognition runs on-device, ensuring conversations remain private while still delivering powerful insights when they matter most.
\ Our ultimate goal is to make every conversation an opportunity for growth and to level the playing field in professional settings. Whether helping a non-native speaker contribute confidently in meetings, enabling a patient to better understand their medical options, or assisting a journalist in conducting more insightful interviews, Hedy amplifies human potential in the moments that matter.
What sets Hedy apart from other AI assistants in the market?Three key factors set Hedy apart in the rapidly evolving AI landscape:
\ First, our obsessive focus on the quality of AI responses. While we use leading language models as our foundation, our sophisticated prompt engineering system with thousands of permutations elevates these responses to a new level. Our users consistently tell us that Hedy's suggestions are significantly better than other AI tools they use – even better than direct access to the same underlying models.
\ Second, our specialized approach to different conversation contexts. Instead of creating a general-purpose tool, we've developed purpose-built modes tailored to specific professional scenarios – business meetings, journalism, healthcare, coaching, and more. Each mode is fine-tuned to provide uniquely valuable insights for that specific situation.
\ Third, our deep user collaboration. We've made it incredibly easy for users to provide feedback and request features, and we implement their suggestions quickly when they align with our vision. This has created a passionate community of users who describe Hedy as "life-changing" for their professional performance.
What was the most surprising discovery in your journey to product-market fit?The most illuminating moment in our journey came about three months after launch. We had built Hedy with the assumption that students would be our primary users – who wouldn't want AI support during lectures? But our analytics and user feedback told a different story.
\ We were seeing passionate adoption from business professionals, journalists, coaches, and other knowledge workers who found immense value in having AI support during their high-stakes conversations. Meanwhile, students weren't engaging with the product at the level we had anticipated.
\ This insight led us to pivot our focus toward professional use cases. We developed specialized modes for different contexts and refined our features to better serve these users. This pivot accelerated our growth and significantly improved our retention metrics.
\ One particularly striking example was a journalist who began using Hedy to moderate panel discussions. This use case inspired our journalism mode, which helps with interview questions and real-time fact-checking. Similarly, we discovered users bringing Hedy to medical appointments, which led to our patient support mode that helps decode medical terminology and remember important questions.
\ The key lesson was the importance of following the actual evidence of user behavior rather than our initial assumptions. By listening to our users and adapting quickly, we found our true product-market fit and a passionate user base that continues to drive our evolution.
How have your power users shaped Hedy's evolution?The most valuable lesson we've learned is the incredible impact of making users partners in the development process. When users see that their feedback directly influences the product, it deepens their engagement and loyalty, creating evangelists rather than just customers.
\ We've seen this play out dramatically with our power users – professionals who use Hedy daily and have incorporated it deeply into their workflow. They consistently tell us how Hedy has transformed their professional performance, helping them contribute more confidently in meetings, prepare more effectively for important conversations, and capture crucial information without losing focus on the interaction itself.
\ These power users have become our most important product development partners, suggesting features and refinements that have shaped Hedy in ways we couldn't have anticipated. Their enthusiastic adoption has also been our most effective growth driver, as they frequently demonstrate Hedy to colleagues who inevitably ask, "What are you using? I need that too!"
How do you see the conversation intelligence landscape evolving?The conversation intelligence landscape is at an inflection point, moving from passive recording and transcription tools to active, real-time AI assistance. We believe we'll see AI becoming an increasingly seamless participant in professional conversations – not to replace human participation, but to enhance it.
\ Several key trends will shape this evolution:
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\ Hedy is positioned at the forefront of these trends with our focus on real-time, in-the-moment assistance rather than just post-conversation analysis. We're already developing capabilities to understand visual content being shared during meetings and to provide more contextually aware assistance based on a user's calendar, documents, and professional role.
What are your ambitions for Hedy in 2025?In the coming year, we're focused on three ambitious initiatives:
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\ These initiatives all serve our fundamental mission: helping everyone perform at their best in professional conversations by providing intelligent, real-time support when it matters most.
How has the rapid evolution of AI in 2024 affected your approach?The extraordinary pace of AI advancement in 2024 has both challenged and energized us. Each leap in underlying model capabilities enables us to deliver increasingly valuable insights to our users, but requires continual adaptation of our systems.
\ What's fascinating is how the broader economic uncertainty has actually highlighted the value of tools like Hedy. As professionals face greater pressure to perform at their best with fewer resources, AI-powered productivity tools have become more essential than ever.
\ We've also observed a significant shift in the market from general-purpose AI tools toward specialized applications designed for specific needs. Users increasingly recognize that while general AI assistants are impressive, purpose-built solutions like Hedy deliver substantially more value for specific use cases.
\ This trend toward specialization plays directly to our strengths. Rather than trying to be everything for everyone, we've focused intensely on one mission: making people more effective in their real-time conversations. This focused approach has allowed us to develop deeper expertise and deliver more tailored solutions than would be possible with a broader scope.
What perspective guides your development philosophy in this AI revolution?The boundaries between human and AI capabilities are being redrawn daily, but one truth remains constant: the most successful applications of AI are those that enhance human capabilities rather than attempting to replace them.
\ For Hedy, this means we're not trying to make human participants in conversations obsolete – we're helping them be more present, more prepared, and more effective. Our technology is designed to amplify what humans do best: connecting authentically, thinking creatively, and bringing emotional intelligence to interactions.
\ As AI capabilities continue to advance, this human-centered approach becomes even more important. The question isn't "What can AI do instead of humans?" but rather "How can AI help humans do what they already do, but better?"
\ By keeping this perspective at the center of our work, we're building technology that serves genuine human needs rather than technology for its own sake. And ultimately, that human-centered approach is what will determine which AI applications deliver lasting value in this new era.
We would love your feedback on HackerNoon as a tech publication! How has your experience been with us?What sets HackerNoon apart from other tech publications is your focus on the craft of building technology – the nuts and bolts of making things work – rather than just funding announcements and industry gossip. This dedication to substance over spectacle resonates deeply with our approach at Hedy, where we're focused on creating genuine value through technological innovation.
\ The Startups of the Year program specifically deserves recognition for spotlighting companies based on innovation and impact rather than just funding rounds or growth metrics. This approach helps surface truly groundbreaking work that might otherwise be overlooked in the noise of the tech industry.
Any words of wisdom you’d like to share with us?We stand at a profound inflection point in human history where the relationship between technology and humanity is being fundamentally reimagined. The most valuable AI systems won't be those that simply automate what humans do, but those that create entirely new capabilities through the union of human and machine intelligence.
\ At Hedy, we've discovered something remarkable: when AI enters the conversation not as a replacement but as an enhancer of human capability, it creates a third space – neither purely human nor purely artificial – where new forms of intelligence emerge. Like the Socratic dialogues that elevated human thought through guided questioning, AI can serve as both mirror and catalyst for human excellence.
\ The future we're building toward isn't one where AI replaces the human voice in the room, but rather one where it helps that voice find its clearest, most insightful expression. True AI-human symbiosis isn't achieved through larger models or more compute, but through deeply understanding the contexts where human intelligence naturally flourishes and designing AI to amplify those moments.
\ Perhaps the most profound insight from our journey is that the most powerful application of AI may not be in replacing human thought, but in helping humans think better together. In a world increasingly divided by information bubbles and polarization, tools that enhance our collective intelligence and improve communication may be the most revolutionary of all.
\ The coming decade will reveal whether AI becomes a technology that isolates us further or one that helps bridge our divides. At Hedy, we're committed to the latter vision – creating technology that doesn't just make us smarter, but helps us be more present, more effective, and more connected in our most important conversations.
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About HackerNoon’s Startups of The YearStartups of The Year 2024 is HackerNoon’s flagship community-driven event celebrating startups, technology, and the spirit of innovation. Currently in its third iteration, the prestigious Internet award recognizes and celebrates tech startups of all shapes and sizes. This year, over 150,000 entities across 4200+ cities, 6 continents, and 100+ industries will participate in a bid to be crowned the best startup of the year! Millions of votes have been cast over the past few years, and many stories have been written about these daring and rising startups.
\ The winners will get a free interview on HackerNoon and an Evergreen Tech Company Newspage. \n
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