neoncoral

What do they actually do

neoncoral is an early Y Combinator S25 startup led by solo founder Thomas Liao (ex-Scale AI; previously worked on evaluation and post‑training at Anthropic). Public listings indicate the company is in stealth with no broadly available consumer app, and third‑party profiles describe a focus on AI video generation YC company page, PitchBook.

External writeups describe the concept as a consumer social product that delivers hyper‑personalized, AI‑generated short videos. In practice, that suggests they are building the machine‑learning and product pieces for an AI‑first feed and likely validating quality, safety, and personalization before any wide launch Alumni Ventures overview.

Who are their target customer(s)

• Mobile short‑video consumers: Feeds can feel repetitive or creator‑dependent; they want fresh clips tailored to their tastes and moments rather than endless, generic scrolling. AV
• Casual creators: Posting consistently is hard without editing skills or time; producing short videos is slow and often requires tools or paid help. PitchBook
• Small brands and direct‑response advertisers: They need many low‑cost short‑video variations to test and target audiences, but current production is expensive and slow.
• Early beta testers / power users: They need controls to steer personalization and easy ways to flag low‑quality or unsafe outputs while models are still being tuned. YC

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Handpick 10 engaged testers from the founder’s YC/network and creator communities; offer usage credits or a small stipend for structured feedback, with 1:1 onboarding to surface quality, safety, and UX issues early.
• First 50: Run closed cohorts combining referral‑seeded creators and targeted outreach to small brands for low‑cost pilots of generated video variations; use templated onboarding, in‑app feedback, and weekly check‑ins to measure engagement and moderation gaps.
• First 100: Open broader invites and run limited paid pilots in two verticals (casual creators and small brands/DR advertisers), recruiting via creator‑tool communities and YC/demo‑day channels; instrument funnels and A/B test simple pricing/credit offers before any public launch.

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

The closest direct TAM is short‑form video ad spend, projected at about US$115.8B in 2025; the broader social‑media ad market is about US$276B, indicating the upper bound for attention‑driven social apps Statista: Digital Video, Statista: Social. Adjacent revenue from AI‑generated content tools sits in the low‑to‑mid tens of billions today Grand View, GMI.

Bottom-up calculation:

Example sizing: if neoncoral reaches 10M MAU with US$15/year ad ARPU, that’s ~US$150M annual revenue potential; or if 50k SMBs buy AI‑video variants at ~US$1,000/year, that’s ~US$50M—scaling to 500k SMBs implies ~US$500M.

Assumptions:

• Ad ARPU comparable to early‑stage short‑video apps after initial scale.
• A subset of SMB advertisers adopt AI‑video variation tools at ~US$80–120/month.
• User growth and advertiser adoption concentrate in a few geographies initially.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• TikTok: The leading short‑video app with a highly personalized For You feed; it increasingly offers controls around AI‑generated content, making it a direct attention and feature competitor TikTok help, TechCrunch.
• Instagram / Meta (Reels & Vibes): Instagram Reels already bundles creation, distribution, and ads; Meta has also tested an AI‑first short‑video feed (Vibes), leveraging massive cross‑app reach Reels, TechCrunch.
• Runway: An end‑to‑end AI video creation suite (text‑to‑video, editing, VFX). It’s a go‑to toolset for creators and small studios who might otherwise rely on neoncoral for generation Runway.
• Synthesia: AI video platform for fast, low‑cost, localized and avatar‑led videos used by marketing and enterprise teams—an alternative for brands seeking scalable video variants Synthesia.
• Pika Labs: Consumer‑friendly text‑to‑video focused on short, shareable clips; overlaps with the promise of quick AI video creation for social Pika, Tom’s Guide.