20-Year-Old Stanford Dropout Raises $5M for AI Startup Revolutionizing Product Analytics with Real User Session Replays
At 6 a.m., Amogh Chaturvedi, a 20-year-old entrepreneur, is alert and determined despite a recent scare involving a family member and an electric scooter. He has rescheduled our meeting due to fatigue, but his passion for innovation shines through as he explains the journey of him and his co-founders.
Having sold one startup at the age of 19, secured a spot in Y Combinator, and raised $5 million for their current venture, Human Behavior, Chaturvedi and his team are making waves in the tech industry. Launched just a few months ago, Human Behavior aims to revolutionize product analytics with its vision AI technology.
The startup asserts that its AI can provide companies with genuine insights into how people use their products, answering questions about conversion rates or churn without requiring hours of code instrumentation. Instead of relying on manually tagged events or clickstream data, Human Behavior claims its AI watches real user session replays and generates actionable insights.
In a record-breaking two days, the four-month-old YC startup closed its $5 million seed round with backing from General Catalyst, Paul Graham, Vercel Ventures, and Y Combinator. The team could have opted for higher valuations in financial engineering deals but chose not to.
Chaturvedi, along with Skyler Ji and Chirag Kawediya (both 22), met at a hacker house organized by Chaturvedi in 2023 as a means to live and work with friends post-freshman year at Stanford. Their first startup, Dough, was an e-commerce accounting tool they bootstrapped.
Despite initial skepticism from YC about Dough’s market potential, the team was admitted into the accelerator’s spring batch this year on the condition that they would eventually pivot. Following customer feedback, they did so immediately, focusing on providing analytics powered by behavioral data rather than just accounting reports.
With this new direction, the team sold Dough for six figures to Employer.com and dedicated themselves entirely to Human Behavior. According to Kawediya, traditional analytics often require engineers to set up event trackers for every button and click, consuming hours or even weeks of engineering time. For fast-moving startups, this is less than ideal.
Session replays aren’t novel, but Human Behaviour is leveraging advancements in computer vision to parse them at scale and summarize thousands of hours of footage. The founders question why hours would be spent writing code to track clicks when they can simply watch the video.
Currently, Human Behavior’s customers—mainly fast-moving Series A and B startups—receive daily summary emails highlighting which features were used, which bugs appeared, and which users churned. Since launching four months ago, the company has seen a 20% month-over-month growth rate.
The founders refer to session replays as an “untapped goldmine.” At present, Human Behavior helps teams understand users and squash bugs. In the future, the same dataset could power automated QA and embedded IT support. Their ambition is for Human Behavior to become the Datadog of session replay, spinning out numerous products from the same core data.
The founders believe that building with new technology from the ground up will enable them to compete with established players like Mixpanel and PostHog. “For some of these companies, it might be challenging to replicate what we have because their architecture can’t support the shift without starting over,” remarked Chaturvedi.
