Watch This Startup Pitch Dystopian Sweatshop-Monitoring Software

Following intense backlash, startup accelerator Y Combinator quietly pulled a video from its X account demonstrating a new startup’s AI-powered worker monitoring software. The startup, called Optifye, says on its website that it is developing “AI line optimization for manual assembly” that can boost efficiency by up to 30%. That sounds anodyne enough until you watch the video.

“Thirty percent line efficiency? That’s bad,” the video starts, as a young man looks at a dashboard showing the supposed performance metrics of a specific worker on a manufacturing line.

The man calls his “supervisor,” who looks at a dashboard filled with red and begins haranguing the worker, whom he refers not by name but only as “Workspace 17,” over a video feed pointing down at the worker’s station. The worker pleads that he has been working all day, only for the manager to look at another dashboard and retort, “you haven’t even hit your hourly output once today, and you had 11.4% efficiency.” How that efficiency number is calculated, or what that would even mean to a line worker, is unclear.

“It’s just been a rough day,” the worker adds, only for the manager to say, “Rough day? More like a rough month.”

Y Combinator is considered the premier boot camp for new startups to get off the ground and provides accepted companies with $500,000 in initial funding.

There are many things you could say about this video. It, of course, comes off as cold and inhumane. But what is perhaps most funny is that, despite claiming it can increase assembly line efficiency, in the demo video itself, Optifye’s software has zero impact other than to harass the worker. The so-called managers do not take any tangible steps to resolve the “issue” other than yelling at the man. How exactly the software can improve efficiency other than encouraging managers to berate their reports is unclear. Optifye’s website leans on the idea that only what is measured can be improved.

sir, workspace 17 is operating at 11% efficiency and hasn’t hit it’s hourly output even once today pic.twitter.com/PTsT517khK

— Jordi Hays (@jordihays) February 25, 2025

Maybe the video garnered such a visceral reaction from people across Silicon Valley due to an underlying PTSD from the way in which software engineers are already monitored through tracking software like Jira. But the few defenders out there have pointed out that the founders of Optifye appear to be from India, and dubiously argue that work ethic in the country is much less reliable than one can expect in the United States.

Optifye is likely targeting the Indian manufacturing base, where different, and more, accountability tools may be necessary. However, the poor productivity may be due in part to a bad managerial class in the country, where a 2022 report found 45% of workers dreaded going to work due to poor treatment by a supervisor. And needless to say, video monitoring is not an accepted practice in most of the world and is never received well when it is identified.

Another argument that has been made defending the video is that critics are hypocritical to complain about “sweatshop” practices while using devices, like iPhones, made using cheap foreign labor. But it is tough to avoid these products today due to the complex global supply chain and the glacial pace at which change can be made. One can still denounce these types of surveillance practices, not endorse or support them, without being a hypocrite.

No matter where you come down on the subject, especially considering the cultural nuance, the video was quite tone-deaf considering it was published on the X account of a U.S.-based investment firm. How nobody at the company recognized what type of feedback the video would receive is damning.

Gizmodo reached out to Y Combinator for comment.