Other
May 2026Co-founder Bryan Hong is listed as having departed in May 2026, indicating a leadership change.
SourceCompany research
Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals
Updated Jul 30, 2026
Overview
Shofo is a Y Combinator-backed, founder-led company building a live index of social/video content and using that index to produce custom, cleaned, segmented, labeled datasets and API access for AI teams, especially computer-vision labs. Public funding sources disagree on round labeling and totals; the company’s LinkedIn page reports $625K across two rounds.
Primary product
Custom, cleaned, segmented, labeled video datasets plus social-media data APIs for AI teams
Founded
2025
Headquarters
San Francisco, California, United States
Team size
1-10
Industry
Data Infrastructure and Analytics
Sub-industry
Social media video data infrastructure for AI training
Offices
San Francisco, California 94124 (HQ)
San Francisco, California, United States
Business model
Pay-as-you-go API access
Custom dataset generation
Funding
Stage
pre-seed
Total raised
$625K
Latest round
Pre Seed Round · Mar 2026
Latest amount
$500K
Mar 2026 · Y Combinator
Jan 2026
People & investors
Leadership
Co-Founder & CEO
Co-Founder & CTO
Founder & Head of AI
Founders
Co-Founder (departed May 2026)
Work & culture
Founder-led, scrappy, research-heavy, and fast-moving; public posts emphasize building quickly, shipping live products, and working closely with AI labs on custom data needs.
Product & market
Pricing
Usage-based / pay-as-you-go per record, with add-on charges for transcripts and comments; custom dataset requests are handled through direct outreach.
Differentiators
- —Claims to index billions of videos
- —Custom dataset delivery in days rather than months
- —Cleaned, segmented, and labeled video data
- —Combines public web video and private aggregated sources
- —200+ fields per video / rich metadata
- —Direct API access across multiple social platforms
Technology
RESTful APIs
SQL query interface
API key / Bearer-token authentication
Interactive API playground
Human-in-the-loop labeling pipeline
Semantic search / searchable indexes
Hugging Face datasets
Multi-platform social data ingestion
Customers
AI labs
computer vision teams
behavioral researchers
universities
unicorn startups
builders and businesses needing social data
Competitors
Crimson Hexagon
Unmetric
Topsy
Scale & contact
Estimated revenue
$538K-$1.4M
Estimated monthly visits
4.1K
Traffic estimate as of Jul 2026
Signals & risks
Latest news
StartupHub.ai · May 2026
A third-party writeup described Shofo as a large-scale indexed video library for AI labs and discussed the company’s dataset/sample strategy and monetization assumptions.
LinkedIn · Jan 2026
Y Combinator highlighted Shofo’s pitch as a Common Crawl for videos, focused on collecting, segmenting, sanitizing, and labeling large video datasets for AI labs.
LinkedIn · Jan 2026
Braiden Dishman announced that Shofo had been accepted into Y Combinator with the W26 batch.
LinkedIn · Dec 2025
The company announced direct API access to live social-media data across TikTok, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn, with 200+ fields and starting pricing around $0.0001 per post.
LinkedIn · May 2025
Braiden Dishman announced Shofo’s live launch, saying the team had been building a semantic social search product that started with Reddit and would expand to more platforms.
Jobs and careers at Shofo
0 jobs at Shofo
No open positions
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