Shofo — Startup Profile

Common Crawl for Video

HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States | Founded: 2025 | Employees: 4 | Stage: Seed | Website: https://www.shofo.ai

About

Shofo is building what it describes as the world's largest indexed video library—a 'Common Crawl for video.' It continuously crawls billions of short-form clips from platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, then runs them through a pipeline that sanitizes, deduplicates, segments and labels footage with object detection, activity recognition and reasoning annotations. Shofo sells custom, ready-to-train datasets to AI labs, delivering a request like '100K hours of cooking videos where someone is holding a pan' in days rather than months.

The Take

Shofo is building the data infrastructure layer for multimodal AI—while text data has been scraped and image data is done, video training data remains a bottleneck of million-dollar contracts and months-long collection timelines. By building Common Crawl for video, Shofo aims to own the most strategically important data infrastructure layer for the next decade of AI.

Key Metrics

Total Funding: $500K (YC standard)
Last Round: Seed (YC W26)
Founded: 2025
Headcount: 4
Y Combinator Batch: Winter 2026
Videos Indexed: Billions

Funding Rounds

Round: $500K (2026-01-01) — Y Combinator

Key People

Braiden Dishman
Alexzendor Misra
Andre Braga
Bryan Hong

Key Competitors

Common Crawl —
Scale AI —

Timeline Highlights

2026-01-22: YC W26 Launch
2025-01-01: Shofo Founded
2024-01-01: Correkt Founded

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