Y Combinator has welcomed Ocular AI, a startup based in Silicon Valley, into its Winter 2024 batch. The company has developed a platform that enables users to search, visualize, and interact with their work and engineering tools and data through a single unified platform.
Launched in 2024, Ocular AI is the brainchild of Micheal Moyo, serving as CEO, who brings his experience from Microsoft, and Louis Murerwa, a software engineer with a background at Google hailing from Zimbabwe.
Murerwa, in particular, has noted the significance of being among the first Zimbabweans to be accepted into Y Combinator, underscoring the milestone for representation. Despite the achievement, the specific market focus of Ocular AI remains to be clarified.
Ocular AI emerged from a vision to transform the way teams interact with their work, engineering tools, and data. Founders Micheal Moyo and Louis Murerwa, who have rich backgrounds from their tenure at Microsoft and Google, identified the challenges of managing and navigating data across various SaaS tools in both general and engineering-specific contexts.
Their journey began to take shape around 2017/2018 when Moyo and Murerwa arrived in Boston on full scholarships to attend Dartmouth College. It was here that Moyo explored Biomedical & Computer Engineering, while Murerwa focused on Computer Science, marking the start of their collaborative path.
Moyo, leveraging his internships at Novartis and Microsoft, secured a role as a software engineer at Microsoft upon graduation. His drive for social impact led him to establish The MentalLiberty Foundation in Lusaka, which, with over $15,000 in secured grants, aims to address mental healthcare disparities in Zambia. Additionally, Moyo founded two startups: Ipahive, a Zambian fintech that provides SME financing solutions and empowers African businesses through APIs; and Qurre Health, further showcasing his entrepreneurial spirit.
Reflecting on their experiences, Moyo reiterated the motivation behind Ocular AI, “Having navigated the complexities of information access, data, and tool discovery across multiple SaaS platforms in our previous roles, Louis and I saw a clear need for a solution. This insight was pivotal in founding Ocular AI.”
Louis Murerwa’s tenure as an intern at Google twice offered him a deep dive into the complexities of large-scale software development. Following these internships, he secured a full-time position as a software engineer, a role he held for two years. In January 2024, Murerwa embarked on a significant career move, leaving his position in New York at Google for San Francisco to co-found Ocular AI.
In a LinkedIn post, Murerwa shared insights into the inspiration behind Ocular AI, “My co-founder and I were motivated to start Ocular AI due to the challenges we faced at Google and Microsoft in understanding the dynamics of what was happening within teams when it was happening, and its impact on other teams. This experience highlighted the need for a solution that could revolutionize team interactions with their work, engineering tools, and data.”
Although Ocular AI is in the early stages of its journey, its mission is to transform workplace efficiency by simplifying access to information and streamlining task automation. The platform aims to integrate a company’s array of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, cloud infrastructure, tools, dashboards, and data into a singular, cohesive platform. By leveraging AI, Ocular AI introduces “generative knowledge discovery,” a feature designed to empower users to effortlessly search, visualize, and derive insights from their data, thereby enhancing productivity and decision-making processes.
