Fridayy AI founder says first product was overtaken

Khyati Thakur, co-founder of Fridayy AI, said in a LinkedIn post that she left her job in the tech industry to start building her own company, only to watch the initial product become irrelevant as generative AI tools evolved. She said it took seven months to find a new direction and another nine months to build something useful.

Fridayy AI now helps small businesses create online stores, product catalogs and marketing content, while also helping them sell across marketplaces. Thakur said the startup’s runway is thinner than she would like and that B2B sales cycles are running three to four months, which raises the financing burden for an early-stage company still working to prove product-market fit.

The episode lands as investor appetite for AI remains strong even as competition intensifies. Recent funding activity has pushed valuations higher across the sector, including a $5 billion round for Wonderful and a $48 billion valuation for Cognition, the developer of the Devin programming assistant, underscoring how much capital is still chasing perceived AI winners.

For investors, the lesson is that AI can create opportunity and destroy it at the same time. Startups that sit too close to functions now handled by large language models face rapid obsolescence, while companies that integrate AI into workflows with clearer revenue paths may still command premium funding.

Thakur’s account also points to a broader reset in startup strategy: speed to market is no longer enough if a product can be replicated by incumbents or absorbed by platform AI. The next test for Fridayy AI, and for similar startups, will be whether they can hold customers long enough to justify more capital and convert interest into recurring revenue.