Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI

Founder @ Innovating with AI for WASH. Cutting cost and complexity to monetizing safe water at scale.

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

Just got accepted into Hyperagent’s Founding 500 — $20k in AI inference credits to help build https://t.co/DL58Tflv1Y.
The goal: plain-English AI that helps developers carve through the cost and complexity of monetizing safe water projects. We’re scaling fast, to help corporates address sustainability goals and shared water challenges.
Excited for the journey. If you’re in water, carbon, or sustainability, I’d love your thoughts.
#WaterTech #WASH #AI

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@hyperagentapp I won! Check out my site at https://t.co/Oc6QiBKMcc .

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

Just applied to Hyperagent’s Founding 500 — the $10M program for agent-first founders.
https://t.co/DL58Tflv1Y: plain-English AI crew that helps NGOs & developers monetize safe water projects by stacking carbon + VWBA + WASH Benefits.
One project description → eligibility mapping → stacked revenue estimates → technical packages.
Data centers & industry are crushing water resources. We’re building the flywheel that turns safe water into real revenue so we can scale faster than philanthropy alone ever could.
If you’re in WASH, carbon, or water stewardship — comment or DM. Early beta testers & partners wanted.
#WaterTech #WASH #CarbonCredits #AgenticAI

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

New founder here. Is there a better way to do this?

Goal: Preparing an MVP for stabilization by real software engineers:

1. Draft .MD with platform strategy and goals and workflows.
2. Give it to Replit,
3. Use Grok/Claude to draft prompts to Replit to iterate (follow software 3.0 as much as possible)
4. Use Claude Code in powershell to debug and replace files in Replit

Would love tips for low/no- tech founders.
https://t.co/xglAYgcDj5
#buildinpublic

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@DanielSmidstrup https://t.co/oSgJTnQCGp

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@LoicBerthelot Hi! Yeas building in public

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@Adidotdev https://t.co/Ef8O9IyqYW

[Starter Story @starter_story]

My salary as an employee:

Year 1: $54K (Big 4 accounting)
Year 2: $60K (worked at startup)
Year 3: $80K (startup)
Year 4: $105K (software engineer)
Year 5: $115K (software engineer)

Then, I quit my job to build Starter Story.

My revenue as an owner:
Year 1: $0
Year 2: $12K
Year 3: $67K
Year 4: $186K
Year 5: $497K
Year 6: $752K
Year 7: $1.6M
Year 8: Sold the company.

Bet on yourself.

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@VitalRenaiss Not when the baby’s sleeping… or there’s 4 ft of snow, or you’re waiting for work to call…

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@aiedge_ If you’re on Route 3, I’d love to connect

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@WallStreetApes 👉https://t.co/VEJs1bmkXZ

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.

I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.

My takeaways:

1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.

2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.

3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)

4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.

5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million

6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.

7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.

8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.

9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.

10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.

11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.

12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.

13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.

14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....

15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.

16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.

17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.

It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.

But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.

We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.

What an incredible time to be building.

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@elgermerlo https://t.co/VEJs1bmkXZ would love tips and support

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@JonBuildsHQ Safe water —> https://t.co/Oc6QiBKMcc

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@theVincentQ Also a new founder.

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@Aiswarya_Sankar But it gets shipped, amirite? That’s the democratization of it. So you’re saying there’s a chance.

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@CNviolations TO MORDOR!!!

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@adahstwt .ai

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@asaio87 It even has a little stick figure running game if you type “Wellington run” in the chat. So I’m essentially the next big thing.

[Amy Nyhof | WaterBots.AI @waterbotsAI]

@asaio87 I made https://t.co/Zk3ulRJxVD by vibe coding, spun it off into a bigger revenue wheel project, have consultants to back it, and applied to an accelerator program to fully stabilize it with grant funding. Haters.