Helium is building self-improving software — AI that continuously experiments on key moments in the user funnel to boost revenue. Our first customer, a social app with 20M MAU, uses Helium to test new in-app paywalls to get more users to subscribe. 

Zach previously made $100M+ in growth experiments at Uber, Shishir led the first LLM features for Alexa, and Anish worked at Meta building ML to automatically experiment on ads, increasing Instagram ads conversion by 10%. 
Self Improving Software
Title: Helium: Self Improving Software | Y Combinator

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### Self Improving Software

Helium is building self-improving software — AI that continuously experiments on key moments in the user funnel to boost revenue. Our first customer, a social app with 20M MAU, uses Helium to test new in-app paywalls to get more users to subscribe. Zach previously made $100M+ in growth experiments at Uber, Shishir led the first LLM features for Alexa, and Anish worked at Meta building ML to automatically experiment on ads, increasing Instagram ads conversion by 10%.



Helium

Founded:2024

Team Size:3

Location:San Francisco

### Active Founders

### Zach Witzel, Founder

Made \>$100M in growth experiments at Uber. Now building tryhelium.com to personalize upsell flows. We help consumer subscription companies double their conversion.



### Anish Doshi, Founder

Cofounder @ Helium. Previously ML @ Meta, Apple, Alteryx, Berkeley. Into 🥊 ,♟️, and 🎹



### Shishir Jakati, Founder

Cofounder and CTO of Helium. Before Helium I worked at Amazon Alexa building predictive models to determine the quality of content and utterances spoken by Alexa, reducing cloud costs 10x. I love ML, LLMs, and MLOps - definitely reach out if I can help!



### Company Launches

[### 🎈 Helium: Improve your paywall at the speed of thought](



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**TLDR**
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[Helium]( lets mobile companies launch and personalize upsell flows without code. We previously made \>$100M in conversion experiments at Uber and Meta and are building the tools we wish we had.

With Helium, growth teams can add new paywalls or experiments in minutes! Helium also helps drive conversion with SmartSelect, our AI that finds the best paywall experience for each user.

If you know anyone working on consumer apps, [give us a shout]( If we can’t help them earn 5x our price in new revenue, we’ll give their money back.

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**👋 We’re Helium!**
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We’re building tools to experiment on in-app paywalls without code.

*   [Zach]( (CEO) worked on in-app upsell at Uber. He ran dozens of conversion experiments that made \>$100M.
*   [Anish]( (CPO) worked in ad optimization at Meta. He drove 10% in Instagram ad conversion through AI to personalize ads to users.
*   [Shishir]( (CTO) worked on Alexa AI, using ML / LLMs to make Alexa smarter for millions of users.



Early on we realized how dumb it was that Zach spent years doing crude in-product personalization at Uber, while Anish built tools to automatically personalize tens of thousands of ad variants.

While ads have come a long way, software upsell is stuck in the past — it’s too slow, too manual, and too one-size-fits-all.

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**👴📟📼 Mobile Paywalls are stuck in 2008**
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In 2023, mobile in-app purchases crossed $150 billion, with $45B from subscriptions.

Mobile companies we talked to, from Headspace to Hinge, spend ~1/3 of eng bandwidth on upsell, but optimizing in-app conversion is still highly manual. Teams spend months experimenting with paywall entry points, messaging, UX, targeting, premium features, and discounting.

The problem is that…

*   **⏰ Each change takes weeks**: Because paywalls live in native mobile code, making a change takes at least 6 weeks to code, test, launch to the app store, get it approved, and then get installs of the new version.
*   **🫨 Upsell becomes a maze**: There are typically dozens of entry points (onboarding, profile, feed, modals, etc) leading to different experiences. One prospect had 87 separate paywalls, so rolling out even small changes turns into weeks of manual work.
*   **🆘 Personalization is hard:** Personalization drives conversion (1 customer saw +40% conversion personalizing copy) but takes a ton of work. Most companies struggled with identifying key segments, designing custom experiences, implementing new logic in code, and dealing with many-variant experiments.

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**🎈 Introducing, Helium**
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Helium helps consumer app companies launch, manage, and improve paywalls without code.

It allows growth or product teams to run tests on their own (and stop bothering engineers) as they work on upsell conversion.

*   **🖥️ Visual editor**: Add new paywalls or multi-step flows all from the editor. All you need is one line of code to wire up your upsell flow with our SDK (React Native, Swift, & Android)
*   **🔬 Experimentation**: Add test copy, imagery, UI, or more, and run an experiment in 3 clicks. Results populate in your analytics tool
*   **👥 Personalization made simple**: Add as many variants as you want, and our AI algorithm (Smart Select) will find the right one for each user to drive conversion. Solve problems like…
    *   What CTA works best in each language?
    *   What feature do we emphasize for each customer segment?
    *   Which paywall do we show on onboarding vs app open?

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**😍 Ask: Intros to consumer mobile folks 😍**
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If you know anyone who leads growth or monetization at a consumer mobile company, we’d love to talk to them to see if we can help!

We’re doing a design partner deal for the next few months…

*   White glove support for your implementation (or we can integrate Helium into your codebase directly for you)
*   We’ll run 3-5 experiments of your choice on your behalf
*   If we don’t make you 5x times our price in additional revenue, we’ll offer you a refund

**If you know anyone who may be a fit, you can email us at** [**founders@tryhelium.com,**](mailto:founders@tryhelium.com) or just [**click here.**](
