Hi Launch YC,

I'm the founder and CEO of OneSignal. Today, we're announcing our new AI vision, and I'm excited to share it with the Launch YC community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7ccDbGVJ5U

The problem

OneSignal first went through YC as a mobile gaming company called Hiptic Games.

After pivoting away from mobile games, we used our experience to uncover an opportunity to truly "Make something people want," and began working toward a mission to Democratize Customer Engagement for B2C companies.

For years, most B2C marketing automation products have had lengthy implementation processes, dated interfaces, and a learning curve steep enough that many teams hire a full-time expert. Many of them were also built in a world where email was the dominant channel, and have zero or weak support campaigns that span across Email, Mobile Push, SMS/RCS, and other channels.

In contrast, we made OneSignal incredibly easy to use from the start: customers can get going for free with an intuitive product experience, a powerful suite of tools for omni-channel messaging, and the performance to support some of the largest brands in the world. Today, OneSignal sends billions of daily messages for hundreds of thousands of active apps.

But no matter how easy and powerful we made the product, marketers still needed to bring a lot of their own time and expertise to get the best results from their campaigns.

The solution

Today, I'm excited to announce our vision and the products that will make lifecycle marketing autonomous. Our mission is still to Democratize Customer Engagement, but with AI we can achieve it in ways that were never possible before. This AI vision enables us to empower under-resourced marketing teams with the time and expertise that has seemed always out of reach.

We've broken this mission into phases, which we think of as an autonomy ladder. Most marketers don't want to hand the keys to an autonomous system on day one, so we'll roll out features that build the systems and trust needed at each step.

Level 0 — Manual. The dashboard. A marketer drives every click, and the team scales by hiring. This is where the entire category has lived.

Level 1 — Assistance. AI drafts copy, suggests audiences, and explains your analytics in plain language. You review and ship. This is live today.

Level 2 — Expert Assist. AI becomes proactive. It recommends campaigns to fill lifecycle gaps, flags mistakes, and checks your work. Your input is still required.

Level 3 — Agentic Autopilot. You delegate bounded work, and AI does it within the scope and rules you've defined. You approve work in batches.

Level 4 — Full Operator. You set the goals and the guardrails. AI plans, sends, tests, and improves campaigns against them, reaching out only when it needs you.

What we're launching today

OneSignal AI — An in-product agent that can do everything a person can: generate message copy, design emails, analyze message performance, and recommend next steps to maximize user engagement. Best of all, it can create and analyze complex multi-step Journeys, saving hours of work.

Brand Kit — Define your audience, voice and tone, industry, and visual assets on a centralized configuration page or pull them automatically from your website. Set guardrails for language to avoid. OneSignal AI uses your Brand Kit when generating copy, email designs, and in-app messages.

OneSignal MCP — Brings OneSignal's capabilities to the AI tools and agents you already use. The MCP is available now on the ChatGPT and Cursor marketplaces, coming soon to the Claude marketplace, and available through Smithery for any other AI client. Together, the MCP and the OneSignal API make it possible to use the platform in a fully headless way.

Soon, we'll also release a OneSignal Slack Agent, bringing the capabilities of OneSignal AI and the OneSignal MCP to where your team already spends its time. And we'll be rolling out an API to create, edit, and analyze Journeys, so your team can set up complex campaigns without ever logging into the OneSignal dashboard.

Try it today

All of these features are available on OneSignal's free plan. Small companies can send unlimited push notifications and up to 10,000 emails per month for free. Paid plans start at $19/mo plus affordable usage-based pricing. Installing OneSignal is as simple as copying a prompt into Claude Code. You can get started at https://onesignal.com