Avi Patel rages as rivals copycat seed deal

Kled founder – A viral, profanity-laced video feud between AI training-data startups Kled and Luel erupted after General Catalyst investor Yuri Sagalov announced a $31 million seed round for Luel. Avi Patel, the founder of Kled, says the new company appears to be a replica o

Last Friday morning, Avi Patel was scrolling on X when a post pulled him up short. Yuri Sagalov, a General Catalyst investor, announced a $31 million seed round for a startup called Luel.

Patel is the founder of Kled. Both startups pay people for AI training data. When Patel looked at Luel’s website, he says it appeared nearly identical to Kled’s, “right down to the font.” Kled had recently raised a $5.5 million seed round, and Patel had taken multiple meetings with General Catalyst.

“They gave these guys the same terms I was asking for,” Patel told MISRYOUM. “That was my check that they were supposed to give me.”

What followed turned into a public confrontation carried out at full volume. Patel called Sagalov and other investors at General Catalyst to demand answers. When he says they didn’t pick up, he called his own investors. One of them—Keenan Rice, a general partner at K5 Global—encouraged Patel to take the dispute to X.

“If you really fundamentally believe that they ripped you off, they fully just copied it blatantly, then let the court of public opinion decide,” Rice said.

So Patel filmed himself on a laptop camera and hit record. The resulting five-minute response video has been viewed more than 9 million times.

In the takedown, Patel’s anger is unmistakable. He posts a pull-up bar draped with what appears to be a used towel. launches into a profanity-filled attack on Luel. and argues the company ripped off his idea. He also posted a side-by-side comparison of the two websites, saying Luel’s site looks like a replica. He mocked a General Catalyst advertisement earlier in the week as well. Patel’s defenders and critics both piled in once the video circulated around tech Twitter. where it sparked replies. subtweets. and memes. Few people had heard of Kled or Luel before Friday; within days, nearly everyone was talking.

Startup turf wars aren’t new. Yet this one. played out by founders still near the beginning of their careers. reads like something harsher than a normal business dispute. On one side. Patel’s defenders sympathized with what they saw as unfairness and questioned why a large seed round went to a company that appeared to have done little of its own work. On the other. Patel’s critics pressed on a different point: if a competitor could so easily spin up a replica. how defensible is his own startup?.

“Patel needs to embrace the competition and just build harder and stop crying. No crying in the casino,” one detractor wrote on X.

Patel, 22, dropped out of the University of Illinois to start a music licensing company before pivoting to Kled in 2025. Luel’s founders—William Namgyal and Inigo Lenderking, both 18—dropped out of Berkeley to start Luel in January 2026. They joined Y Combinator’s winter 2026 batch. a three-month program that comes with a $500. 000 investment. before raising more money this month.

Luel’s funding announcement claims its $31 million seed round is one of the largest in Y Combinator history. Namgyal and Lenderking did not respond to multiple requests for comments. Sagalov, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator also did not respond to requests for comments.

Patel, though, shared a Signal message he says he received during the drama from a General Catalyst partner, who told him he had been “asked not to communicate.”

“They gave these guys the same terms I was asking for. That was my check that they were supposed to give me,” Patel reiterated to MISRYOUM.

Under the shouting is a real business problem: getting data. As frontier labs develop more advanced models, they are exhausting the supply of data publicly available on the web. At the same time, scraping web data without permission has led to massive copyright lawsuits. For AI companies, the need is straightforward—more training data, but data that explicitly consents to being used.

Kled and Luel, both described as marketplaces, broker that exchange. They post “tasks” from AI companies—such as taking a video of a street intersection or reading a Hebrew transcript out loud—and pay users a nominal fee for collecting it. Both startups target users in the developing world.

When you zoom out beyond Kled and Luel, the feud fits into a broader acceleration in early-stage funding. Crunchbase analysis cited in the reporting says seed rounds are getting bigger and bigger: in 2025. more than half of seed rounds were more than $10 million. even as fewer deals are getting done. Investors, the piece notes, are eager to back early-stage companies that could become essential in the AI economy.

It isn’t just Kled and Luel, either. Mercor—another AI training platform—was founded three years ago and has achieved a valuation of $10 billion. Its three founders are also 22-year-olds who each dropped out of college to start the company.

That’s where the public narrative comes in. In a world where “code is commodity,” traditional startup moats can look fragile. Seed-stage founders. the reporting argues. are learning that they may need to act like influencers as much as engineers—because in the current environment. shaping what people talk about can be a differentiator.

Rice, the K5 Global partner, put it bluntly: “There’s a lot less defensibility.” Capital is “the cheapest thing out there right now.” The ones that can garner attention and use it well, he said, get an advantage.

Bryan Kim. an early-stage AI investor at Andreessen Horowitz. offered a related theme in a blog post last year: “How do you build a moat in consumer AI?. Right now. sorry to say. there is none.” He wrote that in the environment founders should focus on “velocity”—how fast you can launch. gain traction. and seize mindshare.

Mindshare, of course, is not the same as market share. It’s part of why founders are being pushed to “go direct,” bypassing traditional channels and pushing their own messaging. Patel followed that playbook. doubling down after the first viral blast: on Saturday. he posted a follow-up video accusing Luel of “misrepresenting their compliance practices” and “fabricating their website user numbers.” After that. he appeared on the Andreessen Horowitz-backed news show MTS and was a guest on Jason Calacanis’s podcast “This Week In Startups.”.

The Luel founders, in contrast, have remained quiet.

The immediate outcome has been stark. After Patel’s video went viral, multiple people reached out to him—offering encouragement and even offering to invest. The investor Sahill Bloom said, “This is incredible content. I want to invest in Kled now.” Bastian Lehmann. cofounder of Postmates. wrote. “Take my money.” Austin Rief. cofounder of Morning Brew. said. “Don’t even know what Kled does but I’m a fan now.”.

Patel, who says he will likely take another million dollars in angel investments before raising a Series A, may have found his own leverage in the chaos. In the span of days, Luel gained $31 million, while Kled gained something that can be worth far more in a crowded market right now: attention.

Avi Patel Kled Luel General Catalyst Yuri Sagalov K5 Global Keenan Rice AI training data seed round Y Combinator Crunchbase startup funding Silicon Valley social media controversy data marketplaces