RecipeBook lets AI teams rank and purchase video datasets in minutes

Shofo co-founder Braiden Dishman launched RecipeBook on July 27th, a self-service interface that lets AI developers search, rank and purchase video training data from a corpus of over 25 million videos at $3 per selected hour. Dishman said data vendors had quoted prices from $15 to $480 per hour with delivery in weeks or months, while Shofo claims RecipeBook can deliver selected data within minutes. The four-person San Francisco startup, backed by Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch, previously built a social data API before pivoting to video datasets for AI labs.

Braiden Dishman @BraidenDishman https://x.com/BraidenDishman , a co-founder of Shofo, launched RecipeBook https://recipebook.shofo.ai/ on July 27th, giving AI developers a self-service interface for searching, ranking and purchasing video training data. Dishman said in a thread on X https://x.com/BraidenDishman/status/2081817648019734920 that the initial corpus contains more than 25 million videos and sells for $3 per selected hour. The release turns part of Shofo's custom data operation into a storefront. A user enters a search, rates relevant clips, trains what the interface calls a "probe," re-ranks the results and adds a chosen number of top-ranked hours to an order. The live application includes filters, ordering controls and buttons to clear ratings or retrain the probe. Dishman said data vendors had quoted prices ranging from $15 to $480 per hour, with delivery measured in weeks or months. Shofo claims RecipeBook can deliver selected data within minutes. Those price and delivery comparisons come from Shofo, and the company has not published the vendors or specifications behind them. From social search to video data Shofo is a four-person San Francisco startup founded in 2025 and backed by Y Combinator https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/shofo through its Winter 2026 batch. YC launch materials identify Bryan Hong https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zixihong six-months-ago-my-co-founders-and-i-made-activity-7406460451242475521-Lo7c as CEO, Dishman as COO, Alexzendor Misra @AlexzendorMisra https://x.com/AlexzendorMisra as CTO and Andre Braga @AndreBragaML https://x.com/AndreBragaML as head of AI. The founders met while building Correkt, a multimodal AI search engine. The Daily Nexus reported https://dailynexus.com/2024-05-16/making-sure-its-correkt-a-group-of-ucsb-students-set-out-to-revolutionize-the-ethics-of-ai-chatbots/ that Correkt launched in April 2024 as a citation-focused search product and attracted about 5,000 users shortly after release. Shofo's YC materials say Correkt eventually passed 40,000 users before the founders changed direction. Hong described the pivot in a December 2025 post: the founders shut down Correkt, turned down internships at Stripe and Meta, and moved into a $1,000 room in San Francisco to build live indexes of social platforms. Dishman's YC profile lists an economics background at the University of California, Santa Barbara and prior work at Amazon Web Services. Misra previously led Correkt, while Braga studied statistics and data science at UCSB and worked on reinforcement learning as a 2025 MIT Summer Research Program intern https://oge.mit.edu/msrp/profiles/andre-braga/ . Shofo initially presented itself as an API for live social data. Its current pitch focuses on assembling video datasets for AI labs from an index that Shofo says contains billions of videos. The Shofo website https://www.shofo.ai/ advertises custom collections drawn from millions of hours of video, with footage cleaned, segmented and labeled for model training. RecipeBook narrows that pitch into a buyer-controlled workflow. Shofo's main site still directs customers to request a custom dataset https://www.shofo.ai/contact , while RecipeBook lets researchers conduct the initial search and relevance-ranking work themselves. That can reduce the costly back-and-forth involved in defining a dataset, particularly when a model developer needs a narrow visual concept or interaction rather than a general-purpose video collection. The contract behind the clips Shofo says its larger index combines public videos collected from the open web with private videos aggregated from thousands of sources. Its enterprise terms https://recipebook.shofo.ai/terms grant customers a perpetual, worldwide license to use purchased datasets for training, fine-tuning, evaluation, benchmarking and model development. The license is non-exclusive and generally non-transferable. The same terms provide the service "as is" and disclaim warranties including title and non-infringement. RecipeBook also maintains a copyright removal process https://recipebook.shofo.ai/copyright-policy for rights holders. Buyers evaluating the $3-per-hour offer will still have to weigh provenance, licensing terms and dataset quality alongside procurement speed. RecipeBook is a test of whether Shofo can make highly specific video data behave like searchable cloud inventory. The founders already built one multimodal search product and then repurposed that indexing experience for AI infrastructure. With RecipeBook, they are betting that researchers want direct control over the final mile: deciding which examples belong in a training set before paying for the underlying video.