Artificial Intelligence Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Scale accelerates the development of AI within organizations of any size to deliver critical business insights and operational efficiency. Its data-centric infrastructure platform leverages RLHF (Reinforced Learning with Human Feedback) to help organizations build the strongest AI models that supercharge their business, with customers across industries including Meta, Microsoft, U.S. Army, DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit, Open AI, General Motors, Toyota Research Institute, Brex, Instacart and Flexport.

Checkr builds people infrastructure for the future of work. And we believe everyone should have a fair chance to work. That's why we've designed a faster—and fairer—way to screen job seekers. For more information on our mission and products, visit https://checkr.com.

We've spent decades tracking everything. Sleep. Recovery. Steps. All proxies for how we feel. Performance is 90% mental. And yet no one has built the feedback loop for our emotions. We close that loop by designing a device that understands how you feel, tells you why, and what you can do about it. Emotional intelligence becomes trainable, so you can better connect and create with those around you.

Rudus is an AI-powered takeoff and estimation platform built for concrete contractors. We cut takeoff time by 70% and help estimators bid 2-5× more projects without adding headcount. From plan upload to bid package, every part of the workflow gets faster.

Quant research is generating candidate strategies orders of magnitude faster than backtesting infrastructure can evaluate them. AI has further accelerated alpha research from a handful of signals per quarter to hundreds per day. The bottleneck has moved from researcher time to compute throughput. We're building large HPC clusters (100 - 50,000 nodes) that can run up to 6.4M tasks in parallel across multiple cloud providers on spot instances. Our goal is to make backtesting strategies simple, fast, and cheap at scale.

PLAN0 is an AI-powered preconstruction cost intelligence platform serving real estate developers, general contractors, and investors. We analyze architectural plans using computer vision AI models trained on tens of thousands of examples to generate detailed, industry standard cost estimates in 30 minutes vs. 2+ weeks traditionally. The platform is also building a proprietary database of real-time localized cost data that feed its analytics and forecasting tools. Using quant finance inspired deep neural networks, PLAN0 can decompose construction costs in market observable factors to predict all local trade level costs up to 24 months out with high accuracy. The vision is to develop the CoStar or Bloomberg of construction – a system of record and intelligence layer that allows real estate stakeholders to underwrite, design, and benchmark development projects with greater speed, precision, and confidence.

ReasonBlocks makes AI agents more accurate and cheaper by catching failures mid-run and compounding reasoning patterns across every agent you deploy. Plugs into your existing agent stack in minutes and starts improving results from the first call.

Archal lets you test agents and code that touch third-party APIs without hitting the real services. We build working digital twins that hold state across requests and behave like the originals, so you catch bugs before your agent does something irreversible in production.

Elyra is an AI reservation system for restaurants with built-in voice and email agents that handle bookings end-to-end.

Modern helps IT, HR, and Finance teams automatically resolve 80%+ of high-volume requests. Teams define workflows in plain language, set approval rules and policies, and Modern handles the rest: password resets, access provisioning, expense approvals, on-boarding checklists, and more. Everything runs with full audit trails, role-based approvals, and enterprise-grade security built in. Modern works alongside your existing ITSM with no rip-and-replace required or runs as your ITSM from day one. Most teams are live in under a day. For teams that want to go fully hands-off, 100% automation via a fully managed IT services are also available.

Napkin Math is the food journal for real people. Stop counting calories, get personalized insights and realistic goals. Easily keep a beautiful food journal, get deep insights on your data with AI, and share your table with friends.

We're an AI Research lab that utilizes complex agentic workflows to accelerate the discovery of novel AI research. We've discovered novel optimizers, language modelling architectures, and work in interpretability. We develop products and conduct frontier research, pushing the bounds of automating research.

Mount is the Insurer for the Agent Economy. When AI systems autonomously sign contracts, manage finances, or talk to customers, every failure becomes the deployer's liability. Existing insurers don't want to cover this. They lack the data, the models, and the speed to assess deployed AI systems. We're solving this by building a risk evaluation and mitigation platform specifically for AI Agents. Mount's platform red-teams them, scores their operational risk, and issues ADR certifications (the SOC 2 for AI agents). Every evaluation generates proprietary risk data that feeds our underwriting engine, a data moat no competitor can replicate. The AI agent market is projected to grow from $7.6B to $183B by 2033. The EU AI Act and upcoming regulation require deployers to manage AI risk. Over 90% of businesses want coverage for AI risks, yet no insurer is built to price this new risk category. We are that company. Fabian studied CS at ETH Zürich with a focus on machine learning and has been building AI systems since. John founded an AI-first media company at 18 and scaled it to 400K in annual revenue. Together, they combine deep technical AI expertise with the operational intensity to build a full-stack insurance company from scratch.

Klaimee is the first insurance for your AI agents. It covers what traditional E&O and cyber explicitly carve out, so you can deploy agentic AI at scale with real peace of mind. Built for companies deploying agentic AI, self-serve from day one. The problem: AI agents are taking actions autonomously buying, emailing, modifying sensitive data. AB 316 already holds deployers liable. EU AI Act enforces in August. Cyber and E&O insurance are excluding AI claims. Companies shipping agents have zero coverage and no third-party proof their agent is safe. Enterprise legal asks "who pays if your agent breaks something?" and there's no good answer. We built the answer. Critical-category risk evaluation, certification, financial guarantee, liability insurance and the documentation enterprise procurement needs to sign off. Team: Ines (ex-General Manager at SafetyWing, grew insurance product from $5M to $60M revenue, 5 years launching insurance products from scratch and structuring a TokioMarine MGA into its own carrier) + Julien (AI software engineer + corporate strategy, enterprise compliance). We understand how insurance works, what enterprises require, and why startups can't wait 6 months for either.

We're building robots that just work and use them to deliver autonomous services at scale. Our first use case is semi-humanoid robots for manufacturing and logistics. Unlike traditional robotics companies, we don't sell robots, we provide physical agents for hire where companies pay for the robots based on usage, decreasing the barrier to entry and expanding the robotics market as a whole.

Pulsent continuously watches how your users and interacts with your product and engages them at the right moment to convert, upsell, and retain. As companies scale, founders, account managers and customer success teams can only take care of a small fraction of users. The rest receive generic, annoying and poorly timed communication. Opportunities are missed, customers churn, and revenue is lost. The core problem is that user behavior is fragmented across tools like PostHog, Stripe, Salesforce, etc., making it impossible to understand users in real time. We unify all data into a single view and let AI agents act on top. This only recently became possible with advances in visual AI (dec ‘25), allowing agents to watch sessions and understand behavior at human or better level. Pulsent detects expansion and churn signals, prioritizes high-value accounts, and executes through AI agents across channels like email, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp. It increases conversion and reduces churn without adding headcount. We already have paying customers, process hundreds of millions of events daily, and are seeing strong demand from PLG B2B Clients. Nicolò is an ex-BCG who has scaled two startups to millions in ARR. Arseniy worked for several years at Datadog handling billions of datapoints. We’ve worked together for 3+ years and experienced this problem firsthand in our previous startup.

We provide a AI customization layer that learns your APIs and embeds in your product, so your customers can build their own apps on your SaaS. Each customer can now adapt your product to match their workflows perfectly, and share it across their team with our in-built app store. The result is that customers use your SaaS more, retain for longer, and expand quicker, because they get bespoke implementation for their exact usecase, without waiting. We're live with the top Series B companies with 90% repeat usage rate. Our customers tell us that Gigacatalyst is the best way to increase usage, retention, and expansion in 2026.

Enterprise software implementation is broken, and it has been for decades. Every rollout, whether it's a traditional ERP or a new AI system, requires months of manual integration, configuration, and tuning done by armies of system integrators and forward-deployed engineers. Lab0 builds agentic systems that automate this layer, compressing months-long implementations into weeks.

Sherpa automatically increases website conversion rates by analyzing visitor behavior, building new page variants, and continuously A/B testing them. Customers typically see a 15-20% lift on their primary conversion metric in their first 30 days.

Saudara AI is an AI broker connecting American brands with vetted overseas factories. International sourcing is broken. We're fixing it. US brands import over $3 trillion in goods every year and lose billions to ghost suppliers, hidden fees, and missed deadlines. The best factories sit behind decades-old relationships. We have them. Our AI handles the rest. A real broker on every deal, supercharged by AI. 10x faster, at a fraction of the cost. We are the on-ramp.

We are making the world's fastest browser for your AI agents. Agents don’t need to see UIs like us humans do. We give agents a semantic understanding of the web instead of brittle visual interfaces. Your agents can perform deep research, large-scale scraping, and complex automation—more efficiently with our agentic browser that turns the web into a native protocol for LLMs.

We are building AI-native fulfillment powered by robotics. Warehouses without human labor that get better, faster, and cheaper with every order. Most robotics companies wait until their system is perfect before deploying. We don't. We ship imperfect policies into real warehouses, detect failures in real time, recover automatically when we can, and bring in a remote human operator when we can't. Every failure becomes training data. Every intervention makes the system better. The result is a fulfillment system that continuously learns from production.

Prototyping.io turns CAD designs into real mechanical parts through an AI-driven manufacturing system. We analyze designs for manufacturability and automate production workflows to deliver high-quality parts faster and at lower cost.

We build AI scientists that discover new materials for the semiconductor industry - specifically datacenters and fabs. Finding novel materials today takes 10+ years of lab work. We aim to compress that timeline to months, using a swarm of AI agents. Akash completed his PhD at Stanford on material discovery for semiconductors. The materials he discovered for nanoscale interconnects have been adopted into the roadmaps of Intel and TSMC. Advaith was the founding applied scientist at Persona AI (acquired by Luma Labs), where he built long horizon autonomous agents for major telecom and crypto companies. Power consumption and heat release from AI chips is doubling every year. The semiconductor industry needs new materials to keep this exponential going - Matforge will help find them.

Playabl.ai is an AI game builder that lets anyone create games and interactive experiences by chatting with AI.

Foaster is an AI-native consulting firm for AI transformation, powered by agents instead of armies of consultants. Companies are spending millions on AI tools, pilots, workshops, and roadmaps. But most confuse AI adoption with AI transformation. Adoption is buying tools. Transformation is understanding how work should change across every team, workflow, and role. Traditional consulting moves too slowly for that: a few interviews, a few workshops, a static roadmap, then the company is left to execute. Foaster uses AI agents to go much faster and much deeper. Agents interview employees at scale, map how work actually happens, and build in days a roadmap showing what should be automated, redesigned, or improved first. Then Foaster stays embedded to keep the transformation moving through adoption tracking, deeply personalized upskilling, and continuous follow-up. The result is the precision and scale of AI, with human experts brought in where judgment, expertise and implementation matter most.

Asendia AI builds AI recruiters for staffing agencies and enterprise companies. It clones their best recruiters into AI agents that match, screen, and submit candidates 10x faster.

Ontora gives C-suite leaders AI agents that interview every employee to uncover process bottlenecks across their organization. Consultants spend months doing this manually; Ontora does it in hours.

Every computer ever made forces you to do one thing at a time. One cursor. One keyboard. One Hardware. One app in focus. Fifty years. Nobody questioned it. We did. We started over. We built InfinityOS, a fundamentally new computer OS on the cloud from ground up. Infinity runs every app in its own independent computer -- own GPU, own input, own environment. Windows and Linux in the same session. Humans and agents working side by side. No concurrency ceiling. Cold start in seconds. One URL.

Commercial lenders manage billions in assets but service their loans like it's 2005: spreadsheets, legacy software, and teams of people doing manual reconciliation all day. Zolvo replaces that entire back office with AI. We automate reconciliation, verification, collections, and reporting so lenders can scale their portfolios without scaling their teams. We're building the operating system for commercial lending

Korso builds AI agents that handle the operational work manufacturers still do manually, including processing RFQs, following up on quotes, coordinating with suppliers, and keeping production on track when things go wrong. Our agents plug into your existing ERP and CRM, understand your workflows, and act on your behalf: triaging incoming requests, chasing delayed orders, notifying customers, and escalating when human judgment is needed. We built Korso around the reality that enterprise systems cannot afford mistakes. Every agent action passes through verification layers, tools are scoped, and critical operations go through dry-run validation and secondary review. Full audit trails mean you can see exactly what was done, why, and when. Most AI automation breaks down at the ERP integration layer. Korso's orchestration is built for the messiness of real manufacturing systems, with long-running workflows that span weeks and checkpointing that never loses progress. Instead of replacing your systems, Korso makes them work harder, so your team spends less time on coordination and more time on the work that actually matters.

Building the communication infrastructure needed for fully autonomous agents

Fortune 500 companies and the fastest-growing manufacturing firms use Arzana’s AI platform to automate order entry, quoting, and customer updates. So teams can scale faster, respond sooner, and grow without adding overhead.

Sandbox infrastructure for AI agents, with full-environment forks and snapshots across files, processes, memory, and databases.

Superset helps engineers run 100s of coding agents in parallel.

Ndea is building frontier AI systems that blend intuitive pattern recognition and formal reasoning into a unified architecture. # AI for Scientific Advancement Unlike all life before us, humanity's ascent is a story of ingenuity, not just biological evolution. Our progress has been driven by the curiosity to acquire knowledge, the ability to pass it on, and an intrinsic drive to innovate. We build technology which gives us leverage beyond our biology. We stand at the top of a knowledge and technology colossus that we collectively created over the past ten thousand generations. Scientific progress has helped us overcome burdens that long defined human life — famines, plagues, and widespread illiteracy. Science will continue to redefine the boundaries of the human condition. Today, the acceleration of scientific progress hinges on one factor: AI capable of independent invention and discovery. This capacity is the gateway to advancements beyond our wildest imagination. # A New Research Lab We're starting Ndea — an AI research and science lab. The name - like 'idea' with an 'n' - is inspired by the Greek concepts ennoia (intuitive understanding) and dianoia (logical reasoning), capturing our first goal to merge deep learning with program synthesis. Ndea is entirely focused on developing and operationalizing AGI to realize unprecedented scientific progress in our lifetime for the benefit of all current and future generations. Building AGI alone is a monumental undertaking, but our mission is even bigger. We're creating a factory for rapid scientific advancement — a factory capable of inventing and commercializing N ideas. From our vantage point today, we see many 'known' frontiers like self-driving vehicles, drug discovery, sustainable energy, robotics, and space exploration. While AGI will benefit all of these, the most exciting adventure lies in the 'unknown'. AGI promises discoveries and progress we cannot imagine today.

We build specialized LLMs for your business’s specific workflows and use cases, then continuously hone them against your success metrics, capturing your proprietary know-how in the model so it gets more valuable and harder to copy as you grow.

AI SRE agents that automatically learn each customer’s system so they work just like an in-house engineer.

Tsenta is a desktop app that matches you with jobs, optimizes your profile & applies on your behalf. It runs on your device, so you have granular control over every application being submitted in real-time. We built Tsenta after applying to over 3,000 jobs manually, so that nobody else would have to. Check us out at https://tsenta.com :)

Grade is the API for performance-based payroll. Think of us like Deel or Gusto, but our payouts are for work completed, not hours. Companies use Grade to pay AI agents and contractors based on results: tasks completed, targets hit, work delivered. We handle compliance, tax reporting, and global payouts.

The best grid connection is no grid connection. Voxel builds vertically integrated energy generation and storage systems for data centers that bypass utility connection delays. By leveraging the vast supply of second-life EV batteries and our novel DC microgrid architecture, Voxel generates datacenter power on site and drastically reduces system cost and time-to-power.

We are building the world’s largest video library. We've aggregated billions of videos into a searchable index and use agents to find and label the exact datasets a lab needs on demand. If a lab needs 100K hours of cooking videos where someone is holding a pan, with reasoning annotations on top, our agents search the index, extract the matching subset, route it through our labeling pipeline, and deliver a custom dataset in days, not months.

We engineer inexpensive, autonomous strike drones designed to operate in the most contested combat environments on Earth! By combining true hardware modularity with an agentic control system that lowers cognitive load on operators, we enable faster upgrades, broader adoption, and more than 2x reduction in lifecycle cost. Our customers and partners include the UK Royal Marine Commandos, several other units in the UK, and 4 other NATO forces, and we are currently shipping prototypes for iterative feedback. Think of us as Anduril, but with worse weather, and better banter.

RamAIn can intelligently automate any super complex and repetitive process across applications (Browser & Desktop) super fast. It doesn’t matter whether you have API access or not - if you can see it, RamAIn can do it. Simply chat with it and get your UI task as a composable API - fully managed, self-healing and self-evolving!