Creator Economy Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

YouArt helps storytellers create AI originals using our industry-leading video agent, launch their original concepts, get funded directly by early fans, and earn from their audience.

Koyal is an Agentic AI Filmmaking Platform that allows you to seamlessly convert script or audio into personalized, visually compelling stories. We’re a team from Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Meta, with experience in AI video generation. https://koyal.ai builds directly upon our published research at the AI conference NeurIPS in December. We’ve been covered in the international press for our patented secure personalization protocol CHARCHA: the genAI captcha. Announcement: https://x.com/meh_agarwal/status/1965866965425348687 Demo: https://x.com/meh_agarwal/status/1965137062119752099 We currently have paid pilots with the biggest global music labels, podcasts and production houses, and just launched our public beta at beta.koyal.ai We recently concluded a pilot with Universal Music and T-Series (world’s largest music label) alongside Bollywood production houses like Maddock Entertainment, and Collective Artists Network! As part of that, we launched 5 music videos for Grammy and Oscar winning artists like A R Rahman, Ricky Kej and Shankar Mahadevan all crossing 1.5 million views! We've recently built SOTA capabilities in (i) multilingual script to audio to video, (ii) Agentic lip-sync with dynamic movement & (iii) Multi-character consistency.

Reacher is an AI-powered platform that automates creator marketing workflows—from discovery and outreach to campaign management and content strategy—making marketing teams 10x more productive. We handle the manual tasks so brands can focus on building relationships with creators while centralizing their operations in one platform to manage creators on TikTok Shop, Instagram, and YouTube.

Using our 6+ years of influencer marketing experience to help companies run their influencer campaigns at scale. Fully managed solution to drive real, attributable results to their marketing efforts.

AI creative tools became powerful quickly. But they also got complicated. Most of them require creatives to do the engineering. Prompts. Parameters. Node graphs. Creative work doesn’t start there. It starts with thinking, exploring directions, and iterating on ideas. With Awen, we’re trying a different approach: A creative partner that turns intent into exceptional visuals through conversation.

Magic Hour is a professional video creation tool. It takes the best AI video models, puts them in one workflow, and makes creating an amazing video as easy as selecting a template and customizing it. You can use the product at https://magichour.ai

Storyboarder is a tool and a platform for anyone to create, share, and sell webcomics. In East Asia, the webcomic (or digital manga) industry is an $12B market and rapidly growing to the rest of the world. Webtoon, the largest company in the space, generates $100M / month in revenue. However, their addressable market is limited by their content creators, who need know how to draw. Readers are desperate for a greater variety of stories in webcomics. Through years of working with filmmakers, we’ve built extremely easy to use storyboarding software that has 700K users. We’re democratizing visual storytelling to everyone. We’re working on the next generation that, through advances in video game interfaces, ubiquitous 3D compute, and AI, will allow anyone to easily create scenes, pose characters, to create webcomics. Storyboarder is backed by Y Combinator (W23), David Karp (Tumblr Founder), Andrew Kortina (Venmo Founder), and other product focused investors.

Pair AI is Shopify for knowledge products. We empower creators, educators, and experts to launch addicting mobile-first video courses and provide AI-assisted coaching services at scale. Our platform is a one-stop shop to seamlessly monetize what you know! We make learning as fun and engaging as watching a TikTok.

1stCollab is the first influencer platform that fully automates and optimizes every aspect of your influencer marketing program. We’ve helped hundreds of startups launch their first campaigns and enabled larger brands to scale to thousands of influencers, while saving them over $1M annually in influencer spend. What we offer: - Smart search & recommendations – Instantly connect with thousands of relevant influencers. - Full campaign automation – From outreach and negotiations to contracts, payments, and taxes, we handle it all. - Real-time performance tracking – Monitor conversions, revenue, and run A/B tests with detailed reporting.

Star makes game development accessible to anyone with an idea. Using AI, you can create complex, playable games without writing code - just describe what you want and iterate. We're building the future of creative tools for the next generation of game makers.

Jamble is the new place to buy & sell secondhand fashion. We empower resellers with video & Live streaming tools to sell more effectively; and buyers with a unique compelling experience. Jamble is designed for the sustainable fashion community to engage, connect and inspire. We’re a mobile-first platform and launched on iOS! 👉 Check us out: https://apple.co/3Pfwran

Venue.ink is a booking app for tattoo artists and studios. Receive bookings, manage your calendar, chat with clients and get paid. We help artists spend more time on art, and less time on admin.

Finnix is a financial technology solutions provider for Indonesian creative businesses. We provide loans and financial management tools for event organizers, agencies, concert promoters, and others.

Poko enables seamless transfers from local payment rails to web3 infrastructure enabling web3 wallets, marketplaces, games and DApps to acquire more users. With Poko’s SDK, web3 builders can easily enable fiat-to-crypto onramping with 100+ common local payment methods or easily pay for NFTs with local payment methods. Poko's fiat-to-cryptoonramp aggregator reduces onramping costs by up to 70% and increases transaction success rates by up to 5x through a smart routing logic and a single integration to multiple onramps. It's Direct Checkout solution enables one step purchasing from fiat payment rails from any smart contract for 79% higher user conversion. The co-founders’ experience includes being chief strategy officer of a $2.4B coincap protocol, leading technical implementation of Singapore’s central bank’s experiment in cross-border payments on blockchain rails, policy experience as payments task force member at the World Economic Forum, ex-Ethereum Foundation Fellow, and CTO of a 2M+ user play to earn game.

UpBanx is Brex for D2C brands and content creators in Indonesia. We help our customers open a high-yield business account, get financing, manage transactions, and launch Web3 projects, all in one place. There are over 700k D2C brands and content creators in Indonesia. If we serve all of them, that is a $14b/year market opportunity. We've raised $5.6m so far from investors like Y Combinator, Alpha JWC, Alto Partners, CreditEase, Oliver Jung and lndonesia's biggest influencer Raffi Ahmad who has over 100m followers on social. We have also raised from 6 other Y Combinator founders. We are open to working with more investors that can bring strategic value to our long-term roadmap.

Dots is a developer-friendly API that lets businesses pay their contractors through just a few lines of code. Whether its gig workers like Uber drivers, sellers on marketplaces like Etsy, or simply your local handyman - Dots’ abstracts away the complexity of payouts completely. We manage the entire process: information collection (KYC), payments through any rail (ACH, Venmo, CashApp, Zelle, international, and many more to come), and even filing tax forms! Dots lets developers get payouts up and running over just a few hours, rather than the many months this would normally take.

Laylo powers drops for the world’s biggest musicians and events. The platform combines landing pages, messaging, link tracking, and more to drive sales and streams around the most important moments in entertainment.

Kaiten is a discovery app that gives you access to culinary products and experiences from quality makers around the world. We are home to hundreds of makers from around the world including restaurants, chefs, farmers, vineyards and even knife makers and ceramicists. Find new ways to enjoy the culinary world every day. A special bottle of wine, soy sauce from a 100 year old brewery in Kyoto, working a day at a Michelin star restaurant - if amazing people make it and sell it, you'll find it on Kaiten.

Jitter is a fast and simple motion design tool on the web. We help designers create professional animations for communication content, videos, websites or apps easily, while collaborating with product & marketing teams. It's like “Figma for motion design”.

TagMango is building a SAAS tool to enable edutainment creators create monetisation channels by creating paid and scalable communities. Anyone who has a skill-set, talent and an engaged audience can build their community on TagMango and provide exclusive services, learnings and content.

Plotdrive is the first continuous production system for narrative — infrastructure that transforms how long-form stories move from imagination to completion. Most books don’t fail for lack of talent; they fail when the workflow collapses somewhere between page 80 and page 300. Founded by brothers with backgrounds in high-stakes poker, VR, and narrative systems, we built what we couldn’t find: an engine that holds the entire shape of a story while authors work inside it. Writers see 5-10× gains in throughput without losing their voice. Manuscripts that sat untouched for years finally reach the finish line. Authors are using Plotdrive to break decade-long blocks. Publishers are using it to rethink how story pipelines should operate when continuity, context, and editorial craft can finally scale. The printing press made distribution industrial. We’re making completion industrial — creating the foundational layer for how narrative gets made at scale.

Exly is an all-in-one business platform built for knowledge businesses, coaches, trainers and creators to launch, manage and market their products (courses, webinars, ecommunities, 1:1 consultations and workshops).

Easol is the all-in-one platform for managing your entire experience business, on your terms. Sell directly on your own website with smart booking, payment, and marketing tools that all work together, brilliantly. We believe that with the right tools, anyone can turn their passion into an empire. So we made them – and brought them together to work in sync, all in one place. We call it Experience Commerce. It's e-commerce specially designed for selling experiences and especially designed for experience creators.

Makrwatch helps D2C companies scale user acquisition with YouTube creators. Our clients see us as an alternative growth channel to Google/Facebook, by reaching their audience at a more efficient cost per acquisition and obtaining high quality customers that are more engaged. Makrwatch has been growing 100%+ year over year, currently processes 2M-5M in billings and helps creators in over 60+ countries. We are reaching 20 team members in 6+ countries, have been fully remote for the past years and aim to reach 20M in billings with 10,000 sponsored videos within the next 18 months.

Taro is a community of 150k+ software engineers looking to grow their careers. High-growth tech companies leverage the Taro platform to hire engineers who can grow the company. Taro's education platform offers online courses and discussions with leaders at top tech companies. These resources attract many top engineers seeking their next career move. Taro supports the hiring process at startups through sourcing and feedback on engineers. If you're looking to expand your engineering team quickly, without compromising on quality, book time here: https://www.jointaro.com/enterprise/

Trendpop is the leading analytics and insights platform for short-form video marketing. We’re on a mission to help anyone go viral on social video platforms. We’re a deeply technical team that has taken a data-first approach to this problem: our core engine has collected over a billion social video posts that are analyzed with state-of-the-art algorithms to understand the recommendation algorithms that power virality. Trendpop was co-founded by Yoav Zimmerman (CEO) and Jonathan (Yoni) Ben-tzur (CTO) in August 2020, raising money from YCombinator (W21) to build Trendpop and growing to profitability in 12 short months. In January 2022, Trendpop was acquired by Collab, a veteran company in the digital creator space and an official TikTok creative and marketing partner. Today, Trendpop powers the TikTok marketing programs of top major record labels in North America and is quickly expanding to new markets in the film, television, beauty, and DTC eCommerce industry. Trendpop is currently used by leading marketing and A&R professionals in the music industry (both indie and major) to help their artists go viral on TikTok and hundreds of brands and creators who consistently win on social video.

Revlo helps eSports streamers better connect, engage, and monetize their fan base. Today, thousands of gamers are becoming online celebrities as they stream their video games to over 100 million fans all over the world. Yet, the only method for popular streamers to interact with their fans while streaming is in a cluttered IRC chat room. Revlo allows streamers to reward their loyal fans with recognition, merchandise, and interaction opportunities. Naturally, fans engage more, driving up repeat viewership and conversion into paid subscription on a streamer's channel.