Food & Beverage Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Zerocater builds revolutionary corporate catering and cafeteria solutions employees love while saving companies millions of dollars as they transition to the hybrid workplace. With its Cloud Cafe, Hybrid Cafe, Managed Cafe, and Event Cafe products; Zerocater has built corporate cafeteria and office catering programs for companies of all sizes from growing startups to the Fortune 500. Thousands of companies choose Zerocater for the customized, consistent, and diverse meal experiences its products offer, while also reducing costs by giving companies the flexibility to only pay for the employees who come into the office. Zerocater currently offers its corporate cafeteria and office catering products in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Austin, Denver, Seattle, Atlanta, Dallas, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. Since completing YCombinator in Winter 2011, Zerocater has raised $38.5M from leading investors including Cleveland Avenue, Remus Capital, Romulus Capital, Struck Capital, SV Angel, Keith Rabois, Yuri Milner, Paul Buchheit, and Justin Kan. For more information visit zerocater.com and follow @Zerocater on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Stockline is an AI-native ERP for food wholesalers. Our agents eliminate human labor for repetitive tasks, starting with order entry. Our goal is to replace clunky software with the next generation of ERPs, built with AI employees at their core. Team is 2 Polytechnique alums who dropped out of Stanford and MIT. Mariem is daughter of the fish industry and Moncef started coding and building softwares at 13.

Scout is an AI insights tool for consumer products companies to increase topline revenue. It ingests data from retailer portals and syndicated sources (such as SPINS, NielsenIQ), and tell sales teams exactly where they can grow. Brands use Scout to figure out which accounts to expand, which SKUs to prioritize, and which promotions drove incremental sales.

BetterBasket provides grocery retailers with AI agents for pricing, competitive intelligence and promotion optimization, with the aim of helping teams boost revenue, manage margin targets and automate decisions using real-time data across operations.

Chow Central is building technology to disrupt the food industry in Nigeria. The goal is to profitably provide food to as many people as possible in record time. Chow Central has launched its first product "500chow". A delivery-only quick service restaurant that serves customers in record time. 500chow has 10x lower costs than traditional brick-and-mortar restaurants, and 10x more online orders. Our customers love us for our super fast and cheaper deliveries. We are able to do this by launching hyper-locally within a 3km radius. We are very focused on solving real problems in the food industry one scalable product at a time.

Nino Foods builds and operates fast food restaurants in India. We own 3 brands- Nino Burgers, Francesco's Pizzeria and KHA-Fried Chicken. We operate QSR and cloud kitchen formats and have industry leading payback period per store (<1 year). We are tripling in size yearly and are profitable. We have 20 Locations in Mumbai and service 40K orders per month. The founding team has Nishant - an Insead MBA, and Pranav-who led online revenue for Disney and Conde Nast India.

Vendease is a marketplace that lets restaurants in Africa, order directly from farms and food manufacturers. Now, instead of going through expensive - middlemen - vendors, or wasting productive man hours sending staff to open markets with hiked prices, restaurants can now get on our platform, click to order and get all their food supplies within 24hrs.

Glimpse is the leading AI platform for CPG brands - automating key back office workflows like deductions management, revenue recovery, & cash application to increase operating leverage and put millions of dollars back into a brand's pocket.  Our agents automatically retrieve deduction data, validate charges, automate cash application, and dispute invalid claims to recover lost revenue—often starting with a lookback of the past year of deductions. For a $1B CPG, one agent reviewed 17,000 deductions in under 24 hours (work that would take an FTE ~2 years), identifying $10M+ in revenue and driving meaningful margin expansion. Pricing is simple and incentive-aligned, structured to create clear P&L impact from day one.

ZBiotics is a synthetic biology company founded in 2016 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company bioengineers probiotic bacteria for nutraceutical and other applications. They launched the world's first genetically engineered probiotic in 2019 – a probiotic that breaks down a toxic byproduct of alcohol. They are currently developing a pipeline of additional engineered probiotics for other consumer health applications.

Tovala is a Chicago-based food-tech company with a smart oven that is paired with a weekly meal delivery service.

Flaviar, a spirits tasting club, offers a subscription service that helps members discover new liquor products through sample tasting packs. Every month, subscribers receive a tasting kit featuring 3 samples of spirits that have been sourced from across the globe.

AnyList is the best way to create and share grocery shopping lists. Easily share a list with your spouse or roommates. List changes show up instantly on everyone’s iOS or Android device.

Meet the Replenish Blender, the first self-cleaning appliance that instantly and harmoniously prepares healthy smoothies and snacks. The Replenish Blender mixes health, wellness, and simplicity in under a minute.

SpoonRocket is a next-gen, ultra fast delivery platform that delivers high quality tasty meals to customers in 15 minutes or less. Currently backed by Y Combinator, Foundation Capital, General Catalyst, and various other angels and funds. Download the app or checkout the website at www.spoonrocket.com.