Social Media Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, Reddit is an online community where users submit, vote, and comment on content, news, and discussions. Nicknamed "the front page of the internet,"​ Reddit is one of the top ten sites in the United States (source: Alexa), with hundreds of millions of users each month on desktop, mobile web, and our official Android/iOS apps. Interested in joining our growing team? Check out about.reddit.com/careers

Kuli is an AI agent for social media and influencer marketing teams at the world's largest consumer brands. Our agent watches every video on socials in the brand's context and helps marketers get work done to launch their campaigns 4x faster. Previous platforms gave marketers databases to search through and a CRM. Kuli actually watches the content. Marketers at team like Supercell, Disney and Havas use it to scout creators, run analysis on trends and competitor strategies, and analyse what makes their campaign perform better. For 10 years, influencer marketing meant more tools, more tabs, more spreadsheets. Kuli replaces all of that with one single agent you orchestrate. One marketer with Kuli does what a $50K/month agency bills for manual tasks.

Social networks are dead. Social media became more media than social. My friends aren't on social media anymore - it's one third ads, one third content from strangers, and one third AI slop. Our social lives are fragmented across dozens of different apps - iMessage, WhatsApp, Find My, Partiful, and Venmo. Digipals is the first AI-native social operating system that improves our relationships with friends. We built ambient AI agents that use social context from our location, calendar, and photos to take action and write code in our group chats. We are the last social platform anyone will ever need. Launch Video https://youtu.be/KW2tjLl6sxM

Bluma is the first AI short form content engine. In a post-AI world, attention is the most valuable commodity. Social media is only growing faster and faster, and we're still early. We automate your entire consumer marketing strategy by cloning your competitor's viral videos. Everything that a growth team would plan, script, produce, and edit, Bluma can clone end-to-end and at scale.

We're building a protocol for large language models to directly interface with image sensors.

Charm makes sending money as easy as sending email. Most people juggle multiple payment apps and scattered balances. Charm lets you pay anyone — no matter what app they use — and earns you 5% interest on your balance, automatically.

We help businesses capture what resonates, make it repeatable, and turn attention into lasting momentum. With Typa, you can build a scalable inbound growth engine with content that compounds. We make this possible through three pillars: 1. A tone of voice that always sounds like you. Typa learns your style, cadence, and perspective so every piece of content reflects your authentic voice. 2. A knowledge base that updates in real time. Your digital clone continuously absorbs everything you say and create, ensuring your content always reflects your latest thinking. 3. A personal ghostwriter that’s always just a call away. Puff is your 24/7 AI ghostwriter and strategist, available via phone or WhatsApp whenever you want to brainstorm, plan, or execute. Currently supported channels: X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, and blog/newsletters.

We build AI video apps that bring joy. Taffy, our latest app, is used by friends and lovers to make animations of favorite memories and inside jokes.

Storio is a content platform where creators can create original fiction or derivative works based on other fictional worlds. Creators write fictions 10 times faster on Storio. It's a place for community to fully indulge in the fictional world that they wish they were in.

We build generative AI tools that enhance the fan engagement experience. Want to remix Taylor Swift in the style of Slayer? Now you can with our new product Groove.

Syncly is an AI-native social listening platform that analyzes social content from text to video. Syncly extracts content, creator, and consumer insights from audio, visuals, and on-screen context, not just captions and comments, across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and more. From enterprise leaders like Kimberly-Clark and Clorox to fast-growing brands like Neuro, teams use Syncly to get full visibility across every social channel and make faster, smarter decisions.

Rethoric is a LinkedIn content agency built by founders, for founders. We run your entire content operation from strategy to publishing so you stay visible and top of mind with your ICP without spending time on it. Your content starts with a monthly interview led by people who understand the founder journey. We go deep on your ideas, decisions, and lessons learned so the content sounds like your best thinking, not a marketing team's version of it. From there, world-class ghostwriters and editors turn those conversations into a full content calendar. Our platform replaces the usual agency workflow of Google Docs, review threads, and scheduling tools. You connect your LinkedIn and Slack, and everything shows up already written, scheduled, and ready to publish. You approve directly from Slack notifications.

We help aspiring creators go viral and monetize their content.

Users perform millions of calls and send hundreds of millions of messages every month. The topics vary from language practicing to mental issues to personal life conversations.

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.

9GAG is the global cross-platform entertainment media network. It is a place for fun, conversation, and engagement. Founded in 2008, 9GAG’s mission is to make the world happier. 9GAG has a total of 150 million global audience with 39 million followers on Facebook, 44 million on Instagram and 15 million on Twitter. Being #1 ranked global social media platform in entertainment & gaming, #1 ranked US's cross-platform video creators, we distribute 2.2 billion social video views on a monthly basis (source: tubular labs). 9GAG.com is #6 most followed brand on Instagram and is a top 200 website globally. 9GAG is backed by: Freestyle Capital, True Ventures, First Round Capital, Greycroft Partners, 500 Startups, Y Combinator and a group of great angel investors in the United States. eg Anthony Soohoo, Benjamin Ling, BoxGroup, Gary Vaynerchuk, James Hong, Kevin Rose, Karl Jacob, Lowercase Capital, Maneesh Arora, Naval Ravikant, Othman Laraki, Philip Kaplan, Rich Chen, Rich Lefurgy, Scott and Cyan Banister, Tim Ferriss.

Remade is building an AI-native canvas for creative workflows. Try it now at: app.remade.ai

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.

Brainstorm, create, publish and manage content and advertisements on social media using 1 tool.

We started Wildfire during our senior year at UC Berkeley as a safety alert app for colleges. Wildfire quickly grew beyond a campus safety tool to a social news app, which empowered people to spread the word quickly to their community when something significant happened nearby. Over six years, we've sent 65 million alerts to nearly 1 million users.

Breaker is a podcast listening and discovery application. Most podcasts are free, but serious publishers are spending big budgets to make high quality audio content like Serial, which hit 100 million downloads and made podcasts mainstream. 67 million Americans are already listening to podcasts a month. Breaker wants to sign exclusive deals to distribute the best premium podcasts and charge users $6 per month. First, its goal is to build a huge listener audience by making the best podcast consumption app. It launched today, and will offer podcasters ways to connect and get feedback from their community, and analytics about what content performs best. It has a stunning 67% retention rate after a month for beta users. If it can convince people to pay for what’s often free, it could become the preferred place for podcasters to talk.

Twitch is the world’s leading video platform and community for gamers. More than 100 million gamers gather every month to broadcast, watch and chat about gaming. Twitch’s video platform is the backbone of live and on-demand distribution for leading video game broadcasters including casual gamers, pro players, tournaments, leagues, developers and gaming media organizations. Twitch is leading a revolution in the gaming community, working to create a participatory experience that transcends gameplay. Learn more at http://twitch.tv.

hute powers enterprise UGC for brands, agencies and publishers – from discovering consumer photos and videos, both with visual and text search, to the ideation, production, and amplification of compelling visual material. Chute works with some of the world’s biggest brands and publishers including Benefit Cosmetics, NBCUniversal, adidas, Brown-Forman, Condé Nast, NBA, United Nations, New York Times, and Ford. For more information, visit www.getchute.com. You can reach us anytime at hello@getchute.com. We look forward to hearing from you!