Advertising Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Lapis gives businesses the ability to generate on-brand advertising creatives using AI. It uses existing assets like logos, colors, fonts, and product images, and automatically creates image ads that match a company's visual identity and voice across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and Google. With Lapis, businesses can rapidly iterate on creatives and A/B test at scale without being bottlenecked by design and creative capacity. Lapis is used by 1,000+ marketing teams, from big businesses like Hyundai and Tata to small businesses around the world, and supports 15+ languages including English, Spanish, and Italian.

Absurd makes AI brand and performance ads at scale. Our last video for Kalshi ("Election Day") did 1M+ views, and our videos average 400K+ organic views. Companies like Hims, Kalshi, Replit, and Brex use Absurd to create production-quality videos in 72 hours. We do it with a multi-agent orchestration layer, working closely with your team from concept to final cut. Try it at absurd.com

Uplane replaces marketing agencies with AI. We generate hundreds of ads with matching landing pages and steer the ad spend across channels like Meta, Google, LinkedIn and others. By connecting to CRM and ERP data, Uplane learns what drives profits and continuously improves campaigns. Companies waste billions on bad ads, mismatched landing pages, and poor budget allocation. Uplane fixes this by replacing a patchwork of agencies, spreadsheets, and siloed tools with one self-improving system. The result: Higher ROAS for enterprises and effortless, expert-level marketing for SMBs.

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.

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.

Stewdio is a collaborative platform for creative teams to use all the latest image + video generation models in one place. Music video directors, ad agencies, and architects use Stewdio to create everything from rap videos for Quavo and Loco, advertising storyboards, to architectural renderings.

Surface Labs helps B2B companies capture, qualify, and convert inbound leads through intelligent contact forms. We replace tools like HubSpot Forms, Zapier, and Chili Piper with a single platform that embeds on any site with one line of code. Our AI agents handle lead capture, enrichment, routing, follow-up, and CRO testing — automating what used to require full marketing ops teams. Customers see a 30% lift in conversions in under 2 weeks, and our partial response capture feature collects 50% more emails from form drop-offs.

Kite is a screen recorder that makes your demo videos look like Apple commercials in minutes. Simply record your app (works for iPhone recordings too!). Kite will track your cursor and keyboard inputs, so it can automatically zoom in on the action with professional 3D animations. Kite is as easy as Canva, but your videos will look like they came out of OpenAI or Figma. - One-click cinematic 3D animations - Display recordings on 3D mockup devices (MacBooks, iPhones etc) - Combine unlimited recordings into one video - Edit, adjust speed and trim recordings - Add text scenes and text annotations alongside recordings - AI voiceovers using state of the art text to speech models - Free music library - Brand kit–upload your logos, colors and fonts - Start from our template library or start from scratch Kite is used by hundreds of YC companies for launch videos, social media posts, landing page demos, changelog updates, feature releases and more.

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.

Rubbrband creates world-class video ads and stories with AI and human creativity. We work with companies from seed to growth, see our work at rubbrband.com.

Kular is an AI Lead Generator, generating leads for busy professionals and business owners and only charging for results. Today, Kular generates leads for over 1000 companies via email and LinkedIn. Kular is being built by a team of MIT, IIT, Cambridge and Oxford grads, backed by some of the best investors in the world, including Y-Combinator, Entrepreneur First, Acequia Capital and angel investors behind companies like Ironclad, OpenSea and Stripe.

Designers, branding agencies, and on-line stores can use Vimmerse’s AI creators platform, Apps, and API to animate their images at scale making their business stand out from the crowd.

Reforged Labs Boa is the AI creative intelligence agent that answers all your questions about what ads are performing, why they work, and what to create next.

Buoyant Aero builds zero-emissions autonomous drone blimps to break free from existing advertising paradigms and reach new audiences in new places. Whether it’s on the beach, outside the convention center, or through the window of your target executive’s office, Buoyant’s blimps amplify your message to create measurable brand benefits.

Plai makes it easy to create, launch, and optimize ads with AI doing the heavy lifting. Brands use Plai across Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Trusted across 100,000+ campaigns and 5B+ ad impressions.

Taiv puts TVs on autopilot, automatically switching between cable, our own streaming channels, digital signage, and trivia. Our proprietary AI model analyzes the live video feed and intelligently switches sources during commercial breaks, show changes, or based on the time of day, to show the best possible content & ads for any environment. We offer this for free to venues and make money by selling ads, which we rev-share back with the venue, turning their TVs from a cost center to a profit center.

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.

As third-party identifiers like the cookie disappear, ad-tech breaks—targeting, frequency capping and measurement disappear. We're rebuilding data infrastructure in advertising to work with cohorts—privacy safe descriptions of users—which enable advertising use cases without the need for sharing personal identifiers. We do this by moving data processing and management out of the cloud, and on to the user's device.

mth sense focuses on finding solutions to "blind" ads. mth sense offers its users an audience library to target certain demographics and psychographics.

Popular Pays is a platform connecting content Creators with Brands who want content to tell their stories. We’re tech-forward, with an in-house built iOS and web app (for creators) and dashboard (for brands) that delivers direct communication & powerful statistics to help you run a multiplatform campaign. To find out what we’re about, visit our website: www.popularpays.com.

Motionlead empowers advertisers and publishers to reach their audience through a unique advertising experience thanks to transparent, animated and interactive ads that come on top of native and web apps without stopping user navigation

Boostable makes advertising easy for sellers and brands on marketplaces. We grow marketplaces by helping their sellers advertise their listings and gather insights. Boostable is a YCombinator company based in San Francisco and funded by SVAngel, 500 Startups and others.

URX empowers publishers to monetize mobile content and enables advertisers to drive mobile commerce. The world's most forward-thinking companies use URX to connect users directly to relevant commerce experiences. URX is headquartered in San Francisco and has raised $15M from Accel, Google Ventures, First Round Capital, SV Angel and Y Combinator.

A LITTLE ABOUT VIROOL Virool is a video distribution platform for brand marketers that leverages programmatic technology to reach key influencers, making content more engaging and the ability to share easier than ever. Having served more than 75,000 global campaigns, Virool’s robust ActivView product suite and in-article native unit, deliver fully transparent and insightful analytics that offers viewability guarantees, emotional resonance and fraud protection. Within our platform, users can leverage a proprietary DMP of 450MM unique profiles to build custom, addressable audience segments across all screens. More than 100,000 multi-channel sites have activated video content from Virool via partnerships including Rubicon Project and direct native placements. Founded in 2012, Virool has raised $18.62M in funding from a collection of top VC firms and angel investors, including $6.62M in its seed round. It is the biggest seed investment that anymore Y-Combinator graduate has ever received.

OmniVirt is 360° Virtual Reality advertising platform for brands and publishers. Audiences can view 360° content with just one tap of their fingertip on smartphones, tablets and websites. No app installation or VR headset required. HTML5 / VAST complaint. Our company is specialize in mobile formats, the network optimizes revenue for publishers and serves billions of ad impressions in more than 200 countries.

Heyzap is a premier mobile ad network that helps millions of users discover apps they love. Heyzap’s SDK for Android and iOS apps allows both well-established app producers and innovative indie developers to monetize and bring their apps to a wide audience. It currently provides advertising, publishing, mediation, and cross-promotion services to mobile developers worldwide. Heyzap is based in San Francisco and was founded in 2009 by Jude Gomila and Immad Akhund.

AdGrok allows business owners to automate the process of choosing and bidding on keywords on Google AdWords.

Google AdWords for music. Allowing bands and labels to bid for airtime and have their music streamed to qualified audience.

Perfect Audience is a retargeting platform that lets businesses bring back lost customers and get more sales effortlessly.