AI Assistant Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Touchy is your personal AI assistant that lives on your iPhone. It sees what you see and talks to your other apps to take care of work so you can get back to living in the moment.

Developers don't run one coding agent anymore. They run fleets of them — for hours, sometimes days — across laptops, servers, and sandboxes. Keeping track of that work is the new bottleneck: which agent is blocked, which one finished, which terminal is it in, and why did everything die when the laptop closed. Herdr is the open-source home for that work. A background server owns the agents' terminal sessions on each machine, so the work survives disconnects, closed lids, and dropped SSH. Herdr detects each agent and turns the chaos into an attention queue — working, blocked, done, across every project — so you look only when an agent needs you. Every client is just a view: the bundled terminal UI, SSH from another machine, your phone. Close one, open another; the work never stops. Software can drive it too: a CLI, a socket API, and a plugin marketplace that passed 500 community plugins in its first month. The runtime is Apache-2.0 and stays open. Four months after launch: 25k GitHub stars, 340k downloads.

Wondering turns anything you want to learn, from LLMs to quantum mechanics to product design, into a path of three-minute lessons with visuals, podcasts, and interactive exercises. Each learning path and its content are personalized to your background, how you learn best, and how deep you want to go. It’s the most delightful way to understand complex topics and turn information into knowledge you can remember and apply. You don’t just passively read. You practice, make connections, and form your own insights. Start learning anything for free at https://wondering.app/download

We're building AI Passport, a personal memory layer that works across AI apps. Every AI product you use today keeps its own memory of you: ChatGPT has one, Claude has one, and every AI-powered app is starting to build one too. None of them talk to each other, you can't see most of what they've stored, and you re-explain yourself to each new tool. AI Passport replaces those scattered profiles with one card you own. Your preferences, history, and goals live in one place, and new information lands in an inbox where you approve or reject it before it's saved. Apps that want to use your context request a pass, which grants them access to only the categories you allow and can be revoked at any time. Receipts show you exactly which app read what, and when. For a user, this means any AI app can know you from the first message. For a business, personalization works in both directions: a storefront can retrieve a customer's taste, sizes, and budget and personalize instantly instead of running an onboarding quiz, and a support organization can keep one memory of each customer across tickets, teams, and agents, so every new case starts with what the company already knows about the person.

Almanac is Hermes with a company brain. You message it in Slack or iMessage; it knows what is happening across your company and can use your accounts to get real tasks done for you. It has a full computer, browser and terminal. It takes your Gmail, Calendar, Attio, GitHub, AI convos, docs and meeting notes and compiles them into a Wiki that keeps itself up to date. It keeps a current understanding of what you’re building, who your customers are, what was decided, and what still needs to happen. It can use websites, run code, create files and take actions across your accounts. If it reaches a login, payment or decision it shouldn’t make alone, it pings you or hands you the live browser.

An adaptive training coach to help runners, cyclists, and triathletes set and achieve goals. It adapts your training, recovery, and nutrition to how your body is actually responding.

Sidekick is an AI assistant for frontline manufacturing workers. Sidekick lets workers text problems, photos, or voice memos in any language; it answers from the company's own documents, creates and routes the work order, and syncs with software the company already runs. Sidekick captures the tribal knowledge in veterans' heads - the know-how that usually walks out the door when they retire - into a searchable knowledge base the company owns. No app, no login, works on any phone.

We automate the entire end-to-end prior-authorization process for private practices for cheaper, and more accurately than they're doing today.

A personal AI HUD that lives in a pair of glasses. Think Jarvis. It reads your email, runs your calendar and puts directions in your eye. 25 grams, no cameras, all day.

Supafax is an AI agent that lives in your inbox and proactively manages your email and calendar.

item connects to all your customer tools, gathers and enriches context automatically, and becomes your company’s source of truth — one place where your team and your AI agents share the full picture to act autonomously. At the center is the Assistant — your sidekick for daily work. It can send follow-ups, research leads, or add deals with a simple prompt. No complex UI, drop-downs or fields, simply ask. For repeatable work, you build Agents that you can train like new hires, simply by writing documents that describe your processes. item Agents run business processes across sales, support, and account management autonomously.

We build AI that runs carrier operations. Lunavo is the AI assistant for carriers. It plugs directly into their existing toolstack, understands their processes, and monitors all incoming data and requests. Lunavo runs end-to-end backoffice operations, handling repetitive tasks, resolving issues autonomously, and escalating only what matters. Lunavo helps carriers scale operations without scaling headcount.

Logical is a desktop AI that acts as a proactive and largely promptless copilot, designed to reduce the friction of using AI for everyday tasks. It transfers context across apps, and allows taking action on many apps with just a few clicks. Logical can assist with drafting emails, writing docs, noting meetings and can even automatically detect action items. Need to prompt? Logical can understand intent in much fewer words than a regular chatbot. Plus, user data is never sent to Logical servers. Logical is the AI resurrection of Clippy, but actually good.

Bron is the Tiktok for sports betting. Scroll through recommended bets across 150+ sportsbooks and prediction markets and place them automatically. Download Bron on the App Store here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bron-ai-sports-analysis/id6761323087

If you’ve got a lot to do, we believe AI can make things feel doable. Caddy is our core product: a Personal AI that helps you stay on top of everything going on. All you have to do is text. On overwhelming days, it’s super simple to just drop any task in a text thread, and Caddy will help you handle it. Caddy also keeps an eye on your calendars, chats and tasks to make sure you stay focused on what matters. If something needs you, Caddy will nudge you, or can just do it if you don’t have time. The best part is, no two Caddys are alike. The more you use Caddy, the more it learns your vibe, how you work, and what you care about. 

Fastshot is a no-code mobile development platform. Our mission is to "Democratize mobile app creation with AI" Anyone can develop a mobile app from idea to App Stores within minutes just by chatting with AI.

Automate internal auditing (planning, testing, documenting) to comply better with financial regulations. Denki performs audit work with 99% software, 1% services: ✔️ Works on existing systems (e.g. Auditboard, Workiva, ERPs) ✔️ Automates Control processes (e.g. collects evidence, runs walkthrough interviews, tests) ✔️ Records every step for traceability (workpapers w/ full audit trace) Focused on SOX programs and financial regulations (SEC Rules etc.)

Bravi is building the AI operating system for home-services businesses, using AI-powered customer communication as the wedge. We replace the front office (calls, chats, follow-ups) with AI agents that never miss a lead, then layer an internal AI copilot that understands products, pricing, and technical documentation. We started with fenestration (shutters, windows, garage doors), a large, complex vertical with no modern software, before expanding to adjacent trades. Bravi is already live with leading installers and manufacturers across Europe and the US, turning missed demand into revenue.

Brickanta – agentic AI for society builders. Hundreds of construction-specific AI agents for project analysis, insights, tenders, procurement, and more. Combine the latest AI technology with your organization's project data, templates, and workflows to identify risks and opportunities early and produce better decision support. Brickanta has raised $8 million from leading AI, construction, and real estate investors behind companies like OpenAI/ChatGPT, Airbnb, Klarna, Spotify, and Plangrid-Autodesk, as well as star investors such as Mario Götze, Anton Osika, and Northzone (see movie and press). The founding team has been building and implementing AI in construction and industry since 2018 at companies such as ABB, Fabege, Husqvarna, IKEA and Konecranes.

Char is a daily notepad that finishes your todos for you. Type a checkbox, and an agent picks it up — researching, drafting, or scheduling on your behalf. Stay in command. Char does the work.

Clodo is the planet's best people discovery. Used in GTM, Recruiting, Marketing, and Ops at AI Natives, B2Bs, and Fortune 500s in SaaS, Manufacturing/Industrials, BioTech, Healthcare, Fintech, Compliance, and more

Meet Meteor: a Chrome-alternative that can actually do your work for you. With agents getting better by the day (literally), we realize that it’s time to automate the boring, tedious work. We use your browser session to empower agents to act like your personal assistants (ex. book a calendar, find cheaper flights, buy clothes on amazon etc.) Some of Meteor’s features: - Chat with any page - Integrate with popular apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, Twitter etc. - Browser agent to autonomously navigate the web and perform tasks - More coming soon! We're excited to usher in a new era of browsing.

Epicenter is an ecosystem of open-source, local-first apps that share a memory. We store all your work—notes, transcripts, chat histories—in a single folder of plain text and SQLite. Every tool we build shares this memory: your text editor, personal assistant, etc.. It's open, tweakable, and yours. Grep it, open it in Obsidian, host it wherever you like. The choice is yours. Our vision is to build a personal workspace where you own your data, choose your own AI models, and replace siloed apps with open, interoperable alternatives. All while preserving authenticity and being free and open source. ❤️

Omnara is an open-source, model-agnostic control plane for managed agents. One API to deploy, run, and control them. Self-host it, or use our managed cloud.

SigmanticAI is building an AI-native hardware development assistant that automates the entire RTL design flow, from natural language to synthesizable HDL and testbenches, inside a seamless VSCode fork. Powered by fine-tuned Verilog LLMs, reinforcement learning, and real compiler feedback, SigmanticAI iteratively refines code until it compiles and passes synthesis, no matter how complex the design. It’s like the Cursor for HDL design. In addition to code generation, SigmanticAI can generate token-level annotations and onboarding documents to accelerate ramp-up for new engineers. With support for both cloud and on-prem deployment, it integrates with existing EDA tools to dramatically reduce debug time, improve collaboration, and accelerate hardware design across teams

AI that helps you fly through your inbox.

Bond is an AI Chief of Staff that gives CEOs and busy executives real-time visibility into what’s happening across the company and tells them what to focus on. Saving execs 10+ hours a week.

Alkali is building the next generation of estimation tools for construction.

Orchid is an executive assistant that lives in iMessage. It texts you your day each morning, drafts your replies, and books your meetings. You approve, it handles the rest. If you've ever wished for a world-class EA, come talk to us.

Flott helps transport and logistics companies run leaner, smarter, and more profitable operations. Flott unifies everything transport and logistics teams need in a single, AI-powered control center—bringing planning, live tracking (gps, fuel, etc), invoicing, and payments into one place and delivering true end-to-end visibility. Flott’s AI agents act as an extension of fleet managers — automating repetitive tasks and optimizing workflows.This lets companies focus on what truly matters: growing the business.

Founder led hiring for London startups

Truffle AI makes it easy for developers to integrate AI agents into any software application. We do this by exposing agents as simple APIs that can be called from anywhere. Developers have used Truffle to add customer support agents into WhatsApp and analytics agents into Slack.

Rebolt sits on top of your systems and builds tailor-made AI software - to drive outcomes

G LNK is an AI-powered platform simplifying how healthcare companies connect with the relevant medical professionals. Our proprietary matching and ranking models instantly identify the most qualified experts, accelerating drug development and commercialization. Designed with compliance at its core, G LNK ensures every connection meets strict regulatory and ethical standards—empowering companies to innovate faster with confidence.

assistant-ui helps frontend developers add AI chat to their apps. Our product is used by several dozen companies, like LangChain, Stack AI, Browser Use, and Athena Intelligence. We're building an open source Typescript/React library and a backend as a service, with first class integrations into popular agent frameworks like LangGraph and Vercel AI SDK.

jo is a personal AI agent that keeps up with your work and life, surfaces what matters, and helps you follow through. It remembers relevant context, works proactively, and supports recurring workflows through autopilot while keeping you in control.

Edexia is an AI Teacher Assistant for grading essays. It can be trained and controlled by the teacher and can grade assignments from any curriculum, year level, subject, or format. Learning like a teacher, Edexia visually breaks down its understanding of the rubric, and updates this as a teacher corrects it. Our vision is to transform education by facilitating AI’s safe and effective integration across all institutions and applications. Not using AI to replace teachers but rather to empower them—providing them with all the time and resources they need to develop their students.

Vortexify is an AI app builder for full-stack, internal business apps. Businesses such as manufacturers, hospitals and logistics services use Vortexify to solve complex, operational problems such as scheduling, process optimization, forecasting, root cause analysis and scenario planning. Our agents encode business logic by mapping operational problems to the data in your systems and collaborating with domain experts. Operations teams can build apps without writing code. Engineering teams can edit and manage agent written code at any time. Vortexify builds applications beyond simple dashboards with native support for databases, scheduled tasks, optimization solvers, machine learning models, data pipelines, API calls and more. Our secure, managed infrastructure enables our agents to build quickly and get it right the first time. Solve your hardest operations problems today! Create a free account to get started. For additional technical services or support, contact us or book a demo.

Endstack is a full desktop, collaborative workspace built for humans and agents running in the cloud available on web, desktop, and mobile. Each workspace powered by endOS, giving you a familiar channel-based experience augmented by a real desktop environment. The desktop is backed by Linux and ships with a built-in Chrome browser. Files, notes, browser tabs, native apps, terminal, and all your agents in a single beautiful, unified interface. At the center of it all you get a powerful agent running 24/7 that you can also reach via Slack, email, or SMS.

Email sucks. It takes forever to go through, and hiring an assistant is costly and invasive. Friday is building the assistant that learns how to predict the action that you will take on your emails, and does it for you. Today's email products try to help you go through your emails a little faster, but if you have to get through 1000 emails, those products doesn't do much for you. The reality is, most of the emails you get don't require you to personally look at them. Freestyle completely eliminates the need to check those emails, and handles them all at once for you, immediately. Freestyle is here to file away spam, sift through newsletters for important tidbits, text you important notifications, and reply to mundane emails, so that no matter how many thousands of emails are in your inbox, you'll just be left with the few emails that actually require your personal touch. Getting this right is difficult, so everyone else settles with trying to help you go through your email twice as fast. If you want to go 100x as fast, you shouldn't spend even a second on useless emails. Freestyle gets this right, bringing the elite experience of having a professional assistant to the entire world.

Orchestrate an army of coding agents from one dashboard. Ship entire sprints in parallel.

Sandra AI is building the AI operating system for car dealerships, replacing clumsy legacy software with an AI-native, automation-driven platform. Founded by 3 McKinsey, HEC & MIT alumni who met 10 years ago at Ecole Polytechnique, the company’s AI agents already automates all customer interactions across calls & messages, and increasingly run dealership operations by automating sales and aftersales workflows end-to-end. This operational footprint naturally extends into a proprietary software layer that unifies billing, scheduling, inventory, and CRM into a single dealership OS.

Random Labs is building Slate. Slate is a coding agent designed to work with you for long hours on hard problems.

VideoGen makes it easy for anyone to create professional, copyright-free videos in seconds. Our AI video generator turns a prompt, script, or article into a finished video, complete with AI voiceover, subtitles, and b-roll, powered by the latest models like Sora, Veo, and Kling. Today, over 5 million users trust VideoGen, from individuals and small businesses to teams at Google and ByteDance. Making videos is hard, time-consuming, and expensive if you hire someone to do it for you. With VideoGen, it only takes a few clicks! Try it at https://videogen.io/, or build video into your own product with our API: https://videogen.io/videogen-api

We are on a mission to provide faster and affordable access to the justice system - starting with depositions and trials. 1000s of depositions and trials run through DraftTheRecord every week including Senate and House meetings, Confidential federal hearings, criminal proceedings like murder trials, and civil lawsuits involving family disputes, personal injury and much more. During legal proceedings, • DraftTheRecord provides real time assistance to attorneys, previously requiring a legal team. The platform then helps analyze depositions and other evidence cutting down trial prep time from weeks to days.  • Court reporters use DraftTheRecord to capture audio and generate live transcript drafts for attorneys and judges.  • Transcribers use our legal-specific AI transcription model to cut transcription time by 3x.

Consumers miss out on $70B+ every year because they're busy and unaware, and that money is sitting in their email inbox. So, we automated reading email receipts and claiming the money they're entitled to, offering a service to which you can sign up once, do (literally) nothing, and earn $. Where is this money coming from? - Retailers: When the price of clothes or furniture you've already bought drops, you're entitled to a refund for the difference - Airlines: When a flight you've booked gets delayed or canceled, you're entitled to a cash compensation. - Enterprises: When a class-action lawsuit is filed against a company you engage with, you're entitled to money. - And many more, that even the government holds some of your unclaimed funds. Today, the dream of one service that automatically claims the money you deserve when you shop, fly,... and live is (finally) possible. We started with automating refunds in the shopping industry and have secured $8,000 in refunds to our users, growing 233% MoM. With AI, we've been able to repurpose that same automation to tackle refunds in the flight industry and the class-action lawsuit landscape. Why us? (1) We're obsessed with reclaiming what's rightfully yours: Kamal and Anthony grew up in Lebanon, where people's money was unfairly taken away. (2) Weijie was the lead infra engineer for Wish's recommendation system, the feature that fueled their IPO. Our combined experience includes Apple, Addepar, Bolt, Wish, and StackAdapt. And we're all working towards one goal: move those billions of dollars where they belong.

Rowboat is an AI coworker for everyday work - email, meetings, projects, and people. It builds a local knowledge graph from your work and uses it to draft emails, prep meetings, track projects, and get work done on your own computer. It comes with batteries included - meeting note capture, in-app browsing, search, and app integrations - plus MCP support for custom tools.

Orca is a game launcher for Minecraft. Players browse games and experiences and join with one click, no mod installation, no setup. We handle hosting and mod delivery for server owners and game creators, who earn revenue from their games. Think Roblox, but built on top of Minecraft's 312M player base.

ProhostAI is building an AI Property Manager for short-term rental hosts on Airbnb and other platforms. Our team consists of an ex-Airbnb Staff Data Scientist and Dropbox Sr Software Engineer who are also Superhosts with 9 properties worth $15M making $1.5M/yr.

MinusX is a state-of-the-art data agent that can build the best dashboards for your data, and notify you when something's up. You can interrogate all your data on our open source BI platform via Slack or MCP. Connect your data, and put agents to work.