AI (Artificial Intelligence) Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) in the San Francisco Bay Area that are currently hiring 2026

Scale accelerates the development of AI within organizations of any size to deliver critical business insights and operational efficiency. Its data-centric infrastructure platform leverages RLHF (Reinforced Learning with Human Feedback) to help organizations build the strongest AI models that supercharge their business, with customers across industries including Meta, Microsoft, U.S. Army, DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit, Open AI, General Motors, Toyota Research Institute, Brex, Instacart and Flexport.

Checkr builds people infrastructure for the future of work. And we believe everyone should have a fair chance to work. That's why we've designed a faster—and fairer—way to screen job seekers. For more information on our mission and products, visit https://checkr.com.

Korso is an AI-powered operations platform for manufacturers that automates the full quote-to-order workflow: processing incoming RFQs, extracting line items, generating professional quotes, and tracking purchase orders through production. At its core is an intelligent assistant with frontier-model capabilities that understands your business documents, pricing history, and customer relationships, so your team can ask questions, get instant analysis, and make decisions in seconds rather than hours.

Building the communication infrastructure needed for fully autonomous agents

Sandbox infrastructure for AI agents, with full-environment forks and snapshots across files, processes, memory, and databases.

Asimov collects real-world human movement data from households and businesses to train humanoid robots. Unlike factory datasets that capture the same tasks in the same environments, we deliver the full diversity of real human environments, thousands of hours a day to leading labs.

Samora runs multilingual voice operations for organizations with high-volume calling without requiring engineering teams, call centers, or AI expertise. Many important tasks still depend on phone calls, including customer support, outreach, follow-ups, screening, and intake. But voice AI often fails in production because real callers interrupt, go off-script, switch languages mid-sentence, and speak in local dialects. Teams also worry about safety and compliance, especially when an agent can accidentally make the wrong promise. Samora solves this with voice agents that sound local and follow strict rules. Samora agents handle inbound and outbound calls, collect information, and update internal systems like CRMs, ticketing tools, and ATS platforms. When a call becomes sensitive or uncertain, the agent hands off to a human. It can also follow up over WhatsApp, SMS, or email when needed. With Samora, teams get: 1. Voice agents that work in real conversations, including dialects and code-switching 2. Strict safety controls so agents don’t make unauthorized offers, discounts, or promises 3. Calls that result in completed actions, system updates, and safe human handoff

Oximy helps enterprises understand and manage AI usage across their workforce. Used by security, finance, and transformation teams to track adoption, control spend, and manage governance as AI scales.

Scout Out is the all-in-one AI-powered project management platform built for residential contractors. Today, contractors run complex businesses on a patchwork of tools that were never designed for construction — estimates in spreadsheets, plans in email, proposals copy-pasted from old Word docs, photos scattered across phones. Nothing talks to anything else, and the admin work never stops. Scout Out replaces that patchwork with a single platform that manages the full lifecycle of a construction job, from first estimate to final invoice. Contractors upload plans, photos, or a project description, and Scout Out's AI instantly generates structured takeoffs, scoped estimates, and professional proposals — in minutes, not hours. From there, every customer record, document, permit, photo, change order, and conversation lives in one place, organized around the job. The result: contractors spend less time buried in admin and more time building. They bid faster, manage jobs with less chaos, and close projects cleanly — without duct-taping five tools together to do it. We're starting in Los Angeles, working closely with residential remodelers and contractors — including those managing post-fire rebuilds following the Palisades and Eaton fires.

We’re archiving the physical world for embodied intelligence by collecting and labeling aligned multimodal data. To build dexterous and perceptive robots that generalize robustly, we need massive amounts of real-world data across multiple modalities and environments. We have thought deeply about the fine line between biomimicry and its application to humanoid systems. Based on this research, we design and deploy custom hardware across residential and manufacturing settings. We then post-process the resulting data through internal QA, anonymization, and annotation pipelines to deliver diverse, high-fidelity datasets at scale to frontier labs developing robotics foundation models and general-purpose robotics companies. We believe we are at a historic inflection point, with a unique opportunity to leave a dent on humanity and reshape physical labor markets forever. That's why our team dropped out of Stanford and Berkeley and moved to Asia to collect the world’s largest annotated multimodal dataset.

Pax Historia is an alternate-history sandbox game where players choose a country, a moment in time, and rewrite the course of history. What if Rome never fell? What if the Soviet Union survived? What if Genghis Khan ruled for another generation? We go beyond history, too. What if aliens invaded Earth? What if you were a college dropout creating a tech startup? The ability to create, edit, and copy custom maps, actors, historical context, and more means that users can play nearly any scenario they can imagine. In the last four months we've organically built a passionate fanbase of tens of thousands of daily active players and we're excited to expand on this early start. Consider joining us to help build vastly better tools for creators and experiences for players.

Fifth Door unlocks the power of imagination by making it easy for everyone to create, share, and play games anywhere, with anyone. We exist to stimulate the creativity, connection, and joy that people get when they play games.

DiligenceSquared delivers AI-powered market due diligence for investment decisions - like the $500k McKinsey reports, but automated, auditable, and at a fraction of the cost. When Private Equity funds evaluate deals, they pay firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Bain $500K-$1M for market due diligence. The process takes weeks, and the output is a static PowerPoint that's impossible to audit. A single large-cap PE fund can spend >$30M annually on this and the total market is $10B per year. Our AI agents conduct expert interviews and synthesize insights with every claim linked to source transcripts. No black box, no "trust me" slides, and no 10x mark-up for human labor. Frederik bought these reports as a Principal at Blackstone. Soren sold them as a Principal at BCG. Harshil is a repeat founder and former Software Engineer at Google. We've seen both sides and know what matters in due diligence - and now we automate it. Our clients already include 8 leading private equity funds with over $2.4 trillion in combined AUM.

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

Leadbay (YC F25) discovers and qualifies SMB leads that couldn't be found before. Small-to-enterprise teams use us to prospect the most low-data-low-signals industries like construction, hospitality, even startups. Co-founders are Milan Stankovic (CTO) - PhD to make AI work with limited data, and Ludovic Granger (CEO). Try us on leadbay.ai.

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.

Clicks automates your back-office using your existing tools and processes without requiring any IT integrations. What We Do: Think of Clicks as your back-office worker that can handle any repetitive task. Simply describe your process via video call or share documentation, and our forward-deployed engineering team ensures it's automated exactly your way. Our AI agents work 24/7 and can be kicked-off via email, Slack, or our web app, handling tasks like CRM updates, report generation, and data entry while adapting to your existing software. Initial Focus: We're starting with recruiting and executive search firms, automating candidate codification, assessment reports, and administrative workflows that typically consume hours of manual work each day. Value Proposition: Our pricing is 100% outcome based: you only pay for the work outputs we complete (e.g., candidates added to CRM, reports generate, etc.). Current customers are already live and saving an average of 60% in costs compared to human workers, with full automation deployed within one week.

AI teams spend 6+ months building document workflows, yet fewer than 10% ever reach production. Generic LLM parsers and OCR collapse on multimodal documents with text, tables, images, and charts. Poor parsing and suboptimal chunking cripple RAG pipelines and downstream automation. Unsiloed AI has built state-of-the-art vision models which serves as the infrastructure layer for turning unstructured data into structured, queryable, and LLM-ready assets. Our APIs are already parsing hundreds of thousands of documents for startups and NASDAQ-listed enterprises, powering vertical AI solutions across industries. On public benchmarks, Unsiloed AI consistently outperforms solutions from LlamaIndex, Gemini, Mistral, and Unstructured.io among others.

Semble AI builds AI agents that design building-systems (fire, HVAC, plumbing, security). Construction companies use Semble to cut down weeks on commercial and residential projects. The $600B building-system integration industry still runs on spreadsheets and manual drawings, even as building codes rapidly evolve and become more localized. It’s a massive blind spot for the tech world. Jonathan and Ethan met studying computer science at Stanford. Jonathan worked at Convergint, one of the world's largest building system integrators, specifically for the purpose of learning how this industry works. Ethan is obsessed for a different reason: His house burned down in a wildfire in 2017. They are determined to make Semble the industry standard for construction design.

1. Multi-model Agents SDK: build production-grade tool-calling agents in 5 lines of code using our open-source, vendor-agnostic SDK. Connect multiple models across providers (eg. Opus 4.6 + Gemini 3 Flash + GPT 5.4) within the same agent to optimize your agentic workflow's cost, latency, efficiency, and performance. 2. Agents-as-a-Service (AaaS): serve your agent or service as a hosted endpoint that anyone - including OpenClaw and Claude Code - can call.

Food Supply Chain companies have been using legacy ERPs for decades. Everyone knows these are necessary evils that essentially run the business but take up a lot of operational capacity. They are not about to just rip and replace their existing system that runs their whole business with a system that takes years to implement. Imagine if they could implement AI that runs the ERP for them, in weeks? Burnt’s building an agentic OS for the Food Supply Chain with AI Agents for each department. Our AI Agent, Ozai, has started by replacing the whole order management job function at food distribution companies, so that sales and customer service teams can focus on what matters - the customer. Ozai monitors all incoming messages (emails, phone calls, voicemails, whatsapp, fax etc.), figures out if it's an order, learns each customer's habits, shorthand, and favorite products, picks up on any prep notes, and enters it straight into the existing ERP. It'll even go back to the customers on your behalf when it's not sure about something, clarify things and carry on working. The more it sees, the smarter it gets.

Blank Bio builds foundation models that understand RNA, the language of life. Our model powers applications across the entire R&D pipeline, from designing better drugs to running smarter clinical trials. Our first model is state-of-the-art in mRNA property prediction. It simulates costly experiments, helping partners design more effective mRNA medicines faster and cheaper. Our open-source models are being used by Sanofi & GSK. We’re also collaborating with the Arc Institute to bring our RNA embeddings into the next generation of virtual cell models. mRNA design is just the beginning. As the model improves, we’re extending to applications like target ID, novel biomarker discovery, patient stratification, and more. We’ve spent decades applying machine learning to biology across academia (PhDs at the University of Toronto) and industry (Recursion, Deep Genomics, Amazon). Contact us to learn more: founders@blank.bio

We help AI become better at real-world software engineering through production-grade RL environments.

Speech and video models trained on internet data still lack realistic and domain-specific results. We solve this by collecting targeted training data for model labs. We hope to create a world where AI feels more human.

Truth Systems provides a compliance agent to govern the use of generative AI. It translates operational policies into intelligent, real-time guardrails that monitor every AI interaction. This empowers companies to proactively block non-compliant actions and align access to AI tools with user competency. By eliminating the risks and operational blind spots associated with uncontrolled AI adoption, our platform enables enterprises to fully leverage the technology's potential without compromising security. We are establishing the new standard for AI governance, building a future where every professional can innovate safely and confidently.

Lanesurf helps freight brokers book shipments with vetted carriers at the best prices by negotiating rates across multiple calls in parallel. Our self-improving voice AI stack is built for the messy reality of logistics - noisy calls, compliance checks, constant exceptions and turns them into faster bookings at better margins. With each booking, the AI learns from aggregated, anonymized lane and pricing data. As more customers use Lanesurf, this learning compounds, driving faster bookings at the best prices and powering a voice-driven freight marketplace.

DeepAware builds an AI-driven automation system for GPU-intensive data centers. Our reinforcement-learning scheduler, real-time market integration, and unified dashboard slice energy waste by up to 30%. Coming soon: autonomous “robot-hand” inspections and maintenance to enable 24/7 operations with minimal staff. More info: https://deepawareai.com/ Jobs/Internship: https://www.deepawareai.com/careers

We help your company identify roles that can be filled by agentic AI tools, onboard them quickly, monitor their performance and behavior post deployment, ensure they remain compliant, and aligned with regulations. Tecto is building the governance platform for managing the AI stack!

Riff is a music editor with superpowers — helping artists work faster and making it easier than ever for hobbyists to break into music. As we continue to build, we see Riff turning into an entirely new paradigm for creating music.

AI that optimizes AI

We spend our lives in messaging apps. Slack. iMessage. WhatsApp. We face a constant stream of information, introductions, and things we need to do. What if you could bring together every message, from every platform, in a Superhuman-like experience, with AI agents that automatically complete your action items? That’s exactly what we’re building at Pally; a future where you never need to check another inbox again.

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.

Proliferate gives coding agents production-grade infrastructure- sandboxed environments, event triggers, and verification workflows- so they can ship code end-to-end, not just write it.

We are building the data layer for AI, starting with audio. We start with data collection, curating our own proprietary set of diverse conversational data covering a wide range of languages, dialects and accents. We then leverage human expert audio annotators and our own annotation platform to process audio data for Automatic Speech Recognition. With human level transcription and diarization, our data help push the audio model frontier. Today we have over millions of hours of conversational data, and growing. If you need audio data for training or evaluating your voice models or voice agents, reach out! We offer flexible licensing deals that work for startups and enterprises, with minimal process. Audio data should besimple :)

Chestnut is the first AI mortgage lender. We automate 99% of human work with AI agents, saving customers 0.5%+ in interest. This is Spencer's second mortgage startup; the first processes 2% of US mortgages annually. So far, Chestnut is licensed in Texas and Colorado where we power purchases, refinances, cash-outs, and more.

Instantly deploy custom research agents to source and enrich specialized professionals, company data, and insights directly into your existing systems.

Relixir builds autonomous agent runtimes (employees) with recursive self-improvement. Our first agent, Rex, is an autonomous GEO employee that gets brands recommended by AI search engines and compounds results over time by improving how it learns. 400+ customers including Rippling, Airwallex, and HackerRank. Backed by YC, DEEPCORE (SoftBank), Founder of Turing.

What if every experiment you wanted to run could be modeled using AI? Godela is an AI-powered physics engine that gives engineers faster, cheaper replacement to simulations and physical prototypes. No set up, no wait. Just ask—and get simulation quality result.

StarSling is building an agentic developer homepage that automates all the tasks that eat up a developer’s time after they’ve left their code editor: deployments, performance, incidents, and bugs. Open your homepage, click on a GitHub, Linear, or Sentry issue and you’ll see an Autofix button that triggers an AI agent and opens up a Pull Request with a fix, all without leaving your homepage.

Next-generation truck management software to automate back-office operations for trucking companies. Features include AI agents to automate inbound/outbound calls, AI document upload to reduce manual data entry, load sourcing tools, automated accounting, and more.

QualGent is an AI Mobile App Quality Assurance Tester that mimics a real human, helping teams catch bugs and ship faster - without hiring more QA testers. One customer reached #3 in the Education category on the App Store by improving app quality with QualGent. Mobile bugs hurt: crashes kill ratings, broken checkouts drive churn. QualGent helps teams scale QA effortlessly and avoid Sonos-level disasters. The idea for QualGent was born from the founders’ experience leading engineering teams at Google across Android XR, Stadia, Quick Share, and foldable devices where shipping to billions of users meant constantly facing the painful trade-off between moving fast and maintaining quality. With prior research experience at Nvidia, Maryland, and Berkeley, the team saw a clear opportunity: use AI to scale QA. QualGent’s vision is to close the loop on software creation. As AI enables engineers to code 100x faster, QualGent eliminates the next bottleneck—software verification—unlocking truly scalable, end-to-end software development.

Lumari enables supply chain teams to streamline operations with always-on agents that monitor, coordinate, and take action from sourcing to delivery.

Cactus is the 24/7 AI call center built for home service businesses. Our AI answers calls, qualifies customers, books jobs, and follows up automatically, helping business owners capture more leads and retain more customers - all without hiring additional staff.

Sim enables fast-growing technical teams to build and deploy AI agent workflows. 70,000+ developers are already using Sim, integrating with 1000+ apps and LLMs to streamline workflows with AI agents.

Blaxel is the perpetual sandbox platform for AI agents that need to run code fast. Unlike traditional sandboxes that expire or suffer from cold starts, our sandboxes automatically scale to zero after 1s of inactivity and resume in under 25ms with full memory state preserved — allowing you to keep millions of secure sandboxes on standby indefinitely. We also co-locate your agent logic alongside these sandboxes to eliminate network overhead, delivering near-instant latency for end users.

nao is an open source framework to build and deploy analytics agent. Create the context of your analytics agent with nao-core cli: data, metadata, modeling, rules, etc. Deploy a UI for anyone to chat with your agent and run analytics on your data.

We're building the first group chat with social skills. While everyone else is stuck with boring individual chatbots, we've cracked the impossible: Alfi reads the room, understands each person, and creates custom intelligence for every group chat. Alfi is your new social friend. The one who remembers everything, plans effortlessly, and keeps the crew together. Here's what that looks like: - Book restaurants together, with Yelp built in, directly in the chat. No more "where should we go?" spirals. Reserve instantly. - Create images with your friends: drop your crew into funny hats, wild scenes, anything you can dream up. Multiplayer image gen, first of its kind. - Social calendar: upcoming hangs, all in one place. Everyone on the same page. - Group Wrapped: who's the chattiest? Top inside jokes? Now you'll know. - Reminders & Memory: Alfi remembers your spots, your preferences, and nudges you to actually hang out. We're in the middle of a quiet shift. Gen Z is leaving broadcast social media. They're retreating to group chats, smaller, more intentional and personal spaces where they're honestly themselves. But group chats are also where plans go to die. Someone has to be "the planner" or nothing happens. We believe the group chat is the real social network. Where the funniest moments and real conversations happen in real time. With Alfi, we hope to bring you together more expressively, a lot more often. This technology will bring humanity closer than it's ever been before. Not replace connection, deepen it. That's the future we're building toward.

Code Four slashes the administrative burden on law enforcement through AI-driven automation. Officers spend up to a third of their shifts manually transcribing body camera footage, creating inaccuracies, reducing transparency, and cutting into frontline duties. We're here to eliminate these inefficiencies by integrating with body cameras, record management systems, and digital evidence management systems—acting as a software layer for data processing. We free the most overworked and underappreciated people in the world: police officers.

We automate complex, regulated operations in financial services—no APIs, no engineering required. We hit $500K ARR in just four weeks because customers deploy instantly. Our AI Operator learns by observing existing workflows and SOPs, securely controlling browser and desktop applications to automate up to 96% of tasks.