AI (Artificial Intelligence) Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 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.

Podium is the all-in-one AI-powered lead management and communication platform used by more than 100,000 businesses to acquire and convert new customers. At the forefront of Podium’s innovation is its AI employee, who ensures businesses respond to leads instantly, anytime of the day or night—significantly increasing lead conversion rates and revenue. Podium helps businesses obtain more reviews, rank higher on Google, and consolidate lead channels. Businesses can call and text customers from the web and/or mobile app, send payment links, drive repeat business through bulk messages, and more—all managed and delivered from one easy-to-use dashboard. Additionally, with Podium’s AI Employee and automations, businesses can efficiently handle customer inquiries seamlessly across all communication channels, providing timely and accurate responses that drive sales. Podium’s innovative work has gained recognition on top industry lists, such as Forbes’ Next Billion Dollar Startups, Forbes’ Cloud 100, the Inc. 5000, and Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies. Podium was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in Lehi, Utah. It is currently backed by Accel, Summit Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Y Combinator.

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.

Native is building an autonomous marketing platform where business can do all of their marketing within one platform using our artificial intuition model called Norn, that predicts what people will respond to, researched and built in house.

Munito is an open-model inference provider for Europe, private by default. Its API lets users choose their models and keep inference and storage in the EU. Founded by the former inference lead at Mistral AI, Munito is built on one belief: open and independent intelligence, both models and inference, is key to economic growth and prosperity.

Check features, not code. Composal sends a swarm of agents to use your product like your users do. They test real flows and edge cases to show you what works, what breaks, and if it’s ready to ship.

Quivly is the agentic workspace for everything after the sale. Our agents turn kickoff calls into launch plans, chase blockers, catch risk and expansion signals, and have the full account story ready at renewal. With Quivly, companies are able to take their customers live in 7 days instead of 30, and then grow revenue from these customers by 4.3x on avg.

Starting with a modern interface for drones that users can build on and adapt. Works with planes, copters, rovers, boats and submarines.

Databuddy gives you your very own data analyst, always watching over your data, combining all your context to investigate and paint a full picture on every product issue that emerges in real-time; conversion drops, user frustration and churn. It makes your product better without needing to have you look at a dashboard and spend hours figuring out the why. one click to install or switch from any dated analytics provider.

Resin is an AI-native ECAD tool. It lets engineers: - research designs - generate schematics - generate any symbols/footprints - route simple to complex boards

Latent catches wrong or unsupported LLM answers before they reach your users. Instead of running a second model to check every output, it reads the model's own internal state as it generates, so every request is verified with no added latency, no extra inference cost, and nothing leaving your deployment. Teams running LLMs in production, in finance, legal, healthcare and customer support, get a review queue of the answers most likely to be wrong, calibrated to their own model and traffic, with a plain explanation of why each one was flagged.

Ploid is the AI-native people data infrastructure for building products, workflows, and agents around people. We’ve built an index of 2B+ people across professional and social sources, with the infrastructure to search, resolve, enrich, and retrieve up-to-date information about anyone on demand. Through Ploid’s API, CLI, and MCP, developers and companies can search for people, enrich profiles, find emails and phone numbers, resolve identities across different data points, and access the broader web context associated with a person. Unlike traditional people databases that rely primarily on static records, Ploid is designed for AI-native workflows. We combine our people index with real-time retrieval and entity resolution so data can be refreshed and expanded at the moment it is requested. Ploid can power everything from sales and recruiting products to customer intelligence, identity resolution, trust and safety, and AI agents that need reliable information about people. Instead of building and maintaining dozens of data integrations yourself, Ploid gives you one infrastructure layer for people data. 2B+ people. One API. Built for AI.

Agents will do most of the work in the future, but only if teams can trust them unsupervised. Stacktrace is the control layer for every agent: it sees every action, detects risky behavior, enforces the bounds your team sets, and steps in when an agent drifts from intent.

A data-first model company for neurotech. We collect brain data for others, and use it to build toward general models of the brain.

We build infrastructure to power agentic systems such as software factories, multiplayer agent frameworks and agent coordination.

CONUS structures fragmented medical device information for surgeons. We combine manufacturer documentation, hospital protocols and medical research in one place, giving surgeons and MedTech teams reliable answers across products and procedures. We already work with leading manufacturers including Johnson & Johnson, Stryker and Zimmer Biomet, and since launching six months ago we’ve gone live in 20 hospitals. Long term, hospitals will use CONUS to select and order implants across manufacturers.

Port your development environment to the cloud. Give every coding agent on its own cloud computer, bring your Codex or Claude subscription, start agents from Slack and Linear, and manage them from your desktop, phone, or terminal.

UFO is the operating platform for your business built by the creators of Github Copilot and Perplexity Computer. UFO learns your company, goals, tools, and workflows. UFO builds what your team needs to keep work moving.

OpenHack is an always on AI Security Engineer. OpenHack understands your business, system design and developer intent like a real security engineer. It ingests all this context to find the hardest vulnerabilities through AI codebase scanning, AI pentesting and Supply Chain Security. It verifies and prioritizes vulnerabilities automatically, and filters out false positives like a real security engineer drastically reducing overhead.

Opera (YC F26) is an automated operations research lab applying mathematics and AI to optimize operations for retail, logistics, manufacturing, agriculture and more, delivering solutions for VP of Operations, supply chain leaders, plant managers and COOs to improve efficiency and decision-making.

https://musicarena.io/

Hue turns production usage of agents into repeatable tests that preserve the tools, data, and state behind the real run. As AI agents take on real work, their behavior depends increasingly on the nuances of the world around them. With Hue, teams can test and improve their agents under conditions that mimic real usage.

Mantle is a full-stack field service company that deploys, fixes and maintains machines for the companies that build them. We're not a marketplace or software tool, we own uptime directly to provide better, more reliable service without burdening your engineers on support calls. $500B+ a year is spent to keep machines running in the US, we're coming for all of it.

Ageospatial helps organizations value the risk on their physical assets (properties, land, infrastructure) remotely using satellite imagery. 97% of commercial properties are never physically inspected because it's too slow and expensive. So insurers price risk based on what the client or broker tells them, and about half the time at least one of those records is wrong. The result is mispricing, fraud, and an estimated $36B in premium leakage every year in the US alone, which gets exposed the moment a disaster hits. Upload a list of addresses and their GeoAI reads satellite and street-level imagery, maps, real-time data, public records and the insurer's own data to determine what's really there, which natural and human hazards surround it, what changed over time, and which properties are worth inspecting. Each property becomes a living record that underwriting, claims and pricing teams can trace from past to present. Ageospatial deploys inside carriers and MGAs as an AI-native service, so insurers get outcomes delivered.

Cyclon is rebuilding the phone around AI. Instead of opening apps and tapping through screens, you tell your phone what you want and it does it for you. With one touch, you can spin up AI agents to control your phone or handle tasks in the background. AI isn’t just inside an app - it’s the phone itself.

Grep AI is the fastest way to create, optimize, and deploy agents for tedious, complex operational work that slows down your business. Our self-improving agents learn from every run, making them smarter and cheaper as you scale. IG.com a global retail brokerage used our agents to review compliance alerts and now 80% of their customers onboad without manual intervention, doubling first trades and propelling them to a FTSE 100 company. Customers including Airwallex, Worldpay, Citizens Bank, FV Bank and Shopmonkey have used our agents to automate over 250,000 of operational work across compliance, onboarding, underwriting, corporate due diligence, document verification, merchant categorization, market and competitive research, rev ops and much more. We founded Grep AI after experiencing firsthand how manual workflows can prevent a business from growing when we ran the platform team at Brex. We're now on a mission to rid businesses of tedious, repetitive so their employees can focus on the most high leverage tasks that matter.

Decent is a health insurance brokerage for small businesses. We compare every way to cover your team, show what each one costs, and then keep improving your plan all year. We're paid by insurance companies, so we're free to you.

Turning ideas into trades. Every great investment starts as an idea about the world. Institutions have teams of analysts turning those ideas into positions. Volaren is that team, processing data through fundamentals and quantitative models that can be personalized with AI. Turn your views into trades, portfolios, and back-testable frameworks and strategies, and Volaren stays with you from there, showing you what's actually driving each position and what it means for your next move.

The next constraint is not intelligence, it is the energy and operational cost of running it. We deploy custom AI models inside critical infrastructure companies that ingest SCADA data, work orders, human interventions, operational data no public model has seen, grounded in physics-informed neural networks and differentiable simulators. This creates a flywheel: more operator data → better process understanding → more efficient operations → cheaper energy → cheaper AI → more deployment → more data. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uDH6pMn5OE AI compute doubles every 2.2 years. Data center demand grows from 415 to 945 TWh by 2030. Without near-zero energy cost, AI remains limited by human infrastructure. We are the layer that runs AI at zero energy cost. Energy is a $10 trillion market. The infrastructure layer doesn't exist yet. We are building it.

Applied Kinetics builds and deploys specialized AI employees to handle the coordination work behind America's energy and data center buildout. Our agents chase suppliers, track equipment approvals and delivery dates, and flag delays so project teams can keep critical equipment moving without hunting for updates across emails and spreadsheets.

Autonomous accounting platform for global companies. We close your books and give you financial clarity while you run your business.

AI made software engineers 100x more productive. We're bringing that same transformation to knowledge workers with the AI desktop.

Lark builds specialized AI agents that automate manual workflows for wholesale distributors. Our agents work with existing ERP systems, learning from each distributor’s historical data and the team’s decisions. Together, these agents can run a distributor’s entire operation.

Ignition is an AI-native employee benefits brokerage for companies with under 200 employees. Health insurance is one of the largest line items these companies carry, and employers absorb 15 to 40% rate increases year after year without ever seeing their own numbers. We have rebuilt the sales and back office to be AI-first. This market represents about $500B of market cap, and those businesses have not fundamentally changed in over 50 years. While scaling Plated, I wore every HR hat from doing payroll myself, to managing a PEO, to eventually hiring an employee benefits broker on our way to 1,500 employees. We wasted over $4M on benefits over 5 years, and I'm building Ignition to help companies under 200 employees avoid making my mistakes.

* Ready to Use Instantly: Skip the complex server setup. It comes pre loaded with top AI Agents (like Claude Code and Hermes) so your agents can start working immediately. * Keep Your Work Safe: Unlike other systems that delete everything when they finish a task, these sandboxes remember your files, code, and settings forever until you delete them. * Pay Only for What You Use: Stop paying for idle servers. You pay a tiny fee to store your files, but you only pay for compute power during the exact minutes your AI is actively running. * Zero Infrastructure Headaches: You don’t need to be a senior DevOps engineer or manage complex cloud networks. One simple command handles the entire backend for you. * Connect to Any App: Allow your AI agents to securely log into and interact with everyday tools like Slack, Gmail, and GitHub in just a few clicks.

Papaya is the optimization engine for AI agents. Engineers don't have time to continually improve the agents they've shipped — the context bloat, overly chatty subagents, and broken tool calls sit in production traces nobody reads, quietly hurting agent efficiency. With Papaya they connect their agent directly via SDK, get actionable recommendations on how to improve quality, latency, and cost, and the ones they approve are pushed to production as pull requests. Papaya runs 200+ research-backed analyses across context, prompts, prompt caching, subagents, and tool calls. Every recommendation is ranked by impact and comes with the production runs that produced it — typically a 10%+ quality improvement on the first workflow analysis.

Production agents handle many different customer workflows. Currently, when one handles a situation badly, an engineer reads the trace and patches the prompt. The next situation needs another exception. Soon, improving the agent becomes a recurring engineering job, and the prompt keeps growing. Mirrors finds patterns in past runs. Engineers review guidance for a specific situation and preview where it would apply. Mirrors then delivers that guidance while the agent works, inside the team’s existing setup. The team can check whether the change improved the outcome. We’re building Mirrors for engineering teams running customer-facing agents across varied workflows, so they can improve behavior without hardcoding every lesson in the global prompt.

Shepherd Robotics builds general purpose robots for skilled physical work across AI infrastructure and advanced manufacturing. Our robots are powered by robot foundation models and use modular, flexible hardware designed to adapt to different environments and tasks. We train our systems on a combination of real world and simulation data so they can learn complex manipulation skills and generalize across workflows. We also provide integration into customers’ existing workflows, starting with data center construction and operations, electrical manufacturing and testing, and electronics manufacturing, where traditional automation struggles with variability, dexterity, and changing environments. 

Sona8 is a voice agent that talks to every employee about how their work gets done. Consulting, transformation and corporate development teams spend a large part of every project on stakeholder interviews and stakeholder alignment, and still only hear from a small share of the people affected. Each employee gets a link and talks to the agent for about 20 minutes. The agent asks follow-up questions, for example why a step is still done by hand or who else is involved. From the conversations we build process maps and a list of the problems people described, by site and team. During the implementation, the agent goes back to the employees involved after each initiative and asks whether it was implemented and what changed. The result is a project management office that has talked to every employee. Today consulting firms buy it for the stakeholder interviews at the start of an engagement. Transformation and corporate development teams buy it to run the implementation of a change program. Over time this becomes the way a company knows how it runs. Sona8 reads the systems the company already uses, connects them to what employees said, and keeps the picture current by asking again. Before a decision, you ask what it would do across sites and teams and get an answer from the whole company. A small team steers a company-wide program that used to need a large one. And AI agents inside the company come here first to learn how the work is done before they change anything.

ByteAsk is an AI coding agent built for C and C++, the code that runs trading systems, cars, chips, and operating systems. It does not stop at a diff that looks right. ByteAsk builds, debugs, and tests every change with the real toolchain until the change holds. If the compiler, the debugger, or the tests can catch it, then ByteAsk catches it too. It runs from the terminal or inside VS Code, Neovim, and Emacs, and is available fully on-prem.

Build agents that research accounts, find prospects, run campaigns, update your CRM, qualify inbound, and more. Connect them to the systems you already use and let them work alongside your GTM team. Engineer your revenue factory on Frontrunner.

We design and collect audio datasets for training speech models.

Every instance of intelligence occurring in nature is embodied. Scientific intelligence is no different. We are building general-purpose robotic experimentalists: systems that unite scientific reasoning and physical action to iterate toward discovery by observing, hypothesizing and experimenting.