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.

Cerenovus is a company brain. We aggregate every kind of file a company produces — documents, PDFs, emails, Slack messages, spreadsheets, meeting notes — and convert them into a single markdown knowledge graph with native AI-agent integration. A company's information becomes uniformly readable both by humans and by the AI agents working inside the graph. On top of that foundation, Cerenovus maps the company as a system, drawing connections between the people, processes, and tools that make up real workflows. From that systems map, it infers where operations are inefficient and how to improve them. In practice, this tool will help executives make better decisions. Whenever a leader has to act on a question — how to restructure a team, whether to keep a vendor, or where handoffs between teams are breaking down — Cerenovus will give them an evidence-backed answer in minutes rather than weeks. Today, that work is done by consultants, by internal analysts, or by the executive asking around informally. Each of those approaches is slow, partial, and goes stale the moment it is delivered. Cerenovus produces the same answers faster, at a fraction of the cost, and keeps them live as the company evolves.

Akkari runs the operational work from the first sales call through expansion. It captures and stays on top of every commitment, issue, request and opportunity across customer channels (Slack, calls, meetings, email, Discord, etc.) then drives each loop to resolution - our wedge toward building the AI execution system for companies. We are 2x YC founders who scaled OrderAhead (acquired by Square) to millions of users and BLADE to $1.2B+ in monthly trading volume.

Care GP is building AI agents to run operations for primary healthcare clinics

Zenbu is an extensible IDE for orchestrating coding agents. Shape it around exactly how you and your team work.

RealPact builds AI agents that handle the paperwork behind real estate transactions. They find property records like deeds, tax records, permits, parcel data, and MLS information, then use that data to fill out contracts, organize documents, track deadlines, and help brokerages close deals faster. We currently sell to brokerages in New Hampshire and are expanding quickly.

Shotwell provides dense annotations and quality checks for robotics training data. Data quality is the biggest lever in improving robot model performance, and we have developed models that can automatically produce these annotations and operate at a fraction of the cost and instant turnaround time.

Miso Labs is building the world’s most emotive foundation models for voice. We believe that the next generation of AI interactions shouldn't just be functional—they should be human. By bringing warmth and lightning-fast speed to the voice layer, we empower developers to build voice agents that users truly love.

Hi, I'm Thomas, and my creator is named Thomas :p Thomas is the first YC-backed AI founder: a virtual human who starts, runs, and grows his own companies on the internet.

RASPIRE is a mobile threat defense platform with autonomous threat response that protects Android and iOS applications post-compilation without SDKs, code changes, or complex integrations. It adds advanced runtime security layers including anti-reverse engineering, fraud prevention, API attestation, and live threat monitoring against real-time attacks.

CentralComs is building AI Agents for property managers that tracks every maintenance call, chases every open ticket, and keep owners/tenants/vendors updated, so nothing falls through the cracks and operations never stall. These agent work directly inside AppFolio, Buildium, Yardi and your existing stack, making real-time decisions and resolving multi-step workflows without handoffs.

We believe in the next generation of finance where everyone around the world can access the global market and liquidity from the tip of their hands. We are building the best mobile trading app that will enable this vision. Hyperliquid is the house of all finance, Instinct is the app of all finance. Hyperliquid.

ValCtrl is building the world model for Prediction Finance. Prediction markets contain useful prices about the future, but today those prices are fragmented across venues, titles, rules, and proxy contracts. Users think in beliefs; markets are stored as scattered contracts. Our first product is Kassandre Search. Users type a natural-language belief, and Kassandre maps it to relevant prediction markets with backtrace and quality labels. Existing markets are the first scaffold. The long-term product path is search -> composed exposures -> native quotes -> gated bet/trade placement, with legal/compliance gates respected at each step. We are looking for hard belief-to-market queries from forecasters, investors, operators, and YC founders.

Walter is an AI employee for manufacturing operations.

Rex is an AI-native service for order to cash. We replace people-heavy operations with AI agents that continuously manage invoices, customers and exceptions. Order to cash is a $60B outsourced function because the work is too messy for traditional automation. Every customer has different context, exceptions do not follow clean rules, and the next step is often buried in emails, portals, handoffs, or someone’s memory. Rex agents run continuously in the background and resolve work to SLA standards so cash keeps moving. We're live with pre-IPO tech companies, managing >$500m in receivables from F100 companies, cutting manual follow-up cycles from weeks to hours. We founded Rex after spending four years building Sequence, an a16z-backed finance ops platform, from zero to Series A — where we saw firsthand that at-scale, O2C still runs on manual labour. Rex is the #1 winner of the Vercel AI Accelerator out of 2,500 teams, selected by Guillermo Rauch and leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Browserbase and more.

Soria is an AI-native Bloomberg Terminal for investors who specialize in a particular sector, starting with healthcare. Our agents convert hundreds of the most important public and private sources into an always-on financial model, reviewed by domain experts and delivered to hedge funds, banks, and asset managers through a terminal UI, MCP, API, warehouse sync, and research feed. Unlike our competitors, we own the data layer and expand bottom-up, one sector at a time - additionally our agents proactively do research on behalf of our clients without them lifting a finger or sharing any data.

Uno is building the AI wallet that replaces Apple Pay. At checkout, Uno automatically picks the best credit card for every purchase based on merchant category, rewards structure, and spending patterns. Users earn more points, miles, and cashback without thinking about it. That's the wedge. The vision is a financial agent that automates every money decision in your pocket. Founded by Saket Joshi (www.linkedin.com/in/saket-dattatray-joshi/) and Mordi Shadpour (www.linkedin.com/in/mordi-shadpour/)

Voquill is the modern AI-native operating system for medical labs. This software manages the entire workflow of the lab (accessioning, workflow, reporting, coding, compliance, and revenue) and contains modern agentic AI tools to help each step. For example, pathologists can write reports 20% faster through our voice AI coworker. Incumbent lab operating systems are old, don't scale with how modern labs work, and can’t integrate existing AI solutions. As a result, labs are either building their own or paying millions for band-aid solutions and consultants. We're building an agentic platform to manage every aspect of the lab and displace the billions spent on legacy management systems.

Coding agents in the cloud don't work for majority of teams who require native capabilities; they lack XCode for iOS, Emulator for Android, Unity for game development teams. We are on a mission to cloudify every local development utility so that regardless of where it runs, your agent can compose an ideal set of capabilities on the fly so you don't need to run it on your laptop. Today, we provide remote services such as XCode, iOS & Android simulators to enable coding agents running in any sandbox to be able to build and iterate over mobile apps, too. Replit, Rork, Momentic, Minitap and more agent companies have built mobile development and testing experiences on Limrun platform. Coconote (Quizlet), SorceJobs (W25) and more companies with mobile apps use Limrun with their cloud agents, merging PRs without having to check out the code locally.

Hessian is the platform for automating business operations with AI agents. We forward deploy on-site to map the work, and build the agents on our platform to run it end-to-end. Unlike off-the-shelf tools that don't know your business, you get a partner that owns the software and operates it every day. Why now? Coding agents have matured to the point where, combined with our engineering judgment we've built across a decade of shipping production systems, we can scale forward-deployed engagements with minimal headcount. Furthermore, our FDE agents and tooling will accelerate how quickly we automate workflows on our platform. We're already saving our customers hundreds of hours a month. Trillions of dollars a year are spent on knowledge work, and we're building the standard for how every company deploys, operates, and governs the AI agents that do it.

Founded by former WorldQuant portfolio manager Jeremie Cohen, KelAI is building the autonomous alpha engine for hedge funds, traders and institutional investors. Investment teams now have more data, tools and compute than ever, but research still runs across siloed systems and inefficient workflows. KelAI turns that fragmented process into a compounding AI-native engine that continuously finds, tests and validates trading signals at a pace no human team can match.

Wato gives AI agents shared memory, reusable workflows, connected tools, and living artifacts so work compounds across a team instead of disappearing into chat threads. Teams use Wato to give every agent access to trusted company context and turn useful runs into knowledge the next agent can build on.

Deep Interactions is a humans-in-the-loop AI builder. We don't leave you with a spaghetti mess of a code. We bring product intelligence and power the context layer that enables your team to build in sync - saving companies tokens, time, and nerves. You give us a problem and we ship a working AI product in the same afternoon.

Panacea provides AI-native FDA regulatory services for Biotechs and Medical Device companies. We hire the most experienced FDA consultants in the industry (ex-FDA, decades of experience, hundreds of filings) and pair them with our AI platform to enable the fastest and lowest cost pathway to FDA approval. While other regulatory consultants bill hourly, our pricing model is simple: fixed, outcome-based pricing. Payment is only due when milestones are complete. We support all FDA regulatory pathways including IND, NDA, BLA, ODD, Pre-Subs, 510(k), De Novo, PMA, IDE, BDD, etc.

GUILD is a Neoprime contractor automating defense supply chain end-to-end by vertically integrating with our supplier partners. We integrate artificial intelligence, contracting operations, and capital to source, fund, produce, and deliver defense contracts end-to-end. Operating across the U.S. and NATO markets, we bridge global manufacturing capacity with defense demand and execute with the speed and precision of an AI-driven system. Our mission is to build a modern, new generation defense contracting institution where technology and production operate as one.

Incandor detects fraud on banking and fintech platforms by learning how every user physically behaves — mouse dynamics, keystroke timing, scroll patterns, and on mobile, how they hold their phone. Founded by two Stanford engineers and backed by Y Combinator, Incandor builds a behavioral map of every user on your platform — no fraud labels or historical data required. At the individual level, it identifies account takeovers with >99% accuracy. At the population level, coordinated rings, mule operators, and coerced sessions separate out naturally. Rather than a black-box risk score, fraud teams query the map via a programmable API.

AI marketing service for developer tools. We turn your real product into social posts and demo videos in your voice automatically. Think of it as a clone of you that's also marketing your company at the same time. Memoir is one system. It reads your repo, drives your live staging app with an AI agent, generates branded demo videos with synthetic data so dashboards look real and narrates them in a voice cloned from yours. For the social side, we monitor what's actually getting traction in your space right now. The threads going viral on dev-tools X, the posts climbing on HN, the formats your audience is engaging with this week, and we draft posts in your writing voice that ride those currents. You review everything before it goes out. The output is indistinguishable from how you'd write and record it yourself, if you had the time and a full marketing team behind you.

Auxos builds AI customer twins for marketing, product, and research teams to test their hypotheses at scale. We work with companies to create 1:1 replicas of their customers by sourcing and interviewing real people in their ICP, allowing us to accurately model how they behave and make decisions. Currently, market research is too slow and expensive to use on anything but the biggest decisions. Surveys and panels cost a fortune and it takes weeks to recruit, moderate, and gather insights. Auxos provides a 24/7 available customer panel that can give population-scale insights in minutes. The day-to-day decisions surrounding product, pricing, and positioning can now be validated with the same rigor that used to be reserved for the big ones.

FinalDose is building the first programmable drug - a single smart drug molecule that you can insert any diseased genetic code and it can search and destroy cells upon DNA recognition. Unlocking 80% of undruggable targets today. Starting with all cancers.

WithAI helps institutional investors research stocks and manage their portfolios. We're live with four hedge funds, and our users spend 5+ hours a day in the platform. Investors who try "nearly every tool on the market," to quote a client of ours, "wind up with an unwieldy collection of fragmented point solutions." Those who focus on building a great setup with general agents are instead "signing up for a full-time job." So we deploy a platform called Multiplier that unifies structured data, unstructured data, AI work, human work, and tacit firm knowledge in one secure, governed, customized application. Our first vertical: independent equity funds with $250M-$5B of assets. They know AI is essential for staying relevant, but they don't have the time or talent to figure out what to do about it. But once we deploy Multiplier––"We used to spend 80% of our time gathering information and 20% of our time acting on it," said one customer. "WithAI has flipped those percentages."

Aseon Labs builds robotic pitstops for self-driving cars. A depot in a box for charging, cleaning & inspecting autonomous fleets directly in operating zones. Autonomous driving is working. The operational layer around it is not. Today, fleets lose significant time and money traveling to centralized depots for charging, cleaning and servicing, creating dead miles, lower uptime and operational bottlenecks that limit fleet scale. Aseon Pods are modular, rapidly deployable robotic pitstops that keep autonomous fleets operating near demand. By bringing charging, cleaning and inspection directly into operating zones, we help fleet operators increase uptime, reduce operational overhead and scale markets more efficiently without relying on large centralized depots. We’re second-time founders and mobility infrastructure operators. Previously, we built and scaled Pushme to 5,000 stations across 40 cities before its acquisition by TIER–Dott ($600M raised). Aseon Labs is backed by Y Combinator and headquartered in Redwood City.

Madrone builds cooling systems for data centers. In Texas, where most new sites are, Madrone can cool using 30% less power and water, thanks to novel dew-point cooling technology.

flowscope is an AI-native consulting firm that deploys agents to map, optimize, and automate companies’ processes end to end; doing what consulting firms charge millions for at a fraction of the cost and timeline.

Marketers today don’t actually do much marketing at all. Today, over 80% of time spent on launching a marketing campaign is actually ops work: tweaking automation flows in Pardot, configuring audiences in LinkedIn, or wiring HTML emails in Marketo. CharacterQuilt is AI infrastructure for marketing teams: a brain that learns your brand, and agents that operate your existing tools. Marketing campaigns that used to take 3 agencies, 10 tools, and 6 weeks are now being built, designed, and deployed from CQ in an hour. Customers submit a brief like they would send to a human teammate or marketing agency, and they get back fully designed and deployed campaigns. Teams like 1upHealth, ABC Fitness, and Emplifi use us to: 1-) Build segments/audiences faster 2-) Create on-brand creative (AI is terrible at staying on-brand) 3-) Deploy campaigns automatically into HubSpot, WordPress, LinkedIn etc. We replicate your brand guidelines, deeply understand past campaigns, and work inside your systems. If you run demand gen or lifecycle at a B2B/B2C company and want to ship campaigns faster, send us a brief and we’ll build it in 15 minutes.

Arctic Health is building AI-native credentialing and contracting for healthcare organizations. We automate the full workflow, from establishing payer contracts to enrolling each provider. We collect and validate organization and provider data according to each state and payer’s requirements, and submit on the organization's behalf. We then monitor status and compliance on an ongoing basis. Tools on the market today either perform small pieces of the workflow or price out small and mid-sized organizations. We handle the process end-to-end regardless of organization type or size. Our browser automations enable AI agents to submit and monitor across hundreds of payer portals, and our system is trained by experienced industry experts who handle every edge case. Healthcare organizations get one simple platform. We handle the rest.

Klarify handles every job a therapist does other than the therapy itself, from clinical notes and treatment plans to insurance claims and finding new clients. Therapists hold the world together. They also run businesses, file insurance claims, write letters, fill forms, supervise new grads, and do hours of paperwork every night. Practice management software has existed for decades. It records what therapists do. It can't actually do any of it. Klara is the AI at the heart of Klarify. She handles notes, treatment plans, clinical letters, insurance claims, between-session resources, supervision prep, and finding new clients. Nearly 6,000 therapists use Klarify today. Our mission is to empower therapists, not replace them. So they can focus on the one thing only a human can do. Be present with their client.

Foresight builds AI-powered simulations of human behavior to help companies predict how people will think, react, and choose before making real-world decisions. It lets organizations test countless possible moves in advance, see how each one is likely to play out, and choose the strongest path forward.

Armature helps companies monitor, analyze, and optimize how AI agents experience their products. What we do today: - Automated testing: We run complex sessions against your MCPs/CLIs across all major harnesses and models to catch broken workflows before your users do. - AX analytics & benchmarking: No more black boxes. We trace agent sessions to show you exactly what the model "thought", what context it missed, and why it failed. We measure your AX against competitors to ensure you remain the preferred platform for agents to use. - Auto-remediation: Our MCP lets your internal coding agents plug into Armature to autonomously fix your product's AX based on our run data. Our vision for tomorrow: Reaching full understanding of how agents use your product and how you can improve it is only step one. The next step is to provide the foundational infrastructure for the Agent Experience, powering agent-native revenue, lifecycle marketing, and customer support for the next generation of software.

Pavoot is an AI event manager for companies that run in person customer events. More and more companies are investing in dinners, summits, and community events because relationships drive revenue. But today, running events means sourcing attendees, sending invites, hosting the event, and then manually digging through notes, emails, and spreadsheets afterward to figure out who attended, what was discussed, who is a strong lead, and who should be followed up with. Most teams either send generic "thanks for coming" emails or never properly capture the value created during the event. Pavoot replaces this fragmented workflow with one AI system that keeps every attendee, interaction, conversation, and follow up connected in one place, making relationship driven growth scalable. Gohar and Ana met while studying Computer Science at ETH Zürich. Gohar was part of Switzerland’s national chess team at the age of 16 and is a 6x Swiss chess champion. Ana won more than 20 medals in Scientific Olympiads and built internal AI systems used by hundreds of data scientists at some of the largest banks in Latin America. === Book a demo: pavoot.com

Clawvisor lets AI agents use apps like Gmail, Slack, and Google Drive without going rogue or ever seeing your credentials. You approve tasks once. Clawvisor enforces them on every request.

Netter (YC P26) helps companies regain control over their data, so teams can pilot their activities with high precision. Most companies are sitting on years of valuable data, spread across different formats and disconnected tools that don't talk to each other. Netter brings technical capacity to companies that don't have an army of data engineers, and tackles their most complex data challenges. - A nursing home group was chasing unpaid invoices manually across disconnected tools. Netter centralized the collection workflows, automated reminders, real-time visibility, task routing. - A retail chain had years of loyalty card data sitting unused. Netter cross-referenced it with public demographic data to build precise customer segments and trigger the right promotions to the right people.

Scope is the system companies use to measure and improve how agents discover, interact and use their product. As more products gets used through AI agents like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and similar agents, agents are starting to influence which tools get chosen, how they get set up, and whether they keep getting used. Most companies still cannot see that process clearly. We run real workflows across agents and show teams when the agent picks them versus a competitor, where it breaks, where docs or product surfaces confuse the agent, and what to change to get better results and a better agent experience. I started Scope after working on interpretability research for closed-source models at Princeton and later as an ML engineer in GEO/AEO. I kept seeing the same pattern: these systems were shaping real product discovery and usage, but companies had very little visibility into what the model was actually doing. We are starting with products that agents can directly interact with, especially APIs, infra products, CLIs, and MCP servers.

Pops lets people play, remix, and share AI games with friends. Discover an infinite feed of games, challenges, quizzes, and other fun interactive experiences made by others. Every play instantly becomes a funny gameplay/reaction video you can send to friends, post online, or use to challenge someone to beat your score. For creators, Pops makes it easier than ever to bring ideas to life and get them played. Instead of learning complex game engines, writing code, or fighting for distribution, anyone can create or remix a playable game in seconds. Bring your ideas, and Pops brings the audience.

Chronicle Labs is a staging environment for enterprise AI agents: we capture every event the agent sees in production and backtest it, so customers can safely test new behaviors without breaking anything.

We've spent decades tracking everything. Sleep. Recovery. Steps. All proxies for how we feel. Performance is 90% mental. And yet no one has built the feedback loop for our emotions. We close that loop by designing a device that understands how you feel, tells you why, and what you can do about it. Emotional intelligence becomes trainable, so you can better connect and create with those around you.