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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 18 hospitals. Long term, hospitals will use CONUS to select and order implants across manufacturers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We're building the open benchmark for commerce. Builders submit shopping agents. Independent validators run them against problems that change daily. The best agent earns the rewards, and every run becomes training data.

Dreamscale Labs is building the fastest cloud inference platform for robotics. As complex physical AI models become difficult to fit on expensive on-robot GPUs, we let users offload inference to the cloud and serve them with real-time latency. So far, we've hit 40-50% lower latency than existing neoclouds.

Intelligent Cloud for AI workloads

Workers IO verifies your entire system across millions of interleaving, faults, and timings to find the exact conditions that break the software properties you care about. Built for teams where 99.99% uptime is table-stakes.

Nobody's built truly proactive AI, because it requires running inference on your entire life. In the cloud, that's insanely expensive and a privacy nightmare. But not on your own chip. Every night, Sentient's on-device LLM wakes your Mac and understands what's new in your life (email, messages, files, Granola transcripts...), entirely locally, and distills it into a knowledge base. You wake up to your work already prepared: the reply you forgot, drafted from your own context; the subscription you never use renewing tomorrow, caught; the report you promised in the group chat, ready to send. Everything is one click from firing through computer use, and nothing fires until you click. Or click your Mac notch anytime and say "finish this for me." Sidekick takes over the thing you were doing with its own cursor while you move on. On-device inference at this scale was supposed to be impossible: devices too slow, and models too dumb. So we built the stack ourselves: a custom LiteRT-LM fork (KV-cache reuse, speculative decoding, custom k-quants) that runs nightly on 8 GB Macs. The user's hardware does ~90% of the compute, and their own ChatGPT or Claude subscription does the rest, so our marginal cost is ~$0, and our servers store nothing. Our alpha soft-launch was top post of the month on r/macapps (688 upvotes), and we launched to 4000+ users in our first week with $0 marketing. We're free and open source for consumers; the same engine on the work stack (Slack, Granola, Linear, Notion) is the enterprise business. Sentient OS raised ~$1M in pre-seed, backed by YC, Afore, and the a16z Speedrun scout fund.

Studio is a simulation lab studying how humans and societies respond to new ideas, and is building the first software models that can accurately predict that response. Instead of creating digital twins of survey respondents, Studio builds live market models of interconnected audience segments from real, traceable consumer-behavior data. Our simulations match live KPI outcomes like revenue and purchase behavior with over 97% accuracy for consumer-facing enterprises, higher than any synthetic panel, simulation lab, or traditional market research.

Lantern learns what exceptional looks like for your team, pressure-tests the role against the real talent market, then runs the hiring loop: sourcing, inbound applications, interviews, assessments, candidate communication, and offers.

Grocalo (S26) is an AI brain that runs content for creators. We understand their audiences, using video understanding and deep platform analytics to bottle up the taste behind each creator and personalize and distribute content to creator specific audiences. Grocalo generated 2B views and gained 4M followers for our creators in the last 2 months. Some of our clients include Jimmy O. Yang (Comedian, 11M followers), King Bach (72M followers), Leenda Dong (28M followers), Steven He (30M followers), Sheena Melwani (18M followers), and Jeannie Mai (TV host, 6M followers). Content should be personalized and data-driven. We’ve developed the most advanced AI brain replicating viral content for any given audience.

antimattr builds a voice-first hardware interface for human-agent interaction that includes a ring and a pair of earphones. Designed to make more of your voice, the ring can record and summarise your conversations, capture thoughts on the go, or control your agents. The earphones use proprietary voice isolation technology to block out background noise entirely, so you can take a clear call from a loud pub or dictate with real accuracy.

Hardware teams burn weeks on procurement. An engineer needs a part. Someone emails five distributors, chases quotes, gets an approval, wires the money, tracks a shipment across three carriers, clears customs, and then nobody knows where the box is or what's actually on the shelf. Waybill runs that entire loop. Send us a part, a spec, or a BOM. We source it, pull quotes, route approvals, pay the supplier, handle freight and customs, track it to your dock, and keep your stock count updated. Take your supply chain for granted. Built by a team that's seen it at LAT Aerospace and WareIQ (YC S20).

Palisade spins up a personal sales agent for every single visitor to your website. Marketplaces like trading card platforms, vintage stores, and short-term rental operators sell more when each customer works with a personal agent that remembers them.

Mochi is an app to watch and create anime microdramas: fast paced shows with a cliffhanger every minute. We produce originals with AI, collaborating with writers from Marvel, Cartoon Network, and Toei Animation, and our users can also create in app too - with over 500 episodes created each day from 3,000+ creators.

PRINCEPS is the first purpose-built insurance company for the trillion-dollar compute buildout. We underwrite SLA, GPU residual value, and outage risk, and price the coverage that unlocks cheaper financing for data centers and neoclouds.

Led by former institutional proxy voters and technologists with a collective 20+ years of experience, Pennant gives institutional investors, public companies, and corporate advisors voting and governance intelligence to act on their own principles at scale.

Familiar is the Neolab for world translation. Dubbing into 30 languages. Now with Familiar, the same actor's performance is preserved instead of a mismatched voice over a mismatched face. One model does the voice, the lips, and the scene together, with identity permanence and scene & world understanding. Built by the researchers who pioneered joint audio-visual human models.

Physical AI — robots and world models — is bottlenecked on one thing: diverse, real-world data at massive scale showing how humans actually do work in the physical world. It was never written down, and you can't buy it, because no one has ever captured it. Only real local experts, the people who do this work every day, can produce data this authentic and valuable. DeepReach builds the network that reaches them. We design and manufacture wearable stereo capture devices, then place them with local data partners who run collection as their own business — in warehouses, workshops, farms, kitchens and repair shops. They own the local relationships; we supply the hardware, the software platform, the quality pipeline and the payments. Anyone can run a data business. That structure is what produces diversity. Instead of thousands of hours inside one environment, we deliver hours spread across thousands of environments — which is what actually makes robot policies generalize. 475 devices in the field and 100+ data partners are live across 7 countries, adding new partners every week. They've collected nearly 150,000 clips in the past three months, with volume roughly doubling month over month. Our data is in production with multiple frontier model and robotics companies, and we're scaling to 10,000+ devices across 50 countries.

TovenAI builds a platform of AI agents that handle manual, data-intensive work for compliance teams at institutional trading firms, with six agents currently live. Our customers range from specialist firms to large global institutions, with our agents supporting multiple compliance workflows at a top-10 institutional brokerage. With prebuilt connectors to more than 30 systems—including Bloomberg, Cloud9, and NICE Actimize—firms can onboard to our platform and evaluate results using their own data in less than a week.

Our first model, Atom 1, pre-trained on the internets video, and fine tuned for physics. It has been action conditioned, so you can simulate robot actions within it. This lets Robot Labs train their robots using GPUs instead of relying on human collected manual data that is slow and expensive. In unseen and hard to replicate environments, this is the only path to getting ANY training data.

Tenor is a full-stack infrastructure for building and running AI-native businesses. We’re not just an agent framework, we manage the entire loop from how AI executes work to how every action, decision, and business outcome is captured and learned from. Owning the full stack lets companies deploy governed AI workflows, understand what actually drives results, and continuously improve how their business operates without building the infrastructure themselves.

Engineering is bottlenecked by slow, costly simulations. We're fixing that by building foundation models that learn physics end-to-end and deliver the same results in seconds, at a fraction of the cost.

Mosaic gives teams and their coding agents shared memory across every session, so everyone can understand what happened, why decisions were made, and pick up where someone else left off. We started as a real-time coding environment where multiple people and their agents can work together live. It went viral, defined the multiplayer AI category, and inspired frontier labs like Anthropic. Together, we’re building the infrastructure for people and agents to share context and work together.

Erinys provides the technology, intake, back office, and client acquisition needed to launch and scale an AI-native law firm. Lawyers own their firms and make every legal decision; Erinys handles everything around them.

VIM connects to the entire cell: PLCs, robots, CNC machines, sensors. When a cell faults, VIM finds the cause, stages the fix, and the operator approves with one click. When a part drifts, VIM catches it seconds after the cut, inside the machine, and recommends the correction. Recovery drops from 30 minutes to under two, saving more than $15,000 per fault in large factories.

Audun automates debt collection.