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.

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.

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

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.

Enjamb puts agents across the entire drug program, from preclinical research through clinical trials and approval. Our agents synthesize up-to-date clinical evidence from the literature and real-world data to pinpoint the right endpoints and patient populations; draft and audit regulatory documents like INDs, protocols, SAPs, and NDAs; and run the statistical programming behind them, including SDTM, ADaM, TFLs, and QC, all in one auditable workspace that cuts months off the path from preclinical to clinic and clinic to market.

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.

Describe an experiment in plain English, and Infera turns it into a validated, instrument-ready run across the equipment your lab already uses. Infera handles the protocol logic, vendor-specific scripts, data, inventory, and institutional knowledge in one system. An AI-native compiler for the lab: one system from intent to execution.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Astraea automates clinical trial biometrics from raw study inputs to FDA-ready outputs. The platform handles data normalization, CDISC mapping, SDTM, ADaM, TFLs, QC, and revision workflows in one auditable system, helping Phase II/III sponsors reduce months of manual programming and data management into automated, reviewable execution.

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 track their portfolio using AI. Today's agents are powerful but insufficient. The training data quality and customization schlep prevent them from being seriously useful for investors. But WithAI has found the right form factor, context management, and consultative sale to help independent asset managers hold their own against the huge platforms' in-house projects. Our first client is "tremendously accelerated" (their words) when months ago they were "existentially threatened." Ben and Ian became fast friends at Princeton co-founding a technology investment firm. Ben became the founding researcher at unicorn Sentient Labs, where he built LLM coordination and security tech. Ian became an investor at Bridgewater Associates, where he spearheaded "how will AI affect the economy?" and "how can we use LLMs to invest?" His contrarian conclusion: the future of work isn't just "managing agents." That form factor works for coding, but non-verifiable work is structurally different. You check whether code is good by running it. But do you check whether a stock is good by shorting it? Fundamental equity hedge funds are elite, time-constrained, un-automatable knowledge workers in dire need of AI augmentation, so they make an ideal customer. But the combination of customization lock-in and huge ACV is not the real prize. If human knowledge work survives this decade, it will be AI-augmented. We're building that augmentation.

Alchemize is building an AI-native customs brokerage. Importers are currently hindered by legacy brokers relying on manual workflows, where hand-keyed entries and slow research result in preventable shipping delays, lack of visibility, and unnecessary costs. Alchemize automates these workflows, delivering expert-level compliance at software speed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rudus is an AI-powered takeoff and estimation platform built for concrete contractors. We cut takeoff time by 70% and help estimators bid 3-5× more projects without adding headcount. From plan upload to bid package, every part of the workflow gets faster.

Light Anchor (YC P26) builds AI-run consumer brands that run at the speed of compute. Consumer brands have always been limited by the speed of humans: hiring, coordinating, and sleeping. AI agents that now run operations end-to-end break all those constraints, making a new kind of consumer business possible: one capped by compute, not headcount. Today, Light Anchor operates one flagship brand and multiple experiment stores, all run by AI agents on a shared platform that compounds with every new brand launched. The vision is thousands of consumer businesses, operating with little to no human intervention.

Robotics is the new paradigm. With hardware converging, Intelligence is the biggest bottleneck. Our world was built for humans and we're giving robots the ability to reason and act like us. The way we learn any task - by seeing, doing, and feeling - is how we train robots. We're building general intelligence that works on any robot and fits seamlessly within our world.

Chert provides the infrastructure for businesses to automate conversations over iMessage. We’re already working with B2C startups, customer experience teams, and sales teams to reach end users through trusted and conversational messaging.

Modern is consolidating the IT function into a single platform powered by secure, always-on agents who understand your business. Help desk, access, hardware, on/off-boarding, security, procurement are automated end-to-end inside the channels your team already uses (Slack, Teams, Email, Voice, WhatsApp, Telegram).

We're an AI Research lab that utilizes complex agentic workflows to accelerate the discovery of novel AI research. We've discovered novel optimizers, language modelling architectures, and work in interpretability. We're pushing the frontier of automating research.

TLDR: Mount is building the AI insurance carrier, starting with liability coverage for deployed AI agents. As everyone moves AI Agents into production and gives them more responsibility, we help businesses insure and secure them. Whenever responsibility shifts from human operators to autonomous systems, so too does the liability that accompanies it. The systems also introduce new risks: agentic software failures, prompt injection attacks, autonomous workflow errors, data leaks, and more. Legacy insurance was not built for this. Existing policies are often silent, ambiguous, or exclude autonomous software, and traditional insurers lack the data and technical capability to assess deployed AI Systems. Our first product, the Mount AI Liability Policy, is built for mid-market and enterprise companies deploying autonomous AI agents in real business processes. We scan and red-team AI deployments, quantify operational risk, help fix vulnerabilities, and insure the residual risk with purpose-built AI liability coverage. Mount is best thought of as a highly automated version of today's commercial insurance carriers, which run on manual workflows, layers of intermediaries, and tens of thousands of employees. AI enables automation of underwriting, pricing, policy issuance, claims, fraud detection, customer support, and distribution. We believe that the best way to use this opportunity is to rebuild those processes from the ground up.

We turn natural Language into Multi-Drone Search & Rescue Mission execution. Degla is built around a simple idea: once you’ve expressed your intent, the system owns the problem.You don’t babysit drones. You don’t micromanage failures. You don’t rewrite plans. You state the goal, Degla figures out how.

Klaimee is the first insurance for your AI agents. It covers what traditional E&O and cyber explicitly carve out, so you can deploy agentic AI at scale with real peace of mind. Built for companies deploying agentic AI, self-serve from day one. The problem: AI agents are taking actions autonomously buying, emailing, modifying sensitive data. AB 316 already holds deployers liable. EU AI Act enforces in August. Cyber and E&O insurance are excluding AI claims. Companies shipping agents have zero coverage and no third-party proof their agent is safe. Enterprise legal asks "who pays if your agent breaks something?" and there's no good answer. We built the answer. Critical-category risk evaluation, certification, financial guarantee, liability insurance and the documentation enterprise procurement needs to sign off. Team: Ines (ex-General Manager at SafetyWing, grew insurance product from $5M to $60M revenue, 5 years launching insurance products from scratch and structuring a TokioMarine MGA into its own carrier) + Julien (AI software engineer + corporate strategy, enterprise compliance). We understand how insurance works, what enterprises require, and why startups can't wait 6 months for either.

Pentagon is a workspace for your AI employees to communicate, coordinate, and get work done as a team.

Sentry and Datadog dump a stream of alerts. Most are duplicates, most lack context, and you still have to solve the issue yourself. Superlog is AI-native observability that's meant not to be opened. A wizard scans your repo and installs proper OpenTelemetry instrumentation, then runs daily to keep up as you ship new code. When something breaks, Superlog groups the errors into a single incident, investigates with full context (logs, traces, recent deploys, past Slack threads), and posts one mergeable PR in Slack. You merge it, ignore it, or open it as a Claude Code session and modify it. Telemetry is vendor-neutral, so you keep every log, trace, and metric we install, even if you leave.

Ara is the self-driving IDE for software teams. It watches work in progress, suggests the next step, and executes tasks through non-invasive computer use, background agents, memory, and reusable skills. Ara turns coding into a closed loop: suggest, act, learn, improve.

Sherpa automatically increases website conversion rates by analyzing visitor behavior, building new page variants, and continuously A/B testing them. Customers typically see a 15-20% lift on their primary conversion metric in their first 30 days.

Saudara AI is an AI broker connecting American brands with vetted overseas factories. US brands import $3T in goods a year and lose billions to ghost suppliers, hidden fees, and blown deadlines. The factories that actually deliver sit behind decades-old relationships outsiders can't break into. We were born into them. Every deal runs through a real human broker, supercharged by AI that handles sourcing, quoting, QC, and logistics. 10x faster, at a fraction of the cost. Sourcing is the largest broken market in global trade. We're the on-ramp.