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.

What your best people know, every agent in your org can use. Glen picks it up as the work happens, nothing to write down, nothing to maintain, and it never walks out the door. A day-one hire's agent runs on the same judgment as your most senior person's.

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.

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.

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.

Walter is an AI employee for manufacturing operations.

Uno is building the AI wallet that replaces Apple Pay. At checkout, Uno automatically picks the best credit card for every purchase based on rewards. 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/)

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.

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.

Abinitio Bio builds foundation models for biomanufacturing, validated against wet lab data. Our first model, Echo, predicts manufacturing outcomes more accurately than standard models, and any pharma or CDMO can adapt it to their own workflow instantly. By making process decisions that take 6-18 months today in hours, we help teams avoid the cost of delay on a single program.

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.

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.

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.

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.

PLAN0 is building the Bloomberg of construction for real estate developers, investors, and general contractors — $20B of projects are already running through the platform. We analyze architectural plans using vision models to generate detailed cost estimates and analytics in minutes. Through industry partnerships, the platform also aggregates historical and real-time project data across all major geographies to power ML-driven analytics, decomposing costs into market-observable factors and creating an agentic layer for cost optimization.

We turn natural Language into Multi-Drone 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.

Enterprise software implementation is broken, and it has been for decades. Every rollout, whether it's a traditional ERP or a new AI system, requires months of manual integration, configuration, and tuning done by armies of system integrators and forward-deployed engineers. Lab0 builds agentic systems that automate this layer, compressing months-long implementations into weeks.

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.

Runtime (runtm.com) gives engineering teams control and visibility to enable anyone in their org to use coding agents securely. Eng leaders rolling out coding agents have no way to see what's happening, set boundaries, or safely let non-engineers use them. We provide sandboxed environments, session-level observability, and configurable guardrails so anyone on your team can ship with coding agents without breaking prod. We're live with fast-growing YC scaleups empowering their Engineers, PMs, designers, marketers, and ops to contribute to their codebase or build prod-grade zero-to-one apps.

Playabl is the TikTok for user-generated games, where anyone can play, create, publish, and monetize games. [June 7 Update] Two weeks ago we went public, users are creating games and posting them on playabl.ai - since then we had over: • 2m unique plays on 5k user-generated games built on playabl.ai • 96% of visitors interacte with the games they view, with an avarage play time of 4min. • 25k DAU • D1 at 27%, D7 at 11%

Standout gives every talent and company an autonomous agent that represents them, assess the other side, and makes intros when it matters. Why it matters? Because this is hiring today: - Talent use AI to apply to 100s of jobs - this is spam. - Founders/Recruiting send 100s of AI-generated messages to hire the same talent - this is spam. This has to stop. Talent stays fully anonymous until they accept an intro. The best way for passively exploring the market and not missing a life changing opportunity. In 1 month, 10k talent / 60 companies / 100 intros.

Korso builds AI agents that handle the operational work manufacturers still do manually, including processing RFQs, following up on quotes, coordinating with suppliers, and keeping production on track when things go wrong. Our agents plug into your existing ERP and CRM, understand your workflows, and act on your behalf: triaging incoming requests, chasing delayed orders, notifying customers, and escalating when human judgment is needed. We built Korso around the reality that enterprise systems cannot afford mistakes. Every agent action passes through verification layers, tools are scoped, and critical operations go through dry-run validation and secondary review. Full audit trails mean you can see exactly what was done, why, and when. Most AI automation breaks down at the ERP integration layer. Korso's orchestration is built for the messiness of real manufacturing systems, with long-running workflows that span weeks and checkpointing that never loses progress. Instead of replacing your systems, Korso makes them work harder, so your team spends less time on coordination and more time on the work that actually matters.

Fuchsia handles hardware certification and testing so great products can get to markets faster. AI agents keep our work accurate, timely, and fully traceable for every stakeholder.

Ndea is building frontier AI systems that blend intuitive pattern recognition and formal reasoning into a unified architecture. # AI for Scientific Advancement Unlike all life before us, humanity's ascent is a story of ingenuity, not just biological evolution. Our progress has been driven by the curiosity to acquire knowledge, the ability to pass it on, and an intrinsic drive to innovate. We build technology which gives us leverage beyond our biology. We stand at the top of a knowledge and technology colossus that we collectively created over the past ten thousand generations. Scientific progress has helped us overcome burdens that long defined human life — famines, plagues, and widespread illiteracy. Science will continue to redefine the boundaries of the human condition. Today, the acceleration of scientific progress hinges on one factor: AI capable of independent invention and discovery. This capacity is the gateway to advancements beyond our wildest imagination. # A New Research Lab We're starting Ndea — an AI research and science lab. The name - like 'idea' with an 'n' - is inspired by the Greek concepts ennoia (intuitive understanding) and dianoia (logical reasoning), capturing our first goal to merge deep learning with program synthesis. Ndea is entirely focused on developing and operationalizing AGI to realize unprecedented scientific progress in our lifetime for the benefit of all current and future generations. Building AGI alone is a monumental undertaking, but our mission is even bigger. We're creating a factory for rapid scientific advancement — a factory capable of inventing and commercializing N ideas. From our vantage point today, we see many 'known' frontiers like self-driving vehicles, drug discovery, sustainable energy, robotics, and space exploration. While AGI will benefit all of these, the most exciting adventure lies in the 'unknown'. AGI promises discoveries and progress we cannot imagine today.

The problem: AI spend is scattered across multiple provider billing consoles that don't talk to each other. Teams can't answer simple questions like "which customer is driving our Anthropic bill?" or "is this feature profitable after AI costs?" without manually pulling data from each provider and stitching it together in a spreadsheet. What SuperPenguin does: SuperPenguin tracks AI spend across 14 providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Modal, Cursor and more). Zero-code setup: connect an API key and costs sync automatically with model-level breakdowns, trends, and forecasts. Per-request attribution: add two lines of Python SDK to tag every AI call by customer, feature, or team. Slack alerts on budget thresholds and spend anomalies. Most teams are set up in under five minutes. We help companies see where their AI money goes and whether it's worth it.

We have sold $1.6m of systems to the DoW. Multiple systems delivered to the DoW. Our first product - EDDA - is a counter drone system - small, low power, low cost fully autonomous-capable. It's designed to be used on vehicles, bases, or carried - to stop group 1 suicide drones. We have multiple contracts, sales, etc. We have 3 more products with demand in various stages of development. More details at https://9mothers.com

AI SRE agents that automatically learn each customer’s system so they work just like an in-house engineer.

We build intelligence for cultural institutions. Our first commercial product is for the literature industry with a focus on school and public libraries. It is a AI-native OS for libraries, that helps librarians save time on tedious tasks and lets them focus on their patrons.

The best grid connection is no grid connection. Voxel builds vertically integrated energy generation and storage systems for data centers that bypass utility connection delays. By leveraging the vast supply of second-life EV batteries and our novel DC microgrid architecture, Voxel generates datacenter power on site and drastically reduces system cost and time-to-power.

We are building the world’s largest video library. We've aggregated billions of videos into a searchable index and use agents to find and label the exact datasets a lab needs on demand. If a lab needs 100K hours of cooking videos where someone is holding a pan, with reasoning annotations on top, our agents search the index, extract the matching subset, route it through our labeling pipeline, and deliver a custom dataset in days, not months.

We engineer inexpensive, autonomous strike drones designed to operate in the most contested combat environments on Earth! By combining true hardware modularity with an agentic control system that lowers cognitive load on operators, we enable faster upgrades, broader adoption, and more than 2x reduction in lifecycle cost. Our customers and partners include the UK Royal Marine Commandos, several other units in the UK, and 4 other NATO forces, and we are currently shipping prototypes for iterative feedback. Think of us as Anduril, but with worse weather, and better banter.

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

Corelayer is the AI-native platform for production software support, built for data-heavy, regulated industries like finance and healthcare. It continuously monitors alerts, logs, infrastructure, and underlying data for issues and uses agents to debug and suggest fixes. We're helping teams at companies ranging from growth-stage fintechs to S&P 500 financial institutions spend less time on support and more on high-leverage work.

RamAIn can intelligently automate any super complex and repetitive process across applications (Browser & Desktop) super fast. It doesn’t matter whether you have API access or not - if you can see it, RamAIn can do it. Simply chat with it and get your UI task as a composable API - fully managed, self-healing and self-evolving!

Companies lose revenue every time a customer is stuck in IVR, waits too long for help, gets blocked by a dumb chatbot, or receives a generic answer from an agent without the right context. These are not just support problems. A complaint is a retention moment, an inquiry is a sales moment, and a support call is often an upsell moment. We built Cignara to fix this. Cignara provides end-to-end AI voice and chat agents that use customer context, company data, business logic, and policy rules to take personalized, agentic actions. Every response is grounded, every action is policy-bound, governed, and verifiable, and every conversation is tracked as a business outcome. Fortune 500 brands like LG use Cignara as fully autonomous agents and as real-time assistants for human teams.

Autonomous is a superintelligent financial advisor at 0% advisory fees. Today, managing your money means one of two bad options: DIY your money: You end up with accounts everywhere (401k, IRAs, brokerage, crypto, savings, equity, secondaries). Your spreadsheet is always wrong. You make expensive mistakes because this isn't your full-time job. Hire a financial advisor: They'll manage your money and charge 1-2% of assets annually. Run that math over multiple decades and you're handing over half your net worth to fees. Neither path can economically deliver the sophisticated, personalized strategies the ultra-wealthy use to compound wealth: strategic tax-loss harvesting across individual securities, systematic risk management, portfolio-backed borrowing to defer capital gains, access to alternatives, etc. These aren't secret – they're just economically impossible to deliver at scale through traditional human advisors. Robos were supposed to fix this, but they were designed in a pre-AI world. In practice they just manage cookie-cutter portfolios. They don’t coordinate across your 401(k), taxable accounts, mortgage, equity, and cash flow, they don’t help with real decisions like job offers, windfalls, or concentrated stock, and they don’t deliver institutional strategies. That’s why, even after a decade plus, the biggest robos are still <$100B AUM while old-school advisors like Raymond James / Edward Jones sit on trillions. We’re doing for financial advising what Robinhood did for brokerages. Think of it as a full-stack, AI-native wealth strategist that brings billionaire-style playbooks to ordinary investors. Autonomous is built around a frontier-scale reasoning engine—an AI that perceives global events as they unfold, understanding their deeper implications for markets and and most importantly, how these events will impact your investments.

Corvera (YC W26) is the context layer for AI-native CPG brands. We help brands unlock the full potential of AI by making their unified data legible to any AI tool via MCP. As of mid-March 2026, we scaled from $0 to $33k in MRR in 4 weeks, are serving 12 brands, and are growing 130% week-on-week. With Corvera in place, brands can enable anyone in their organization to: - Rapidly deploy AI agents via tools such as Claude and ChatGPT, - Build dashboards and apps using Cursor and Lovable, and - Automate workflows across the entire business, from category management to supply chain. All in a secure, audit-logged, and access-controlled environment, without the need for a team of data engineers or AI specialists, in a simple plug-and-play solution. We're founded by Chris (2x Founder; ex-CEO at Better Nature; Forbes 30U30), Dirk (ex-Google Data & AI Lead), and Matthew (ex-Head of Product at Rosemark; Princeton MEng in CS). To-date, we’ve raised $6.2M and are backed by YC, firstminute capital, 6 Degrees Capital, 20VC, Rebel Fund, Duke Capital Partners, and more. Our ICP are omnichannel retail-focused CPG brands at the $100M+ revenue inflection point. Our mission is bold: to enable the next generation of unicorn CPG brands to be run by teams of less than 10 people. Our vision is even bolder: to be the system of intelligence for the $5.4T global CPG industry. Visit www.corvera.ai to learn more!

Use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini safely without leaking sensitive data. LogosGuard redacts your private information before the prompt ever leaves your device.

We’re building AI agents that speed up drug trials by automating the manual consolidation and document prep required for every IND submission. Today, biotechs spend months stitching together reports from contractors and internal teams just to file and get to their first-in-human trial.