Automation Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Ginkgo Bioworks is the organism company. We design custom organisms for customers across multiple markets. We build our foundries to scale the process of organism engineering using software and hardware automation. Organism engineers at Ginkgo learn from nature to develop new organisms that replace technology with biology.

Founded in 2011, Zapier is the #1 workflow automation platform for small and mid-sized businesses. By connecting more than 6,000 of the most popular work apps, Zapier empowers its users to make the most of the tools they already use—and to focus on what matters most.

We build specialized LLMs for your business’s specific workflows and use cases, then continuously hone them against your success metrics, capturing your proprietary know-how in the model so it gets more valuable and harder to copy as you grow.

We are building a "manipulate anything" model with the robot hardware that embodies it. We designed a hand-based data-collection device and a high DOF, direct drive robotic hand that match each other exactly, enabling us to eliminate embodiment gap and collect real-world data and deploy it directly. We want to scale real world manipulation data by deploying our devices "in the wild" like manufacturing factories, logistic centers to collect Tesla like data, use these data to train our model and then provide automation solutions to these industries.

You’re wasting millions of dollars on custom industry robots that take months to implement. Today, robotic automation means redesigning your entire facility for the robot to work. You need to change the floor plan, adjust conveyor belts, and re-educate your staff. This is inefficient and unnecessary. With Servo7, you don’t have to do any of that. Automating with Servo7 is simple and fast, because our robots: 1) Deploy in existing operations 2) Learn from simple demonstrations 3) Keep improving on the job We have previously worked on autonomous defense systems, LLMs, autonomous driving, and hyperloops. Not just in the lab, but actually deploying them in the field. We’re already working with warehouses to automate their fulfillment. If you work in assembly, manufacturing, or logistics, email founders@servo7.com. We're onboarding our next partners now.

RoboDock builds robots that automate depot operations, like charging and vehicle checks, for electric and autonomous vehicle fleets. We turn fleet depots from manual sites into self-running systems that lower operational costs and increase vehicle uptime.

Balance is an AI accounting firm that helps SMBs close their monthly books. Our agents do the work of an in-house finance hire, reconciling books in real time and flagging issues before they become problems.

EigenPal.com automates your document processing workflows with AI. KYC docs, invoices, claims, shipping forms, contracts, receipts, loan docs - we automate that. Works on messy scans, handwritten forms, third-party docs. Powerful workflow builder and team functionality. On-prem ready or use our cloud.

Tensr is building fully autonomous robotic factories that make scaling hardware as effortless as scaling on AWS. We’re a group of Berkeley graduate robotics researchers who previously won a full scale autonomous IndyCar competition at 160mph.

item connects to all your customer tools, gathers and enriches context automatically, and becomes your company’s source of truth — one place where your team and your AI agents share the full picture to act autonomously. At the center is the Assistant — your sidekick for daily work. It can send follow-ups, research leads, or add deals with a simple prompt. No complex UI, drop-downs or fields, simply ask. For repeatable work, you build Agents that you can train like new hires, simply by writing documents that describe your processes. item Agents run business processes across sales, support, and account management autonomously.

Bravi is building the AI operating system for home-services businesses, using AI-powered customer communication as the wedge. We replace the front office (calls, chats, follow-ups) with AI agents that never miss a lead, then layer an internal AI copilot that understands products, pricing, and technical documentation. We started with fenestration (shutters, windows, garage doors), a large, complex vertical with no modern software, before expanding to adjacent trades. Bravi is already live with leading installers and manufacturers across Europe and the US, turning missed demand into revenue.

Lark lets teams write end-to-end tests in plain English. Validate dashboards, APIs, SDKs, and full product flows without maintaining fragile test code. Run continuously on feature branches, in CI, or in production.

Okibi is a web app that lets you create AI coworkers using natural language. It's like Lovable for creating AI agents that talk to your internal software Corporate users lose 2 hours every day doing tasks that can be automated with agents But existing agent builders have janky drag and drop UIs that don’t map to what they want exactiy. Okibi lets everyone use natural language to build the exact agent they want.

Nottelabs offers a platform to build and deploy enterprise-grade browser agents. We help companies cut costs and save time by automating repetitive tasks. Unlike others, we provide agents, tools, and infrastructure through a single API, making us the fastest path to reliable web AI agents in production.

Sagekit is the AI workspace for research and writing. Work side by side with AI as ideas and research become real, lasting documents.

Teach robots new skills through natural language and run reliably in production in minutes. Mbodi combines generative AI and agent orchestration, turning everyday language and quick demos into precise, reliable robot actions for industrial automation.

At Moby Analytics, we provide the first AI agentic platform built for financial auditors. Auditors easily create and deploy AI agents to automate audit workflows. No code, just prompts and domain expertise.

throxy builds vertical AI agents that book meetings for software companies selling into traditional industries: manufacturing, logistics, education, and finance. Outbound is broken. Generic automation gets ignored, and decision-makers in legacy sectors are hard to reach. Most of your TAM isn't even on LinkedIn, and tools like Clay, Apollo, and ZoomInfo only cover about 65% of the market. throxy fixes this by running bespoke, fully managed outbound systems for software sales teams trying to crack these industries. We use proprietary scraping tools to map your entire addressable market, then combine AI agents with human experts to deliver hyper-personalised email campaigns and human cold calling that is consistently generating six-figure qualified pipelines. Since 2023, throxy has powered outbound for B2B software companies, from industrial SaaS to fintech providers, replacing the need for internal SDR teams or stacks of tools with a solution that outperforms on both speed and quality. Today, we have a team of 55 across London and Cape Town, booking on average 8 to 12 qualified meetings per month per client, with some clients seeing 20+ in their first weeks after we doubled down on human-led cold calling. AI handles the data: building custom databases, scoring leads against your ICP, and personalising outreach at scale. Humans handle the conversations: real cold calls, real emails, real relationships. That's the difference between us and every AI SDR on the market. Our founding team has built AI at JP Morgan, scaled businesses from age 14, and led enterprise sales from Seed to Series D. We're not just automating outbound, we're redefining what sales execution looks like for software companies selling into traditional industries. throxy is the AI SDR purpose-built for the sectors software forgot.

We’re building AI-powered systems that automate manual work in scientific labs using robotics. Scientists simply type their experiment in plain English. Zeon translates it into code and runs it on robotic arms (no coding required). By controlling robots with natural language, we’re enabling automation for every lab, every scientist, and every experiment. Zeon is lab-aware. It detects equipment, adapts to protocols, and moves autonomously between instruments to execute full workflows. We’re already working with labs at Stanford and UCSF to accelerate discovery - from running overnight nanoparticle fluorescence measurements to safely disposing of hundreds of bacterial samples. Zeon reclaims time for what matters most: the science.

Ovlo is a no-code AI platform for supply chain teams, building custom agents that automate critical workflows like demand forecasting, compliance validation, invoice reconciliation, and inventory optimization to eliminate manual errors and supercharge efficiency. As an AI layer connecting onto of your current tech stack, even email and Sheets, it creates streamlined end-to-end processes, empowering teams.

As AI agents take on more consequential workflows, the hard part isn’t just whether they work—it’s whether they behave consistently with your company’s knowledge, policies, and expectations. Lucidic AI turns that institutional knowledge into consistent agent behavior by continuously testing, stress-simulating, and auto-optimizing agents against your real production scenarios. Lucidic ingests your real logs, edge cases, and operational rules, then uses controlled simulations, reinforcement learning, and Bayesian optimization to automatically discover failure modes, propose targeted fixes, and verify improvements before anything reaches production. Instead of relying on manual prompt fiddling or guesswork, your agents get a continuous improvement loop: they’re tested, corrected, and optimized based on what your business actually requires—not what a generic model assumes. The result is AI agents that reliably follow your domain logic, adapt to changes, and stay aligned across clients, configurations, and environments—without you needing to hand-engineer every prompt or behavior.

Helping manufacturers and distributors automate the process of moving RFQs, invoices, and POs from their inboxes to their ERPs.

Quantstruct automatically creates and improves product documentation, implementation guides, and changelogs for API & SDK products, web-based enterprise software, and internal applications. Quantstruct identifies gaps in your knowledge base based on each product release or unfulfilled customer query. It uses multiple AI agents to search existing knowledge sources, test existing docs for validity and style guidelines, and clicks, scrolls, and uses enterprise software through a web browser to generate docs with embedded screenshots and video recordings. Quanstruct is available as a cloud service to start, targeting technical writers, content writing, professional services, and product teams. Traditional generative AI tools risk hallucinating critical API & SDK fields, even with RAG based approaches. Purely agent-based approaches risk providing unpredictable output that can diverge from desired documentation processes. Finally, no company’s review and publishing workflow is the same. Quantstruct is the easiest way to onboard and customize AI agents to continuously improve your documentation based on your customer needs and product evolution. https://quantstruct.com

Altrina automates SOPs to give humans back their time to do what matters. We have already significantly improved organizational efficiency for local governments, law offices, insurance brokers, consulting firms, and hedge funds. Formerly General Agency/Tessa AI

We enable AI to control the browser. Browser-use is the biggest open-source web agent project. We got 40k stars in the last 3 months.

Asteroid builds and hosts AI browser agents for back-office tasks. With guardrails, evaluations, and human oversight, we deliver enterprise-grade reliability across millions of operations, even in regulated industries. Companies can build agents themselves or rely on us to deliver and maintain them.

x1 is building the next generation AI app studio for iOS. Instead of generating disposable demos, we provide a structured system that guides builders from idea to a production-ready App Store launch. Our platform replaces chaotic prompt loops with modular, purpose-built studios that handle everything from product design to monetization and growth. We’re turning AI app creation into a disciplined, end-to-end system.

BrowserBook makes it easy to reliably automate the web. It's a Jupyter-style IDE for browser automation that combines a live browser, executable code cells, and an AI coding assistant to generate Playwright scripts that are deterministic by default. Developers use BrowserBook to build, debug, and deploy robust web automations, powering AI agents, QA workflows, and data operations.

AutoComputer is a desktop robotic process automation system.  Given just a text prompt, our AI automates tedious tasks such as financial data entry by performing all the clicks and keystrokes for you.

We are building state-of-the-art SLAM, perception, and spatial understanding models that leverage vision alone to map, interpret, and interact with the world.

AI procurement agents built for European enterprises. Automate intake, supplier onboarding, contracts, order tracking, and 4-way match.

Callback is AI-native business process outsourcing. We help our customers stay focused on their core business while we use AI to automate tasks like invoice processing, PDF report parsing, and data labeling.

Your spreadsheet operations, automated. Decisional deploys AI reasoning agents directly into your existing spreadsheets to handle complex long running workflows like quote generation, data extraction, invoicing, and collections at scale without the rigidity of no code tools.

We’re building the next generation of warehouse robotics. In the US today, retailers spend approximately $10B per year paying human laborers to pick up and move cardboard boxes in warehouses. Existing solutions for automating this are expensive and difficult to install, which is why manual operation is still so prevalent. Our solution is different. We make swarms of small mobile robots that install into existing warehouses to provide a low-cost and robust automation solution for case picking and mixed-SKU palletization. Our novel technology allows these robots to be installed and operate at significantly lower cost than existing solutions while being both flexible and robust.

Leviathan is an AI encyclopedia.

Sage is a HIPAA compliant, AI-native communication platform that makes home care agency client-intake handling smarter, faster, and more reliable. Teams that use Sage can save over 100 minutes of busywork per prospect, freeing up their teams to manage a larger, faster growing business.

Elevate is bringing AI to private equity-backed roll-ups. For example, one of our customers is Guardian Restoration Partners, which is backed by Alpine Investors, the leading roll-up focused private equity firm. In three months, we integrated 10 acquisitions and enabled them to pilot AI agents built on top of our data warehouse. We know this problem personally. Before Elevate, Scott was a Vice President at a $15B private equity firm where he was leading a roll-up. Steve and Jeff are both software engineers with backgrounds across finance, big tech, and start-ups. The founding team has been friends for over a decade from their Duke undergraduate days.

FINNY is building a new operating system for independent financial advisors, and starting by helping them grow. Our goal is to empower the best financial advisors (the independents!) to serve all Americans who want financial advice. We are starting with growth, which is the most existential problem advisors face. The organic growth process is highly inefficient and full of noise. Advisors often waste 60 hours of business development to convert 1 new client. At FINNY, we are certain we can do better with AI. With our tool, advisors can: - Identify prospects within their target niche, aggregating thousands of data points per lead - Prioritize prospects based on their predicted likelihood of converting, a score unique to each advisor and prospect pair - Automate the outreach and meeting scheduling with their high priority prospects In essence, doing all the work for the advisors, and letting them focus on what actually matters, the client relationship.

Entangl uses AI to detect and automatically resolve issues in data center engineering and operations, ensuring efficiency and uptime.

Integuru turns any website into a reliable, real-time, and low-latency API. No RPA required. Our services include authentication management and integration maintenance.

We build AI agents that automate healthcare admin workflows. Our agents navigate legacy hospital software like humans (using mouse and keyboard) and automate end-to-end workflows (starting with medical coding), freeing medical professionals from manual tasks.

Manifold is revolutionizing the spot freight procurement process for Carriers, Brokers, and Shippers. Our inaugural product transforms the booking process for spot shipments, significantly reducing empty miles and increasing revenue. We do this by aggregating spot shipment opportunities from a variety of shipper and brokerage sources into a single location. Andrew and Oliver bring deep domain expertise of freight from their pivotal roles at Convoy, where they were engineering leaders automating processes that were scaled to handle over 10,000 weekly shipments. This background has been instrumental in shaping Manifold's innovative approach. In just two months since launching Manifold has achieved $5,100 in monthly revenue, showcasing the pressing demand for our product. Manifold is poised to transform this $100+ billion industry. Not only will we streamline spot freight procurement operations but we will also redefine the industry's cost structure for the better.

Basalt is building self-flying satellite constellations for enterprise customers, no prior aerospace experience or expertise needed! Powered by our spacecraft OS, Basalt provides a seamless experience, enabling users to fly and stream data from their own tailored satellite constellation from an app on their phones or laptops. The company is founded by Max Bhatti and Alex Choi, lead engineers at the MIT CubeSat program. Previously, the duo worked as systems engineers at SpaceX, and the UK Ministry of Defense. Basalt Tech recently received its seed investment as part of the Y Combinator W24 batch, and is currently in technical development.

GetCrux is the AI Creative Strategist to launch winning ads. Creatives have become the biggest lever to win on ad platforms. Yet, there is no clear way to figure out why something works. Marketers end up guessing and replicating the best performing ad, only to see it fail - with high CAC & wasted dollars. GetCrux helps performance marketers find winning patterns in their ad creatives across 100+ parameters like hooks, messaging, storyline, music, pacing, and recommend exactly what to launch next.

Tracecat is the open source AI automation platform for technical teams. Purpose-built for security, reliability, and internal operations. We provide everything technical builders need to automate work — AI agents, workflows, cases, and over 150 integrations. Trusted by automation builders (open source and enterprise) across 500+ organizations from startups to Fortune 500 and federal agencies.

Basepilot builds AI coworkers that collaborate with humans to automate work across the browser. They learn from what you do and you can teach them new skills, just by demonstration. Companies using Basepilot save 30% of their time and resources per week, freeing up time for more high-value tasks. Basepilot is founded by Ken, who previously led a fintech-product to 3M users in <12 months, and Pascal, who worked on robotics & self-driving at Carnegie Mellon and Mercedes-Benz Research. Interested to try it out? Get started here: https://www.basepilot.com/ YC Launch: https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/KcS-basepilot-your-ai-employee-to-automate-repetitive-browser-work-in-minutes

We create AI agents that constantly monitor emails, calendar, calls, or wherever else companies have relationship data and organize it into CRM records as meticulously as a great rep would. We build these agents on top of the DryMerge platform, a tool to build AI agents that integrate with business apps and work in the background.

At Omni, we’re rebuilding how banks and fintechs lend to small businesses. There are 34 million small businesses in the U.S., yet getting a loan still means weeks of emails, PDFs, and paperwork. Every deal starts with a pile of documents — tax returns, bank statements, corporate filings, and contracts that no one wants to read but everyone depends on. Omni is changing that. We work directly with lenders to modernize the entire stack, from document intake to underwriting, and we’re doing it with a small, fast-moving team that ships real systems used in production every day.

At Artisan, we’re building real AI employees - not copilots, not assistants, but autonomous teammates. Our first, Ava, is an AI BDR. She finds and researches leads, writes emails in customers’ tone of voice, runs outbound sequences, self-optimizes, and manages email deliverability infrastructure. She learns, adapts, and improves over time - just like a human would. Human team members use Artisan as their primary working platform, replacing a sprawling stack of sales tools, and have Artisans working alongside them. We went through Y Combinator (W24) and have raised $35M+ from top investors. We’re at $6M+ ARR, with hundreds of customers including Remote, Quora, and SumUp. We’re currently working on Ava 2.0, pushing the boundaries of what an AI employee can do. And we're hiring.

Energent.ai turns every knowledge worker into a top performer by pairing them with an AI teammate. We streamline manual workflows without integrations, democratize automation with zero code, and move beyond passive chatbots to deliver real, visible output — all securely within the enterprise environment.