E-commerce Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) in the San Francisco Bay Area that are currently hiring 2026

Founded in 2013, DoorDash is a San Francisco-based technology company passionate about transforming local businesses and dedicated to enabling new ways of working, earning, and living. Today, DoorDash connects customers with their favorite local and national restaurants in more than 600 cities across the United States and Canada. By building intelligent, last-mile delivery technology for local cities, DoorDash aims to connect people with the things they care about — one dash at a time. Read more at blog.doordash.com, and find us on Glassdoor.

Instacart is the North American leader in online grocery and one of the fastest-growing companies in e-commerce. Instacart’s same-day delivery and pickup services bring fresh groceries and everyday essentials to busy people and families across the U.S. and Canada in as fast as an hour. Since its founding in 2012, Instacart has become an essential service for millions of families, while also serving as an immediate, flexible earnings opportunity for hundreds of thousands of shoppers across North America. The company partners with more than 350 retailers and delivers from more than 25,000 stores across more than 5,500 cities in North America. Today, Instacart is accessible to more than 85% of households in the U.S. and more than 70% of households in Canada.

Every product ever sold needs support at some point. That support falls into one of two buckets. Bucket 1: Simple stuff. T-shirts, screen protectors, keyboards. You buy it, it shows up, maybe you ask “where's my order?” once. This is solved. Zendesk and a hundred other horizontal companies solved it. Bucket 2: Hard stuff. $20,000 industrial heaters. HVAC systems. CNC machines. Car parts. Products where buying wrong means your building doesn't have heat or your manufacturing line is down. Support for these products can only be performed by highly trained domain specialists and there aren't enough of them. If you're selling EV charging stations, your support person needs to be a certified electrician who understands local power grids, installation codes, and compatibility matrices. You can't hire this off the street. You can't outsource it overseas. You'd think LLMs would have solved this by now. They haven't. Three years into the LLM era, penetration in this industry is very low & the reason is twofold. First, off-the-shelf models don't actually understand these products. The knowledge lives in 48-page technical manuals buried on some manufacturer's website in terrible formatting — wiring schematics, compatibility matrices, installation diagrams that can only make sense visually. A general-purpose LLM can't draw you the diagram showing how to connect terminal A to terminal B. It doesn't have the spatial understanding or the product-specific reasoning to be a real technical advisor. So companies still rely entirely on human experts. Second, even if the models were good enough, there are no harnesses to make them useful in the business. No engine to capture deep technical knowledge about complex physical products and keep it updated. No way for a company to offload tribal knowledge from their senior technicians into a system. No way to see what questions customers are actually asking and feed that back into the knowledge base. No generative multimodal presentation and no expressive voice support. Prox is building the best technical product expert for extremely complicated physical products. A multimodal agent that can draw wiring schemes, share CAD models, process incoming videos from a technician in the field, and support people over the phone with voice that can pass the Turing test. To get there, we're solving multimodal knowledge graph building at a very deep level. A huge portion of your work will be developing SOTA knowledge engines that can truly understand complex physical products.

Reacher is an AI-powered platform that automates creator marketing workflows—from discovery and outreach to campaign management and content strategy—making marketing teams 10x more productive. We handle the manual tasks so brands can focus on building relationships with creators while centralizing their operations in one platform to manage creators on TikTok Shop, Instagram, and YouTube.

Wildcard is the AEO and GEO platform designed specifically for e-commerce and retail brands. We help merchants improve visibility across AI search and AI shopping platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Amazon Rufus. Wildcard tracks how brands, categories, collections, and SKUs appear across AI search results, identifies visibility gaps, and turns those insights into actions. We use AI agents to enrich product data, generate SEO, AEO, and GEO content, create collection and comparison pages, build FAQs, and improve off-site discoverability across Reddit, YouTube, blogs, and other sources. As AI shopping evolves, Wildcard is building the infrastructure brands need to win in agentic commerce, including support for emerging standards like the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).

At Anglera, we're developing a suite of AI agents to help e-commerce companies run their operations more efficiently. Our flagship agent helps our customers onboard, enrich, and manage their product data, reducing time per product from 15 mins down to 5 seconds. We previously developed ML to automatically enrich millions of products at Uber Eats, and we're now on a mission to automate the most common manual workflows for every e-commerce business.

14.ai operates brands autonomously. Our software runs the core machinery of a modern company, from demand generation to fulfillment to customer relationships. The next iconic brands will run with far fewer people, tighter software loops, and much more operational intelligence. Our system connects acquisition, operations, support, and decision-making across the brands we build into one intelligent layer. We use 14.ai to launch and run our own brands, improve the system in production, and make brand creation faster, measurable, and more programmable with every cycle.

Numeral is the fastest, easiest way to stay compliant with US sales tax and global VAT. Trusted by 3,000+ businesses, including Eight Sleep, Ridge, and Manus, our end-to-end platform keeps our customers compliant wherever they sell, with registrations, filings, calculations, and ongoing compliance support. Numeral’s AI-native solution covers more than 70 countries and tens of thousands of jurisdictions and is built for accuracy and scale.

A place where you can spin off commerce agents or build your automation across the funnel of acquisition, retention & support. The single place where you can handle everything you need for your ecommerce / retail business when it comes to marketing & support.

Hypotenuse AI is an AI-native platform for managing, creating and optimizing your ecommerce product data and content. Fortune 500 ecommerce brands use us to enrich their product data, edit images, and create high-quality product copy at scale to make their teams 10x faster.

Pillar is the all-in-one business platform for content creators and talent managers.

Short Story is a style discovery platform to help petite women find clothes that fit. The average American woman is 5'4" and petite, yet this remains an enormously underserved segment. We’re a team of curators passionate about finding style, quality, and fit for petite women. Our mission is to remove the “ugh” from the shopping equation and support petite women in telling their stories, stylishly and confidently.

Proven is a data powered skincare company that creates personalized skincare products based on more than 47 factors about an individual's skin, genetic background, lifestyle and environment. Our formulations are rooted in the largest beauty database in the world, the proprietary Skin Genome Project, built in-house by Proven's cofounder Amy Yuan, a computational physicist from Stanford. The database has won MIT's AI Technology of the Year award and encompasses more than 20Million consumer datapoints and thousands of scientific articles on skin. Our challenge now is to tell the story of Proven, and share our industry leading personalized skincare products with the world.

Joy is a software platform with a mission to help the world celebrate better together. Our software helps everyone plan and remember all of life's events. Big or small, Joy is there every step of the way.

Gemnote creates custom merch, swag and gifts for the modern business. Our expert team helps you curate, source, warehouse, fulfill and ship your branded merchandise and company swag, so you don't have to lift a finger. Our clients love our full-service platform and they are some of the biggest companies in the world, including Airbnb, Google, Meta, Slack, Netflix and more.

The world’s No. 1 lab management platform. We help scientists easily organize orders, manage inventory, and save money.

Drapr lets shoppers try on clothing, online. Apparel brands use Drapr to make more money online.