Education Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) in the San Francisco Bay Area 2026

Frizzle uses AI to grade handwritten math assignments for teachers and transform them into rich analytics and differentiated assessment to help personalize instruction for every student. Teachers spend over 10 hours a week or 25% of all their work grading - Frizzle does it in minutes. Frizzle is the most valuable piece of software for teachers ever, as it eliminates the most time-consuming part of their workflow so they can focus on teaching. Frizzle shifts education from waterfall to agile learning. Instead of waiting for end-of-unit tests to discover gaps, teachers get continuous, real-time insight into student thinking from everyday work. Feedback becomes immediate, instruction adapts weekly, and learning iterates (measure, adjust, improve) so every student progresses faster with less teacher burnout. Frizzle was named an official White House AI Education Partner alongside OpenAI and Meta: https://www.whitehouse.gov/edai/. Frizzle was co-founded by Abhay Gupta and Shyam Sai, who met in high school over 10 years ago.

Opennote is the one space for everything you study, turning chaos into clarity. Most learners struggle with scattered knowledge across different apps and tools that don't understand their learning style. Opennote changes that with a note-taking platform where AI knows your style, connects to your existing knowledge bases and the web, and provides proactive feedback and edits—right where you're already working.

Chiron is an iPad app that understands math as it’s written - like Grammarly for algebra. We’re both Oxford math grads, have tutored for a decade, and we’re creating the future of learning which will be entirely 1-on-1.

Tegore follows K-12 school curriculum to design courses like Algebra I & Algebra II. In addition to working with high schools in the Bay Area to design the best in-classroom experiences, Tegore is developing the corresponding consumer product, a Duolingo for Math. Each lesson in Tegore follows a lesson plan (e.g. Polynomial Long Division), and the content is delivered with voice / interactive visuals, and checks students' understanding by using dialectic teaching.

Excellence an after-school maths and science program. We replace/supplement private tutoring and long-term study programs such as Kumon (over 30B TAM). US Parents are our primary customers. Our web and iPad software serves both ambitious and struggling students. As we believe each student is unique, we adapt our high quality courses and exercises to their knowledge and learning style in a very granular way. To facilitate learning, they get detailed text, voice and graphical explanations, can craft study plans, revise and memorize, and received human mentorship if needed. We believe LLMs have made edtech interesting, as technology now allows us to replicate a tutoring learning experience. In addition, we offer a program with daily courses and exercises, detailed feedback on their worksheets and more (super Kumon). Finally we sell the AI tutoring and exercise databases to schools in a B2B and B2B2C model and already work for the most prestigious institutions in France (Ecole polytechnique, college Stanislas...). We're a passionate team of ex-quants, mathematicians and physics champions devoted to improving science education.

GradeWiz is an AI assistant that helps educators create rubrics, grade student work and give detailed feedback on handwritten worksheets and tests, saving 4+ hrs a week

Edexia is an AI Teacher Assistant for grading essays. It can be trained and controlled by the teacher and can grade assignments from any curriculum, year level, subject, or format. Learning like a teacher, Edexia visually breaks down its understanding of the rubric, and updates this as a teacher corrects it. Our vision is to transform education by facilitating AI’s safe and effective integration across all institutions and applications. Not using AI to replace teachers but rather to empower them—providing them with all the time and resources they need to develop their students.

Educato builds exam prep platforms worldwide using AI. Online exam prep has existed for decades, yet the big players all target the same top 10 exams in the US. The reality is that most exams around the world still have little to no quality online prep material, including many taken by hundreds of thousands of students each year. Educato uses AI to generate high-quality prep content for these exams. LLMs allow us to target the profitable fat middle in the distribution of exams, historically overlooked by education companies.

Mathos AI (Formerly MathGPTPro) is the leading AI math solver that enables academic performance and productivity of both students and teachers. It has empowered over 1M students from over 200 countries in the past year, which turns the previously mission-impossible personalized learning into real. Our advanced math AI model achieves roughly 20% higher accuracy in mathematical and quantitative problem-solving capabilities then GPT4o. As we move forward, we will tackle the hardest problems in the educational sector, personalization, adaptive learning, and shortages of teachers, with our trial runs in schools. By automating grading, providing insightful analytics, and generating adaptive assignments, our model empowers teachers to understand what their students need and what should be provided accordingly.

MathDash is an online math education platform that gets students addicted to working through textbooks and seeing their improvement.

Ora is an AI-native education platform that students love. We're starting with medical school, training students from matriculation to MD. Soon, we'll serve every corner of the $830B higher education market.

At Studdy, our mission is to unlock the full potential of the next generation by providing a personalized AI tutor for every student. Studdy Buddy is a multilingual tutor that uses AI, as well as advanced speech, text, and image recognition technology to supercharge students' ability to learn new subjects. We believe that making self-learning as easy as possible for as many students as possible (no matter their cultural, social, or educational background) is the key to unlocking the full potential of students around the world. We're a passionate team of AI experts, educators, and builders - if you also have a passion for transforming education we'd love to hear from you. Shoot us a message at team@studdy.ai!

PROBLEM 😩 Zoom is great for adults, not ideal to engage an 8 year old online. SOLUTION 🔥 Koala Go, the award-winning interactive platform for online teaching businesses. Learn more at https://teachwithkoala.com/

Careerist is an ed-fintech platform that trains job seekers for tech careers (in QA, Sales, Support & more), finances them and automates their job hunting. Our B2B2C platform aggregates job seekers, tutors and employers – streamlining training and placement. Techcrunch: "Edtech meets SaaS in Careerist’s job placement learning platform. The startup trains job seekers through live and self-paced training taught by third-party tutors. The adaptive learning software is meant to help candidates prep for tech interviews. Once a candidate is well equipped, Careerist uses automation to help them apply for jobs."

Demand Curve is your startup's growth operating system, the lowest risk, fastest path to getting traction and growing your company. 🚀 Growth Program: A membership/course designed for startup operators who want to learn and execute growth without hiring a full team yet. Powered by our premium content library, expert guidance, and AI growth co-pilot, it's a step-by-step guide to building a growth engine that actually works. Trusted by 3,000+ startups (including over 500 YC companies). 📰 Newsletter: We also publish the Growth Newsletter, reaching 100,000+ founders and marketers every week with strategic and tactical growth advice. It's one of the most-read startup growth newsletters with 46-50% open rates. 🦄 Agency: For companies ready to scale, our agency team provides full-service execution across growth strategy, paid acquisition, and funnel optimization. We've helped scale Microsoft, Framer, Pilot, Ancestry, and hundreds of other companies and YC startups. 💸 Newsletter sponsorships: Get your brand in front of 100,000+ engaged founders and growth operators. Learn more at demandcurve.com

Outtalent helps top engineers from emerging markets get jobs abroad at companies like Google. We started Outtalent because we believe that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not and emerging markets have an exceptional number of great but undervalued engineers. We believe getting a job at one of the world’s best companies sets people on a great path to realize their full potential. Outtalent is funded by YCombinator, world-class venture capital funds, executives from Google and Facebook, and other angel investors who are passionate about our mission. We have already helped software engineers from Russia, Ukraine and Central Asia get jobs at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and many other companies in the US, Canada, and Europe.

AnnieCannons (AC) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to training survivors of human trafficking and gender-based violence to be programmers, giving them both the economic and technological empowerment to invent solutions to overcome the hardships they have survived, and the capacity to support themselves and their families.

AskMyClass, is a learning assistant that helps teachers save time and enhance learning, using smart speakers like Alexa, and help students get back-on-task quickly and build life skills through classroom management, social-emotional learning, and lesson support.

Acely is the leading AI tutor for the digital SAT and ACT, helping students get into their dream college. Our mission is to democratize opportunity for high school families through AI-native tools that empower students to learn smarter and gain confidence. Backed by Forerunner Ventures, we've grown to $10M ARR with a lean, 10-person team, proof that small, mission-driven teams can deliver outsized impact. Our product has traction, our users are engaged, and we're now at an inflection point: ready to scale with speed, craft, and AI-native excellence. Acely was launched out of beta in January 2024 as a spinout product from Juni (YC W18).

We can provide you with the skills, experience and knowledge you need to skyrocket through the ranks of the IT industry faster than anyone even if you have zero experience right now. Our job-ready training program (which is based on our thorough experience working at Cisco, Dimension Data, Arista, etc. and as IT instructors for the U.S. Air Force) and and in-person certification will help you master the most in-demand networking skills in 2-5 months so that you can break into a tech job or get promoted. Additionally, we provide 1:1 live mentorship from some of the best engineers in the world, skills assessment, career guidance and a proven system that can help you prioritize and execute your career plans confidently. Apply to our program here: http://zerotoengineer.com and/or learn more here: http://help.nexgent.com

Bloom Institute of Technology is a full computer science education that's free until you get a high-paying job. We invest in our students, train them for free, and take a portion of income if they get a job above a certain threshold. If they never make above that threshold or don't get a job in the chosen field, they never pay us a dime.

ClassDojo's mission is to give every kid an education they love. Our flagship communication app has become the world’s largest network serving kids, reaching over 51 million kids, families and teachers in 180 countries every month, entirely through word of mouth. They use it to share the best moments in a kid's day through pictures, videos, messages, and more. ClassDojo has recognized by Forbes, LinkedIn, Inc and Fast Company, and it is a top 100 Y Combinator company.

Outschool is an innovative education platform that offers a variety of engaging, small-group classes online. Unlike traditional classes, Outschool classes give kids the unique opportunity to explore their interests in-depth via interactive, live video by experienced, independent educators. When Outschool was founded in 2015, homeschoolers were the first to discover our classes, but it wasn’t long before kids in conventional schools began supplementing their education with fun and unique, interest-based classes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Outschool became vital to families who wanted to keep kids learning, social, and pursuing their passions. Today, Outschool offers more than 140,000 live online classes to more than 1,000,000 learners in 183 countries worldwide.

Platzi cracked online education. It teaches courses on design, marketing and programming with a 70% completion rate, to over one million students worldwide. The classes include real-time collaboration among students and industry leaders as teachers. It aims to be the professional home for lifelong learning of advanced skills.

CodeCombat is a multiplayer programming game for learning how to code. With thousands of schools and millions of students, we are bringing K12 computer science education to everyone, regardless of gender, race, or background. Everyone should have the opportunity to learn. The ultimate goal of CodeCombat is to bring more users into the field of computer programming by making the logic and syntax more accessible and enjoyable to learn. The end game is to educate a whole new generation of computer programmers that started their journey by slaying ogres and defending their castles from oncoming enemy hordes. We teach Python, JavaScript, and other languages directly in the browser. Teachers with no computer science background can get started in five minutes. In a world where all programmers have had to be second-language learners, do you want your students to become native speakers of code? Let's chat about bringing CodeCombat to your school! Find us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/CodeCombat

The Cambly app gives English learners instant 1-on-1 access to friendly native speakers over video chat 24/7. Students get an affordable and convenient way to practice their English and gain confidence. Tutors get to make money helping people from around the world practice English.

Lingt empowers teachers to speak more with their students. Create and manage online speaking assignments for use in the classroom.

It combines the latest adaptive learning and Natural Language Understanding technology with pedagogical content as well as on-demand human instructors to offer its students affordable, personalized, 1:1 learning. Based in San Francisco, the company was funded by General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Google Assistant Investments Program, and several other investors. Over 800 thousand students have improved their English with Edwin. In early 2020 Edwin merged with MyBuddy.ai. The resulting company kept the name “Buddy.ai”. Headquartered in San Francisco, it focuses on building a virtual English conversation partner for over 500 million children around the globe who are trying to learn English, but can't reach fluency because they lack genuine practice speaking the language. The company doubled down on its mobile app Buddy, the voice-based English tutor for kids, organically combining solutions developed by Buddy.ai and Edwin.

We started Mystery.org to create better explanations for every question children have about the world. We began with the 150 most common science questions that children ask teachers. We call this collection Mystery Science. Last year, more than 4 million children used Mystery Science in 50% of U.S. elementary schools. In an industry that is plagued by long sales cycles and high barriers to entry, we’ve sold thousands of schools without a single sales person. We’re backed by a great group of investors including Y Combinator, Learn Capital, and Reach Capital. We’re now moving on to all the other questions children have that they’ll never learn in school. In the last 18 months we received over 500,000 questions from children eager for better explanations of the world. Now we’re creating video explanations for every question. You can think of this like a visual Wikipedia for kids. Our goal is to create a generation of better thinkers. We think this is the most important problem to solve in the world today.

Py is democratizing access to career opportunities in tech. Our iOS and Android apps have been featured in the App Store & Google Play Store and we've provided millions of lessons and quizzes to our users. We are changing the way that educational content is delivered and modernizing traditional online teaching tools. We launched Py for Work to level the playing field for candidates and empower companies to take a skills-based approach to hiring. Our platform enables companies to assess candidates using real-world assessments, not brain teasers. We’re helping industry leaders like LiveRamp, Amplitude, and Factual approach hiring based on merit, not resume keywords.

Vidcode is computer science courses for tweens and teens. With over three hundred self-guided coding tutorials teens can build their web development skills with Vidcode course tracks. The curricular approach enables students to create video filters, simulations, augmented reality, and other creative projects -- all while learning the fundamentals of computer programming. Founded by female developers and artists, the company was originally built with girls in mind and pays special attention to increasing participation from young women and underrepresented minorities.

Clever is a single platform for all of your digital learning programs. Founded in 2012, Clever was started by educators and technology professionals who knew that schools, teachers, and students could all benefit from the amazing learning software that was available, but key challenges stood in the way of accessing the technology. Today, half of K-12 schools in the U.S. use Clever to give students and teachers single sign-on access for any resource or file they need, and to automate software account setup and updates for district administrators. Clever gives teachers time to teach, helps districts be better informed, and makes using applications in the classroom effortless. We are a team of more than 100 people passionate about education. If you feel the same way, you should see our openings at https://clever.com/about/jobs.

Knowmia is a destination for learning that features short video lessons from great teachers everywhere. We help you to find what you need to succeed in school in a personal, affordable, and time-efficient way. By bringing together a wide range of video lessons and making it easy to find what you need, we help you with challenging topics, prepare you for an upcoming test or new course, and find the right teacher for your style of learning.

Verbling’s mission is to empower people all over the world to become fluent in a foreign language. We use online live video technology to help people develop their skills together with teachers and students on a global scale. The core team is based in San Francisco, California. The teachers and students who make our mission possible are spread across six continents.