Engineering, Product and Design Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Flock Safety provides the first public safety operating system that empowers private communities and law enforcement to work together to eliminate crime. We are committed to protecting human privacy and mitigating bias in policing with the development of best-in-class technology rooted in ethical design, which unites civilians and public servants in pursuit of a safer, more equitable society. Our Safety-as-a-Service approach includes affordable devices powered by LTE and solar that can be installed anywhere. Our technology detects and captures objective details, decodes evidence in real-time and delivers investigative leads into the hands of those who matter. While safety is a serious business, we are a supportive team that is optimizing the remote experience to create strong and fun relationships even when we are physically apart. Our flock of hard-working employees thrive in a positive and inclusive environment, where a bias towards action is rewarded. Flock Safety is headquartered in Atlanta and operates nationwide. We have raised $150M in our Series E led by Tiger Global at a $3.5B valuation.

The world’s largest omnichannel communications platform. Bird CRM powers communication between businesses and their customers — across any channel, always with the right context, and on every corner of the planet. Its products and solutions are the foundational building blocks to business communications across preferred channels, like SMS, Voice, WhatsApp, WeChat, Messenger, Email and more. Founded in 2011, Bird connects to billions of devices and is trusted by nearly 20,000 customers worldwide. Headquartered in Amsterdam, Bird operates across nine global hubs — including Singapore, Dublin, Shanghai, Sydney, London, Bogota and Asuncion — and is proud to be a “Work Anywhere” company. Its team of 500 employees represent more than 55 nationalities.

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.

GitLab is the first single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle. Only GitLab enables Concurrent DevOps, unlocking organizations from the constraints of today’s toolchain. GitLab provides unmatched visibility, radical new levels of efficiency and comprehensive governance to significantly compress the time between planning a change and monitoring its effect. This makes the software lifecycle 200% faster, radically improving the speed of business. GitLab and Concurrent DevOps collapses cycle times by driving higher efficiency across all stages of the software development lifecycle. For the first time, Product, Development, QA, Security, and Operations teams can work concurrently in a single application. There’s no need to integrate and synchronize tools, or waste time waiting for handoffs. Everyone contributes to a single conversation, instead of managing multiple threads across disparate tools. And only GitLab gives teams complete visibility across the lifecycle with a single, trusted source of data to simplify troubleshooting and drive accountability. All activity is governed by consistent controls, making security and compliance first-class citizens instead of an afterthought. Built on Open Source, GitLab leverages the community contributions of thousands of developers and millions of users to continuously deliver new DevOps innovations. More than 100,000 organizations from startups to global enterprise organizations, including Ticketmaster, Jaguar Land Rover, NASDAQ, Dish Network and Comcast trust GitLab to deliver great software at new speeds.

Our mission is to make every search interaction meaningful & rewarding, through developer-friendly and enterprise-grade APIs. Algolia is the leading Search & Discovery API for websites and mobile apps. We help the most innovative companies across e-commerce, media and SaaS industries create powerful, relevant and scalable discovery experiences for their users. Unlike other solutions, our hosted platform reduces the complexities of building and scaling a fast, relevant digital experience and helps teams accelerate development time. More than 9,000 companies like Under Armour, Twitch, Periscope, Medium and Stripe rely on Algolia to manage 50+ billion search queries a month. Founded in 2012, we're backed by $184M in funding from Accel Partners, Alven Capital, Point Nine Capital and Storm Ventures. The team is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Paris, London, New York, and Atlanta. To learn more, visit www.algolia.com. --- We’re looking for talented, passionate people to build the world’s best search technology. As an ownership-driven company, we seek team members who thrive under autonomy and diversity. We're committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace. We care about each other and the world around us, and embrace talented people regardless of their race, age, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, color, veteran status, disability and socioeconomic background

PagerDuty is an operations performance platform delivering visibility and actionable intelligence across the entire incident lifecycle. Their SaaS-based solution empowers over 10,000 small, mid-size and enterprise global customers such as Comcast, eHarmony, Slack and Lululemon with the insight to intelligently respond to critical disruptions for exceptional customer experience. PagerDuty was founded to deliver a new and innovative approach to increase business response and efficiency. When brand reputation depends on customer satisfaction, PagerDuty arms businesses with the insight to proactively manage incidents and events that may impact customers across their IT environment.

At Optimizely, we're on a mission to help people unlock their digital potential. We do that by reinventing how marketing and product teams work to create and optimize digital experiences across all channels. With Optimizely One, our industry-first operating system for marketers, we offer teams flexibility and choice to build their stack their way with our fully SaaS, fully decoupled, and highly composable solution. We help companies around the world orchestrate their entire content lifecycle, monetize every digital experience and experiment across all customer touchpoints – all through Optimizely One, the leading digital experience platform that powers every phase of the marketing lifecycle through a single, AI-accelerated workflow. Optimizely has nearly 1500 employees across our 21 global offices and has 700+ partners. We are proud to help more than 10,000 businesses, including H&M, PayPal, Zoom, and Toyota, enrich their customer lifetime value, increase revenue and grow their brands. At Optimizely, we live each day with a simple philosophy: large enough to serve, small enough to care. Learn more at optimizely.com.

As we shift from user experience to agent experience, the entire way we design, operate, and evaluate our products must be rethought. The first step is to understand how agents use products through MCPs and CLIs, the exact same way we used to understand how users interacted with UIs. Armature automates agent workflow testing. Connect your MCP, CLI and ChatGPT apps and let Armature discover the workflows agents actually run. Armature will then continuously test them across every harness (Claude Code, Codex, Openclaw, etc.) and frontier model and show you how you perform, how you compare to your competitors as well as alert you when something breaks.

Lightsprint is a product development platform designed to let non-engineering teammates ship real features to an existing codebase. PMs, designers and founders describe what they want in plain English. Lightsprint reads the codebase, presents trade-offs and visual options styled to the actual app, generates a live preview, and ships a real pull request. It also closes the product loop - connect tools like Granola to surface insights from customer conversations, so our product agent builds what customers actually need. The company is founded by Ben Ong, an AI investor who previously scaled AI products at SEA Group (NYSE: SE) and Temasek ($300B fund), Benedict Chan who was VP Engineering at Chainlink and CTO at BitGo (NYSE:BTGO), and Heng Hong Lee who built Facebook Messenger in 2013 and was Director of Engineering at Fazz (YC S17).

InsForge is the backend platform designed for coding agents. Database, auth, storage, compute, hosting, and AI gateway in one place, built for agents to configure and manage end to end.

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.

Gigacatalyst allows sales and CS teams to build missing features that customers need, so you stop losing business because of feature gaps. We’ve helped our customers unblock $1M in sales in 6 weeks. We do this with an embedded AI customization layer that learns your APIs. Each customer can now adapt your product to match their workflows perfectly, and share it across their team with our in-built app store. The result is that customers use your SaaS more, retain for longer, and expand quicker, because they get bespoke implementation for their exact usecase, without waiting. We're live with the top Series B companies with 90% repeat usage rate. Our customers tell us that Gigacatalyst is the best way to increase usage, retention, and expansion in 2026.

Teams are shipping faster than ever with AI, but engineers are merging changes that neither they nor their reviewers fully understand, leading to bugs in production and cognitive debt. Stage is a new code review platform built for today’s fast moving teams. Instead of forcing readers to piece things together from unorganized diffs, Stage breaks changes down into structured chapters so teams can understand what's happening and ship with confidence.

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.

TesterArmy is an AI agent that tests websites and mobile apps. It monitors production on a schedule and runs automatically on every GitHub Pull Request, delivering screenshots, recordings, and actionable bug reports. Describe tests in plain English. The agent handles login flows, OAuth, and OTPs, no scripts to write or maintain. We catch the regressions and UX issues that code review misses.

Replicas is a background coding agent that allows you to delegate tasks to Claude Code or Codex from Slack, Linear, GitHub, and more. Each task works inside of a sandboxed virtual machine, allowing teams to heavily parallelize work and burn through tickets. Replicas agents output higher quality PRs via feedback loops - each task automatically is notified and fixes CI failures and reads all code reviews. With Environments, engineering teams can configure agents to run their entire codebase locally, verify its work, and provide preview URLs.

We are building the fastest visual infrastructure for EdTech AI applications. With a simple text prompt, students get accurate visual explanations in seconds, making high-quality learning dramatically faster and cheaper. 

Glue is an open source design editor for AI agents. It gives coding agents an infinite canvas to create new interfaces, iterate on existing ones, and turn those changes into production-ready code all in real time. The rise of coding agents is collapsing EPD into one role: builders. This new paradigm means design and engineering can now converge to a single workflow. Builders no longer want static mockups in one tool, and implementation in another. Glue is a collaborative workspace where builders and agents can create new components, iterate on existing interfaces, and implement as code. The same tight feedback loop that once made Figma powerful for designers is now built for builders and their armies of agents. Being open source allows us to penetrate workflows at zero cost and build trust quickly. Right now there are no design tools with AI as the primary user. Existing tools bolt on copilots as an afterthought. Soon, every company will have AI agents building their interfaces. We are building the surface for this workflow.

Superset helps engineers run 100s of coding agents in parallel.

ShortKit lets any consumer app launch a TikTok-grade media expereinces. Michael, spent 6 years at YouTube building the infrastructure that powers YouTube Shorts. Neil, prev. scaled a SaaS company from 0 to $6M ARR as employee #1. We handle the full media stack, starting with short form video - client SDKs, video infrastructure, rec systems, and monetization - so product teams don't have to.

Ashr is a fully contained test and evals platform that improves AI agents by ensuring accuracy and quality across a wide range of user journeys through your product. Ashr generates user journeys through your agents’ tool calls, results, and questions. We don’t generate one off tests, we generate large amounts of authentic user stories through your product, and pick up on errors, inconsistencies, and failures that would otherwise take hours of manual testing or get caught by a customer. We also work to ensure agent response quality in line with your business goals by offering custom evaluation metrics. Ashr works with voice, text, automated website generation, image, file generation, and multimodal. We’re also willing to generate custom input types or make modifications for anyone interested. Currently, we integrate as an SDK, and are proactively working to make our documentation and resources as accessible and easy to use as possible.

AI coding tools have made developers 100x faster but customer-facing incidents are up 43% YoY, QA hasn't kept up. Canary is the first AI QA engineer that understands your codebase. Instead of relying on flaky DOM scraping or screenshot analysis, Canary reads your source code directly to understand developer intent and catch broken user flows before they hit production. Engineering teams go from weeks of manual testing to 90%+ coverage in days. Built by a team that built coding agents at Windsurf, Cognition and Google.

Reframe is the only AI-native marketplace for hardware teams to procure both COTS and custom manufactured components. We have access to trusted suppliers that have made parts for the most reliable hardware products that people use today (iPhones, Teslas, and more). We use Agents to automate end-to-end procurement so that hardware teams can scale while remaining lean.

We’re building the infrastructure for the future AI co-scientist, starting with computational research. Our core thesis is that powerful AI scientists require two things built together: a human-centered product that generates high-quality process data, and the research infrastructure to turn that data into increasingly autonomous systems. We’re building both. SynSci is our platform where scientists delegate complex research tasks to swarms of AI co-scientists across reading → hypotheses → methods → experimentation → results → drafting, even while they sleep.

Sentrial is the monitoring platform for AI products in production. When your AI product/agent loops indefinitely, hallucinates, or frustrates users, Sentrial detects it in real-time, diagnoses the root cause, and recommends specific fixes. We provide the monitoring, evaluation, and debugging infrastructure that traditional tools weren't built for, so teams iterate based on production reality, not just offline evals.

REV1 is Claude code for mechanical engineers, starting with automating the process of turning 3D designs into 2D manufacturing drawings – which is more than 25% of all of what a mechanical engineer does - our software does it in minutes. Compressing hours of work into minutes while delivering consistent, higher quality results.

There are 2 problems: The first, CAD software is slow and the second, designing with it is a tedious process with many steps. Aurorin solves both of these problems by being a CAD software built from the ground up on a modern tech stack with AI at its heart. Building the CAD kernel lets us fully leverage AI while modernizing execution speed. Almost all existing CAD software (Solidworks, NX, Creo, Catia, Fusion 360, Onshape etc) use the same couple of underlying CAD kernels built in the 80's. It's common for these programs to take 4 hours to open a file. Aurorin uses a custom parametric and B-Rep driven CAD Kernel built to take full advantage of modern CPUs and GPUs and be AI native.

Martini is a collaborative, AI-native platform for professional filmmaking in the era of generative media. By integrating the best generative models into professional workflows, we enable world-class creatives to harness generative AI as a legitimate medium for film.

Sparkles is like Lovable for existing projects, so even Sharon from Marketing can change the button styling on the front page without going back and forth with the dev team. Someone technical connects their GitHub to Sparkles, sets up the repository and environment variables, and then anyone on the team with a @yourcompany.com email can log in on Sparkles and create pull requests without needing to know what Git is.

We’re building the AI on-call engineer for data-heavy, regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and insurance. Engineers in these industries need to inspect data to debug production issues. We continuously monitor logs, metrics, and data for issues and use agents to debug and suggest fixes in minutes. Data is especially sensitive in regulated industries, so we offer on-prem deployments and hardware-backed secure inference environments that let agents safely use production data as context while debugging. Mitch and Shipra founded Corelayer after building data infrastructure together at Goldman Sachs, where they spent many late nights and weekends debugging systems that processed 100s of billions of rows a day.

Visibl makes custom chip development dramatically faster and lower cost for hardware companies. Today, most hardware companies that need a custom chip have bad options: sign a massive contract with an incumbent like Broadcom, pay a traditional design house millions of dollars and wait 18+ months, or keep using off-the-shelf chips and FPGAs that are not optimized for their product's cost, power, performance, size, or manufacturability. We handle the full path from architecture and design through verification, foundry management, and production. That makes custom ASICs accessible to robotics, drones, industrial, IoT, and edge hardware companies that were previously priced out of the market. As more hardware products need differentiated silicon, we think custom chip development should be available to far more companies than it is today.

Human-assisted development should be for novel ideation, not routine maintenance, bug fixes or incremental updates. Approxima is bringing you that future with agents that can scope work, code, validate their fixes end-to-end in sandbox environments and merge to production. Book a demo: https://calendly.com/ashish-selvaraj/approxima

We want software to improve itself. Sonarly connects to your monitoring stack - tools like Sentry, Datadog, and Grafana - and triages every alert to remove noise and duplicates. It then investigates logs, traces, metrics, and code to build a living map of your production system and find root cause. The result is either a ready-to-merge fix PR or a recommendation to update your alerting rules so the noise never comes back.

21st.dev is the largest React component registry for AI applications, used by 2M developers (370K MAU). We provide the building blocks to create AI agents and agent-powered apps: UI components, agent templates, and an SDK with built-in UI, tools, memory, observability, and managed infrastructure.

Insurers struggle to price autonomous systems because the historical data simply doesn't exist. Your car insurance draws from over 30 billion claims records, but autonomous trucks and robots have nearly zero. Valgo is the risk quantification platform that closes that gap. We are building probabilistic models of routes, tasks, and environments from the bottom up. We output a simulated loss estimate that insurers need to price coverage. Valgo is the foundational layer that gives insurance providers confidence to properly price autonomy risk. Our team combines expertise in risk estimation for autonomy with deep experience in the insurance industry. Sydney and Robert are Stanford PhDs with leading expertise in safety of physical AI systems. Sydney wrote the textbook on validating safety-critical systems and teaches the course at Stanford. Robert spent 7 years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on the core team that designed and validated an FAA-certified aircraft collision avoidance system, now a worldwide standard. Jon is a Sloan Fellow from the Stanford GSB and an actuary who spent over 12 years in insurance leadership and led over $5 billion in M&A as head of corporate development for one of the largest insurers in Asia-Pacific.

AtlasGrid automatically builds a visual graph of your mobile app UI and displays analytics directly on your screens. Additionally, our fleet of AI-powered agents will continuously analyze thousands of mobile apps, gathering design insights and identifying growth opportunities + actionable product improvements.

F2 is the AI platform for private markets investors. Purpose-built for private credit, private equity, and commercial banking, F2 accelerates diligence, underwriting, and portfolio monitoring, helping teams evaluate deals over 60% faster. F2 turns unstructured deal data into investment-grade analysis and polished memos in minutes. Unlike general-purpose AI, F2 is built with the domain expertise and depth to handle the most complex financial analysis. Already trusted across thousands of deals, F2 makes collaboration easy and retains historical context, so past work compounds into future wins. Headquartered in New York City, F2 is backed by leading investors including NFX, Left Lane Capital, and Y Combinator.

A Coast (containerized host) is a local development runtime. Coasts let you run multiple isolated environments for the same project on one machine. As AI coding agents increasingly work in parallel across git worktrees, developers hit painful conflicts — clashing ports, duplicated databases, and fragile per-branch setup. Coasts solve this by giving each worktree its own fully isolated runtime, so multiple agents can build and test side by side without stepping on each other.

Minro is a shared workspace for engineering teams using AI coding tools. Your teams are running a ton of Claude, Codex, and Cursor sessions every day, and the context from those sessions goes nowhere. Decisions get lost between sessions. Plans live in one person's head. Docs are stale within a week. Engineers keep rebuilding things someone already figured out. Minro captures what happens in every coding session - decisions, architecture choices, what was tried, what broke, what shipped and writes it back to one place your team and your agents both use. Features get broken into task graphs so work can be split across humans and agents. Docs stay in sync with the code. A new engineer joins and the workspace already knows the system. A session ends and the next one picks up where it left off. A feature spans three sprints and four people, and the plan is right there - linked to every ticket, doc, and decision.

Inspector is the AI IDE for designers to ship to prod. Just select any element on your live front end, edit it like you would in Figma, and Inspector writes the changes straight to your codebase.

Lemma catches the silent, semantic failures your observability tools miss, where your AI agent looks like it worked but didn’t. We scan every trace to surface issues before users complain, identify root causes, and help you fix them without manual digging, so your agents improve over time.

Rovr streamlines engineering operations by automating intake, triage, routing, and cross-team coordination. It replaces internal forms, manual Slack triage, and scattered docs with an AI front desk that understands requests, assigns owners, updates context, and posts status changes directly into Slack. Rovr’s built-in ops CRM gives teams a single system of record for eng requests — from tooling access to platform incidents to dev-infra workflows — reducing operational drag across the entire org.

Aspect helps creative teams consolidate 5 media tools into one platform. We provide everything a media team needs: file ingest, local file streaming, review and approval, sharing, and archiving. Aspect workspaces come with an agent that has complete understanding of your asset library including comments and revisions. Ask the agent to complete any task in the background: searching for files, setting up folder structures, labeling and organizing footage, and much more. Check out aspect.inc/use-cases to see how different media teams use Aspect to deliver content faster.

We make your agents pay. As agents evolve from tools into dependable, autonomous actors, they’ll need the ability to execute open-ended workflows end-to-end. This inevitably means payments: accessing paywalled data, transacting for services or with other specialist agents. But autonomy requires guardrails. Businesses and developers will need a way to ensure their agents only spend how much and on what they’re supposed to. The machine economy is coming, and Locus (YC F25) is building the connector businesses will need to participate. We connect agents securely to funds, letting you define permissions and limits for every transaction. Each payment is traceable, auditable, and fully reconcilable with your existing financial stack.

Caddy is the operating system that works proactively for you. It learns how you work and acts on your behalf, keeping work moving while your context and voice stay intact. Instead of producing generic AI output, Caddy creates real work artifacts that sound like you and fit how you actually work. Today, it operates across the tools you use every day, including email, calendar, Slack, Linear, and Notion. Caddy is built by the team behind Loom’s AI and core product. We believe the next era of computing is software that understands intent, handles ambiguous work, and quietly gets work done in the background.

Semiotic builds AI design agents. We’re starting with agents that build landing pages for fast‑growing startups. Existing AI website builders didn't make creating websites easier—they made creating ugly websites easier. So, companies choose between blue-purple gradient slop or agencies with 3-month waitlists and $100k minimums. You don't have to choose anymore. Start a project: semiotic.com

Compyle is a less autonomous coding agent that asks before it acts. We're like Cursor or Claude Code - but you won't need to rewrite your codebase every time you use it for more than a small task. We built Compyle because we were frustrated with the direction other coding agents are headed. They're all racing to be more autonomous, running for hours without human input. This doesn't work for real production code. When agents run autonomously, they make countless small decisions that pile up in your codebase. Engineers lose ownership - they don't know what was implemented, can't effectively debug or maintain it, and struggle to build on top of it. The code becomes a black box, and they're forced to throw it away. Compyle keeps engineers in the driver's seat.