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

Koyal is an Agentic AI Filmmaking Platform that allows you to seamlessly convert script or audio into personalized, visually compelling stories. We’re a team from Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Meta, with experience in AI video generation. https://koyal.ai builds directly upon our published research at the AI conference NeurIPS in December. We’ve been covered in the international press for our patented secure personalization protocol CHARCHA: the genAI captcha. Announcement: https://x.com/meh_agarwal/status/1965866965425348687 Demo: https://x.com/meh_agarwal/status/1965137062119752099 We currently have paid pilots with the biggest global music labels, podcasts and production houses, and just launched our public beta at beta.koyal.ai We recently concluded a pilot with Universal Music and T-Series (world’s largest music label) alongside Bollywood production houses like Maddock Entertainment, and Collective Artists Network! As part of that, we launched 5 music videos for Grammy and Oscar winning artists like A R Rahman, Ricky Kej and Shankar Mahadevan all crossing 1.5 million views! We've recently built SOTA capabilities in (i) multilingual script to audio to video, (ii) Agentic lip-sync with dynamic movement & (iii) Multi-character consistency.

Swerve is an AI character chat app that immerses users in rich stories and conversations. Users discover unique AI characters, choose their own persona, and dive into one-on-one or group chats that evolve naturally with no scripts and no limits. Our goal is to make Swerve the most entertaining part of your phone, a place where you step into any world, build stories with characters you connect with, and let every conversation go wherever it leads.

AI entertainment feels like slop because companies bet on technology instead of people. Companies chase tech because it usually lets them win. But what fans love has never been about the tech. A fan doesn’t fill their apartment with posters because of the lens a movie was shot on. They do it because of the mind behind the camera. AI is a power-up. In the wrong hands, more and more of what you see becomes sludge. In the right ones, the good stuff wins. DreamRP builds for creatives, from indie artists to global stars, because they’ve always been the real reason fans love what they love. If you get it, message me why.

Lovable for Minecraft Mods. Empowering over 250,000 players to become creators.

Eggnog is the Youtube for AI-generated content. The initial product is the only AI video platform on the market that generates consistent characters. The vision is to have the largest library of remixable characters and sets for users to collaboratively build and watch AI-generated content. Eggnog launched a week ago, and videos made on the platform are getting 100k views on Twitter. Team: Sam (BS, Applied Math from Harvard) was a data scientist at Facebook and Quora working on newsfeed and creator monetization. Jitesh (BS, MEng from MIT CS) was a consultant at McKinsey and PM at Flexport.

Storio is a content platform where creators can create original fiction or derivative works based on other fictional worlds. Creators write fictions 10 times faster on Storio. It's a place for community to fully indulge in the fictional world that they wish they were in.

Kino is a web-native video editor where your footage, your team, and your AI agents work together — video editing never had its Figma moment, and it certainly never had its Cursor moment. We proved our platform on Hollywood's biggest shows, and soon it's free for everyone.

Glade is helping everyone build games with AI. GladeCore powers hundreds of studios and developers with locally powered AI NPCs that include TTS, STT, emotional tuning, and RAG. GladeKit is Cursor for Games - an AI agent that lives directly in your game engine and builds games for you.

Shortbread app is Netflix for romance comics built by a team of women writers, artists and engineers. We work with bestselling authors on Kindle and #BookTok to turn their romance fictions into comics. Our content specialize in viral romance fiction tropes such as mafia and dark romance. The comics are free to read with options to buy a subscription.

Omoi (formerly Azuki) is Netflix-style Japanese comic subscription service where users can subscribe for $4.99 a month to unlock access to all the manga on the service. Free users have access to select chapters with ads.

Tappity is building the world’s largest library of interactive lessons for kids—starting with science! Find every science topic kids love in one place taught by the world's most entertaining instructors.

✨ Hello! ✨ - StartPlaying.Games is the largest marketplace for finding game masters to host digital tabletop games like D&D. Today, more than 40 million people play D&D around the world and sales have grown by double-digit percentages for the last five consecutive years. But still finding people to host and play these games with is challenging. Most solutions involve digging through discord servers, reddit, and specialty forums. We built StartPlaying.Games to solve this problem.

We're building the one-stop shop for creator finances. Your favorite digital creators—the ones you follow every day on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or Twitch—aren’t just extraordinarily talented personalities and community builders. They’re also businesses. That means they have business needs—managing revenues, expenses, savings, credit, banking. We’re building products that help creators spend less time worrying about finances so they can focus on creating.

DreamCraft enables anyone to create, publish, and monetize video games. The company’s core product is a code-free game creation platform, bundled with high quality art assets. DreamCraft is backed by March Capital, Makers Fund, Tencent Corporation, Y Combinator, and other top investors in the gaming space. The company was founded in 2018 and now has a global team of 20+ people with half remote and half based in Silicon Valley.

Weekend builds the best AI games and entertainment experiences for TVs. Popular Weekend games include Song Quiz, Jeopardy!, and Wheel of Fortune, and Wit's End. Weekend was founded by Max Child and James Wilsterman and is headquartered in San Francisco.

Mirror Emoji Keyboard by Mirror AI is an app that takes a photo of your face and creates you a set of personalized emoji. You get hundreds of them ready to be shared on messengers or social networks.

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.

Our mission is to help creators and entrepreneurs grow online. We do this by helping them build a beautiful website and online store with no coding or design background.

Humble Bundle is a distribution platform selling games, ebooks, software, and other digital content. Since Humble’s founding in 2010, our mission has been to support charity (“Humble”) while providing awesome content to customers at great prices (“Bundle”). We started by offering only game bundles, but have branched out to include an online storefront, a monthly subscription service, a publishing initiative, and lots more. We have raised over $250 million for charity. And we now have over 500,000 subscribers to our Humble Monthly. Join our award winning team by checking out our careers page at https://jobs.humblebundle.com