Financial Technology and Services Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) in the San Francisco Bay Area 2026

Launched out of Y Combinator’s 2009 Summer batch, Stripe is a global technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. Businesses of every size—from new startups to public companies—use our software to accept payments and manage their businesses online Stripe is a proud partner of YC companies—from Airbnb (S09) to Defog (W23)—to help them grow their businesses and increase the GDP of the internet.

Newfront is building the modern insurance brokerage. Transparent data delivered real-time translates into a lower total cost of risk and greater insights. We work with 20% of US unicorns, 100s of YC startups, and 150+ public companies on their Business Insurance and Total Rewards. Headquartered in San Francisco, Newfront has more than 800 colleagues and offices throughout the US.

Brex is the AI-powered spend platform for modern companies, from startups to enterprises. Combining corporate cards, expense management, travel, business accounts, and bill pay, Brex makes it easy to control spend before it happens with unprecedented efficiency and accuracy. Our mission is to empower employees anywhere to make better financial decisions, so we designed our platform to make expenses almost effortless with unrivaled automation of manual expense work and real-time tracking. Brex supports more countries and currencies than any other spend solution. Brex has tens of thousands of customers, including some of the most successful, high-growth companies, such as DoorDash, SeatGeek, Coinbase, ScaleAI, MasterClass, Indeed, Allbirds, and Superhuman. Brex offers: - Corporate cards with 10-20x higher limits - Business accounts with easy wires, same-day liquidity, fast global payments, and $6M in FDIC insurance - Reward options that include billboards, offsites, and coaching - Founder-friendly financial modeling tools - Special events and masterclasses for founders - Advanced spend management software as startups grow that includes global capabilities, travel, bill pay and more.

🔥FIRE WALLET 🔥 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeXDDegwhgA TL;DR: Fire Wallet is a fast, end-to-end encrypted, non-custodial stablecoin wallet with built-in payment processing and fiat on/off ramps, built by the team that created MobileCoin, the cryptocurrency inside Signal. Hey Bookface! We're Josh, Michael, and Manny and we're building Fire Wallet! 🔥Why we built this Most wallets and payment processors don’t work FOR you. They're slow, route your payments in the way that earns them the most, and they leak your financial life to anyone asking. Worse: every single one hold the keys to your money. We believe your financial tools should act in your interest and, frankly, that your money should be yours. 🔥What Fire does Multi-chain, non-custodial, end-to-end encrypted wallet. Your keys, your money, your assets: you are in full control of your funds at all times. Least Cost Routing. Every swap and payment takes the cheapest path, not the one that pays a middleman the most. Self-sovereign payment processing. Send an invoice straight from the wallet. Get paid from your web checkout. No middleman. Easy fiat on/off ramps. Move stablecoins to USD and back without the pain. Built for agentic commerce. Manage per-agent sub-wallets for agentic workflows. Encrypted by default. Protecting you from bad actors and surveillance capitalism. 🔥Early traction Signed our first major LOI with @Trustboop (founded by Justice Laub of Drone Racing League and Rob Rhinehart of Soylent). Onboarding our first enterprise customer in ecommerce packaging and marketing, doing about $1.5M/month in volume. They've connected us to 10 more companies in the same vertical at similar volume, roughly a $100M/yr GMV opportunity. 🔥Why us Josh and Manuel led the creation of MobileCoin, the cryptocurrency in Signal Messenger: $100M+ raised, $1.16B peak valuation, $4B+ peak coin market cap, acquired in 2026. Michael runs product and design. He's an internationally exhibited artist with two published art books, and he builds sick products. Manuel runs operations and orchestrates systems that actually work at scale. 🔥Asks Intros to businesses moving $1M+/month in payments, especially cross-border, ecommerce, and DTC, who want lower fees and more control over their funds. Strategic partners in fintech and payments interested in integrating our infrastructure. Tell us what's broken. Reply here or email founders@fire.co. We're looking for our first 100 customers. If that's you or someone you know, we'd love to talk.

Ageospatial helps organizations value the risk on their physical assets (properties, land, infrastructure) remotely using satellite imagery. 97% of commercial properties are never physically inspected because it's too slow and expensive. So insurers price risk based on what the client or broker tells them, and about half the time at least one of those records is wrong. The result is mispricing, fraud, and an estimated $36B in premium leakage every year in the US alone, which gets exposed the moment a disaster hits. Upload a list of addresses and their GeoAI reads satellite and street-level imagery, maps, real-time data, public records and the insurer's own data to determine what's really there, which natural and human hazards surround it, what changed over time, and which properties are worth inspecting. Each property becomes a living record that underwriting, claims and pricing teams can trace from past to present. Ageospatial deploys inside carriers and MGAs as an AI-native service, so insurers get outcomes delivered.

Decent is a health insurance brokerage for small businesses. We compare every way to cover your team, show what each one costs, and then keep improving your plan all year. We're paid by insurance companies, so we're free to you.

Oasive helps bond investors figure out which bonds are rich or cheap, and why. We give portfolio managers, traders, analysts and investment advisers a team of AI analysts, combining fixed income research, proprietary quantitative models and scenario analysis to move from trade idea to decision in minutes. Our focus is Macro and Rates Research and MBS, with munis, ABS and corporates next.

Spectre Intelligence is a neotrading firm. We create AI traders instead of hiring human ones. Currently trading semis + bio.

Covera is the AI-native operating system for independent P&C insurance agencies. It lives inside the agency's AMS and inbox and runs agentic AI workflows across the whole client journey, from the first email to the next renewal. Producers quote first and win more business; CSRs and account managers stop retyping data. Submissions, for producers: every new request becomes a ready file, one click keys every carrier portal for a first quote during the call, quotes come back side by side, and binding updates the AMS with no double entry. Servicing, for CSRs and account managers: answers about any account with their source, COIs and follow-ups drafted, renewal reminders 90, 60 and 30 days out with remarketing when premiums jump, and coverage gaps across the book turned into cross-sell leads. Agencies using Covera go from lead to quote in 5 minutes, save 10 hours a week per user and win 20% more deals against competitors. Every action is reviewed by the agency team and logged for E&O. Works with Applied Epic, AMS360, QQCatalyst, HawkSoft, EZLynx, Momentum, Gmail and Outlook. Built by the founders of Simio (conversational AI, acquired in 2024).

Veltha is the AI native TPA starting with workers comp. We handle claim for insurance providers end to end. Learn more at https://veltha.ai

TovenAI builds a platform of AI agents that handle manual, data-intensive work for compliance teams at institutional trading firms, with six agents currently live. Our customers range from specialist firms to large global institutions, with our agents supporting multiple compliance workflows at a top-10 institutional brokerage. With prebuilt connectors to more than 30 systems—including Bloomberg, Cloud9, and NICE Actimize—firms can onboard to our platform and evaluate results using their own data in less than a week.

Prodigy is the frontier AI trading research lab. We've trained the world's best foundation model for quantitative finance. We've already achieved more than 100% returns in live trading over the course of our YC batch, doubling our capital while major indices were flat. Our founders previously worked on a trading desk at Jane Street, trained frontier AI models at Google DeepMind and shipped cutting-edge AI at Apple to billions of customers. Join us as we use AI to solve the market.

Qlo builds AI agents to run commercial insurance underwriting. We start by fully automating the operational work around risk decisions, become the system of record, and earn autonomy workflow by workflow toward the autonomous AI underwriter. We’re rebuilding underwriting infrastructure from the ground up so human underwriters and AI agents can share the same accounts, rules, documents, permissions, and workflow state.  We believe every commercial insurance program will eventually be built and operated end to end by AI agents on Qlo.

Arbital lets you trade perps, memes, stocks, and run market-making strategies from one place. In our first 7 months, 2,700 traders have traded $1.35B in volume through Arbital, and we're now doing $435M/month. We're building towards a social, mobile-first trading app that brings tokenized equities, crypto, and perps to everyone.

Stoa provides pricing and trading infrastructure for AI hardware, live with an RFQ marketplace where companies buy and sell GPUs through vetted dealers real-time.

Risklytics is the insurance company for frontier tech such as physical AI, robotics, and data centers. Companies answer 6 questions and we bind a tailored policy that other insurance companies won’t.

Starting with dental benefits, we are relentlessly simplifying the process for patients to receive better coverage at a lower cost by putting the buying power back into the hand of the individual.

Florin is a full-stack insurance carrier where a model does the underwriting. When a submission comes in, Florin reads the ACORD forms, then investigates the risk on its own: satellite imagery, permits, public records, even the insured's Instagram, and catches exposures that never make it onto the application. It then simulates tens of thousands of ways the policy year could go, prices the risk, and returns a bindable quote in under a minute instead of weeks. The team is ex-Google, Tesla, Amazon, and Terrafirma, and the bet is that a carrier built this way wins on loss ratio, speed, and cost at the same time.

Levocred AI is the Bloomberg of loans: AI agents that run and price a lender's book. One fund cut the time to mark its book from a week to two hours and now names us as data agent, the system of record, in its loan purchase agreements. $22T of US loans never trade because nobody can price them efficiently and defensibly. We fix pricing first by deploying inside lenders. Trading follows, the way it did for bonds.

Agentcard.sh is a debit card for AI agents. Agents can use Agentcard’s API to issue cards and pay for things online autonomously.

Capital allocation is becoming a more important part of individual economic life. Finance is moving toward a global, onchain, 24/7 future with thousands of markets trading at once. The asset management industry is built around the scarcity of financial expertise and the cost of organizing people around capital. Institutions cover global markets by employing analysts, researchers, and quants around the clock. AI turns this organizational capacity into software. Instinct is building the harness for this transition. Instinct is a proactive team of agents that searches thousands of markets, investigates opportunities, and operates 24/7. The individual becomes the portfolio manager, Instinct becomes the investment firm operating around them. As institutional advantages become widely accessible, the edge concentrates in each trader’s worldview, judgment, and bets. The first one-person investment firm managing $1 billion will emerge within two years. It will run on Instinct.

We are changing the way that people pay... Founded by: Saket Joshi: www.linkedin.com/in/saket-dattatray-joshi/ Mordi Shadpour: www.linkedin.com/in/mordi-shadpour/

River Markets is the prime brokerage for prediction markets. We aggregate every major event-contract venue into one account, giving professional traders best execution, portfolio and order management systems, and a unified API.

Allowance lets AI agents make purchases on a user’s behalf without ever exposing your real card number. Users approve purchases directly from their iPhone with customizable controls like spending limits, merchant restrictions, and expiration windows. Once approved, Allowance generates scoped, one-time payment credentials designed specifically for that transaction. This enables AI agents to safely complete tasks like shopping, ordering food, booking reservations, or purchasing tickets while keeping humans in control of every payment.

Hedge is an AI-Native specialty insurance company. We help insurance brokers find faster, cheaper, and better coverage for their customers.

HEVN is a B2B financial platform built for global commerce. We solve the last-mile problem in cross-border payments by working with licensed local payment service providers and settling transactions through domestic payment rails instead of relying on international bank transfers. HEVN helps importers and exporters move money between jurisdictions with fewer intermediaries and faster, more predictable settlement.

Huscarl is building an autonomous AI actuary to enable self-insurance for corporations. Large companies use insurance subsidiaries ("captives") to self-insure their risks. Some of these captives are larger than regional insurers. We provide them the actuarial and modeling layer to operate and grow. We're building a future where self-insurance is the default, and commercial insurance the exception. This is the best way to solve the inefficiencies of the $1T corporate insurance market.

TLDR: Mount is building the AI insurance carrier, starting with liability coverage for deployed AI agents. As everyone moves AI Agents into production and gives them more responsibility, we help businesses insure and secure them. Whenever responsibility shifts from human operators to autonomous systems, so too does the liability that accompanies it. The systems also introduce new risks: agentic software failures, prompt injection attacks, autonomous workflow errors, data leaks, and more. Legacy insurance was not built for this. Existing policies are often silent, ambiguous, or exclude autonomous software, and traditional insurers lack the data and technical capability to assess deployed AI Systems. Our first product, the Mount AI Liability Policy, is built for mid-market and enterprise companies deploying autonomous AI agents in real business processes. We scan and red-team AI deployments, quantify operational risk, help fix vulnerabilities, and insure the residual risk with purpose-built AI liability coverage. Mount is best thought of as a highly automated version of today's commercial insurance carriers, which run on manual workflows, layers of intermediaries, and tens of thousands of employees. AI enables automation of underwriting, pricing, policy issuance, claims, fraud detection, customer support, and distribution. We believe that the best way to use this opportunity is to rebuild those processes from the ground up.

Klaimee is the first insurance for your AI agents. It covers what traditional E&O and cyber explicitly carve out, so you can deploy agentic AI at scale with real peace of mind. Built for companies deploying agentic AI, self-serve from day one. The problem: AI agents are taking actions autonomously buying, emailing, modifying sensitive data. AB 316 already holds deployers liable. EU AI Act enforces in August. Cyber and E&O insurance are excluding AI claims. Companies shipping agents have zero coverage and no third-party proof their agent is safe. Enterprise legal asks "who pays if your agent breaks something?" and there's no good answer. We built the answer. Critical-category risk evaluation, certification, financial guarantee, liability insurance and the documentation enterprise procurement needs to sign off. Team: Ines (ex-General Manager at SafetyWing, grew insurance product from $5M to $60M revenue, 5 years launching insurance products from scratch and structuring a TokioMarine MGA into its own carrier) + Julien (AI software engineer + corporate strategy, enterprise compliance). We understand how insurance works, what enterprises require, and why startups can't wait 6 months for either.

We help small business owners get the right coverage.

Commercial lenders manage billions in assets on legacy software and manual workflows, their systems live on people’s heads like its the 90s. Zolvo replaces the entire back office with AI: automated data ingestion, invoice reconciliation, collections outreach, and funder monitoring. Our clients go live in weeks and eliminate hours of daily manual work per operator, allowing teams to only handle exceptions. We're building the future of commercial lending.

Valence is a unified trading platform for prediction markets. We provide infrastructure to aggregate and execute contracts across Kalshi, Polymarket, and other platforms, surface arbitrage and mispricing opportunities in real time, and give systematic traders the API and backtesting tools they need to build and execute data-driven strategies on anything.

Proximitty is the AI operating system for commercial loans - we build regulator-grade AI agents that ingest and parse documents, spread financials, automate loan operations and track covenants. We help FDIC-insured banks and fintechs underwrite faster and scale their loan books without scaling costs.

We're building the Legora for traditional financial services, working closely with US bank CEOs to transform their businesses.

Grade is the API for performance-based payroll. Think of us like Deel or Gusto, but our payouts are for work completed, not hours. Companies use Grade to pay AI agents and contractors based on results: tasks completed, targets hit, work delivered. We handle compliance, tax reporting, and global payouts.

Copperlane helps mortgage lenders accelerate the loan process and reduce mistakes in an application. We use AI agents to understand an applicant's profile, verify their documents, and complete initial underwriting tasks.

Verdex is an AI insurance adjuster. We use data streams like satellite imagery to verify claims, allowing insurers to process it immediately and save billions of dollars. We are currently helping insure over 11% of all American farmland.

SpotPay is a global borderless neobank. We give users one account that works for everything payments related: receiving money from abroad, paying locally, spending anywhere with the SpotPay card and saving and earning on their balance.

In emerging markets, open finance is still nascent. Most of the population is traditionally unbanked, banking APIs don’t exist, and a borrower’s financial history lives in documents: e-wallet records, bank statements, utility bills, and more. Because this data is unstructured, credit and risk teams are forced into manual review. This slows decisioning, increases costs, and caps lending volume. Kita is the AI platform for global lending operations. We help lenders in emerging markets automate application completion, document verification, and underwriting from messy financial documents — using AI to extract fraud-checked data and localized risk signals that power faster, better credit decisions. Under the hood, Kita is a learning engine. We link document-level signals to repayment outcomes, allowing our models to continuously improve fraud detection and risk assessment over time. This creates a compounding advantage for lenders as their distinct underwriting decisions feed back into the system. We’re Carmel and Rhea. We met before Stanford and have been building together ever since. Carmel is from Manila, is a repeat founder, and spent three years in product at Apple. Rhea has a research background in computer vision and received the highest honor in Stanford Computer Science. Together, we combine deep local context with strong technical execution to build the infrastructure that expands access to credit in emerging markets.

Panta is a technology-enabled commercial insurance brokerage: we combine AI-powered internal workflows with licensed brokers to help businesses secure complex coverage faster than anyone in the world.

Casey is an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage. Our insurance brokers focus on client relationships and closing business, whilst our AI handles all the operational work behind the scenes.

Bring us risk. We’ll find the market. Institutional liquidity for event-driven exposure across prediction markets.

Tesora builds frontier AI agents for actuaries at P&C carriers, reinsurers, and MGAs. The agents handle the assembly, pulling the data, running the method, and deploying the rater, while you review the work and make every call. We deploy inside the stack you already run, on your infra and under your IT team's control, with no shared servers and nothing to rip out. Your data never trains our models, or anyone else's. We treat this as a partnership so we stay hands-on until the work is live and holding up in production. That standard runs through our security posture too: SOC 2 Type II certified, with a full audit trail behind every change. The part of the job that matters is actuarial judgment, and we automate everything around it so you get back to the work only you can do. Built by AI technologists and actuaries who want to see this exist and backed by Y Combinator & other top investors.

Astor is an AI investment advisor for retail investors. Founded by Bruno Koba (Nubank, monashees) and Daniel Tulha (Stripe, Robinhood), Astor gives every active investor an AI investment advisor working around the clock to surface their next great investment. We’re backed by YC (S25). Retail investors now account for 25% of all U.S. trading volume, nearly double from 2012. But over 56% still say they don’t feel confident in their investment decisions. Astor fixes that. Our AI agents uncover opportunities, decode emerging trends, and deliver analysis tailored to you. Instead of drowning in noise, investors gain a clear edge, shifting from guesswork to confident decision-making.

Shor is international payroll, built for founders. Hire your first international employee or contractor at startup speed. Set up on one call, run payroll the same week. Pay contractors and employ full-time team members through Shor's EOR across the world. Localized contracts, automatic compliance, and same-day local-currency payouts at a flat FX margin. No setup fees, no lock-ins. Backed by Polychain Capital, Founders Capital, and Goodwater, among others.

Veritus is a omni-channel platform for deploying AI agents for loan servicing and collections, including inbound and outbound voice agents. Our agents negotiate repayment plans, follow up across channels, and drive recoveries with zero human involvement. By combining cutting edge voice AI with deep regulatory compliance and vertical specialization we're able to drastically reduce the cost-to-collect while increasing recovery rates.

Conviction lets you create and discover trading ideas, then monitors the market and acts on them for you. Start with any idea you have - or discover one from traders you follow on X or Reddit - and turn it into a strategy in natural language. Backtest it, paper trade it, deploy it and share what you learn.

Chestnut is the first AI mortgage lender. We automate 99% of human work with AI agents, saving customers 0.5%+ in interest. This is Spencer's second mortgage startup; the first processes 2% of US mortgages annually. So far, Chestnut is licensed in Texas and Colorado where we power purchases, refinances, cash-outs, and more.