Machine Learning Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) in the San Francisco Bay Area that are currently hiring 2026

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.

We write the algorithms to turn brain cells into compute.

We are an AI research lab automating AI research. Our aim is to build a hill-climbing machine capable of solving humanity's greatest challenges in science and engineering, uncovering the next AlphaFold or Transformer faster, more systematically, and at scale. We treat discovery not as a matter of luck, but as a combinatorial search problem. Thesis will be the machine behind the defining breakthroughs of the next decade.

Hyperspell is your Company Brain. AI agents are brilliant and clueless. They ace any test and still have no idea how your company works. Hyperspell connects your tools and synthesizes documents and conversations into a live, permissioned context graph. Any agent can read from it and write back to it like a filesystem, with every fact traced to source.

DeepAware (Robotics Center of Silicon Valley, https://roboticscenter.ai/) is the fastest way for enterprises and researchers to get robots and robotics parts in the US — 72-hour delivery or Bay Area pickup. Beyond hardware, we help teams collect teleoperation data, build reinforcement learning environments, and deploy robots into production. Customers include AI labs, industrial operations, research teams, and event producers.

Theorem is training models that make program verification 10,000 times faster. Using verification as a feedback loop, developers have found zero-days in GPU accelerated code and cryptography implementations, and sped up code migration in legacy systems. If you have complicated code that needs to be correct and secure, sign up for our beta!

Nitrode is a research company focused on improving game development with AI. To advance game development, we believe AI models firstly need to be judged against robust evaluation frameworks that reflect the actual complexity of the field.

Osmosis is a post-training platform that helps companies fine-tune language models using reinforcement learning. We work with fast-growing AI companies to train task/domain-specific models that beat foundation models on performance, cost, and latency. Our platform handles compute orchestration, reward modeling, and training run observability as a CLI-based product usable by developers and agents.

Cloudglue is the video context layer for AI. We make it easy for your AI to understand video. - Tinycloud - your AI agent for video, now open for beta: https://tinycloud.cloudglue.dev - Developer API Platform: https://cloudglue.dev

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.

Conductor Quantum is building quantum superintelligence: AI that operates quantum computers to make scientific discoveries beyond human reach. Quantum computers let us understand the world at its most fundamental level, the path to new drugs, new materials, and discoveries no human can reach alone. A quantum computer is the perfect simulator of nature: it encodes the logic of reality into a programmable machine, atom by atom, electron by electron. Give AI that simulator and you open the door to discovery. The bottleneck is operating the hardware. Today, engineers spend days or weeks by hand to bring a chip to operating conditions for just two qubits. A qubit is the information-carrying unit of a quantum computer, the equivalent of a bit in a classical one, and a useful machine needs billions. Removing the human from that loop is only half the problem. Every command an AI sends to a quantum computer must be optimised for the specific hardware it runs on. We build the AI that operates quantum computers and tunes every machine it runs on. That is the path to quantum superintelligence.

Cartage is the future of freight coordination. Transparent, tech-driven and eliminating the need for human coordinators.

Casca is building AGI for Banking. Our first product is an AI-native platform transforming small business lending by enabling banks and lenders to originate 10x more loans with 90% less manual effort. We’ve found product market fit already serving top 10 US banks and are scaling our team very quickly. Small businesses are the heart of the American economy. Many banks shy away from providing funding because of the manual effort in pursuing those deals. With us, that changes. We unlock affordable, quick bank funding for the 30M+ small businesses in the US who would otherwise be subject to the high interest rates from predatory online lenders. We are a world-class team of banking & AI experts from Stanford, MIT & Y Combinator. We like to win and we know that the only thing between us and the title is our own ability to improve every day.

We're building autonomous robots to make surgery safe, easier and more efficient. Robots currently perform about 1/4 of surgeries but only help with the physical aspects. We use AI to make surgery cognitively easier. This has far greater potential to improve outcomes and reduce costs. Founded by 3x founders from medtech and autonomous vehicles, we're on track to be the fastest surgical robot to market of all time. First indication is prostate enucleation.

Diffuse is building generative AI for protein design. Our mission is to build AI systems that engineer new and useful proteins with unprecedented control and accuracy. Our team has been behind breakthroughs in AI protein design for the past 7 years, including the first experimental validation of AI-generated proteins and diffusion models for protein structure and sequence.

1stCollab is the first influencer platform that fully automates and optimizes every aspect of your influencer marketing program. We’ve helped hundreds of startups launch their first campaigns and enabled larger brands to scale to thousands of influencers, while saving them over $1M annually in influencer spend. What we offer: - Smart search & recommendations – Instantly connect with thousands of relevant influencers. - Full campaign automation – From outreach and negotiations to contracts, payments, and taxes, we handle it all. - Real-time performance tracking – Monitor conversions, revenue, and run A/B tests with detailed reporting.

Polymath is building a general autonomy stack for cautious vehicles. Our software allows any industrial vehicle - whether it's a tractor in a field or a bulldozer in a mine, drive itself. We bundle together AI, ML, Controls, ROS, Safety and best-in-class deployment practices to enable our customers to tell automated vehicles to do via a REST API. We're on more robots than we have engineers, are seeing our revenue (and robotic fleet) grow rapidly, and are looking for folks who want to help automate the world.

Delfino AI helps automate the repetitive phone calls that providers' offices make to payors

We build software to manage, analyze, and optimize bioprocessing data. Our initial customers are bio-industrial companies, who produce various products in bioreactors.

End-to-end privacy, security, and compliance solutions to prepare your organization for emerging AI regulations.

Mach9 accelerates how teams model and understand the world with automated feature extraction technology. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in San Francisco, Mach9's flagship Digital Surveyor platform helps transportation agencies, utility companies, and engineering firms extract miles of road corridor projects in a fraction of traditional processing time. Built on decades of research from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, Mach9 empowers the architecture, engineering, and construction industries to tackle large-scale infrastructure projects with unprecedented speed and accuracy. Leading survey and geospatial organizations, including Langan, Olsson, Woolpert, HDR, and major state DOTs trust Digital Surveyor to create engineering-grade maps for infrastructure design and operations.

Accept and reconcile B2B payments seamlessly.

Roboflow enables developers to make the world programmable. Use our tools to build better datasets (collect image, video / annotate), models (foundation and fine tuned small models), and deployments (self hosted, edge, APIs, SDKs) for computer vision. Over 250k developers, including those from over half the Fortune 100, build with our open source and hosted tools. Build with us: https://app.roboflow.com Hack with us: https://roboflow.slab.com/public/posts/roboflow-hackathons-external-u478m1iz Work with us: roboflow.com/careers

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.

Data science is as much a scientific and creative process as it is an engineering one. It involves working together, failing, learning and going back to the drawing board. Data scientists are explorers. To make data projects successful, we need tools that are both powerful and easy to use. Tools that help us collaborate and share our work in an engaging way. Tools that make data science fun again. At Deepnote, we’re building a new standard in data tooling — a notebook that brings teams together to explore, analyze and present data from start to finish. We are building tools for explorers. Join us.

TRM is on a mission to build a safer world for billions of people. AI is extending the capability gap between attackers and defenders. The fundamental unit of scale has shifted from humans to AI tokens. TRM combines proprietary data, with an AI investigations platform to build a system of action for crime fighters. Think Claude CoWork for mission critical investigations. We believe AI scale crime deserves AI scale defense. Join our mission ➔ www.trmlabs.com/careers

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.

We’re on a mission to optimize the agricultural industry. When we started Bountiful in 2015, the grape error rate for predicting production was 30 percent. Why? We found that many farmers in the specialty crops space were still using traditional pencil-and-paper techniques to predict yield. These low-fidelity forecasting methods weren’t giving them a clear enough understanding of their production until it was too late, leading to waste and inefficiency throughout the supply chain. We saw a problem we wanted to solve. Today, Bountiful is using advanced data science to help farmers forecast more accurately, so they can make better decisions. In the last three years, we’ve combined the latest in machine learning with weather, satellite, geographic, and historical data. The result is a user-friendly platform that transforms volumes of complex agricultural information into simple, actionable insights farmers can use to run more economically and environmentally sustainable farms. More recently, we’re working to open the dialogue between buyers and sellers, remove uncertainty, and provide clarity to the supply chain to meet global food demand. Our ultimate goal is to close the agricultural margin of error. Not only will this make individual farms more efficient, profitable, and sustainable, but it will help optimize the global food supply chain. That means healthier people and a healthier planet.

SmartSpot is a post Series-A stealth startup backed by Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures that uses computer vision to deliver an unparalleled fitness training experience to your home. Our unique hardware solution gives amazing trainers the ability to see their class participants in real time and deliver detailed advice that was previously only possible in person.

At AgileMD, we are building the most advanced real-time predictive analytics and clinical algorithms platform for hospitals. Our cloud-based engine helps thousands of doctors and nurses around the country make medical decisions, so that every patient receives the highest quality and value of care based on the latest medical knowledge and data.

At Phiar, we are building the first AI-powered AR navigation driving software solution that runs on a smartphone and in-vehicle displays, utilizing our ultra-lightweight road understanding AI that runs completely at-the-edge, in real-time, all on just a smartphone-level compute. Our mission is to enhance driving safety, facilitate more intuitive wayfinding, and connect drivers with their surrounding environments.