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

Zavo is the first AI-point of sale platform for restaurants. We unify payments, point of sale, and AI agents into one seamless platform, allowing business to accept payments, manage operations and automate manual processes with Ai. From reservations, to payments to point of sale, we have built the full restaurant tech stack in-house with AI automation across all products. We started Zavo in May 2025, currently over 400 businesses of different sizes use Zavo to accept payments and manage operations

Shor is a new Employer-of-Record built from the ground up with AI agents and stablecoins. We enable remote teams to hire and pay global employees at a fraction of the cost. The process is fast, simple, and fully compliant. Today, global payroll is broken. Payments take days, cost 5–10% in fees, and force companies to navigate complex banking, tax, and labor regulations. Platforms like Deel and Rippling solved this for large enterprises but remain too expensive and cumbersome for the millions of startups and growing remote teams scaling globally. Shor fixes this by combining autonomous AI agents with stablecoin-based settlement. Our agents handle contracts, worker classification, compliance, and payroll automatically in a simple, messaging-first experience. Payments can settle in seconds rather than weeks at a fraction of the cost of legacy providers. We are making global payroll fast, affordable, and accessible for the millions of companies left out by legacy platforms.

Infinite is a stablecoin payment processor. We offer businesses turnkey APIs and SDKs to instantly move money anywhere in the world at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.

At Moreta, we simplify payments for international travelers, letting you pay for anything using just your phone. Say goodbye to the hassle of searching for the best cash exchange rates or ATMs on your next trip. With Moreta, paying local merchants is easy, and the best part? Transparent fees. We came up with Moreta while on our own backpacking adventures. Watching locals pay with a simple scan while we fumbled with cards and cash. So, we created a solution. By syncing with local payment networks, Moreta lets you pay like a local securely and digitally, without needing a bank account in every country. We’re starting in Asia, where QR code digital wallets are taking over and are now the top choice at checkout. As these wallets start to join forces for cross-border payments, Moreta will be the first to bridge the gap for international travelers from card-centric markets to seamlessly tap into these local networks. Moreta will target 67 million travelers arriving in the region each year, who together have $127 billion in everyday expenditure.

The New Money Company protects invoices with insurance. We help businesses expand to buyers in new markets or industries by offloading the risk of buyers not paying their bill. Support number: +18889975745.

End-to-end suite of fraud detection and prevention solutions, including an analytics product to monitor and understand dispute + fraud metrics, an AI product which highlights transactions for merchants to follow up on, and an AI solution to recommend rules that can be implemented in payment provider platforms (Stripe, Shopify, Adyen) to proactively reduce dispute + fraud rates.

We make it easy for founders to do billing right out of demo day. Every B2B startup faces the same billing nightmare: unique customer terms, custom pricing, usage tiers, and discount structures that make manual billing a costly mess. Hiring billing specialists adds overhead and introduces human error right when you need to move fast. JustPaid makes billing effortless by extracting billing logic directly from your contracts—whether they're PDFs or stored in your CRM—and automatically generating accurate, timely invoices. Already using Stripe, DocuSign, CommonPaper, HubSpot, or Salesforce? We integrate seamlessly with your existing stack. Maintain control while automating the complexity. No more pricing disputes. Faster cash flow. Fewer headaches. - Move fast: Bill customers from day one without hiring specialists - Scale smart: Handle complex pricing models without operational overhead - Stay focused: Spend time building your product, not managing invoices - Reduce risk: Eliminate human error in billing calculations We're always asking ourselves: How can we make a company's financial operations effortless so teams can focus on scaling? - We don't settle - We are passionate - We are serial entrepreneurs We aim to make a dent in the universe.

OneText is disrupting SMS marketing and payments. We win incremental sales for direct to consumer brands by making every purchase as effortless as paying with your hotel room number. OneText shoppers literally reply and buy with one text. In our first year, we’ve onboarded 50 fast-growing e-commerce brands and have added as much as 14% in incremental revenue to their bottom lines. In March, we generated $597,000 dollars in payments. In April, we’ll book $50,000 dollars in revenue. Founders Jonathan Fudem/CEO and Daniel Brain/CTO met at PayPal Checkout where we designed and launched some of the world’s best checkout experiences. We left PayPal to build a payments company that actually helps merchants acquire customers and win sales. The CMO of our largest customer, a $90M clothing brand, says we have revolutionized marketing for his company, and are, quote: “the best thing that’s happened to SMS marketing in forever.” We are excited to share what you can do with OneText.

BlueHill is like a marketplace for payment processors. Our product is an intelligent gateway routing platform that automatically reduces transaction fees on everyday credit card transactions by routing transactions to different gateways based on a variety of parameters. This allows merchants to get access to a wider variety of alternative payment methods while lowering their fees, improving transaction clearance rate all while still getting lower processing rates.

Internet broke physical boundaries in commerce and made it global. It never happened in finance. Almost all financial consumer apps are country specific. Stablecoins are the internet moment for finance industry. Cypher lets an user download an app from anywhere in the world and have a bank account in 5 mins and start transacting with the crypto card. Can instantly send USDC to anywhere in the world.

Accept and reconcile B2B payments seamlessly.

Dots is a developer-friendly API that lets businesses pay their contractors through just a few lines of code. Whether its gig workers like Uber drivers, sellers on marketplaces like Etsy, or simply your local handyman - Dots’ abstracts away the complexity of payouts completely. We manage the entire process: information collection (KYC), payments through any rail (ACH, Venmo, CashApp, Zelle, international, and many more to come), and even filing tax forms! Dots lets developers get payouts up and running over just a few hours, rather than the many months this would normally take.

Forage is a mission-driven payments company that helps businesses accept government benefits through a single, unified API. Today, over 42 million Americans receive government assistance (ex: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) to buy groceries. Starting with enabling EBT SNAP online, Forage builds the financial infrastructure empowering businesses to serve these shoppers online.

Balance is the easiest way for B2B marketplaces, merchants, and service providers to process payments online. We raised our last funding round from Lightspeed, Stripe, and Max Levchin to build 'Stripe for B2B'. Balance offers the first business checkout, enabling business customers to pay How they want (check, card, bank) and When they want (net terms, payment plans, invoice payments). this is achieved while the seller receives the funds instantly and easily like card payment.

Peg is a global bank account replacement using stablecoins. We make it possible to send money to any email or phone number in the world in seconds. We have taken all the friction out of the current terrible UX with crypto p2p payments and made it better than regular consumer products like Venmo and Square Cash. Unlike those it works across borders and can launch globally due to our non-custodial architecture. Peg was the first self-custodial stablecoin focused wallet, launched early 2020.

Safepay provides a single integrated payments solution that interoperates with local and international payment options. Our current focus is to serve businesses and individuals in Pakistan and neighboring economies.

Afriex makes it easy for immigrants to send money home. We offer instant, low-fee remittances to over 25 countries around the world.

San Francisco-based BillForward a YCombinator company is comprised of talented and passionate folks who are excited by the challenges and opportunities of subscription billing. We offer a flexible and innovative billing platform, which gives any type of recurring-payment based businesses the ability to bill customers for sophisticated products and carry out in-depth revenue analysis. Launched in Jan 2013 the platform has already gained great traction in the Telecoms, SaaS, Product as Service and Platform as a Service industries, where product managers and CFO’s have realized that the ability to change their offering in hours, rather than weeks, can give them an edge on the competition.

Tola is the simple tool for SMBs to pay bills and get paid. On top of that, we help companies better manage their cashflow by allowing them to buy now and pay later expensive bills in exchange for a small fee.

Kinside powers bookings and payments for the $648B care economy. We’ve started with child care, a $136B category that despite being an essential and evergreen service, remains an undigitized space, driven mostly by cash.

At Final, we are re-building the credit card from the ground up. Final is issuing a credit card that gives consumers total control over their merchant relationships, transparency in their spending, and piece of mind across all payment experiences. Rather than a single, 16-digit card number, Final generates multiple card numbers and manages them automatically. It works everywhere you buy; online, and offline, and integrates with digital wallets like Google Wallet and ApplePay with zero updates to the payment infrastructure. Bottom line - with Final, you’ll never lose access to your spending ability from a breach, fraud, cancelled or stolen card ever again.

Apto Payments provides a white-label, turnkey solution to launch innovative, user-first, card programs. Our technology empowers our customers to issue Visa and Mastercard, physical and virtual, card programs. We have both a developer-first, Instant Issuance Platform, as well as an enterprise solution for bespoke opportunities.

Kash is a San Francisco-based mobile payment company that clears transactions without interchange or card fees and is guaranteed against chargeback. The company gets rid of credit cards and middle-men that stand between bank accounts and retailers. It uses SecureDebit technology, a direct bank payment method that avoids the credit card network and allows retailers to save 2% to 5% in transaction processing fees. Kash uses its funding received from Draper Associates, Green Visor Capital, and Structure Capital to develop, market, and expand its mobile payments technology.

WePay is a multi-party payments API for SMB SaaS, POS Platforms, and Online Marketplaces. It was acquired by JPMorgan Chase in 2018.

SlidePay, formerly Cube, is an API that makes it easy for any app to accept credit cards that are processed in person. Integration takes hours, not weeks, and works on any platform or device.