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

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/

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.

Archer is the financial infrastructure for the AI data economy. We’re building global payouts, stablecoin banking, and yield infrastructure for the companies supplying data to frontier AI labs. As demand for high-quality data grows, millions of contributors around the world are generating, labeling, validating, and improving the datasets that power modern AI systems. Yet the financial infrastructure behind these platforms remains slow, fragmented, and expensive. Archer enables data marketplaces, AI labor platforms, and reinforcement learning environment providers to onboard workers globally, pay contributors instantly, and earn yield on idle balances. Today, companies use Archer to manage contributor earnings, global payouts, and treasury operations across hundreds of countries and payment corridors. We believe the next generation of AI companies will need purpose-built financial infrastructure. Just as cloud providers became the backbone of software, Archer is building the financial layer for the global workforce powering artificial intelligence.

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.

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.

BlindPay is a stablecoin API that enables companies to send and receive money worldwide using fiat money, stablecoins and multiple blockchains. We handle all the complex compliance and regulatory requirements, so companies can focus on their core business.

At Moreta, we simplify payments for international travelers, letting you pay for anything using just your phone. Done is the hassle of searching for the best cash exchange rates or ATMs on your next trip. With Moreta, paying local merchants is easy. 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 is the first to bridge the gap for international travelers from card-centric markets to tap into these local networks. Moreta will target 200 million travelers arriving in the region each year, who together have $410 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.