Recruiting and Talent Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Saffron allows companies to quickly evaluate how well software engineers use AI to code. The way engineers write code has fundamentally changed, but the way companies evaluate them hasn't. Saffron gives teams full visibility into how candidates use AI agents to build, debug, and ship real features on an actual codebase. Saffron was founded by Robert Chondro (formerly MIT and Jane Street), Jerry Yao (Stanford and Jane Street), and Kazuma Choji (Harvey Mudd, published in NeurIPS and ICML), and is backed by Y Combinator (P26) and Afore Capital.

Prism is an AI-native recruiting agency. We use software and agents to find companies better people faster.

Outrove is the world’s most realistic AI recruiter, with a human-appearing interview agent that has both video and audio and can join Google Meet calls.

Contrario is on a mission to help companies build generational teams. In the age of AI, the best teams are still built by the best people. Recruiting has become a zero-sum game where speed and quality decide who wins. Contrario is a network of expert recruiters supercharged by vertical AI agents purpose-built for hiring. Teams at Wispr Flow, Listen Labs, Slash, and 200+ of the fastest-growing companies use Contrario to power their hiring. In under six months, Contrario has crossed $6M in annualized revenue, paid out $1M+ to recruiters, and placed 150+ candidates — making it one of the fastest-growing AI recruiting platforms on the market. Backed by Y Combinator, Nexus Venture Partners, Goodwater Capital, and Inventum Ventures, alongside angels including David Chen (ex-HRT), Abhijeet Dwivedi (OpenAI), Hank Couture (DoorDash), and Jerry Cain (Stanford CS). Built by Stanford dropouts. Headquartered in San Francisco.

Make websites work exactly how you want

Software engineering is being rewritten in real time, and hiring is getting pulled along for the ride. With tools like Claude Code and Cursor, being able to ship is the new baseline. The signal for finding extraordinary engineers is the process: how candidates break down work, steer the agent, make tradeoffs, and recover when things break. Outship is a recruiting tool that allows you to capture and analyze that process alongside the final code so you can hire with confidence. Candidates work in a cloud workspace that's ready to code. We handle the environment setup and secret management to give you a level testing ground.

Spott is the first AI-native ATS/CRM for recruiting & staffing firms. We built Spott because existing recruitment platforms require extensive manual work, are clunky to use, rely on fragmented add-ons, and are not designed for AI adoption. Spott combines everything recruiting firms need, from a full ATS & CRM to AI agents across the entire workflow, into one AI-native solution. It enables recruiters to focus on what matters most and close more placements.

Lightscreen’s voice + video AI interviewer enables companies to identify and invest in genuinely skilled candidates. It's already being used by high-growth startups and recruiting agencies to screen technical candidates. We provide companies with a voicebot that can run a full-length technical interview, does smart interruptions, and multi-modal cheating detection. The AI provides the company rubric-based, rich candidate evaluation in minutes and can be fully customized to ask questions and evaluate based on the company's needs.

Alex is an agentic AI recruiter for the future of hiring. Companies use us to get the best hiring signal on their applicant pool and hire in a fraction of the time. Our AI recruiter, Alex, has a live conversation over a video call with each of your candidates based on the interview questions you choose or that are recommended based on the job description. During the interview, Alex asks personalized follow-up questions in real-time based on the candidate's responses. Alex can be customized to your roles in minutes and has already conducted thousands of interviews across engineering, IT, retail, hospitality, and more.

Serra is an AI recruiter that fully automates candidate sourcing and outreach, finding ideal talent from LinkedIn, GitHub, Crunchbase, and your ATS. Companies hiring Serra skip sourcing entirely and simply get qualified interviews on their calendar.

We send founders and recruiting teams a steady flow of engineers filtered with real engineering judgment.

Juicebox is on a mission to help teams win the talent war. In the age of AI, human ingenuity is the ultimate scarce resource. Recruiting is a zero-sum game where you either compete or lose. Teams at Ramp, Perplexity, and leading AI labs use Juicebox to power their hiring, alongside 3,000+ customers from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies. We’ve crossed $10M in ARR with 20%+ monthly growth, powering thousands of searches every day and making Juicebox one of the fastest-growing AI SaaS companies in the world. Juicebox has raised $36M in funding, including a $30M Series A led by Sequoia Capital. Additional investors in Juicebox include Coatue, NFDG, Lux Capital, Y Combinator, and BOND Capital.

At Ashby, we're improving the productivity of working professionals with intelligent and powerful software. We put a lot of effort into designing products that are approachable to beginners but mastered & extended by power users. In many ways, spreadsheets set the bar here. Our first products provide talent teams with clever automation, powerful analytics tools, and customizable workflows packaged in great UX. We have many paying customers who love us and use us every day like Opendoor, Airtable, Duolingo, and Notion. Notion's Head of Talent said Ashby is "probably the tool we are in the most and rely on the most, as a recruiting team." Our culture is motivated by Abhik's (my co-founder and Head of Engineering) and my belief that a small talented team, given the right environment, can build a great product and service fast (and work regular hours!). We hire exceptional, kind, thoughtful people and provide an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. We are well funded and backed by great investors, including Y Combinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom. We'll share more once we meet!

Dealls offers a curated selection of job vacancies for individuals pre-screened and curated by our team. By partnering with us, 5000+ companies have saved time and money by receiving only eligible and top candidates. Job seekers love Dealls because they can apply to multiple top companies with a single click and receive responses 21X faster than with other platforms.

Airwork is an on-demand labor marketplace for premium blue collar workers. You can get an Airworker the same way you get an Uber, except instead of a taxi, someone shows up at your work site to work for the day. Airwork fills 98% of shifts in 2 hours. We're currently live in 8 industries across Southern Ontario, Canada, and customers include Tesla, the Toronto Pearson Airport, and the CNE. We're funded by YCombinator, Expa, Village Global, and SHL Capital.

Crew is the next-gen ATS/CRM built just for recruiting agencies and independent recruiters. It’s all about modern sourcing, packed with cool automation and even a dash of AI. It's beautiful and well-designed. Plus, it’s deeply integrated with LinkedIn—because let’s be honest, that’s where we recruiters hang out most of the day. With Crew, you can forget about all that tedious copying/pasting, and tab-switching, making your workday a whole lot smoother.

Why Howdy.com? Howdy was founded in 2018 to help Austin startups hire talented engineers who work within US time zones in Latin America. Since then we’ve grown to a team of over 600, and our platform has enabled hundreds of companies to hire individual teammates, set up remote, hybrid or in-office teams, and manage remote equipment assets and benefits. Join over 200 companies, like Coinbase,Truepill, Vanta, and other YC companies that have hired with Howdy to build their tech outpost in Latin America. Better talent: Howdy is deeply involved in the Latin American tech scene, regularly hosting meetups and inviting speakers and industry leaders into our local communities called Howdy Houses throughout Latin America. We get to personally know the top tech leaders who are interested in joining product teams in the US for the long-term. These individuals are not actively seeking jobs through freelancer platforms. 98% retention: Developer churn slows teams down. That’s why, when you hire with Howdy, developers are automatically provided with premium health insurance, top-of-the-line Apple equipment, gym memberships, lunches and the use of class-A office spaces. Your engineering culture: When you partner with Howdy, you're not just hiring individuals; you're gaining access to a skilled local workforce that becomes an extension of your team. We provide full support in all areas, from recruitment to equipment and office spaces, allowing you to build and directly oversee your engineering outpost in Latin America as your team grows.

ModernLoop helps every company automate and streamline recruiting operations to deliver the best candidate experience. In 2022, the Department of Labor estimates there is a global talent shortage of 40 million workers, and that number is expected to grow to over 85 million by 2030. In order for companies to win the war for talent, they need to provide a best-in-class candidate experience to recruit top talent, and our product aims at doing just that! Our founders Lydia Han (CEO) and Chris Triolo (CTO) both founded ModernLoop in December of 2020 after they saw the challenges recruiting teams had when it came to coordinating hundreds of interviews across various teams, all while making sure both hiring managers and candidates had the best experience possible. After spending 15+ combined years at companies like Facebook, Slack, Brex and Salesforce, they understood what it took to enable talent teams do their best work, and are building a product to scale alongside them as they grow. We created ModernLoop to serve companies of all sizes in every industry to help Talent teams interview candidates quicker, easier, and enhance productivity of teams as they continue their search for top talent!

At Weekday, we have built the most accurate database of talent (250mn+ people in US & India with contact data), we run outbound campaigns to identify top talent for any role you might be hiring for. We generate the highest response rates (30-40%) on our campaigns making sourcing talent as easy as making a job posting

The best way to know if someone is a good fit is to work with them on a project before you hire them full-time. At Pangea, we make contract-to-hire easy and painless. We'll work with you to provide a shortlist of top, interested candidates. Our talent have an average of 5-7+ years of experience in design, growth, ops, product, and engineering, and are primarily based in the USA (but also extend to 155 countries)

Manara untaps the human potential in the Arab world and helps global tech companies access high-quality, diverse talent. We identify the top software engineers in the region and offer them a last-mile solution to land their dream jobs: interview preparation and referrals.

Pave allows you to make smarter comp decisions and eliminate spreadsheets, powered by real-time integrations with your HRIS, ATS, and Cap Table.

AI Engineers, ML+ Data Scientists, AI Product Engineers. We also help companies accelerate AI Adoption.

Candidately is the AI workspace for recruitment agencies. We sit on top of Bullhorn and other major ATS platforms and give every recruiter on the team the speed and reach of the best biller in the building. One platform, five products. Rediscovery uses semantic search to find candidates the ATS already has but Boolean search can't surface. Sourcing reaches 250+ million web profiles when the database falls short. Resume Builder turns a raw CV into a branded, client-ready document in seconds. Client Portal replaces email threads with a white-labeled space where hiring managers review, shortlist, and respond. Talent Marketplace puts a searchable candidate directory on agency websites so clients come to you. Agencies have spent years building candidate databases worth millions. Candidately makes that investment actually pay off, from first search to final placement.

Our mission is to empower the world’s hiring teams to grow engaged, high-performing organizations - by delivering human connection at scale through innovative technology, commitment, and fairness. High-volume hiring is extremely broken - it is inefficient, ineffective, and biased. Our mission is to fix what is broken. We believe great hiring processes are centered around quality conversations between candidates and employers and a future where every candidate’s journey starts with a conversation - a future where candidates are considered without bias or archaic artifacts like resumes and cover letters.

Easily customize GitHub-based technical assessments, where candidates can complete tasks like reviewing code, submitting a pull request, or improving a system’s design. Hatchways helps you build a state-of-the-art practical interview process that is customized to your role while saving you engineering interview load along the way.

At Emi Labs (YC '19) we are on a mission to increase frontline workers' access to professional opportunities by building the infrastructure for Frontline Workers (check our manifesto here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/our-manifesto-building-infrastructure-frontline-workers-emi-labs/). As our first step, we are transforming the high-volume recruiting process of Frontline Workers to make it as simple, human, and fair as possible for both Candidates and Recruiters. Our product is a SaaS recruitment platform powered by AI that helps companies engage with candidates via text to drive faster and more efficient hiring processes. We are growing fast, well funded, and obsessed with making our mission a reality. Some of their customers include Walmart, Burger King, Starbucks, 7-Eleven, Danone, Imperfect Foods, and Heineken.

Dover is on a mission to help every company build an amazing team. Every founder and business leader should have the tools and support they need to hire the right talent — fast. Dover combines powerful free software with flexible recruiting services to help startups and growing companies scale efficiently. Dover is built around two core offerings: Free Recruiting Tools: Dover's ATS is a lightweight but powerful applicant tracking system built for busy founders and hiring managers. It’s as easy to use as a spreadsheet but includes everything you need to manage your first 100 hires — without the bloat of traditional ATS platforms. Hundreds of companies use Dover’s free tools to streamline their hiring process and stay in control as they grow. Recruiting Partner Marketplace: When companies need help, Dover connects them with top-tier, fractional recruiters through our on-demand marketplace. Recruiting Partners are experienced, startup-savvy professionals who can step in quickly to manage sourcing, interviewing, closing, and more — without the cost or commitment of an agency or full-time hire. Dover went through Y Combinator in 2019, and today 500+ companies use our product to run a better hiring process. We've raised $23M from top VCs.

Pyxai helps organizations evaluate, identify and source top talent by focusing on the best indicators of long-term job success, soft skills. Our proprietary, AI driven assessment tool helps organizations increase retention by at least 30% all while reducing the time to hire by more than 50%.

Torch is a learning and development company that helps employers manage and measure employee growth at scale. Customers can draw from a pool of over 6000 mentors and coaches to pair with high performers and new managers at any layer of the organization. Torch was founded by a team of executive coaches and experienced psychologists who are passionate about helping all professionals perform at their highest level. Torch is on a mission to empower managers to thrive in high growth, high-performance cultures by building the self-awareness and skills required to manage and lead effectively.

10by10 is a marketplace to instantly match qualified candidates with companies by pooling candidates across recruitment agencies. Check out the testimonials on our website (www.10by10.io).

Gem’s talent engagement platform helps recruiting teams use data and automation to improve hiring speed, quality, and diversity. Gem unifies data and context from the tools recruiters use every day, including email, applicant tracking systems, LinkedIn, and other social networks, to create a source of truth for all talent relationships. Armed with insights about the entire recruiting process, automation to reach out to talent at scale, and true cross-functional collaboration tools, TA teams can proactively and strategically plan for what’s ahead. Gem's customers are savvy recruiting teams from industry-leading companies — like Wayfair, Dropbox, Nasdaq, Cisco, and Doordash — who understand that hiring the best talent in the market is key to maintaining their competitive advantage.

We have hundreds of fully qualified and experienced contractors in Information Security, Cloud Security, Privacy and Compliance available at competitive hourly rates.

Instawork is the on-demand staffing app for hourly workers and hospitality businesses. Our vision is to create economic opportunity for local businesses and professionals, globally. Workers need a better way to find great local jobs and businesses need a better way to find quality workers fast.

Fountain’s all-in-one high volume hiring platform empowers the world’s leading enterprises to find the right people through smart, fast, and seamless recruiting. Candidates can apply anytime, anywhere in minutes, right from their phone. Automated and customizable processes streamline the candidate experience and save time for recruitment teams so they can scale with growing hiring needs. Advanced analytics provide end-to-end process visibility so managers can make swift, data-driven decisions. Throughout the candidate journey, the openly integrated platform enables companies to find, qualify and convert more applicants. Fountain’s global customers hire over 1.2 million workers annually in 78 countries.

At HackerRank, our mission is to change the world to value skills over pedigree. Thousands of companies use our AI-powered platform to hire next-gen developers based on what they can do - not just what’s on their resume. From hiring to upskilling, we help teams identify and grow technical talent at every stage of the developer journey. Over 26 million developers have joined the HackerRank Community to learn and certify their skills, practice interviewing, and discover relevant jobs.

Hire Smarter with HireArt. We're a modern staffing agency that uses work samples and video assessments to generate deeper insight & connect contractors to companies where they'll thrive. Our graders and account managers individually assess each candidate on culture fit, experience, and communication skills. The proof is in the talent: our candidates have filled roles at leading start-up and technology companies like Facebook, Airbnb, and Waymo. We put people first, from our candidates to our clients, we believe in the power of transparent hiring. Learn more about our team and our platform at HireArt.com.

Taro is a community of 150k+ software engineers looking to grow their careers. High-growth tech companies leverage the Taro platform to hire engineers who can grow the company. Taro's education platform offers online courses and discussions with leaders at top tech companies. These resources attract many top engineers seeking their next career move. Taro supports the hiring process at startups through sourcing and feedback on engineers. If you're looking to expand your engineering team quickly, without compromising on quality, book time here: https://www.jointaro.com/enterprise/

Forage is changing the world of career discovery and skill-building. We partner with leading companies to create online job simulations for college students to build skills, gain experience and better understand different career paths. Our free digital learning simulations simulate a 'day in the life' of a junior employee, giving students the chance to complete hypothetical tasks, learn from employees and understand which roles are aligned with their interests and skills. We believe 'talent is distributed evenly, but opportunity is not'. Our programs let the world's most iconic employers to open their doors to students from all backgrounds, regardless of where they are located, what they study and what university they go to. Employers use these simulations to attract, and ultimately hire, exceptional and high-intent candidates from broad and diverse audiences. There are now +4m students in the Forage community, and we currently run job simulations with leading organizations including GE, BCG, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Lululemon, EY, Accenture, Latham & Watkins, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Citi, BNY Mellon, Prudential, Verizon, Bloomberg, Oliver Wyman, HPE, KPMG, Deloitte, and others.

Ascen is a back office platform and employer of record for staffing firms.

The Computer Science Proficiency Assessment (CSPA™) is a comprehensive standardized exam for software engineers. The CSPA assesses your technical knowledge, skills, and abilities across a broad array of topics. We write the CSPA exam questions, software engineers take the test, and we share the results with employers and schools. MARKETING & SALES: We actively find software engineers to take our test, whether direct or through partnerships. On the other side, we actively partner with employers looking to hire. PRODUCT: We build the exam content manage system, a proctoring framework, and autograding system, as well as a SaaS employer product to browse the candidate database.

YouTeam has helped more than 60 YC startups hire top-notch engineers they couldn't find elsewhere. YouTeam connects you with select offshore developers seeking full-time contracts that aren't listed on any freelance portals or job boards. We are the only platform accessing this previously untapped talent pool, allowing us to select the "crème de la crème" of the talent.

SharpestMinds is a mentorship program for data scientists based on income share agreements. Experienced engineers mentor aspiring data scientists, who then pay the engineers back a percentage of their first year's salary after they're hired. SharpestMinds mentors come from world leading AI groups at top companies including Apple, Uber, Tesla, Facebook and Amazon.