Retail Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Faire is an innovative online marketplace that uses machine learning to match local retailers with the brands and products that uniquely fit their stores. We are using the power of technology to connect brands and independent retailers from all over the world, building a thriving community of hundreds of thousands of retailers, which has resulted in over 7 million new connections to date. Faire was founded on the belief that the future of retail is local. Our mission is to empower brands and retailers to strengthen the unique character of local communities. Our data-driven approach unburdens retailers from decades-old obstacles by helping find the right products for their shop. Plus, our straight-forward financial terms level the playing field by eliminating inventory risk and providing access to capital—key offerings previously only available to big box chains. For brands, our platform provides powerful sales, marketing, and analytics tools that simplify their business and allow them to focus on what they love: making great products.

Meesho is India’s only true online marketplace, altering the status quo to make e-commerce inclusive and accessible for the next billion users. With a vision to enable 100 million small businesses, including individual entrepreneurs, to succeed online, Meesho is democratising internet commerce and bringing a range of products and new customers online. The Meesho marketplace provides sellers access to millions of customers, selections from over 30 categories, pan-India logistics, payment services and customer support capabilities to efficiently run their businesses.

Podium is the all-in-one AI-powered lead management and communication platform used by more than 100,000 businesses to acquire and convert new customers. At the forefront of Podium’s innovation is its AI employee, who ensures businesses respond to leads instantly, anytime of the day or night—significantly increasing lead conversion rates and revenue. Podium helps businesses obtain more reviews, rank higher on Google, and consolidate lead channels. Businesses can call and text customers from the web and/or mobile app, send payment links, drive repeat business through bulk messages, and more—all managed and delivered from one easy-to-use dashboard. Additionally, with Podium’s AI Employee and automations, businesses can efficiently handle customer inquiries seamlessly across all communication channels, providing timely and accurate responses that drive sales. Podium’s innovative work has gained recognition on top industry lists, such as Forbes’ Next Billion Dollar Startups, Forbes’ Cloud 100, the Inc. 5000, and Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies. Podium was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in Lehi, Utah. It is currently backed by Accel, Summit Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Y Combinator.

We turn existing store security cameras into an AI system that catches shoplifting in real time and alerts staff before thieves leave.

Channel3 is building a database of every product on the internet. Google and OpenAI maintain vast product graphs, but keep that valuable data to themselves. Channel3 gives every developer access, opening a world of possibility for new shopping experiences across any vertical. For instance, developers could build AI fashion stylists or give their agents shopping capabilities. We don’t just collect product data; we actually understand it. With the latest image classification and reasoning models, we can match products across merchants—even when listings and images differ—recognize variants, and surface the perfect matches for every search. As we grow, we’ll capture unique insights into what users want, click, and buy. As AI models get smarter and cheaper, our flywheel accelerates: our catalog will improve, and it will be even easier for developers and vibe-coders to build on our infrastructure. To further incentivize building on Channel3, we provide built-in monetization; developers earn commissions on sales they drive. Alex discovered this need while building an AI tutor that could recommend products and earn affiliate revenue. When no solution existed, he persuaded his smartest friend from Duke and former co-founder George to leave Palantir and build Channel3 together.

Every month, our robots greet thousands of Americans with a smile. They answer questions, upsell customers, and can be trained just like a human employee.

Kirana AI is building the first full-stack AI store manager. With 100 years of family experience owning and operating grocery stores, we are starting there to prove our impact. Our first product utilizes an on-premise GPU that monitors the store 24/7, scans for theft, looks for workplace health and safety issues, and optimizes customer service. With future POS/ordering data integrations, our manager will automate many of the day-to-day tasks of running a store, such as ordering, pricing, assortment, and delegating.

Metreecs helps retailers plan, buy, and allocate products using AI-demand forecasting. We prevent overstock and out-of-stock situations, allowing clients to eliminate waste, free up capital, and drive higher sales.

Furniture companies spend millions and months each year on photoshoots or CGI to create product images as these visuals are crucial for driving sales. Presti offers a faster and cheaper solution powered by generative AI. Unlike other generative AI tools, our core model is optimized for furniture products and includes multiple features tailored to the unique needs of furniture industry. We have 100 paying B2B users with a 10% growth week over week. We raised a $3.5M seed round

Promi is an AI-powered price and discount optimization platform. We help eCommerce merchants personalize their sales to generate additional revenue and profit. Ecommerce merchants and marketers typically use discounts to drive customer acquisition, boost sales during holidays, or liquidate inventory. But deciding on a discount to offer is typically guesswork. Who to send the discount to, how much to offer, and which products it applies to are, in the most advanced cases, determined manually by looking at past sales and seeing what worked well. In the majority of cases, it's what feels and sounds good. Promi leverages store data to optimize discounts at a more granular level than possible manually. We dynamically determine the best value across each product, for different users, at different times in order to maximize sales and profit.

We help distributors and retailers turn catalog chaos into launch-ready products. Share vendor data, pull online specs and pricing, fuzzy match to your database, generate images, and output products in your exact schema.

SureBright lets e-commerce merchants embed "Apple Care” like product warranties into their checkout flows in less than 10 minutes. Our AI-powered warranty platform generates incremental revenue and boosts customer loyalty at zero cost to the merchant. Sanket led engineering at PolicyBazar, an insurance tech company that IPOed and is valued at over $8B. Manish worked at Amazon and has built $100M ARR products, handling over 180B requests per day. Until now, finding the right policy for any product and pricing it at the right price wasn’t possible at scale. We automated this process using LLM and have unlocked a $50B+ opportunity. Each month, over 5 million consumers view SureBright warranty offers.

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.

Post-order operations are one of the least automated parts of e-commerce. After an order is placed, teams still spend their days tracking shipments, chasing exceptions, processing returns, adjusting invoices, and answering “Can you check this?” requests. This manual busywork lives outside core systems and scales linearly with order volume, forcing brands and 3PLs to keep adding headcount as they scale. Handled is an operations automation platform for e-commerce brands and the 3PLs that run their order fulfillment. We execute the manual work that happens after an order is placed by unifying post-order data across commerce, warehouse, carrier, and support systems. Handled gives teams real-time visibility across orders, shipments, returns, and inventory in one system — eliminating the need to dig through disconnected tools or react only after customers complain. When issues occur, Handled automatically executes the follow-up work, such as resolving shipment delays, processing returns, filing claims, or making order and billing adjustments, without manual back-and-forth. By combining visibility, issue detection, and automated execution in a single AI-powered operational layer, Handled replaces manual coordination with software-driven post-order operations in a large, recurring market tied directly to e-commerce volume.

Scout is an AI insights tool for consumer products companies to increase topline revenue. It ingests data from retailer portals and syndicated sources (such as SPINS, NielsenIQ), and tell sales teams exactly where they can grow. Brands use Scout to figure out which accounts to expand, which SKUs to prioritize, and which promotions drove incremental sales.

Transformity is empowering beer, wine & liquor stores with amazing technology. We bring enterprise-level sophistication to liquor retailers, giving them one integrated operating system for every part of their business. Our product integrates with distributors, automates manual work, and opens new sources of revenue.

Airgoods is building the future of food and beverage distribution. Today, we help emerging brands (think Fishwife, Ghia and David Protein) rapidly grow their wholesale business and earn placement into the nation’s best specialty and natural food stores.

At Matagora, our team brings over a decade of retail experience. Our mission is to empower independent retailers with the tools they need to compete with big box stores and effectively level out the playing field. One of the biggest challenges we see is staffing — many retailers struggle to maintain consistent, reliable, and properly trained team members to handle back-office tasks, marketing, ecommerce, POS management, and basic tech know-how. That’s why we offer affordable, ecommerce expertise as a service. Retailers no longer have to worry about high turnover, constant retraining, or trying to learn everything themselves. Instead, they can stay focused on what they love: curating great products and delivering an amazing in-store experience — while we handle the rest. And since it’s a simple expense, it’s easy to plan for and write off, too.

Vendora is building a generational company in one of the largest industries out there - grocery. We build software to serve the $1 trillion dollar (over 3% of US GDP) grocery industry. This ranges from point of sale, payments, e-commerce, inventory management, loyalty, and advanced analytics with more on the horizon.  We’re taking bleeding edge technology and an AI-focused approach to modernizing an industry stuck in legacy software and practices. Backed by Y Combinator and investors with deep expertise in retail, we are a team of operators from Amazon, Uber, Tesla, Figma and McKinsey in transforming a sector that touches us all.

Today, Retailers have to make 1000s of complex operational decisions every day, all impacting their bottom line.This problem is being currently tackled with excel or legacy systems, both no longer fit for purpose. We make a platform that lets retailers make optimal decisions, easily and quickly. We ingest a retailer's data, generate recommendations and then allow users to approve a given action. Our platform covers topics including product pricing, inventory replenishment and re-ordering with the goal of covering all operational processes.

Fleek is a B2B Wholesale Marketplace for second-hand fashion. Our buyers are vintage stores and online resellers; our suppliers are used clothing wholesalers, rag-houses, and donation centres.

Lizza's AI-assistant finds, contacts, and manages the entire collaboration process with content creators for D2C E-commerce brands while making it easy for content creators to make a living off of their talents by working with their favourite brands.

Auto parts retailers get product data from hundreds of manufacturers that is inaccurate and inconsistent, often with big gaps in key values. They currently have a team of "catalog managers" who are required to process and enhance this data line by line, resulting in a week to months long lag between receiving product data and actually being able to start generating revenue from those products. Versable leverages AI to scan the web for tens of millions of auto parts listings, and uses a fine-tuned LLM with RAG to instantly process, enhance, and transform data. With just a part number, Versable is able to generate market-ready titles, product descriptions, and specs, in any format that's needed.

Compra Rápida is checkout made easy. Our platform offers a headless checkout experience for e-commerce stores, enabling retailers to increase conversions, retain abandonment, and boost sales. Registered users can buy at any e-commerce site from our network without requiring lengthy registration forms or complicated payment processes. Stores can automate their sales and recovery flows with our AI sales assistant. We aim to empower retailers to sell more while providing shoppers with a superior, humanized, and effortless buying experience.

CrediBook digitizes the MSMEs' supply chain, from wholesale to retail, through online wholesale and bookkeeping operation system. Our online wholesale platform CrediMart aims to create an efficient inventory-sourcing. We provide online-ordering, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) payment method, and logistic support. We help our wholesale partners earn an additional daily income stream by 50%. Our bookkeeping app CrediBook also enables MSMEs generate financial report in less than 5 minutes and proven to speed up users’ micro-loans process from financial institutions. CrediBook strives to encourage more MSMEs to benefit digitalization from easy and efficient platforms that meet their needs.

We record conversations that customers have when they are placing orders in drive-thru restaurants, automatically analyze them, and help operators to upsell better or alert them when they are out of stock.

StrideQ (formerly SliceQ) is the automated phone ordering system for restaurants which ensures no missed calls and no missed orders. Surprisingly, 33% of restaurant customers still prefer ordering via phone calls, but front desk staff is often busy and revenue is lost. After enabling StrideQ our customers have increased their sales by over 10%, even while dealing with staff shortages in covid times. Phone ordering is our wedge to become the point of sale system for all restaurants. StrideQ also streamlines dine-in and online orders in one single system. It helps to run restaurants more easily by effectively managing operations during weekend peak rush.

Anakin is building a fully automated pricing engine for eCommerce and on-demand service companies. We help them increase their revenue by upto 12% by optimizing the pricing, products and trends data of their competitors. We do that by collecting data and generating actionable insights. Our pricing engine automatically changes the prices of hundreds of millions of products across 30+ countries in real-time. Anakin is profitable and growing every month with 15+ multi-billion-dollar companies as clients.

Aleph helps companies with thousands of products like General Motors and Bosch increase their revenue in Latin America by listing their inventory on large e-commerce sites like Mercado Libre and Amazon. Our customers sell over U$D 4M dollars’ worth of product every month using our software. Many brands struggle with the shift to sell on marketplaces. They want resellers to be involved in their online sales strategies, but both still need to maintain 10,000 products, prices and inventory up-to-date across digital channels and Marketplaces do not provide tools to help brands and resellers on the journey. Aleph is the best way for brands and wholesalers to replicate their offline network of resellers online. With Aleph, Brands create high-quality product catalogs to share with their resellers. Now, any seller can access their product catalogue and sell on marketplaces.

We’re on a mission to help restaurants go direct-to-consumer. With Tablevibe, eateries can easily launch their own online ordering system and sell directly to dine-in, pickup, and delivery customers through a branded webshop. Our platform connects seamlessly with leading logistics partners like Uber, Doordash, Grab, Foodpanda, and Lalamove to automatically book drivers at low, distance-based rates. Restaurants typically save up to 80% on delivery costs while building their own customer database and brand loyalty. Beyond ordering, we’re creating an ecosystem around digital commerce, helping restaurants grow through customer insights, cashback and referral programs, and marketing campaigns. Our unified dashboard simplifies menu and order management, while our feedback tools drive higher customer satisfaction and online reviews. Backed by Global Founders Capital, Y Combinator, and Velocity Ventures, Tablevibe empowers restaurants to take control of their digital future. Join thousands of thriving partners by booking a call with one of our experts at tablevibe.co/democall or by reaching out via hello@tablevibe.co.

Awtomic powers DTC brands with an easy-to-use subscription management and discovery platform. Starting with a Shopify app, we'll give merchants the subscription product power of premium subscription brands like Dollar Shave Club and Ipsy. As we grow our support for more eCommerce platforms and merchants, we'll help customers discover new brands through cross-sells and make it easier for them to manage their subscriptions in one place.

SwiftSku connects the $650B convenience store industry with management and analytics. SwiftSku’s app connects to point of sales at convenience stores in real time, enabling owners to remotely manage and monitor their stores. We take the guesswork out of running a convenience store with predictive analytics, dashboards, and reports. SwiftSku's CEO, Mit Patel, grew up managing the inventory, pricebook, and reporting of his family’s convenience stores, and, when vendors would come by, he’d bridge the language barrier as a translator. More than 85% of independent convenience stores are owned by Indian families like Mit’s. Solving convenience store owners' pains of today leads to SwiftSku's greater vision of optimizing the supply chain, facilitating a retailer agnostic consumer to brand relationship, and providing real time insights to brands and retailers.

Seer helps retail salespeople create and send personalized shoppable Lookbooks to their customers via email and sms.

Zoko: The Ultimate WhatsApp Commerce Solution for Shopify Merchants WHY ZOKO IS THE GAME-CHANGING PLATFORM EVERY SHOPIFY MERCHANT NEEDS Shopify merchants face a critical challenge: while they've built amazing online stores, they're missing out on the world's largest messaging platform where customers actually want to shop. Zoko solves this by seamlessly integrating WhatsApp commerce capabilities with your existing Shopify infrastructure. THE UNTAPPED OPPORTUNITY THAT'S COSTING YOU SALES Consider this: 175 million people message businesses on WhatsApp daily - that's more engagement than Amazon generates. With 100 million merchants already using WhatsApp for business globally, those not leveraging this channel are falling behind competitors who are capturing sales directly through conversations. PROVEN SUCCESS FORMULA Zoko's founders didn't just theorize about WhatsApp commerce - they lived it. Starting with their own ecommerce business entirely on WhatsApp, they scaled to 200,000 engaged followers who eagerly purchased products through weekly WhatsApp updates. When other businesses began paying for access to their "WhatsApp sales tools," they knew they'd discovered something revolutionary. THE $50 BILLION MARKET OPPORTUNITY The WhatsApp commerce market represents over $50 billion annually - a massive revenue stream that traditional ecommerce platforms can't access. For Shopify merchants, this means untapped customers, higher engagement rates, and sales happening through the world's most trusted messaging platform. COMPLETE SALES, MARKETING & SUPPORT INTEGRATION Zoko transforms WhatsApp into a comprehensive business channel, enabling Shopify merchants to: - Convert conversations directly into sales - Run targeted marketing campaigns through WhatsApp - Provide instant customer support where customers prefer to communicate - Build deeper customer relationships through personalized messaging THE FUTURE OF COMMERCE IS CONVERSATIONAL WhatsApp represents the internet for the next billion users entering the digital economy. Zoko positions itself as the "Shopify for WhatsApp merchants," giving existing Shopify store owners the tools to dominate this emerging channel before competitors realize its potential. For Shopify merchants serious about growth, Zoko isn't just another tool - it's the bridge to the next generation of ecommerce where conversations convert to sales.

Avocado is a modern point-of-sale system for restaurants, powered by a built-in AI agent. More than just a POS, Avocado combines order management, KDS, kiosks, and online ordering in one platform - and lets restaurants control everything with simple voice or text commands. Want to change your menu, check your sales, or optimize pricing? Just ask. Avocado’s AI understands your business and takes action instantly, freeing up owners and staff to focus on what matters most: great food and service.

Meru is a platform that is optimizing the automotive aftermarket supply chain for mechanics in Latin America.

Parrot is the operating system for restaurants in LatAm. We convert operational chaos into control by bringing together our Payment terminal, Delivery Apps, and Invoicing into a unified POS system. All of it backed by a fully featured Restaurant Management System on the cloud.

A place where you can spin off commerce agents or build your automation across the funnel of acquisition, retention & support. The single place where you can handle everything you need for your ecommerce / retail business when it comes to marketing & support.

Cradle is a B2B payments network in India that lets small businesses collect online payments from other businesses for free.

Hellometer helps fast food owners' grow same store sales using security cameras to improve customer wait times. Speed of service is fast food's core value proposition (it’s literally in the name) and owners currently don't have a reliable way to measure it. We show them when and where they have slowdowns and for every 7s they improve service times, owners see 1% increase in revenue.

With our API any company that holds consumer deposits (e.g. savings apps) can easily embed professionally managed investment accounts into their services.

The Indian restaurant industry has already adopted technology to adapt to the growing demands and match the expectations of today's customers but the absence of a full-stack cloud-based software is extremely frustrating to business owners today. The existing systems lack modularity, lack the ability to integrate with services, and hence aren't plug and play. Also, Restaurants are extremely frustrated with all the 5-6 independent systems that don't talk to each other. We are solving these problems by building a full-stack solution for the 30 million+ restaurants in India, by solving order management, operations management, online delivery, payment processing, reports & analytics, and guest identification and re-engagement all using one system - Explorex.

MarketForce empowers neighbourhood merchants in Africa to source, order and pay for inventory digitally and conveniently, access a banking wallet with credit facilities, collect digital payments and earn extra income by offering agency baking services and reselling digital financial services such as airtime, electricity tokens and bill payments in their communities. Incorporated in 2019, MarketForce is a fast-growing company running an asset-light business model and is currently operational in 5 markets in Sub-Saharan Africa, with over 200,000 merchants and 180 consumer brands trading on the platform.

Glimpse helps retail brands automate their identify and fight invalid fees & streamline the cash reconciliation process & from their retailers & distributors using AI. Imagine a beverage company sold $100k worth of goods to Whole Foods & only got paid $60k. The deducted $40k comes in hundreds of long PDF’s with obscure codes that a team has to manually review every single one of to ensure the fees are valid. A % of these fees are always invalid and brands have to go through a lengthy process to get back money owed to them. We automate this whole process - saving a brand dozens of hours a week & recouping them 2-3% of their topline sales. Our vision is to become an AI BPO for retail brands.

In Pakistan, stores struggle to buy inventory. Stores waste hours dealing with dozens of suppliers and wait passively for salesmen to visit their stores. Deliveries are often late, incorrect, or never arrive at all. Stores often learn prices at the point of delivery and cannot compare across different suppliers. Tajir solves this by offering a one-stop shop for all inventory purchasing with low prices, huge selection, and the convenience of 24/7 ordering with next-day delivery. Mom-and-pop stores are the arteries of Pakistan's economy. Through empowering them with world class logistics & information tools, Tajir aims to refactor and simplify Pakistan's retail economy.

Vori offers a modern operating system designed for the grocery industry. VoriOS helps independent and regional grocers streamline their inventory management, ordering, and supplier coordination, allowing them to operate more efficiently and profitably. The platform integrates real-time data to optimize stock replenishment and improve pricing strategies. Founded in 2019, Vori empowers grocers with technology that levels the playing field against larger retailers.

Eze is your all-in-one hub for IT asset management, procurement, and recovery. Easily track every laptop, phone, and license from purchase to retirement with real-time visibility across your organization. Need new equipment? Order directly from vetted suppliers at competitive prices. Upgrading? We’ll handle buybacks, trade-ins, and recycling — so you recover value from your old tech instead of letting it collect dust. From automated asset tracking to one-click purchasing and vendor management, Eze keeps your inventory accurate, your costs low, and your team focused on work that matters — not spreadsheets. Whether you’re scaling fast or streamlining operations, we make sure your IT is always working for you.

Our mission is to help local independent retailers find their best-sellers investors by matching them with the right supplier and brands. We believe that today's evolution of the wholesale industry has stifled the growth of many SME businesses. The supply-chain in Malaysia and across Southeast Asia lacks meaningful real-time connectivity between suppliers and retailers. Hence we are determined to transform this industry by providing businesses the right tools to grow. Our modern, digital approach to the wholesale industry allows retailers to discover, purchase, and manage inventories for their store - all on a single marketplace platform. And our software tool for suppliers helps businesses to deal with all the pain points of growing customer database, from ordering to payments. With our data-driven approach, we connects local, independent retailers with the right brands, distributors, and wholesalers to stock their store with the best products. This saves retailers and suppliers time and money, allowing them to focus on what's most important: building and running their business. borong is headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.