Y Combinator Startups in New York 2026

We’re a passionate team of dreamers and builders, determined to liberate small businesses from the not-so-fun aspects of the job so that they can focus on what’s fun and important.

Scentbird inspires fragrance lovers to go beyond the ordinary and sample scents that evoke passion, confidence, and the unknown. Our mission is to revolutionize the way individuals perfume by bringing the ultimate fragrance playground right to their fingertips. By way of a monthly subscription service (starting at $14.95 a month), members can choose from over 500+ designer colognes and perfumes each month! See what we're all about at: www.Scentbird.com // @Scentbird *WE'RE HIRING!: https://www.scentbird.com/careers

SmartAsset is an online destination for consumer-focused financial information and advice. Reaching approximately 59 million people each month (as of January 2024) through its educational content and personalized calculators and tools, SmartAsset's mission is to help people make smart financial decisions. Additionally, SmartAsset powers SmartAsset AMP, a national marketplace connecting consumers to financial advisors. Building on SmartAsset’s relationship with millions of investors, SmartAsset AMP connects financial advisors directly with prospects who meet their target client profile. Our algorithm matches consumers with up to three fiduciary financial advisors. In 2023, SmartAsset helped advisors close an estimated $34 billion.

Litmus is the most accurate read on how an engineer actually builds. We evaluate candidates through async technical assessments built from your own tech context (repos, tickets, and job descriptions), generated from scratch and scoped as real end-to-end features. Candidates work in their own setup with all their tools including AI, while we track and evaluate their process and output. Every submission runs in a sandbox, and grading is tuned to your company across tool fluency, process, and outcome. You get a real read on how someone actually builds, not just how they interview.

Floracene shows independent surgery centers the best-priced equivalent implant for every procedure based on their manufacturer contracts. Every orthopedic surgeon we've talked to says the same thing: 90%+ of expensive implants they use are clinically interchangeable, but the choice comes down to habit, brand comfort, or the device rep. US surgery centers spend ~$7B a year on implants, and in orthopedic and spine cases the implant alone runs ~40-60% of the total cost of the procedure. Roughly ~20-30% of that spend is recoverable by switching to a clinically-equivalent device. Instead of defaulting to the implant they trained on, a surgeon sees the 3+ equivalent options side by side and switches to the one that protects the case's margin. Asaph and Jonah met on the hospitals team at Palantir two years ago, and have each spent the last four years in the plumbing of US healthcare: claims, eligibility, and payor contracting. Asaph was an early PM at Garner. Jonah was a founding engineer at Metriport (YC S22) after starting his own fax-automation startup for fertility clinics. At a big hospital the surgeon picks the implant but isn't spending their own money, so price doesn't impact the decision. At an independent surgery center the physicians own the economics, so a cheaper equivalent goes straight to their bottom line. They have every incentive to switch. They just don't have the information or the tooling.

We manufacture humanoid robots in San Francisco.

Resumes made careers readable. LinkedIn made them searchable. Pluto makes them understood. Professionals talk to Pluto for 10 minutes about what they’ve done, what they’re great at, and what they want next. Pluto makes that context discoverable to the right people and AI agents, helping them understand the professional more fully. For hiring, companies tell Pluto who they want to meet. Pluto searches its network and the broader market, evaluates fit on both sides, privately confirms interest, and makes warm introductions when both sides want to connect. 17K+ professionals have shared their career context with Pluto. 100+ companies, from fast-growing startups to decacorns, use Talentpluto to meet people with deeper context and confirmed interest.

Truffle is the first AI-native operating system for the hospitality back-of-house. Restaurants, cafes and bars still run on a patchwork of disconnected point solutions, spreadsheets, clipboards and tribal knowledge, which costs the industry billions each year in stockouts, food waste, and lost profit. Truffle replaces that entire stack with one system. Computer vision and voice AI capture real-time inventory levels 90% faster than manual counts, ML models forecast item-level demand at 97% accuracy, and AI agents run dozens of end-to-end workflows autonomously, from procurement and invoice reconciliation to scheduling, food prep, menu engineering, and more.

ValCtrl is building the intelligent prediction market: users type any public, resolvable belief about the future, ValCtrl structures it, prices it, and lets them trade it. Today’s prediction markets only support pre-listed questions, leaving user beliefs fragmented across venues, contract wording, rules, and proxy markets. ValCtrl’s world model maps typed beliefs to relevant market signals, evaluates basis risk, prices the claim, and moves toward model-priced liquidity where ValCtrl can take the other side with risk and compliance controls. We are starting from hard belief-to-market queries and building toward a market where anything that can be resolved can be priced.

Soria is an AI-native Financial Terminal for investors who specialize in a particular sector, starting with healthcare. Our agents convert hundreds of the most important public and private sources into an always-on financial model, reviewed by domain experts and delivered to hedge funds, banks, and asset managers through a terminal UI, MCP, API, warehouse sync, and research feed. Unlike our competitors, we own the data layer and expand bottom-up, one sector at a time - additionally our agents proactively do research on behalf of our clients without them lifting a finger or sharing any data.

Founded by former WorldQuant portfolio manager & head of event driven systematic strategies Jeremie Cohen, KelAI is building the autonomous alpha engine for hedge funds, traders and institutional investors. Investment teams now have more data, tools and compute than ever, but research still runs across siloed systems and inefficient workflows. KelAI turns that fragmented process into a compounding AI-native engine that continuously finds, tests and validates trading signals at a pace no human team can match.

GUILD is an AI-native defense contractor that automates the Defense Supply chain for the DoW. We predict government demand, then manufacture in-house cheaper and faster than the incumbents. We've created an AI-native business model for contracting operations, manufacturing, and finance to deliver on defense contracts end-to-end.

Foresight builds AI-powered simulations of human behavior to help companies predict how people will think, react, and choose before making real-world decisions. It lets organizations test countless possible moves in advance, see how each one is likely to play out, and choose the strongest path forward.

Pops lets people play, remix, and share AI games with friends. Discover an infinite feed of games, challenges, quizzes, and other fun interactive experiences made by others. Every play instantly becomes a funny gameplay/reaction video you can send to friends, post online, or use to challenge someone to beat your score. For creators, Pops makes it easier than ever to bring ideas to life and get them played. Instead of learning complex game engines, writing code, or fighting for distribution, anyone can create or remix a playable game in seconds. Bring your ideas, and Pops brings the audience.

Cohesion is building AI agents for hedge funds. Our agents track earnings and non-traditional datasets like podcasts and X/twitter. Analysts spend hours a week manually tracking these data sources and still miss relevant investing signals. Now, our agents do it for them autonomously.

Standard Signal is the first hedge fund that researches and executes trades purely with AI. Our custom models discover and trade on new fundamental truths about the world before humans can.

Rubric AI (backed by Y Combinator) is the reasoning and verification infrastructure for AI. We're building the human and computational layer that turns expert judgment into training signals for the world's most consequential AI systems.

Sila is an agent-native messaging platform where teams and agents collaborate in the same conversations. Every agent works from the live context of everything your team says. We're defining the standard for how companies work in the agent era by creating a new type of communication layer for team-agent and agent-agent collaboration.

Cofia learns how your team runs internal operations and automates the highest-ROI workflows, automatically.

Tepali is the AI-native operating system for medspas. We replace fragmented software and manual work with a single system of record powered by AI agents that handle front desk, patient documentation, and lead conversion.

Revion is building the operating system for Automotive Retail. Our first product helps Technicians automate administrative work, which drains 30-40% of their day. With Revion, Auto Retailers can service more vehicles and drive more high-margin Revenue.

CellType is building an agentic drug company. AI agents that run the full drug discovery pipeline on top of biological foundation models that simulate human biology. Our core technology, developed with Google DeepMind, has already discovered and validated a new cancer treatment signal. We’re working with Top 10 pharma.

Launch crypto deposits in minutes. Unifold is a developer-first API + SDK that makes it easy for any app to accept on-chain deposits – across any chain and token – with less than 10 lines of code. We handle the full deposit flow so teams can ship faster and give users a smooth experience that actually works. If you’re building a consumer-facing on-chain product and want best-in-class deposits (or want to support more chains fast), we’d love to work with you.

Crosslayer Labs detects impersonation attacks on websites and APIs. We provide "outside-in" monitoring of customer infrastructure, comprehensively discovering and monitoring all Internet dependencies, including DNS, BGP, TLS certs, Javascript. We correlate signals from different layers of the Internet stack to identify attack patterns. Our alerts are actionable and contain root cause analysis/remediation recommendations. Our founding team is world renowned for previously inventing the MPIC standard adopted by all the major CAs including Google, Apple, Amazon. The MPIC standard is securing over 700 million websites via the issuance of over 3 billion digital certificates, and is now a global internet standard that protects every single HTTPS connection.

Wayco is building a unified data intelligence layer for medical treatment of legal cases. From the first intake to instant settlement.

Maywood is the first finance-compliant proactive AI that runs 24/7, working across your network, pipeline, and active processes, running constantly in the background and surfacing things you'd otherwise miss. It tracks relationships and sector context to flag when a target is gearing up for a process (and drafts the outreach in your voice), watches network activity across LinkedIn, news, and conference follow-ups, and surfaces where active processes stand, including what's at risk since you last looked. It also auto-updates CRMs and trackers and creates meeting briefs that includes relationship history, recent activity, deal context, external research, talking points that can pull from internal and external data sources. Dealmakers interact with it over email, Teams, or the platform itself.

At Beyond Reach Labs we are building solar panels for Space that grow from the size of a dining table to a football field in orbit. Mitch and Pele met 13 years ago as freshmen at UPenn studying mechanical engineering. Mitch recently got his PhD at Carnegie Mellon working with NASA on kilometer-scale deployable structures, and Pele spent seven years at SpaceX leading Dragon parachute engineering, safely returning astronauts from space. The collective satellites today use around 20MW, roughly the output of a datacenter on earth, but by 2030 there is a demand for over 10GW, a 500x increase, largely driven by orbital datacenters, space stations, and lunar outposts. If you want more power, your only option is to launch larger solar panels, which quickly become fragile or impractically expensive. As a result, power constraints already determine whether missions or industries can exist at all. But at Beyond Reach Labs we have introduced a new class of deployable solar panels giving satellites 10x more usable power without increasing launch mass or volume. This works because our patented deployable design changes geometry in space, allowing for us to reach 10x longer while remaining rigid.

It takes 500,000 days of office work to bring a drug to market. We want to make it 5. To get there, we need agents doing most of the work. Today, our research agent is the best way to know what the FDA thinks. Users ask a question and get an answer backed by up to 1,000 documents, where each statement has a citation. It’s the best because we have the best retrieval engine. We’ve tuned it on our life science-specific dataset, and we find what others miss. As more teams use Rhizome, we gain more data on what regulatory professionals actually need, which makes retrieval even better. This flywheel is how we become the retrieval engine that powers all human and agent work in life sciences. Chetan started his career as a research engineer, but quickly realized he enjoyed building more than research. He joined EvolutionaryScale as their sole founding product engineer, launching their developer-scientist platform and scaling to tens of thousands of users and billions of API calls. He was also #16 at Instabase helping banks with document processing, closing $7m as the technical closer. Agents can do magical things today, but most in life sciences only use them to edit emails. Agents are missing the context they need to 100x the number of drugs we can bring to market. Rhizome AI is focused on that critical problem.

MouseCat enables companies to automatically detect, investigate, and mitigate emerging fraud trends

Bizzy handles your calls, captures and qualifies leads, and books appointments directly into your CRM. It understands your services better than a receptionist would, routes and escalates calls, and syncs with your existing tools to incorporate complex workflows, all so your team can focus on servicing leads, not qualifying them.

Advertising today is like trading in the 1980s pits: archaic, manual, and iterative guesswork. Humans update bids and keywords with noisy, delayed data using simple if-else rules that both break at scale and ignore stochasticity. Laurence advertises like modern hedge funds trade markets, driving a 15-40% improvement in net profit for Amazon brands within a month of onboarding.

Mantis is a digital twin company that combines LLMs with high-fidelity physics simulations in order to convert rare and difficult-to-access human behavior data into predictive models.

Autonomous is a superintelligent financial advisor at 0% advisory fees. Today, managing your money means one of two bad options: DIY your money: You end up with accounts everywhere (401k, IRAs, brokerage, crypto, savings, equity, secondaries). Your spreadsheet is always wrong. You make expensive mistakes because this isn't your full-time job. Hire a financial advisor: They'll manage your money and charge 1-2% of assets annually. Run that math over multiple decades and you're handing over half your net worth to fees. Neither path can economically deliver the sophisticated, personalized strategies the ultra-wealthy use to compound wealth: strategic tax-loss harvesting across individual securities, systematic risk management, portfolio-backed borrowing to defer capital gains, access to alternatives, etc. These aren't secret – they're just economically impossible to deliver at scale through traditional human advisors. Robos were supposed to fix this, but they were designed in a pre-AI world. In practice they just manage cookie-cutter portfolios. They don’t coordinate across your 401(k), taxable accounts, mortgage, equity, and cash flow, they don’t help with real decisions like job offers, windfalls, or concentrated stock, and they don’t deliver institutional strategies. That’s why, even after a decade plus, the biggest robos are still <$100B AUM while old-school advisors like Raymond James / Edward Jones sit on trillions. We’re doing for financial advising what Robinhood did for brokerages. Think of it as a full-stack, AI-native wealth strategist that brings billionaire-style playbooks to ordinary investors. Autonomous is built around a frontier-scale reasoning engine—an AI that perceives global events as they unfold, understanding their deeper implications for markets and and most importantly, how these events will impact your investments.

F2 is the AI platform for private markets investors. Purpose-built for private credit, private equity, and commercial banking, F2 accelerates diligence, underwriting, and portfolio monitoring, helping teams evaluate deals over 60% faster. F2 turns unstructured deal data into investment-grade analysis and polished memos in minutes. Unlike general-purpose AI, F2 is built with the domain expertise and depth to handle the most complex financial analysis. Already trusted across thousands of deals, F2 makes collaboration easy and retains historical context, so past work compounds into future wins. Headquartered in New York City, F2 is backed by leading investors including NFX, Left Lane Capital, and Y Combinator.

DiligenceSquared delivers AI-powered market due diligence for investment decisions - like the $500k McKinsey reports, but automated, auditable, and at a fraction of the cost. When Private Equity funds evaluate deals, they pay firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Bain $500K-$1M for market due diligence. The process takes weeks, and the output is a static PowerPoint that's impossible to audit. A single large-cap PE fund can spend >$30M annually on this and the total market is $10B per year. Our AI agents conduct expert interviews and synthesize insights with every claim linked to source transcripts. No black box, no "trust me" slides, and no 10x mark-up for human labor. Frederik bought these reports as a Principal at Blackstone. Soren sold them as a Principal at BCG. Harshil is a repeat founder and former Software Engineer at Google. We've seen both sides and know what matters in due diligence - and now we automate it. Our clients already include 8 leading private equity funds with over $2.4 trillion in combined AUM.

Coding agents made writing code fast. But 6 engineers in a room will probably still disagree on what needs to be built. Scott AI is a planning workspace where engineering teams align on what to build before their coding agents start building it.

If you are a trusts & estates attorney, RIA, fintech, or family office interested in Sava, reach us at founders@savahq.com

Overdrive Health offers AI powered medical billing services, helping providers get paid more money in less time. Our technology enables us to provide the best quality insurance and patient billing services for a fraction of the usual cost

Aspect helps creative teams consolidate 5 media tools into one platform. We provide everything a media team needs: file ingest, local file streaming, review and approval, sharing, and archiving. Aspect workspaces come with an agent that has complete understanding of your asset library including comments and revisions. Ask the agent to complete any task in the background: searching for files, setting up folder structures, labeling and organizing footage, and much more. Check out aspect.inc/use-cases to see how different media teams use Aspect to deliver content faster.

We deliver high-quality, cost-effective healthcare to employees through text. Employers cut 10–20% of healthcare spend. Employees get concierge care that improves outcomes. Our AI agents analyze clinical data to identify care needs. We treat common conditions through our integrated virtual clinic. For more complex care, our agents find the best in-network providers using millions of price and quality data points, and handle end-to-end appointment booking.

If you’ve got a lot to do, we believe AI can make things feel doable. Caddy is our core product: a Personal AI that helps you stay on top of everything going on. All you have to do is text. On overwhelming days, it’s super simple to just drop any task in a text thread, and Caddy will help you handle it. Caddy also keeps an eye on your calendars, chats and tasks to make sure you stay focused on what matters. If something needs you, Caddy will nudge you, or can just do it if you don’t have time. The best part is, no two Caddys are alike. The more you use Caddy, the more it learns your vibe, how you work, and what you care about. 

Nori is a concierge-level AI health coach in your pocket. It takes all of your health data—Apple Health, medical records, wearables, everything—and boils it down into a personalized daily plan. Users love it: “It's truly one of the best apps and I check it first every day. Since using Nori, I've been limiting devices in bed and eating earlier—and I'll be damned if it's not working... I started getting more deep sleep, my resting HR dropped to 43, my recovery improved.”—Jen, Nori user"

Fernstone is an AI-native insurance brokerage: we combine AI with licensed brokers to obtain complex insurance faster, and at better terms. Today, we manage risk for 100+ businesses in construction, security, and the trades.

Amika is infra to build your software factory. We give your team sandboxed AI coding agents in the cloud: the same infrastructure Ramp, Coinbase, and Stripe built in-house. Kick off work from a web UI, CLI, Slack, or API. Use your preferred coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, etc.). Each agent understands your codebase, runs autonomously, and ships real PRs with live previews of the apps it changed. Use it as your daily driver or plug it into your own code-gen pipeline via API.

Structured AI is building the AI workforce for construction design engineering, starting with AI agents that perform quality control on technical documents and drawings. Our agents learn your standards, apply the right building codes, and automatically review your drawings, so you see fewer clashes, fewer inconsistencies, and fewer costly RFIs and change orders. ⚙️ Automates QA/QC across mechanical, electrical, structural and more 🧩 Used by multi-disciplinary design firms to deliver projects faster with less risk 🚀 Mission: Free engineers to focus on creative design, not repetitive admin

Freeport is a trading platform for pre-IPO shares, equities, crypto, and perpetual futures. Our AI analysts turn trusted social and financial media into a real-time feed of market-moving news and actionable trade ideas.

RowFlow replaces clunky web forms with natural conversations that run over text, slack, or wherever your users are. Our platform increases your form’s response rates while cutting your internal overhead in half. With RowFlow, you can take any existing form and instantly convert it into an AI-powered conversation. New flows launch in minutes and reach respondents over your preferred channel or embedded chat. We guide the exchange, follow up automatically, and return clean structured data without extra work from your team. Forms power billions of business interactions yearly. Whether it’s forms for client intake, registrations, compliance, feedback, or surveys, they all follow the same painful pattern: low conversion, messy data, and frustrated users. Teams have long tolerated forms only because there's been no scalable alternative for collecting structured information from people - until now. Our goal is for RowFlow to become the new default way for how organizations collect user data in an AI-first world.

Bezel helps fashion brands create virtual photo/video shoots with AI. Upload images of clothes, select the human you want to model it, and Bezel generates pictures and videos that rival a full studio production. Every detail of the clothing is rendered flawlessly. Try it for yourself.

Automatic insights on all your company data. Speed up business workflows to visualizations with a 0 learning curve.

We build independent and contamination-proof benchmarks that measure real world performance. LLM Stats is the most complete LLM leaderboard. We have the most complete archive of LLM benchmark results and also run independent evaluations that are not the classical ones that are already in the training data of most models. Our mission: become the biggest community dedicated to AI transparency.