Y Combinator Startups in the San Francisco Bay Area that are currently hiring 2026

Deel is the all-in-one payroll and HR platform for global teams. Built for the way the world works today, Deel combines HRIS, payroll, compliance, benefits, performance, and equipment management into one seamless platform. With AI-powered tools and a fully owned payroll infrastructure, Deel supports every worker type in 120+ countries—helping businesses scale smarter, faster, and more compliantly. Discover how Deel makes global work simple at deel.com.

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.

Our Why At Clipboard, our mission is to uplift as many communities as possible. We do this by connecting professionals with the workplaces that need amazing workers, helping people achieve financial stability for themselves and their families all across the U.S. Our How Clipboard is an app-based marketplace where workplaces post calls for help and workers answer. Every year, we help hundreds of thousands of workers fill millions of shifts across the U.S. We’re the leader in Long-Term Care staffing and are rapidly expanding into Home Health, Hospitals, and more. Our Team Founded in 2016, we are a remote-first team of over 1,000 people working to uplift communities across the country.

Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and Finance. It brings together all of the workforce systems that are normally scattered across a company, like payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers. For the first time ever, you can manage and automate every part of the employee lifecycle in a single system. Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365—all within 90 seconds. Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.2B from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks and Bedrock.

Scale accelerates the development of AI within organizations of any size to deliver critical business insights and operational efficiency. Its data-centric infrastructure platform leverages RLHF (Reinforced Learning with Human Feedback) to help organizations build the strongest AI models that supercharge their business, with customers across industries including Meta, Microsoft, U.S. Army, DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit, Open AI, General Motors, Toyota Research Institute, Brex, Instacart and Flexport.

Checkr builds people infrastructure for the future of work. And we believe everyone should have a fair chance to work. That's why we've designed a faster—and fairer—way to screen job seekers. For more information on our mission and products, visit https://checkr.com.

Webflow is the leading no-code visual web development platform. It seamlessly generates sophisticated code so anyone can build powerful web-based businesses and adapt to changes without developers or months of building. From entrepreneurs and creative agencies to Fortune 500 companies, Webflow makes the internet a more inclusive place by making the tools to build on it more accessible to more people, fueling business growth. Webflow powers websites for innovators like Discord, Monday.com, IDEO, Orange Theory Fitness, TED, and Dropbox. Webflow is backed by Y Combinator, Accel, CapitalG, Silversmith, and other awesome investors.

Founded in 2013, DoorDash is a San Francisco-based technology company passionate about transforming local businesses and dedicated to enabling new ways of working, earning, and living. Today, DoorDash connects customers with their favorite local and national restaurants in more than 600 cities across the United States and Canada. By building intelligent, last-mile delivery technology for local cities, DoorDash aims to connect people with the things they care about — one dash at a time. Read more at blog.doordash.com, and find us on Glassdoor.

Instacart is the North American leader in online grocery and one of the fastest-growing companies in e-commerce. Instacart’s same-day delivery and pickup services bring fresh groceries and everyday essentials to busy people and families across the U.S. and Canada in as fast as an hour. Since its founding in 2012, Instacart has become an essential service for millions of families, while also serving as an immediate, flexible earnings opportunity for hundreds of thousands of shoppers across North America. The company partners with more than 350 retailers and delivers from more than 25,000 stores across more than 5,500 cities in North America. Today, Instacart is accessible to more than 85% of households in the U.S. and more than 70% of households in Canada.

Mixpanel is analytics for builders that need answers from their data at their fingertips. When everyone in the organization can see — and learn from — the impact of their work, they are poised to make better decisions. Companies like OpenAI, Netflix, Pinterest, sweetgreen, CNN, samsara, Uber, and Yelp use Mixpanel to understand their customers, measure progress, and endeavor to make better decisions.

Launched out of Y Combinator’s 2009 Summer batch, Stripe is a global technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. Businesses of every size—from new startups to public companies—use our software to accept payments and manage their businesses online Stripe is a proud partner of YC companies—from Airbnb (S09) to Defog (W23)—to help them grow their businesses and increase the GDP of the internet.

Since graduating from YC, Amplitude (W12) has made it to IPO and beyond by helping cutting edge startups become category leaders. We’ve pioneered the digital analytics category to become the go-to solution for AI pioneers (Cruise, Midjourney), apps that touch millions of consumers (Doordash, Coinbase), and the best in B2B (Atlassian, Rippling, Canva). With product analytics, experiment, CDP, session replay, and more, Amplitude’s digital analytics platform shows you what your users love, where they’re getting stuck, and what keeps them coming back. You want to build a generational business, and we have the capabilities and pricing plans to guide you every step of the way. Check out our special deal for YC companies and get started on your analytics journey.

Deep Interactions is a humans-in-the-loop AI builder. We don't leave you with a spaghetti mess of a code. We bring product intelligence and power the context layer that enables your team to build in sync - saving companies tokens, time, and nerves. You give us a problem and we ship a working AI product in the same afternoon.

Aseon Labs builds robotic pitstops for self-driving cars. A depot in a box for charging, cleaning & inspecting autonomous fleets directly in operating zones. Autonomous driving is working. The operational layer around it is not. Today, fleets lose significant time and money traveling to centralized depots for charging, cleaning and servicing, creating dead miles, lower uptime and operational bottlenecks that limit fleet scale. Aseon Pods are modular, rapidly deployable robotic pitstops that keep autonomous fleets operating near demand. By bringing charging, cleaning and inspection directly into operating zones, we help fleet operators increase uptime, reduce operational overhead and scale markets more efficiently without relying on large centralized depots. We’re second-time founders and mobility infrastructure operators. Previously, we built and scaled Pushme to 5,000 stations across 40 cities before its acquisition by TIER–Dott ($600M raised). Aseon Labs is backed by Y Combinator and headquartered in Redwood City.

The Company Company builds the agent and the infrastructure to run companies.

Strawberry farming is a $3B industry in California alone with 60% labor cost using 40-year old software. Synphony provides strawberry picking robots and software services including: bed-level analytics, data pipeline integration, and agentic solutions. Synphony's "side hustle" is selling data, evals, and viral demos to robot foundation labs while building capacity for general robot deployments. We've started with strawberry farming for great margins and outdoor data moat, but also received requests for robots in semi-conductors and autonomous space labs. Synphony's team has won over 15 hackathons together (taking home 4 Jensen-signed GPUs!). Sean did ML research at NVIDIA and led AI products used by IRS and Citibank. Lucas' research spanned robotics, IoT devices, and neuromorphic computing. Alex architected an app with 400k users.

We've spent decades tracking everything. Sleep. Recovery. Steps. All proxies for how we feel. Performance is 90% mental. And yet no one has built the feedback loop for our emotions. We close that loop by designing a device that understands how you feel, tells you why, and what you can do about it. Emotional intelligence becomes trainable, so you can better connect and create with those around you.

Hedge is an AI-Native specialty insurance company. We help insurance brokers find faster, cheaper, and better coverage for their customers.

Robotics is the new paradigm. With hardware converging, Intelligence is the biggest bottleneck. Our world was built for humans and we're giving robots the ability to reason and act like us. The way we learn any task - by seeing, doing, and feeling - is how we train robots. We're building general intelligence that works on any robot and fits seamlessly within our world.

TLDR: Mount is building the AI-native insurance carrier, starting with liability coverage for deployed AI agents. As everyone moves AI Agents into production and gives them more responsibility, we help businesses insure and secure them. As companies move AI agents into production, liability is shifting from human operators to autonomous systems. These systems introduce new risks: agentic software failures, prompt injection attacks, autonomous workflow errors, data leaks, and more. Legacy insurance was not built for this. Existing policies are often silent, ambiguous, or exclude autonomous software, and traditional insurers lack the data and technical capability to assess deployed AI Systems. Our first product, the Mount AI Liability Policy, is built for mid-market and enterprise companies deploying autonomous AI agents in real business processes. We scan and red-team AI deployments, quantify operational risk, help fix vulnerabilities, and insure the residual risk with purpose-built AI liability coverage. Mount is best thought of as a highly automated version of today's commercial insurance carriers that are running on manual workflows, layers of intermediaries, and tens of thousands of employees. AI makes it possible to automate underwriting, pricing, policy issuance, claims, fraud detection, customer support, and distribution from the ground up.

We're building robots that just work and use them to deliver autonomous services at scale. Our first use case is semi-humanoid robots for manufacturing and logistics. Unlike traditional robotics companies, we don't sell robots, we provide physical agents for hire where companies pay for the robots based on usage, decreasing the barrier to entry and expanding the robotics market as a whole.

AI chatbots can answer questions, but they can't do your work — they aren't connected to your tools, can't take actions, and stop running when you close the tab. Meanwhile, knowledge workers are still spending most of their day switching between dozens of SaaS apps, manually stitching together workflows that should be automated. Tasklet is the AI agent that actually does the work. It connects to every tool you use — via thousands of built-in integrations, any HTTP API, or MCP servers — and takes real actions on your behalf: pulling reports, updating CRMs, triaging emails, processing data, and more. When it needs a UI, it generates one on the fly. When it needs to crunch numbers or do bulk operations, it writes and runs code in a cloud sandbox. When it needs to interact with a website that doesn't have an API, it uses a real browser. And because it runs in the cloud 24/7, you can set up triggers to have it take ongoing responsibility for workflows — not just do something once, but handle it going forward. The product is deliberately simple: a chat interface where you talk to an extremely capable agent. But underneath that simplicity is a cloud-native agent runtime, best-in-class context engineering, a universal connections layer, and multi-model support that keeps us on the frontier as AI improves. We think legacy SaaS is being unbundled by agents, and Tasklet is the operating system that ties it all together.

BioStack is building the data engine for healthcare and drug discovery AI. The bottleneck is not models. It is access to high-quality biological data. Clinical and experimental data is fragmented, unstructured, and locked inside hospitals, labs, and CROs, while generating new data is slow and expensive. BioStack fixes this with proprietary clinical and preclinical data pipelines that turn real biomedical workflows into ML-ready training environments. We structure longitudinal multimodal data across imaging, EHR, and experimental assays, then package it for post-training and reinforcement learning so models can learn how research and care actually happen. Instead of static datasets, BioStack gives AI labs workflow-aligned data and environments that improve reasoning, decision-making, and real-world performance in biology and medicine.

GojiberryAI is a GTM Brain that helps sales teams find and convert high-intent leads by continuously learning what works across their go-to-market. Instead of relying on cold lists, it detects real buying signals like competitor engagement and social signals, job changes, hiring spikes, or funding events, then prioritizes the best prospects based on ICP fit and intent. It analyzes each lead’s context, generates personalized messages, starts conversations, and follows up automatically until a meeting is booked, while constantly optimizing targeting, messaging, and timing so performance compounds over time. The result is simple: 2 to 5x more replies, more qualified conversations, and a predictable pipeline without wasting time on low-intent prospects.

OpenWork is a desktop app that lets people connect to their existing skills, MCPs, and agents. Users can download the app for free, try it with over 50+ model providers, and easily share their setup with their team.

Clara is an AI primary care and longevity practice from the team that founded and grew Circle Medical to $100M in revenue. Our mission at Clara is to add one billion years of healthspan to humanity. We do this with an AI with deep clinical knowledge, coupled with the ability to sift through medical data to detect trends and patterns that could be missed. Unlike Claude or ChatGPT, Clara can see your medical data and then act. Chat with Clara as you would a doctor and Clara can help with you make sense of symptoms, get medication refills, order and understand labs, and achieve health goals. Medical recommendations are preliminary until one of our human medical providers in the loop reviews and approves them.

Runtime (runtm.com) gives engineering teams control and visibility to enable anyone in their org to use coding agents securely. Eng leaders rolling out coding agents have no way to see what's happening, set boundaries, or safely let non-engineers use them. We provide sandboxed environments, session-level observability, and configurable guardrails so anyone on your team can ship with coding agents without breaking prod. We're live with fast-growing YC scaleups empowering their Engineers, PMs, designers, marketers, and ops to contribute to their codebase or build prod-grade zero-to-one apps.

Kinro helps companies sell insurance through AI assistants such as ChatGPT. We build AI sales agents that manage the end-to-end insurance sales process, from answering questions, personalized coverage explanations and quoting. These agents are continuously evaluated and improved through our proprietary platform, optimizing sales performance while remaining 100% compliant. Selling insurance requires strict regulatory compliance, deep carrier integrations, and extremely reliable answers. Platforms like OpenAI and Google remain general-purpose and are less likely to build the vertical infrastructure required for regulated industries. Today, Kinro serves brokers and direct-to-consumer carriers across the US and Europe. Insurance distribution is huge: insurers pay roughly $100B+ in commissions annually, and distributors spend $10B+ every year on advertising to acquire customers. Pierre-Alexandre led research improving Gemini for financial services at DeepMind. Parth led infrastructure for training and inference at Zoox. Corentin was the first employee in an insurance startup and worked closely with many insurance leaders.

Asendia AI builds AI recruiters for staffing agencies and enterprise companies. It clones their best recruiters into AI agents that match, screen, and submit candidates 10x faster. In a few months, the Asendia team crossed $500k in revenue and is now working with the top enterprises in the space.

Standout gives every talent and company an autonomous agent that represents them, assess the other side, and makes intros when it matters. Why it matters? Because this is hiring today: - Talent use AI to apply to 100s of jobs - this is spam. - Founders/Recruiting send 100s of AI-generated messages to hire the same talent - this is spam. This has to stop. Talent stays fully anonymous until they accept an intro. The best way for passively exploring the market and not missing a life changing opportunity. In 1 month, 10k talent / 60 companies / 100 intros.

Replicas is a background coding agent that allows you to delegate tasks to Claude Code or Codex from Slack, Linear, GitHub, and more. Each task works inside of a sandboxed virtual machine, allowing teams to heavily parallelize work and burn through tickets. Replicas agents output higher quality PRs via feedback loops - each task automatically is notified and fixes CI failures and reads all code reviews. With Environments, engineering teams can configure agents to run their entire codebase locally, verify its work, and provide preview URLs.

Building the communication infrastructure needed for fully autonomous agents

Ventura builds the AI workforce for distributors and manufacturers, starting with quoting and order entry. It plugs into your existing ERP, follows your SOPs, and learns your team's tribal knowledge - getting smarter with every completed task.

Sandbox infrastructure for AI agents, with full-environment forks and snapshots across files, processes, memory, and databases.

AI companies selling into legacy industries can't go live because their customers' systems of record are Windows desktop apps with no APIs. The only way in is clicking through the UI, and it breaks constantly. Minicor is a platform for building self-healing desktop automations at scale. Speak the automation into existence through your favourite coding agent via our MCP, or to us directly, and get an API endpoint to trigger it. One API call triggers a full desktop workflow on a Windows VM. On-premise, cloud, or Citrix. Video replay, error logging, and scaling built in.

Superset helps engineers run 100s of coding agents in parallel.

Robots for microgravity research and manufacturing.

One Robot builds simulation environments that are realistic to see and realistic to interact with, so robotics teams can train and evaluate robot policies without being bottlenecked by robot time. Today, improving a VLA often means more real-world hours: setting up the scene, running trials, resetting, and repeating. This loop is slow, expensive, and hard to scale. For example, material handling and manufacturing assembly tasks, models need far more training and evaluation data than teams can collect in the real world. We use task-specific data to build world model-based simulation environments for hard manipulation tasks (for example, textiles and box folding). These environments help teams run more training and evals, find failure modes faster, and accelerate iteration on action policies with less dependence on real-world data collection and robot availability.

Terranox is the first vertically integrated AI-powered uranium exploration company. We find high-grade uranium deposits in North America using AI trained on 70+ years of exploration outcomes. Our mission is to find the fuel we need to power the next century with nuclear energy.

MochaCare is an agentic management service for care organizations. We handle hiring, scheduling, and client intake end-to-end so our partners can focus on growth.

Proximitty is the AI operating system for commercial loans - we build regulator-grade AI agents that ingest and parse documents, spread financials, automate loan operations and track covenants. We help FDIC-insured banks and fintechs underwrite faster and scale their loan books without scaling costs.

Asimov collects real-world human movement data from households and businesses to train humanoid robots. Unlike factory datasets that capture the same tasks in the same environments, we deliver the full diversity of real human environments, thousands of hours a day to leading labs.

Piris Labs offers a full-stack inference service that eliminates the AI data movement bottleneck. By pairing proprietary photonic hardware with a vertically optimized software stack, we minimize the "memory wall" associated with expensive GPUs. This allows us to deliver the same performance as traditional clusters at a fraction of the cost. Our technology improves effective FLOP utilization and reduces latency, finally making the unit economics of trillion-parameter models sustainable. Founded by a team of MIT physicists and Meta AI experts.

Hey YC! We're Devi and Jianna - the founders of Cardinal. TL;DR: Cardinal is the AI platform for precision outbound. We run outbound for 40+ YC companies, like Mintlify, Greptile, and Luminai. The Problem “Spray and Pray” outbound is dead. The best teams at outbound do it with extreme precision. Finding things in common with your customers, staying in touch with them through their content, mapping inbound from signups and ads, tracking website visitors, monitoring various signals, etc. This sounds great in theory, but in reality involves stringing together 10+ tools and hiring a GTM engineer. That’s where Cardinal comes in. Cardinal is an AI platform for precision outbound. Our agents can create workflows that normally require the work of fulltime GTM engineers. If you're a founder or sales leader looking to bring AI into your sales org, would love to chat!

Lucent is an AI product manager that automatically improves products based on how users behave. We use AI to watch and understand user sessions and detect bugs and UX issues.

We are building Vela, the AI scheduling assistant for the most complex interactions. Everyone assumes scheduling is a calendaring problem. It's not. It's a human nuance problem: knowing who to prioritize, how hard to push, and which dynamics to navigate. Vela understands these nuances, and every interaction deepens that understanding. Instead of manually calling, texting, and emailing hundreds of candidates across spreadsheets, today teams connect their system of record to Vela and it handles outreach, scheduling, and confirmation automatically with the nuances of industries and teams built in. Gobhanu and Saatvik are brothers who scaled a microfinance bank to 77 countries as kids. We previously built at AWS ML + SuperCompute and BCG AI.

Fort is a wearable that tracks strength training for people who care about longevity. Other wearables make you manually log every rep, set, and exercise, then provide unhelpful feedback or underestimate strength-related fatigue. We use heart rate and motion data to track your strength workouts for you, then provide thoughtful, actionable feedback that helps you achieve your goals.

Tsenta matches you with jobs, optimizes your profile & applies on your behalf. We have: ➙ a web app ➙ an imessage bot ➙ an MCP ➙ a chrome extension, giving you control over every application being submitted. We built Tsenta after applying to over 3,000 jobs manually, so that nobody else would have to. Check us out at https://tsenta.com :)

Oximy helps enterprises understand and manage AI usage across their workforce. Used by security, finance, and transformation teams to track adoption, control spend, and manage governance as AI scales.

CatchBack Cards is a mobile app and website platform for maximizing the thrill of collecting Pokemon and Sports cards. We allow collectors to create custom mystery packs with personalized chases and customized odds with cryptographically trusted tooling. Users can rip open digital packs and get physical cards shipped to them, receive buyback offers on cards pulled from their mystery packs sent straight to Venmo and PayPal, and buy/sell cards in our $1 marketplace.