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.

Spine runs benefits, payroll, and compliance for startups for free. We do the work by giving teams dedicated senior HR and benefits specialists who operate on top of their existing HRIS (Rippling, Deel, Gusto, ADP). We help companies find better-fit, more cost-effective health plans - reducing healthcare costs by around 15% on average - while running payroll, handling compliance, managing open enrollment, and supporting employees directly in Slack. 30+ startups already use Spine to lower healthcare costs and take hours of back-office work off their teams. Learn more at joinspine.ai or email onur@joinspine.ai

Rhem is building the connected hardware and data platform for care at home.

Instead of making users learn a timeline, we let them upload footage, describe what they want, and get back a polished edit in minutes.

At Orca, we are focused on creating the future of spacecraft operations by moving control onto the vehicle. By allowing AI models to control the satellite using deterministic tooling, we are able to achieve the same holistic, high-quality decisions on "what" to do to carry out a mission while maintaining the safety of systems that decide "how" to execute it.

We're building a silent speech wearable that lets you talk to your computer at the speed of voice, but silently and completely imperceptibly to everyone around you.

Workers IO verifies your entire system across millions of interleaving, faults, and timings to find the exact conditions that break the properties you care about. Built for teams where 99.99% uptime is table-stakes.

Edgerun builds military exoskeletons. The first product is a 10-pound hip system that fits over existing kit and doubles a soldier’s range. Since April 2026, Edgerun built over a dozen iterations of their product through continuous field tests with Ukrainian fighters and secured $150M+ in LOIs. Founder David Venegas previously co-founded Durin (autonomous mining robotics) and worked at Stoke Space (at 19) and Hadrian. He is a high-school dropout, state-championship runner, adventure athlete, and pilot. Edgerun is a Y Combinator company backed by General H.R. McMaster, Cyan Banister, Joshua Steinman and Jason Miller. edgerun.com

Covera is the AI-native operating system for independent P&C insurance agencies. It lives inside the agency's AMS and inbox and runs agentic AI workflows across the whole client journey, from the first email to the next renewal. Producers quote first and win more business; CSRs and account managers stop retyping data. Submissions, for producers: every new request becomes a ready file, one click keys every carrier portal for a first quote during the call, quotes come back side by side, and binding updates the AMS with no double entry. Servicing, for CSRs and account managers: answers about any account with their source, COIs and follow-ups drafted, renewal reminders 90, 60 and 30 days out with remarketing when premiums jump, and coverage gaps across the book turned into cross-sell leads. Agencies using Covera go from lead to quote in 5 minutes, save 10 hours a week per user and win 20% more deals against competitors. Every action is reviewed by the agency team and logged for E&O. Works with Applied Epic, AMS360, QQCatalyst, HawkSoft, EZLynx, Momentum, Gmail and Outlook. Built by the founders of Simio (conversational AI, acquired in 2024).

Allia is the first full-stack, AI-native clinical group for mental health. We bring independent practices into one national clinical group that can deliver, measure, and improve care at scale .

We make mass-deployable radars for unmanned systems. Our first product is Archimedes, a radar seeker that finds and locks onto targets, enabling autonomous intercept on any drone. We have over $580M in LOIs for Archimedes, across some of the largest defense primes in Ukraine, the EU, and the Middle East. Seekers are the most critical and costly component in every autonomous interceptor. Developing a radar seeker takes a 200+ person team at Raytheon and hundreds of millions of dollars. Archimedes is 100x cheaper than existing radar seekers on the market - and is the first product to make it feasible to deploy radars on every drone.

Physical AI — robots and world models — is bottlenecked on one thing: diverse, real-world data at massive scale showing how humans actually do work in the physical world. It was never written down, and you can't buy it, because no one has ever captured it. Only real local experts, the people who do this work every day, can produce data this authentic and valuable. DeepReach builds the network that reaches them. We design and manufacture wearable stereo capture devices, then place them with local data partners who run collection as their own business — in warehouses, workshops, farms, kitchens and repair shops. They own the local relationships; we supply the hardware, the software platform, the quality pipeline and the payments. Anyone can run a data business. That structure is what produces diversity. Instead of thousands of hours inside one environment, we deliver hours spread across thousands of environments — which is what actually makes robot policies generalize. 475 devices in the field and 100+ data partners are live across 7 countries, adding new partners every week. They've collected nearly 150,000 clips in the past three months, with volume roughly doubling month over month. Our data is in production with multiple frontier model and robotics companies, and we're scaling to 10,000+ devices across 50 countries.

We are building robots that can work autonomously in existing wet labs. Unlike traditional lab automation, which requires dedicated equipment and fixed workflows, our robot moves between workstations, manipulates existing scientific equipment, transports lab materials, and executes experiments using the same lab infrastructure as a human technician. We make the robots easy to manage through natural interfaces like Slack, email, and phone. Our goal is to make deploying robots in wet labs as easy as onboarding a new employee, and to accelerate scientific research!

IMPACT builds autonomous interceptor drones that ship in sealed containers. The box sits at the site it protects, data centers, power grids, airports, bases, with no crew on the pad. When sensors cue a hostile drone, an interceptor pierces its own frangible lid, launches, and rams the target, guided by onboard vision that keeps working when GPS is jammed. Legacy effectors cost $1M+ per shot against $30k threats; ours cost less than the threat and scale with the swarm, the same class of interceptor already downing Shahed drones over Ukraine. Sites subscribe to protection instead of buying missiles, hardware, reloads and monitoring included: Air Defense as a Service. 180M+ USD in signed letters of intent.

Runtime is building the evaluation layer for physical intelligence. We push robot policies to their limits across thousands of simulated worlds, before they face the real one.

Luca IQ is an API for deterministic tax calculation and an IRS Authorized e-filing engine - the foundation for accounting firms and fintechs building on tax.

85% of all sales still happen face-to-face. Coach is how those get closed. Our AI turns in-depth sales conversation analysis into company knowledge and personalized coaching to help reps close more deals.

Lamb Labs is building Model Processing Units (MPUs), custom AI chips that hardcode LLM weights directly into silicon. Rather than adapting general-purpose processors to run AI models, we're rethinking how LLMs are implemented in hardware to make inference dramatically faster and more energy-efficient.

At Hera, we build tools that help heavy engineering teams bring products to market up to 20× faster. Today, we work with manufacturers of data center ancillary equipment, renewable energy systems, robotics, heat exchangers, power plants and pressure vessels.

Enabling robot deployment & autonomy

Rational is building the first accounting firm with no humans. It's entirely run by our AI employees, who go from client intake to doing the books to filing with the IRS. We secure 90% cost reduction, 24/7 support, and an overall seamless experience for businesses.

Ooak Data turns internal company data into a training ground where AI agents can be tested on real work.

ProvenMetal manufactures the fastest circuit boards in the United States. Domestic circuit board manufacturing is slow and expensive, and while reshoring is happening, the supply chain isn't there yet. We automate the bottlenecks - part procurement, DFM review, and assembly - delivering circuit boards in days instead of weeks.

Torus lets engineering firms and project owners build infrastructure 10x faster to reindustrialize America and the West. We're working with multiple Fortune 500 companies to build critical infrastructure including data centers and critical energy installations.

Speko is a router for voice models: one API key, and your voice agent runs on the speech-to-text, LLM, and text-to-speech models we measured as best for your language and use case. The measurements are public at benchmarks.speko.ai: we test new models the day they ship and re-route when the numbers change, so you rewrite nothing. We ran this bake-off by hand for four years at previous company, shipping production voice for Fortune 500s.

Screenpipe records and learns how people in your company work and turns it into a searchable memory, documents, and AI agents. Model agnostic and data is stored on your device and/or where your team choose, source available.

LemonLime runs fully automated sales and marketing for small businesses. Every morning, LemonLime finds you new leads and drafts personalized outreach, prepares branded content, and identifies untapped sales & marketing opportunities. All you have to do is click send.

83 Sciences uses AI to mine discarded experimental data and drive scientific breakthroughs. Working alongside labs, we discover the materials that will power the new Industrial Revolution.

Locke is the AI-native firm for public influence. We pair elite lobbyists and political talent with our own AI systems, helping companies lobby policymakers and win government contracts. Locke's team comes from The White House, Congress, and the Pentagon.

Edviro builds AI that operates energy infrastructure. We connect to meters, HVAC systems, batteries, solar, and other energy equipment and continuously handle the work required to keep them efficient: detecting and diagnosing problems to forecasting demand, simulating fixes, creating work orders, coordinating maintenance, and controlling equipment where authorized. Our energy world models learn how each site behaves, choose the highest-value actions, and verify the results against real operational, meter, and billing data.

Operon is the data intelligence layer for heavy industry. We ingest the messy documents a plant runs on (P&IDs, schematics, datasheets, scans) and turn them into one structured, queryable model of the facility. On top of it, engineers query their plant in natural language and build agentic workflows for safety, compliance, and design.

Starting with dental benefits, we are relentlessly simplifying the process for patients to receive better coverage at a lower cost by putting the buying power back into the hand of the individual.

Isengard Industries is not another drone company. We build sovereign production: the means for allied nations to make precision-strike and counter-drone systems by the thousand, on their own soil, at a fraction of what the primes charge. We call it Weapons of Mass Production. The Arsenal of Democracy, rebuilt for the drone age. More to come, and only where it helps. You know how to reach us.

We train human brain cells for compute

Resumes made careers readable. LinkedIn made them filterable. Pluto makes them searchable. Professionals spend 10 minutes talking to Pluto's voice agent about what they've done, what they're great at, and what they want next. Pluto turns that into a structured picture of who someone actually is, capturing the competency and intent that resumes and LinkedIn don't. When companies and AI agents go looking to hire, Pluto makes the right people discoverable. 27K+ professionals have shared their career context with Pluto, and 50+ companies, including Mercor, Warp, and Rho, use it to find and reach the right people. Long-term, we're building the LinkedIn for agents.

Bloomy is the best way to teach anything in school. We provide schools with an AI-native academic system comprising core and supplemental curriculum, AI teaching, and assessment to help K-12 students learn faster. Backed by the founders of Clever.

Glen is the layer that unifies every agent your company runs. Glen pulls in agent sessions from Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, plus Slack messages, GitHub prs, tickets, docs and calls. When a new agent picks up a task, Glen finds relevant prior context and injects it in the agents context window to steer it, producing knowledge work that is significantly higher quality, faster and cheaper. Glen does more. You can query the original agent behind any line of code, or search every session your org has ever run. It distills what your team does into skills and surfaces the right one automatically. Agents work multiplayer, picking up the style and context of whoever else is on the file. Transcripts are unified across Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, so you can hand a session from one to another mid-task. And Glen can also double as a company brain, from Slack, in app, or by just installing Glen on any agent. We’re building toward a future where memory is no longer the missing piece of intelligence. A future where every agent maintains a lossless and continuous thread of institutional experience enabling the era of the compounding organization and fully unsupervised digital labour.