Y Combinator Startups in the San Francisco Bay Area that are currently hiring 2025

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.

We exist to lift as many people up the socioeconomic ladder as possible. We dramatically improve lives by letting professionals turn extra time and ambition into career growth and financial opportunity. We achieve this with our app-based marketplace that connects workplaces and professionals, allowing professionals to book on-demand shifts and workplaces to access on-demand talent.

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.

Fifth Door unlocks the power of imagination by making it easy for everyone to create, share, and play games anywhere, with anyone. We exist to stimulate the creativity, connection, and joy that people get when they play games.

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.

Hireglide is an AI screening tool for hiring teams. Instead of wading through 500 CVs, we screen them and surface the best candidates. In future, with access to millions of CVs, we will match candidates with relevant roles.

Social networks are dead. Social media became more media than social. My friends aren't on social media anymore - it's one third ads, one third content from strangers, and one third AI slop. Our social lives are fragmented across dozens of different apps - iMessage, WhatsApp, Find My, Partiful, and Venmo. Digipals is the first AI-native social operating system that improves our relationships with friends. We built ambient AI agents that use social context from our location, calendar, and photos to take action and write code in our group chats. We are the last social platform anyone will ever need. Launch Video https://youtu.be/KW2tjLl6sxM

Miniswap a marketplace for complex hobbies, starting with Warhammer. In hobbies as complex as Warhammer, finding what you want on general marketplaces is a huge pain. Filters don't work, free-form listings mean that products are regularly misidentified, and piles of counterfeit junk crowd search results. Miniswap saves hobbyists from this chaos with its catalogue of more than 20,000 unique miniatures. Sellers match their listings against Miniswap's catalogue giving buyers more information and structure as they shop. The global market for tabletop games is estimated to be worth $20B in 2025 and Warhammer alone is projected to grow to $3B by 2030. By capturing the market in this untapped niche, Miniswap is strongly positioned to bringing greater transparency, simplicity, and connectivity into adjacent verticals. Miniswap's founding team merges deep domain knowledge with elite programming expertise and years of experience in business consulting and startups. Co-founders Zak and Will met while studying together at Cambridge, bonded over their love of Warhammer and early modern history. They have been best friends ever since.

Leadbay (YC F25) discovers and qualifies SMB leads that couldn't be found before. Small-to-enterprise teams use us to prospect the most low-data-low-signals industries like construction, hospitality, even startups. Co-founders are Milan Stankovic (CTO) - PhD to make AI work with limited data, and Ludovic Granger (CEO). Try us on leadbay.ai.

Bravi is building the AI operating system for home-services businesses, using AI-powered customer communication as the wedge. We replace the front office (calls, chats, follow-ups) with AI agents that never miss a lead, then layer an internal AI copilot that understands products, pricing, and technical documentation. We started with fenestration (shutters, windows, garage doors), a large, complex vertical with no modern software and no real competition, before expanding to adjacent trades. Bravi is already live with leading installers and manufacturers across Europe and the US, turning missed demand into revenue.

Algen is using CRISPR to uncover disease-driving RNA messages to find treatments for cancer, inflammation and diseases with high unmet needs. We are harnessing the power of CRISPR and machine learning to find first-in-class drugs that modulate RNA messages at single-cell resolution. Algen's founders are bioengineer from Jennifer Doudna Lab and biotech commercialization expert, teamed up with experienced pharmaceutical executives.

Uplane replaces marketing agencies with AI. We generate hundreds of ads with matching landing pages and steer the ad spend across channels like Meta, Google, LinkedIn and others. By connecting to CRM and ERP data, Uplane learns what drives profits and continuously improves campaigns. We’ve grown from $0 to $29k MRR in only 4 months. Our largest customer recently fired their ad agency at an all-time performance high, just to work with us. Now they get 20 times as many ads per month as before. The landing pages we generate convert up to 3-times as well as the status quo. Even the best marketing managers in the world can’t beat AI at personalization and A/B testing. Digital marketing is a $740B market with a 10% CAGR. Uplane charges a base fee plus up to 10% of ad spend, outperforming marketing agencies that typically charge 10-30%.

Semble AI builds AI agents that design building-systems (fire, HVAC, plumbing, security). Construction companies use Semble to cut down weeks on commercial and residential projects. The $600B building-system integration industry still runs on spreadsheets and manual drawings, even as building codes rapidly evolve and become more localized. It’s a massive blind spot for the tech world. Jonathan and Ethan met studying computer science at Stanford. Jonathan worked at Convergint, one of the world's largest building system integrators, specifically for the purpose of learning how this industry works. Ethan is obsessed for a different reason: His house burned down in 2017 due to a faulty fire system. They are determined to make Semble the industry standard for construction design.

We build infrastructure enabling AI agents to reliably perform complex tasks in production

China and Russia control the world’s critical minerals. We can produce Titanium, Magnesium, Aluminum, Zirconium & Hafnium in the U.S. more profitably than any existing process, and carbon neutrally via co-production. Carbochlorination is the primary process for producing critical metals like titanium, hafnium, and zirconium, and was once the standard for magnesium. The problem: conventional carbochlorination relies on purchasing carbon feedstocks, wastes valuable byproducts, and is highly CO₂-intensive. Duranium changes this with a novel reactor that recycles CO₂ emissions back into feedstock (CO) while generating a valuable co-product (bleaching agents). This closed loop slashes emissions and delivers Chinese-level metal pricing without subsidies — unlocking the full potential of carbochlorination for U.S. critical mineral production.

Dedalus Labs is building Vercel for AI Agents. We host MCP servers on our cloud and handle the boring stuff like autoscaling and load balancing so users can go from idea to production in a single click. Our OpenAI-compatible SDK lets users orchestrate complex agentic workflows through one clean API. Route between any LLM provider, connect any MCP tools from our hosted marketplace, and ship in minutes.

Outsourced IT is a $350B industry running on 10-20% margins. We're building AI employees to help them solve support tickets faster and increase margins to 70-80%. Yolanda worked as a Senior Support Engineer at Netflix. Her team ran 3x more efficiently than average outsourced IT companies. We're now bringing the automation Netflix has to 150K companies globally.

Food Supply Chain companies have been using legacy ERPs for decades. Everyone knows these are necessary evils that essentially run the business but take up a lot of operational capacity. They are not about to just rip and replace their existing system that runs their whole business with a system that takes years to implement. Imagine if they could implement AI that runs the ERP for them, in weeks? Burnt’s building an agentic OS for the Food Supply Chain with AI Agents for each department. Our AI Agent, Ozai, has started by replacing the whole order management job function at food distribution companies, so that sales and customer service teams can focus on what matters - the customer. Ozai monitors all incoming messages (emails, phone calls, voicemails, whatsapp, fax etc.), figures out if it's an order, learns each customer's habits, shorthand, and favorite products, picks up on any prep notes, and enters it straight into the existing ERP. It'll even go back to the customers on your behalf when it's not sure about something, clarify things and carry on working. The more it sees, the smarter it gets.

Blank Bio builds foundation models that understand RNA, the language of life. Our model powers applications across the entire R&D pipeline, from designing better drugs to running smarter clinical trials. Our first model is state-of-the-art in mRNA property prediction. It simulates costly experiments, helping partners design more effective mRNA medicines faster and cheaper. Our open-source models are being used by Sanofi & GSK. We’re also collaborating with the Arc Institute to bring our RNA embeddings into the next generation of virtual cell models. mRNA design is just the beginning. As the model improves, we’re extending to applications like target ID, novel biomarker discovery, patient stratification, and more. We’ve spent decades applying machine learning to biology across academia (PhDs at the University of Toronto) and industry (Recursion, Deep Genomics, Amazon). Contact us to learn more: founders@blank.bio

Novaflow is the AI data analyst for biology labs. -- Bioinformatics data analysis is a time-consuming and expensive process for scientists. With Novaflow, life scientists can upload experimental data, ask questions in plain English, and get instant, publication-ready plots, giving them results in minutes instead of months. Researchers at leading institutions like UCSF, Mount Sinai, UC Berkeley, and Harvard are already using Novaflow in their labs.

Truth Systems provides a compliance agent to govern the use of generative AI. It translates operational policies into intelligent, real-time guardrails that monitor every AI interaction. This empowers companies to proactively block non-compliant actions and align access to AI tools with user competency. By eliminating the risks and operational blind spots associated with uncontrolled AI adoption, our platform enables enterprises to fully leverage the technology's potential without compromising security. We are establishing the new standard for AI governance, building a future where every professional can innovate safely and confidently.

DeepAware builds an AI-driven automation system for GPU-intensive data centers. Our reinforcement-learning scheduler, real-time market integration, and unified dashboard slice energy waste by up to 30%. Coming soon: autonomous “robot-hand” inspections and maintenance to enable 24/7 operations with minimal staff. More info: https://deepawareai.com/ Jobs/Internship: https://www.deepawareai.com/careers

We help your company identify roles that can be filled by agentic AI tools, onboard them quickly, monitor their performance and behavior post deployment, ensure they remain compliant, and aligned with regulations. Tecto is building the governance platform for managing the AI stack!

Riff is a music editor with superpowers — helping artists work faster and making it easier than ever for hobbyists to break into music. As we continue to build, we see Riff turning into an entirely new paradigm for creating music.

Humoniq is building the first AI-Native BPO for the travel & transport industries, which outsource $20B of customer support each year. Our AI-native approach improves speed, accuracy, and satisfaction. Our team is uniquely equipped to solve this challenge. We previously grew a travel management company, Flightfox (YC S12), to $22M/yr. We handled thousands of customer requests each month, which exposed the limitations of traditional outsourcing.

Every successful tool is a bet on efficiency. A waterwheel grinds more grain per unit effort than a quern. A transistor switches more operations per watt than a vacuum tube. This is civilization's pattern: do more work with less energy. For ten thousand years, efficiency meant physical work. Intellectual work rode the surplus. Better farming, manufacturing, transport. But the brain itself bottlenecked every intellectual task. Compute changes this. For the first time, we can drive efficiency gains in intellectual work directly. Any repeatable job with measurable output has an efficiency ratio. Useful work divided by energy consumed. Intelligence per watt. Humans perform tasks at some quality-weighted outcomes per kilowatt-hour. AI systems do the same jobs. We can measure both the same way. AI is crossing the human baseline. Domain after domain. The world's hardest problems are information problems, and human intelligence is no longer the limit. The cost of intelligence per unit of energy is the limit. Every order of magnitude drop in cost expands the set of solvable problems. Our mission at Wafer is to maximize intelligence per watt by using AI to optimize AI infrastructure, achieving thousands of times better energy and cost efficiency. We want people to do their life's work here in pursuit of radical abundance. We believe cheap intelligence is the most essential piece of technology for a future of abundance. We will build the future with intelligence "too cheap to meter."

AgentMail is the email inbox API for AI agents. It gives agents their own email inboxes, like Gmail does for humans.

We spend our lives in messaging apps. Slack. iMessage. WhatsApp. We face a constant stream of information, introductions, and things we need to do. What if you could bring together every message, from every platform, in a Superhuman-like experience, with AI agents that automatically complete your action items? That’s exactly what we’re building at Pally; a future where you never need to check another inbox again.

Reacher is an AI-powered platform that automates creator marketing workflows—from discovery and outreach to campaign management and content strategy—making marketing teams 10x more productive. We handle the manual tasks so brands can focus on building relationships with creators while centralizing their operations in one platform to manage creators on TikTok Shop, Instagram, and YouTube.

We are building the data layer for AI, starting with audio. We start with data collection, curating our own proprietary set of diverse conversational data covering a wide range of languages, dialects and accents. We then leverage human expert audio annotators and our own annotation platform to process audio data for Automatic Speech Recognition. With human level transcription and diarization, our data help push the audio model frontier. Today we have over millions of hours of conversational data, and growing. If you need audio data for training or evaluating your voice models or voice agents, reach out! We offer flexible licensing deals that work for startups and enterprises, with minimal process. Audio data should besimple :)

The LLM Data Company is a research lab studying post-training data. We work with frontier AI teams to create bespoke tasks, rewards, and environments for models to play and learn at scale.

Tegore follows K-12 school curriculum to design courses like Algebra I & Algebra II. In addition to working with high schools in the Bay Area to design the best in-classroom experiences, Tegore is developing the corresponding consumer product, a Duolingo for Math. Each lesson in Tegore follows a lesson plan (e.g. Polynomial Long Division), and the content is delivered with voice / interactive visuals, and checks students' understanding by using dialectic teaching.

Chestnut is the first AI mortgage lender. We automate 99% of human work with AI agents, saving customers 0.5%+ in interest. This is Spencer's second mortgage startup; the first processes 2% of US mortgages annually. So far, Chestnut is licensed in Texas and Colorado where we power purchases, refinances, cash-outs, and more.

Theorem is training models that make program verification 10,000 times faster. Using verification as a feedback loop, developers have found zero-days in GPU accelerated code and cryptography implementations, and sped up code migration in legacy systems. If you have complicated code that needs to be correct and secure, sign up for our beta!

Instantly deploy custom research agents to source and enrich specialized professionals, company data, and insights directly into your existing systems.

Relixir is the Growth Engine for AI Search. We turn ChatGPT mentions into direct revenue. Over 1B people now use AI search every week to buy products. Relixir creates GEO content that gets cited in AI responses, ensuring your company never misses a search query from prospects. Then tracks exactly which prospects convert to your site. Customers include 100+ fastest growing companies like Rippling, Airwallex, Retell AI, HackerRank, etc.

What if every experiment you wanted to run could be modeled using AI? Godela is an AI-powered physics engine that gives engineers faster, cheaper replacement to simulations and physical prototypes. No set up, no wait. Just ask—and get simulation quality result.

StarSling is building an agentic developer homepage that automates all the tasks that eat up a developer’s time after they’ve left their code editor: deployments, performance, incidents, and bugs. Open your homepage, click on a GitHub, Linear, or Sentry issue and you’ll see an Autofix button that triggers an AI agent and opens up a Pull Request with a fix, all without leaving your homepage.

Next-generation truck management software to automate back-office operations for trucking companies. Features include AI agents to automate inbound/outbound calls, AI document upload to reduce manual data entry, load sourcing tools, automated accounting, and more.

QualGent is an AI Mobile App Quality Assurance Tester that mimics a real human, helping teams catch bugs and ship faster - without hiring more QA testers. One customer reached #3 in the Education category on the App Store by improving app quality with QualGent. Mobile bugs hurt: crashes kill ratings, broken checkouts drive churn. QualGent helps teams scale QA effortlessly and avoid Sonos-level disasters. The idea for QualGent was born from the founders’ experience leading engineering teams at Google across Android XR, Stadia, Quick Share, and foldable devices where shipping to billions of users meant constantly facing the painful trade-off between moving fast and maintaining quality. With prior research experience at Nvidia, Maryland, and Berkeley, the team saw a clear opportunity: use AI to scale QA. QualGent’s vision is to close the loop on software creation. As AI enables engineers to code 100x faster, QualGent eliminates the next bottleneck—software verification—unlocking truly scalable, end-to-end software development.