AI (Artificial Intelligence) Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

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.

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

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.

Enterprise software implementation is broken, and it has been for decades. Every rollout, whether it's a traditional ERP or a new AI system, requires months of manual integration, configuration, and tuning done by armies of system integrators and forward-deployed engineers. Lab0 builds agentic systems that automate this layer, compressing months-long implementations into weeks.

Ara is building the fastest personal AI agent computing environment that works for you 24/7. Users get instant cloud runtimes to run agents like OpenClaw in isolated environments, letting them organize files, send emails, and handle day-to-day tasks automatically.

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.

Sherpa automatically increases website conversion rates by analyzing visitor behavior, building new page variants, and continuously A/B testing them. Customers typically see a 15-20% lift on their primary conversion metric in their first 30 days.

Indonesian exports to the US grew 23% in 2025 up to over $30B. The shift is happening. Most brands just don't have the on-ramp yet. Saudara AI is an AI-native sourcing agency connecting American brands with Indonesian suppliers across apparel, textiles, home goods, supplements, and raw materials. Our AI agent finds your factory, handles vetting, sampling, and delivery. A human is in the loop at every stage. No more ghosting. No more waiting months for supplier updates. You always know where your order stands. We are the on-ramp.

We are making the world's fastest and lightest browser for your AI agents. Agents don’t need to see UIs like us humans do. We remove the costly visual rendering stack, giving agents a semantic understanding of the web instead of brittle interfaces. Your agents can perform deep research, large-scale scraping, and complex automation—more efficiently with our browser that turns the web into a native protocol for LLMs.

RefortifAI provides DRM and IP protection for AI models by obfuscating model weights so they only run inside their hardened runtime, letting companies distribute models to untrusted environments without exposing their IP. It works as a drop-in replacement for existing inference engines (vLLM, SGLang, etc.), so customers deploy normally while weights stay protected.

We automate inventory and contents processing for insurance and insurance-adjacent industries, including public adjusters, restoration contents, and insurance companies. We also handle various inventory and estimate adjacent processes that cost many billions of dollars a year and thousands of years of man hours.

Prototyping.io is a manufacturing intelligence platform that understands mechanical designs, identifies manufacturability issues early, provides actionable insights and delivers custom mechanical parts (CNC machining, sheet metal, 3D printing, injection molding, etc.) with faster lead times, lower cost, and high quality.

Our interactive video models turn agents into lifelike video calls. Deploy in minutes with a few lines of embed code. Photorealism, emotion, and scale for just $0.06 per minute.

Kimpton is an AI-native investment research platform built by ex-quant fund operators. Instead of analysts staring at screens hunting for edge, Kimpton's system is a comprehensive agentic harness containing the context that matters to investors: real-time and historical data across 120,000+ assets, company fundamentals fragmented intelligence sources, and your actual portfolio from 2,500+ brokerages. It conducts the research autonomously: visualizing, backtesting, forecasting with prediction markets, and proposing structured trades tailored to your thesis and risk profile. Built by former hedge fund operators who spent years building this stack for themselves, Kimpton makes the CIO role accessible to every investor. Humans make the decisions. AI does everything else.

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 PMs, designers, marketers, and ops to contribute to their codebase or build prod-grade zero-to-one apps.

We build AI scientists that discover new materials for the semiconductor industry - specifically datacenters and fabs. Finding novel materials today takes 10+ years of lab work. We aim to compress that timeline to months, using a swarm of AI agents. Akash completed his PhD at Stanford on material discovery for semiconductors. The materials he discovered for nanoscale interconnects have been adopted into the roadmaps of Intel and TSMC. Advaith was the founding applied scientist at Persona AI (acquired by Luma Labs), where he built long horizon autonomous agents for major telecom and crypto companies. Power consumption and heat release from AI chips is doubling every year. The semiconductor industry needs new materials to keep this exponential going - Matforge will help find them.

Benchspan is a benchmarking platform for AI agents. If you're building an agent, you need to know if it's getting better. But running benchmarks is slow, expensive, and fragile. You spend days writing glue code every time you want to run a new benchmark, runs take forever on your laptop, and when they fail halfway through you burn hundreds of dollars in tokens with nothing to show for it. Benchspan fixes all of it. Onboard your agent once, and it works with every benchmark on the platform. We onboarded Claude Code in 37 lines of code. Running a benchmark becomes a single command, executed in parallel in the cloud. Every result goes to one place your whole team can see, with full trajectories, token usage, latency, and custom metrics. When runs partially fail, rerun just the subset that errored instead of starting from scratch. Compare runs side by side to see exactly where your agent is improving and where it's regressing.

Playabl.ai is an AI game builder that lets anyone create games and interactive experiences by chatting with AI.

TesterArmy is an AI agent that tests your web app in a real browser before code ships. It runs automatically on every GitHub Pull Request, then posts recording, pass/fail results, and failure context as a PR comment. Teams also get a CLI for local/CI runs and an API for custom pipelines. We catch the regressions that code review misses.

Foaster helps companies turn AI native. To turn an existing company AI native, the first step is to understand at a granular level how it actually works. Not how leaders think it works, but how work really gets done across teams, workflows, dependencies, bottlenecks, handoffs, and day-to-day operations. That is what Foaster does. Our system interviews teams across the company through 45-minute conversations, from frontline employees to leadership, and turns those conversations into a living map of the organization. On top of that map, Foaster shows where and how AI should be integrated, what should change first, and how the transformation should be prioritized. Our system keeps learning through lightweight monthly interviews, tracks progress, detects resistance, and updates its recommendations as the organization and the AI landscape evolve. No human consultant could build this level of operational understanding at that scale, then keep it continuously updated with that degree of adaptation and personalization. We believe every company will need a system like this. Without it, they will never truly become AI native.

Ontora unlocks real-time operational knowledge across the company, helping leaders make faster decisions at a fraction of the cost and delay of traditional consulting.

Manicule is an AI-native technical documentation agency. We own technical documentation end-to-end for developer tool companies, including information architecture, messaging, writing, design, and QA. Agents handle the mechanical parts like code verification and auditing at a scale and speed no human team can match, while humans refine the thinking and make the docs actually good. We're at $15K MRR and profitable, with clients like Supermemory, Greptile, Reducto, and Rootly. Supermemory's docs drove a 30% improvement in answer success rate and went viral on Twitter, all shipped in 23 days. Every dev tool founder knows their docs are broken but simply don't have the time to fix them. The old solution was hiring a full-time technical writer who understands engineering, marketing, and devrel. That role is really hard and expensive to hire for, so docs stay broken. Naman started freelance writing for developer tools 3 years ago and realized that you can't one-shot docs. They require tight feedback loops with the engineering team, multiple review cycles, and real product understanding. When he worked with Supermemory, they had two products that sounded identical to customers. He got on calls with the CEO, figured out the right positioning for each product, and restructured the entire docs around it. That kind of work requires judgment and context that agents simply don’t have. On the other hand, testing every code snippet against a live API, auditing hundreds of pages for broken links, and drafting from OpenAPI specs is grunt work that agents do in minutes. The insight behind Manicule is that good documentation requires both, and nobody has packaged them together. Shreyans was a founding engineer at Supermemory, saw the impact of good docs firsthand, and joined Naman to productize Manicule. We're now a team of 5, building toward that vision. Thousands of AI startups are launching dev tools every month, and docs are the single biggest asset they're all neglecting.

Callab AI is an AI voice agent platform purpose-built to plug into the most complex telephony environments - from legacy CUCM and SIP trunk infrastructures to modern cloud contact centers. Rather than requiring greenfield deployments, Callab AI integrates natively with existing PBX systems, IVR flows, and carrier-grade SIP endpoints, fitting seamlessly within the regulatory and technical constraints of enterprise telecom stacks.

Actors have agents. Athletes have agents. Every elite performer has someone supporting their career. Except people in tech. Standout changes this. We gather deep context on millions of talented builders, learning who they are, what they’ve built, and what they want next. Then we represent a small fraction of them and connect them to the best opportunities in the world. Helping exceptional builders reach their full potential.

Commercial lenders manage billions in assets but service their loans like it's 2005: spreadsheets, legacy software, and teams of people doing manual reconciliation all day. Zolvo replaces that entire back office with AI. We automate reconciliation, verification, collections, and reporting so lenders can scale their portfolios without scaling their teams. We're building the operating system for commercial lending

ScienceSwarm makes AI useful for what matters. Coding assistants turned millions of people into software developers — we're doing the same for science. Our platform lets anyone point their AI at unsolved problems in math, science, and engineering, submit approaches and hypotheses, and verify the work with a community of AI-powered enthusiasts. AI's biggest impact won't be personal productivity. It will be unlocking scientific breakthroughs that humans alone can't reach.

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.

Korso is an AI-powered operations platform for manufacturers that automates the full quote-to-order workflow: processing incoming RFQs, extracting line items, generating professional quotes, and tracking purchase orders through production. At its core is an intelligent assistant with frontier-model capabilities that understands your business documents, pricing history, and customer relationships, so your team can ask questions, get instant analysis, and make decisions in seconds rather than hours.

Building the communication infrastructure needed for fully autonomous agents

Fortune 500 companies and the fastest-growing manufacturing firms use Arzana’s AI platform to automate order entry, quoting, and customer updates. So teams can scale faster, respond sooner, and grow without adding overhead.

Noetic handles hardware compliance end to end, making the process as fast and painless as software compliance has become. Product safety requirements are fragmented across dozens of regional and industry-specific standards (FCC, FDA, FAA, CE, UL, ISO, RIA) and thousands of codes, leaving companies to spend months and tens of thousands in consultant fees just figuring out what applies. Noetic’s AI agents surface every relevant requirement in minutes, drafts the technical documentation, and matches teams with the right testing labs.

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

Run an army of Claude Code, Codex, etc. on your machine

Ndea is building frontier AI systems that blend intuitive pattern recognition and formal reasoning into a unified architecture. # AI for Scientific Advancement Unlike all life before us, humanity's ascent is a story of ingenuity, not just biological evolution. Our progress has been driven by the curiosity to acquire knowledge, the ability to pass it on, and an intrinsic drive to innovate. We build technology which gives us leverage beyond our biology. We stand at the top of a knowledge and technology colossus that we collectively created over the past ten thousand generations. Scientific progress has helped us overcome burdens that long defined human life — famines, plagues, and widespread illiteracy. Science will continue to redefine the boundaries of the human condition. Today, the acceleration of scientific progress hinges on one factor: AI capable of independent invention and discovery. This capacity is the gateway to advancements beyond our wildest imagination. # A New Research Lab We're starting Ndea — an AI research and science lab. The name - like 'idea' with an 'n' - is inspired by the Greek concepts ennoia (intuitive understanding) and dianoia (logical reasoning), capturing our first goal to merge deep learning with program synthesis. Ndea is entirely focused on developing and operationalizing AGI to realize unprecedented scientific progress in our lifetime for the benefit of all current and future generations. Building AGI alone is a monumental undertaking, but our mission is even bigger. We're creating a factory for rapid scientific advancement — a factory capable of inventing and commercializing N ideas. From our vantage point today, we see many 'known' frontiers like self-driving vehicles, drug discovery, sustainable energy, robotics, and space exploration. While AGI will benefit all of these, the most exciting adventure lies in the 'unknown'. AGI promises discoveries and progress we cannot imagine today.

We automate the entire end-to-end prior-authorization process for private practices for cheaper, and more accurately than they're doing today.

We build specialized LLMs for your business’s specific workflows and use cases, then continuously hone them against your success metrics, capturing your proprietary know-how in the model so it gets more valuable and harder to copy as you grow.

qomplement builds the most accurate AI agents for document filling. We take messy data and fill internal pdfs forms and spreadsheets templates teams actually use. Today 90% of enterprise data lives in documents. Extracting it is only half the job. In real workflows, that data has to be filled back into other documents.

AI SRE agents that automatically learn each customer’s system so they work just like an in-house engineer.

Your agent processed a refund without looking up the order ID, costing you thousands. You only found out three hours later from a support ticket. Evals, output scoring, and observability can reduce the likelihood of mistakes like these occurring - but there's no solution that inspects and prevents an action as it’s about to execute. Salus does that. We’ve built an API that wraps around your agent and checks its actions at run time, blocking incorrect ones and providing immediate feedback to guide retries. Kevin and Vedant were roommates at Stanford, where they both studied computer science.

Tsenta is a desktop app that matches you with jobs, optimizes your profile & applies on your behalf. It runs on your device, so you have granular control over every application being submitted in real-time. 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 :)

Backed by top engineers from OpenAI, EQT Motherbrain, and Palantir to give autonomous AI taste. Our first commercial product is for the literature industry with a focus on school libraries. It captures and analyze unstructured (and pre-Librar unattainable) data using it to more than double reading rates at schools. Fastest growing library tech company in history.

Grade is the API for performance-based payroll. Think of us like Deel or Gusto, but our payouts are for work completed, not hours. Companies use Grade to pay AI agents and contractors based on results: tasks completed, targets hit, work delivered. We handle compliance, tax reporting, and global payouts. Grade powers payouts for AI agents and contractors we are at $452k ARR, $520K+ paid in the last 3 weeks, growing 46% MoM across 23 live companies.

The best grid connection is no grid connection. Voxel builds vertically integrated energy generation and storage systems for data centers that bypass utility connection delays. By leveraging the vast supply of second-life EV batteries and our novel DC microgrid architecture, Voxel generates datacenter power on site and drastically reduces system cost and time-to-power.

We are building the world’s largest video library. We've aggregated billions of videos into a searchable index and use agents to find and label the exact datasets a lab needs on demand. If a lab needs 100K hours of cooking videos where someone is holding a pan, with reasoning annotations on top, our agents search the index, extract the matching subset, route it through our labeling pipeline, and deliver a custom dataset in days, not months.

10x Science develops frontier AI models with deep memory to redefine how scientists understand and engineer biology across the life sciences, starting with drug development. AI-powered drug discovery is flooding the pipeline with new candidates faster than ever. But before any of them can advance to the clinic, scientists must deeply characterize the protein therapeutic to understand whether it will work. Today, that process takes months of manual, error-prone analysis that cannot keep pace with discovery. Our AI-native platform automates it, giving drug developers the confidence to advance the right candidates and stop the wrong ones early. We have strong commercial traction with enterprise pharma customers. Our founding team built the field of next-generation protein characterization out of Carolyn Bertozzi's Nobel laureate lab at Stanford. Collectively, we have 18+ years of collective domain expertise, 47+ scientific publications, and a 2x YC Founder. We move at the highest velocity and are positioned to lead the next generation of modern AI development in the life sciences.

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.