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.

Pavoot is an AI agent for events that helps marketing and sales teams source the right attendees, personalize each guest’s experience, and turn events into pipeline. Companies spend millions on events because relationships drive revenue. Yet most interactions are never captured, event experiences remain generic, and standard follow-ups fail to convert high-potential attendees. Before the event, Pavoot identifies the attendee profiles most likely to convert and sends personalized invitations. During the event, it helps create relevant introductions and capture important conversations. After the event, it identifies top leads, generates personalized follow-ups, and syncs engagement back into the CRM. === Pavoot turns events into personalized customer journeys. Book a demo: pavoot.com

Clawvisor lets AI agents use apps like Gmail, Slack, and Google Drive without going rogue or ever seeing your credentials. You approve tasks once. Clawvisor enforces them on every request.

Arden is the AI-native platform for internal audit and SOX teams. We build AI agents that automatically pull evidence from your stack, test controls end-to-end, and produce audit-ready workpapers in minutes instead of weeks. Internal audit is a massive but underserved market. Every public company in the US is required to do SOX testing, yet teams still run it through spreadsheets and screenshots. Arden is the engine that does this work.

Netter centralizes and structures traditional mid-market data to deploy analytics, workflows and ML pipelines. - A nursing home group was chasing unpaid invoices manually across disconnected tools. Netter centralized the collection workflows, automated reminders, real-time visibility, task routing. - A logistics operator had trucks running empty. Netter connected their TMS, ERP and fleet data, and automated route and load optimization. Less fuel, better margins. - A retail chain had years of loyalty card data sitting unused. Netter cross-referenced it with public demographic data to build precise customer segments and trigger the right promotions to the right people.

Scope helps companies understand and improve how AI agents discover and use their product. As more products gets used through AI agents like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and similar agents, agents are starting to influence which tools get chosen, how they get set up, and whether they keep getting used. Most companies still cannot see that process clearly. We run real workflows across agents and show teams when the agent picks them versus a competitor, where it breaks, where docs or product surfaces confuse the agent, and what to change to get better results and a better agent experience. I started Scope after working on interpretability research for closed-source models at Princeton and later as an ML engineer in GEO/AEO. I kept seeing the same pattern: these systems were shaping real product discovery and usage, but companies had very little visibility into what the model was actually doing. We are starting with products that agents can directly interact with, especially APIs, infra products, CLIs, and MCP servers.

Agents can't act in the real world today. They need carrier access, identity, and trust. AgentPhone gives every agent its own phone number to reach people through messages and calls.

Chronicle Labs is a staging environment for enterprise AI agents: we capture every event the agent sees in production and backtest it, so customers can safely test new behaviors without breaking anything.

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.

Rudus is an AI-powered takeoff and estimation platform built for concrete contractors. We cut takeoff time by 70% and help estimators bid 2-5× more projects without adding headcount. From plan upload to bid package, every part of the workflow gets faster.

Quant research is generating candidate strategies orders of magnitude faster than backtesting infrastructure can evaluate them. AI has further accelerated alpha research from a handful of signals per quarter to hundreds per day. The bottleneck has moved from researcher time to compute throughput. We're building large HPC clusters (100 - 50,000 nodes) that can run up to 6.4M tasks in parallel across multiple cloud providers on spot instances. Our goal is to make backtesting strategies simple, fast, and cheap at scale.

Light Anchor (YC P26) builds fully autonomous e-commerce brands that run at the speed of compute. Consumer brands have always been limited by the speed of humans: hiring, coordinating, and sleeping. AI agents that now run operations end-to-end break all those constraints, making a new kind of consumer business possible: one capped by compute, not headcount. Today, Light Anchor operates one flagship brand and multiple experiment stores, all run by AI agents on a shared platform that compounds with every new brand launched. The vision is thousands of consumer businesses, operating with little to no human intervention.

PLAN0 is an AI-powered preconstruction cost intelligence platform serving real estate developers, general contractors, and investors. We analyze architectural plans using computer vision AI models trained on tens of thousands of examples to generate detailed, industry standard cost estimates in 30 minutes vs. 2+ weeks traditionally. The platform is also building a proprietary database of real-time localized cost data that feed its analytics and forecasting tools. Using quant finance inspired deep neural networks, PLAN0 can decompose construction costs in market observable factors to predict all local trade level costs up to 24 months out with high accuracy. The vision is to develop the CoStar or Bloomberg of construction – a system of record and intelligence layer that allows real estate stakeholders to underwrite, design, and benchmark development projects with greater speed, precision, and confidence.

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.

ReasonBlocks makes AI agents more accurate and cheaper by catching failures mid-run and compounding reasoning patterns across every agent you deploy. Plugs into your existing agent stack in minutes and starts improving results from the first call.

Chert helps companies scale their outbound through iMessage. We integrate into existing GTM stacks, find iMessage-qualified leads, and help book 1-5 meetings per week.

GodHands is a deterministic computer use layer that enables AI agents to reliably operate across browser and desktop apps. We make real-world workflows even on legacy or non-API systems more deterministic and predictable, without completely relying on fragile vision-based approaches. By leveraging our infrastructure, your agent can seamlessly operate across new or internal enterprise applications without requiring custom integrations or per-app handling.

Archal lets you test agents and code that touch third-party APIs without hitting the real services. We build working digital twins that hold state across requests and behave like the originals, so you catch bugs before your agent does something irreversible in production.

Elyra is an AI reservation system for restaurants with built-in voice and email agents that handle bookings end-to-end.

Modern helps IT, HR, and Finance teams automatically resolve 80%+ of high-volume requests. Teams define workflows in plain language, set approval rules and policies, and Modern handles the rest: password resets, access provisioning, expense approvals, on-boarding checklists, and more. Everything runs with full audit trails, role-based approvals, and enterprise-grade security built in. Modern works alongside your existing ITSM with no rip-and-replace required or runs as your ITSM from day one. Most teams are live in under a day. For teams that want to go fully hands-off, 100% automation via a fully managed IT services are also available.

Napkin Math is the food journal for real people. Stop counting calories, get personalized insights and realistic goals. Easily keep a beautiful food journal, get deep insights on your data with AI, and share your table with friends.

Clone any postgres DB regardless of size in 6s so agents can test their work

We're an AI Research lab that utilizes complex agentic workflows to accelerate the discovery of novel AI research. We've discovered novel optimizers, language modelling architectures, and work in interpretability. We develop products and conduct frontier research, pushing the bounds of automating research.

Mount is the Insurer for the Agent Economy. When AI systems autonomously sign contracts, manage finances, or talk to customers, every failure becomes the deployer's liability. Existing insurers don't want to cover this. They lack the data, the models, and the speed to assess deployed AI systems. We're solving this by building a risk evaluation and mitigation platform specifically for AI Agents. Mount's platform red-teams them, scores their operational risk, and issues ADR certifications (the SOC 2 for AI agents). Every evaluation generates proprietary risk data that feeds our underwriting engine, a data moat no competitor can replicate. The AI agent market is projected to grow from $7.6B to $183B by 2033. The EU AI Act and upcoming regulation require deployers to manage AI risk. Over 90% of businesses want coverage for AI risks, yet no insurer is built to price this new risk category. We are that company. Fabian studied CS at ETH Zürich with a focus on machine learning and has been building AI systems since. John founded an AI-first media company at 18 and scaled it to 400K in annual revenue. Together, they combine deep technical AI expertise with the operational intensity to build a full-stack insurance company from scratch.

Taiga automates medical billing for doctor's offices. A doctor uploads their visit data, our AI figures out the right billing codes, checks the claim for errors, and submits it to insurance, dealing with any denials. Faster billing, fewer rejected claims, less busywork. We're Nanda and Adam, friends since 3rd grade. Both of our parents are doctors with their own practices, and billing was always a source of stress and lost revenue for them. We want providers to treat patients while we handle the rest.

Kuli is an AI agent for social media and influencer marketing teams at the world's largest consumer brands. Our agent watches every video on socials in the brand's context and helps marketers get work done to launch their campaigns 4x faster. Previous platforms gave marketers databases to search through and a CRM. Kuli actually watches the content. Marketers at team like Supercell, Disney and Havas use it to scout creators, run analysis on trends and competitor strategies, and analyse what makes their campaign perform better. For 10 years, influencer marketing meant more tools, more tabs, more spreadsheets. Kuli replaces all of that with one single agent you orchestrate. One marketer with Kuli does what a $50K/month agency bills for manual tasks.

Klaimee is the first insurance for your AI agents. It covers what traditional E&O and cyber explicitly carve out, so you can deploy agentic AI at scale with real peace of mind. Built for companies deploying agentic AI, self-serve from day one. The problem: AI agents are taking actions autonomously buying, emailing, modifying sensitive data. AB 316 already holds deployers liable. EU AI Act enforces in August. Cyber and E&O insurance are excluding AI claims. Companies shipping agents have zero coverage and no third-party proof their agent is safe. Enterprise legal asks "who pays if your agent breaks something?" and there's no good answer. We built the answer. Critical-category risk evaluation, certification, financial guarantee, liability insurance and the documentation enterprise procurement needs to sign off. Team: Ines (ex-General Manager at SafetyWing, grew insurance product from $5M to $60M revenue, 5 years launching insurance products from scratch and structuring a TokioMarine MGA into its own carrier) + Julien (AI software engineer + corporate strategy, enterprise compliance). We understand how insurance works, what enterprises require, and why startups can't wait 6 months for either.

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.

Pentagon is a workspace for your AI employees to communicate, coordinate, and get work done as a team.

Pulsent continuously watches how your users and interacts with your product and engages them at the right moment to convert, upsell, and retain. As companies scale, founders, account managers and customer success teams can only take care of a small fraction of users. The rest receive generic, annoying and poorly timed communication. Opportunities are missed, customers churn, and revenue is lost. The core problem is that user behavior is fragmented across tools like PostHog, Stripe, Salesforce, etc., making it impossible to understand users in real time. We unify all data into a single view and let AI agents act on top. This only recently became possible with advances in visual AI (dec ‘25), allowing agents to watch sessions and understand behavior at human or better level. Pulsent detects expansion and churn signals, prioritizes high-value accounts, and executes through AI agents across channels like email, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp. It increases conversion and reduces churn without adding headcount. We already have paying customers, process hundreds of millions of events daily, and are seeing strong demand from PLG B2B Clients. Nicolò is an ex-BCG who has scaled two startups to millions in ARR. Arseniy worked for several years at Datadog handling billions of datapoints. We’ve worked together for 3+ years and experienced this problem firsthand in our previous startup.

We provide a AI customization layer that learns your APIs and embeds in your product, so your customers can build their own apps on your SaaS. Each customer can now adapt your product to match their workflows perfectly, and share it across their team with our in-built app store. The result is that customers use your SaaS more, retain for longer, and expand quicker, because they get bespoke implementation for their exact usecase, without waiting. We're live with the top Series B companies with 90% repeat usage rate. Our customers tell us that Gigacatalyst is the best way to increase usage, retention, and expansion in 2026.

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.

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.

Saudara AI is an AI broker connecting American brands with vetted overseas factories. International sourcing is broken. We're fixing it. US brands import over $3 trillion in goods every year and lose billions to ghost suppliers, hidden fees, and missed deadlines. The best factories sit behind decades-old relationships. We have them. Our AI handles the rest. A real broker on every deal, supercharged by AI. 10x faster, at a fraction of the cost. We are the on-ramp.

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

We are building AI-native fulfillment powered by robotics. Warehouses without human labor that get better, faster, and cheaper with every order. Most robotics companies wait until their system is perfect before deploying. We don't. We ship imperfect policies into real warehouses, detect failures in real time, recover automatically when we can, and bring in a remote human operator when we can't. Every failure becomes training data. Every intervention makes the system better. The result is a fulfillment system that continuously learns from production.

Refortifai builds RL environments to solve and evaluate complex tasks involving electronic design.

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 turns CAD designs into real mechanical parts through an AI-driven manufacturing system. We analyze designs for manufacturability and automate production workflows to deliver high-quality parts faster and at lower cost.

Our real-time, generative models turn AI 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 the AI research platform for the buy side, built by ex-Goldman engineers who left to start a hedge fund with $10M and ran it for four years before productizing the stack. Portfolio managers spend most of their day on work that isn't investing: filings, earnings prep, 13Fs, peer benchmarking, thesis validation, trade writeups. Kimpton runs all of it autonomously and delivers structured Trade Proposals with full rationale, fitted to a portfolio manager's mandate and strategy. Risk profile, style, and constraints live in plain-text mandate.md and strategy.md files that drive every analysis the system performs. The rest of the desk sits alongside: Deep Research cited to source, natural-language Dashboards, Agentic Charting & Backtests, scheduled Skills for recurring workflows, and auto-generated Reports. Coverage includes FactSet pricing, fundamentals, estimates, transcripts, ownership, and M&A data, plus live prediction markets from Polymarket. 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 Engineers, PMs, designers, marketers, and ops to contribute to their codebase or build prod-grade zero-to-one apps.