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.

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.

BentoLabs is the monitoring and learning layer for long-running agents. We detect when agents silently fail or drift from the user's goal, system prompt, or tool contracts, show affected users and root cause, and suggest the prompt, skill, or harness fix. As more teams deploy agents, keeping them reliable in production becomes mission-critical. Bento sits directly in the production loop and gives teams the operational leverage required to scale agent ecosystems without scaling human firefighting alongside them. The result is a system that turns opaque agents into agents that can be monitored, debugged, and improved continuously. The founders learned this problem at Emergent (YC S24), where they built and operated production coding agents used by 5M+ users. Abhinav was hire #1 and helped Emergent hit SWE-Bench #1 and scale from $0 to $100M ARR in just 8 months. Kaushik was hire #2, led full-stack engineering at Emergent, and was key to building the infrastructure that made production agents reliable, observable, and debuggable. Bento's self-learning engine has also lifted ARC-AGI-3 (internal) by 2.6x and Terminal-Bench 2.0 (internal) from 42.2% to 52.4% pass@1 with the same model, tools, and budget.

Uno is building an AI-powered wallet for everyday spending. We start at checkout: Uno automatically selects the best credit card for each purchase based on merchant category, card rewards, and spending patterns, so users earn more points, miles, and cashback without thinking about it. Today, people either guess which card to use or manually juggle rewards categories. Uno turns that decision into an invisible automation. Over time, Uno becomes the financial agent in your pocket: optimizing which card to tap, which cards to apply for, when bills are due, and other everyday money decisions.

Voquill is the AI coworker that helps pathologists write their case reports faster. It listens as they work the case, learns their reporting style, maximizes reimbursement codes, and produces a sign-out ready report in real-time. Pathologists bill $30–40B each year, but spend a third of their time on reporting, and lose another third of their contracted revenue to documentation gaps and billing errors. It's a massive drag on a field that's already short-staffed. We're building an agentic platform to manage every aspect of the lab and displace the billions spent on legacy management systems.

Coding agents in the cloud don't work for majority of teams who require native capabilities; they lack XCode for iOS, Emulator for Android, Unity for game development teams. We are on a mission to cloudify every local development utility so that regardless of where it runs, your agent can compose an ideal set of capabilities on the fly so you don't need to run it on your laptop. Today, we provide remote services such as XCode, iOS & Android simulators to enable coding agents running in any sandbox to be able to build and iterate over mobile apps, too. Replit, Rork, Momentic, Minitap and more agent companies have built mobile development and testing experiences on Limrun platform. Coconote (Quizlet), SorceJobs (W25) and more companies with mobile apps use Limrun with their cloud agents, merging PRs without having to check out the code locally.

Create agents with structured english and markdown. OpenProse agents are portable across model providers and harnesses. Our framework allows you to declare intents, responsibilities, and outcomes in natural language, while the agents self-configure to deliver results. Read more about how OpenProse came to be: https://x.com/irl_danB/status/2011122779890831601 If you want to learn more about OpenProse, book some time with the founder here: https://cal.com/irl-danb/openprose-intro

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

Astraea automates clinical trial biometrics from raw study inputs to FDA-ready outputs. The platform handles data normalization, CDISC mapping, SDTM, ADaM, TFLs, QC, and revision workflows in one auditable system, helping Phase II/III sponsors reduce months of manual programming and data management into automated, reviewable execution.

FinalDose is building the first programmable drug - a single smart drug molecule that you can insert any diseased genetic code and it can search and destroy cells upon DNA recognition. Unlocking 80% of undruggable targets today. Starting with all cancers.

WithAI helps institutional investors research stocks and track their portfolio using AI. Today's agents are powerful but insufficient. The training data quality and customization schlep prevent them from being seriously useful for investors. But WithAI has found the right form factor, context management, and consultative sale to help independent asset managers hold their own against the huge platforms' in-house projects. Our first client is "tremendously accelerated" (their words) when months ago they were "existentially threatened." Ben and Ian became fast friends at Princeton co-founding a technology investment firm. Ben became the founding researcher at unicorn Sentient Labs, where he built LLM coordination and security tech. Ian became an investor at Bridgewater Associates, where he spearheaded "how will AI affect the economy?" and "how can we use LLMs to invest?" His contrarian conclusion: the future of work isn't just "managing agents." That form factor works for coding, but non-verifiable work is structurally different. You check whether code is good by running it. But do you check whether a stock is good by shorting it? Fundamental equity hedge funds are elite, time-constrained, un-automatable knowledge workers in dire need of AI augmentation, so they make an ideal customer. But the combination of customization lock-in and huge ACV is not the real prize. If human knowledge work survives this decade, it will be AI-augmented. We're building that augmentation.

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

Madrone builds cooling systems for data centers. In Texas, where most new sites are, Madrone can cool using 30% less power and water, thanks to novel dew-point cooling technology.

flowscope is an AI-native consulting firm that uses agents to learn and document how businesses actually run: who touches what, where it stalls, what's pure repetition. Our agents redesign and automate those processes, shipping AI into production on the company's existing systems. In days, not months.

Marketers today don’t actually do much marketing at all. Today, over 80% of time spent on launching a marketing campaign is actually ops work: tweaking automation flows in Pardot, configuring audiences in LinkedIn, or wiring HTML emails in Marketo. CharacterQuilt is AI infrastructure for marketing teams: a brain that learns your brand, and agents that operate your existing tools. Marketing campaigns that used to take 3 agencies, 10 tools, and 6 weeks are now being built, designed, and deployed from CQ in an hour. Customers submit a brief like they would send to a human teammate or marketing agency, and they get back fully designed and deployed campaigns. Teams like 1upHealth, ABC Fitness, and Emplifi use us to: 1-) Build segments/audiences faster 2-) Create on-brand creative (AI is terrible at staying on-brand) 3-) Deploy campaigns automatically into HubSpot, WordPress, LinkedIn etc. We replicate your brand guidelines, deeply understand past campaigns, and work inside your systems. If you run demand gen or lifecycle at a B2B/B2C company and want to ship campaigns faster, send us a brief and we’ll build it in 15 minutes.

Klarify handles every job a therapist does other than the therapy itself, from clinical notes and treatment plans to insurance claims and finding new clients. Therapists hold the world together. They also run businesses, file insurance claims, write letters, fill forms, supervise new grads, and do hours of paperwork every night. Practice management software has existed for decades. It records what therapists do. It can't actually do any of it. Klara is the AI at the heart of Klarify. She handles notes, treatment plans, clinical letters, insurance claims, between-session resources, supervision prep, and finding new clients. Nearly 6,000 therapists use Klarify today. Our mission is to empower therapists, not replace them. So they can focus on the one thing only a human can do. Be present with their client.

Foresight builds AI-powered simulations of human behavior to help companies predict how people will think, react, and choose before making real-world decisions. It lets organizations test countless possible moves in advance, see how each one is likely to play out, and choose the strongest path forward.

Hyper is the company brain that "just works" for AI-first teams. Hyper silently learns from every update in every tool your team uses -- Notion docs, Claude Code questions, emails, LinkedIn DMs, Cursor sessions, etc. Our agent-driven algorithms update and clean all that information into real-time knowledge that is shared across your entire team. That knowledge is quietly infused into all your existing AI tools on every chat turn, so your whole company gets smarter permanently.

Armature helps companies monitor, analyze, and optimize how AI agents experience their products. What we do today: - Automated testing: We run complex sessions against your MCPs/CLIs across all major harnesses and models to catch broken workflows before your users do. - AX analytics & benchmarking: No more black boxes. We trace agent sessions to show you exactly what the model "thought", what context it missed, and why it failed. We measure your AX against competitors to ensure you remain the preferred platform for agents to use. - Auto-remediation: Our MCP lets your internal coding agents plug into Armature to autonomously fix your product's AX based on our run data. Our vision for tomorrow: Reaching full understanding of how agents use your product and how you can improve it is only step one. The next step is to provide the foundational infrastructure for the Agent Experience, powering agent-native revenue, lifecycle marketing, and customer support for the next generation of software.

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.

Pops lets people play, remix, and share AI games with friends. Discover an infinite feed of games, challenges, quizzes, and other fun interactive experiences made by others. Every play instantly becomes a funny gameplay/reaction video you can send to friends, post online, or use to challenge someone to beat your score. For creators, Pops makes it easier than ever to bring ideas to life and get them played. Instead of learning complex game engines, writing code, or fighting for distribution, anyone can create or remix a playable game in seconds. Bring your ideas, and Pops brings the audience.

The $2T global telecom industry was built for humans. Agents can't act in the real world today because without a phone number, they have no identity. AgentPhone gives every AI agent its own phone number to reach people and businesses through messages and calls.

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.

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

Light Anchor (YC P26) builds AI-run consumer 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.

Chert provides the infrastructure for businesses to automate conversations over iMessage. We’re already working with B2C startups, customer experience teams, and sales teams to reach end users through trusted and conversational messaging.

Archer lets companies programatically send hyper-personalized physical rewards for any action, milestone, or behavior. Businesses use Archer to automate rewards across onboarding, referrals, sales, retention, partnerships, employee milestones, and customer engagement. Rewards can range from personalized gifts and food deliveries to branded merchandise, surprise packages, team experiences, and custom curated rewards all tailored to the person, milestone, and moment. Archer handles the infrastructure behind sourcing, personalization, delivery, payouts, and triggering so companies can turn rewards into a scalable part of how they grow and retain users using AI agents. Reward. Anything.

Elyra is an AI reservation system for restaurants. Instead of missing 40% of incoming phone calls and taking days to reply to emails, leaving over $100,000 in bookings on the table every year, restaurants get AI agents that answer every call and email instantly, 24/7, connected to a reservation system that optimizes table placements in real time so empty seats get filled with the right guests. Felix and Alan met in primary school in Stockholm and have been building things together ever since. We launched with a single restaurant and within weeks they hit record occupancy, bookings they used to miss were suddenly being captured automatically, and empty Tuesday nights started filling up. Today we power top restaurants groups. There are over 1 million restaurants in the US and Europe alone. The average restaurant loses $100K+ a year to missed calls and slow email replies. At our current pricing, that's a $10B+ market opportunity, and we're the only system that handles the call, the email, and the table allocation in one place.

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.

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're pushing the frontier of automating research.

We turn natural Language into Multi-Drone Search & Rescue Mission execution. Degla is built around a simple idea: once you’ve expressed your intent, the system owns the problem.You don’t babysit drones. You don’t micromanage failures. You don’t rewrite plans. You state the goal, Degla figures out how.

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.

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.

Sentry and Datadog dump a stream of alerts. Most are duplicates, most lack context, and you still have to solve the issue yourself. Superlog is AI-native observability that's meant not to be opened. A wizard scans your repo and installs proper OpenTelemetry instrumentation, then runs daily to keep up as you ship new code. When something breaks, Superlog groups the errors into a single incident, investigates with full context (logs, traces, recent deploys, past Slack threads), and posts one mergeable PR in Slack. You merge it, ignore it, or open it as a Claude Code session and modify it. Telemetry is vendor-neutral, so you keep every log, trace, and metric we install, even if you leave.

Ara is a non-invasive AI cursor that executes tasks on your computer. With first-class computer use it clicks buttons and retrieves info from any app, fills out forms and can navigate your browser. It supports self-improving and reproducible workflows that can be scheduled at set times.

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.

AI Agents to build, debug and automate analog circuit design

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.

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.

TesterArmy is an AI agent that tests websites and mobile apps. It monitors production on a schedule and runs automatically on every GitHub Pull Request, delivering screenshots, recordings, and actionable bug reports. Describe tests in plain English. The agent handles login flows, OAuth, and OTPs, no scripts to write or maintain. We catch the regressions and UX issues that code review misses.

Ontora gives C-suite leaders AI agents that interview every employee to uncover process bottlenecks across their organization. Consultants spend months doing this manually; Ontora does it in hours.

Manicule is an AI native devrel that owns developer documentation and technical content across social channels. We grew 100% MoM over the last three months to $58k in monthly revenue, and our customers include Supermemory, Greptile, Reducto, Mastra, Agentmail, and more. It is insanely hard to hire for devrel. Our customers tell us they’ve had roles up for months, paying $300K+ and still can’t find good people. The industry is currently split between SEO/GEO SaaS and agencies that only do videos or in-person devrel. Developer-focused companies also love the velocity AI brings but hate giving their readers AI slop. Naman has been writing content since he was 13 having worked with companies like Promptlayer, Brightdata, Courier.com and others. Shreyans has been building since 14, built an AI app that got onto App Store Productivity Trending in a month and worked as founding engineer at Supermemory. We met in high school and have built multiple startups together since.

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