Generative AI Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

InstaAgent helps consumer brands scale a single campaign across hundreds of specific audiences on Meta and TikTok, each with its own content, voice, and targeting. Traction: $1M ARR in 10 months. From one brief, we create personalized creatives, distribute them through paid channels and niche social accounts, and use performance data to learn what works, scale winners, and improve every campaign.

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.

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.

YouArt helps storytellers create AI originals using our industry-leading video agent, launch their original concepts, get funded directly by early fans, and earn from their audience.

Kugel is an enterprise-ready TTS model, available on-prem, with a focus on European languages and low latency.

One memory for your team's agents. Turn every meeting, Claude session, and Slack chat into context your team and agents share.

Huscarl is an AI-native actuarial advisory for large companies ($50M+ turnover) to optimize their insurance decisions. Our approach helps them save ~30% premiums for similar coverage, and manage their own risks like an insurance company would. Our technology: - scans through risks and quantifies them - translates complex B2B insurance policies into actuarial language - tells if companies are paying the right $ for their coverage - tells them what to keep, change or kill in their insurance program

Interfaze is an AI model built on a new architecture that merges specialized DNN/CNN models with LLMs for developer tasks that require deterministic output and high consistency like OCR, web scraping, classification, Speech-to-text (STT) and more. Read paper:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04101

Amboras puts your entire e-commerce on autopilot. It builds your store, continuously optimizes it, reads your analytics, and learns what converts - all autonomously. No developers. No agencies. No guessing. Today it sells to humans. Tomorrow it sells to AI agents.

Ritivel is an AI-native workspace for regulatory and medical writing teams at life sciences companies. Our AI agents draft CTDs, CSRs, INDs, and BLAs in minutes instead of weeks, helping drugs reach patients faster. Every month a drug is delayed from reaching the market costs pharma companies ~$45M in lost revenue and more importantly, delays treatment for thousands of patients who need it. Yet regulatory teams are stuck in a painful, months-long process: synthesizing thousands of pages of clinical data, hunting through SharePoint folders for the right documents, chasing colleagues for missing inputs, and manually drafting submissions. Ritivel deploys AI agents that transform how regulatory teams work. Our agents generate comprehensive first drafts directly in Microsoft Word, following FDA formatting requirements and pulling from your existing clinical data and prior submissions. Every data point includes citations linked back to the original source, so reviewers can verify with one click. Connected to SharePoint and Veeva, our agents automatically source the right documents. Integrated with Outlook, they handle reminder emails and follow-ups automatically. We're engineers who previously built AI copilots at Microsoft Research. After 50+ conversations with pharma professionals, we discovered the critical bottleneck in regulatory submissions and built Ritivel to solve it.

Anto is building a foundation model for microbial communities, making the gut microbiome computable for the first time. We predict drug toxicity and efficacy across diverse populations and fix drugs so they work for everyone — solving the hidden root cause of most drug failures. Founded by Arvid (Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Nature-published researcher who pioneered quality-aware, goal-directed sparsification) and David (Harvard Medical School Gastroenterology, J&J), second-time founders who published the breakthrough at leading machine learning AI conferences and Nature.

Expected Parrot helps companies simulate their customers with AI agents to explore pricing, product, marketing, communications and other scenarios at scale. Our open-source library and no-code web app let you design custom agent personas and conduct interviews and surveys with them using LLMs of your choice to generate results and reports. Everything is cached and reproducible, and you can send the same surveys to human respondents to validate results in the same interface.

Absurd makes AI brand and performance ads at scale. Our last video for Kalshi ("Election Day") did 1M+ views, and our videos average 400K+ organic views. Companies like Hims, Kalshi, Replit, and Brex use Absurd to create production-quality videos in 72 hours. We do it with a multi-agent orchestration layer, working closely with your team from concept to final cut. Try it at absurd.com

LunaBill is building AI Voice callers for healthcare billing teams. Insurance claim follow-up calls account for the 80% of the daily workload of a healthcare billing team, with each call averaging 30 minutes. Since our launch in July we are now at $764K in contracted ARR, of which $428K is live revenue and the rest will go live by January 2026. Our customers see a 10x increase in claims followed up per biller in the first week and we have converted 100% of pilots to paying customers. We have automated 50,000+ calls and signed partnerships with top healthcare leaders like UC health systems, Mayo, Experian Health and more. The founders have known each other for over a year. Suhail is a 2x founder, with 3+ years of experience building in healthcare including operating a medical billing company with 200+ healthcare clients. David founded Skiesoft, Taiwan’s biggest healthcare AI scribe company, used by 120k+ healthcare professionals. He also worked as a data scientist at UCSF, building models to audit medical-coding accuracy. Yash was a researcher at various hospital systems including Mayo Clinic.

Pixley is the first platform where kids can turn their drawings and ideas into fully animated cartoons in minutes. In just 3 weeks after launch, over 1000 families across 75 countries have already started creating stories. We’re starting with a clear wedge: personalized kids’ entertainment. Parents are tired of overstimulating, low-value content from YouTube and Netflix. Pixley gives them safe and personalized stories that encourage learning and imagination. But kids’ cartoons are just the beginning. As video generation improves, all video content will shift from manual production to being personalized and generated. Our long-term goal is to build the AI Netflix: a platform where shows and movies aren’t recommended, but instead generated around each viewer’s interests and habits. We’re 19 year old CS dropouts who’ve known each other since elementary school and won 4 hackathons at 15. After seeing AI flood the internet with low-quality content, we created Pixley – a safe, personalized way for kids to turn their ideas into animated stories.

Koyal is an Agentic AI Filmmaking Platform that allows you to seamlessly convert script or audio into personalized, visually compelling stories. We’re a team from Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Meta, with experience in AI video generation. https://koyal.ai builds directly upon our published research at the AI conference NeurIPS in December. We’ve been covered in the international press for our patented secure personalization protocol CHARCHA: the genAI captcha. Announcement: https://x.com/meh_agarwal/status/1965866965425348687 Demo: https://x.com/meh_agarwal/status/1965137062119752099 We currently have paid pilots with the biggest global music labels, podcasts and production houses, and just launched our public beta at beta.koyal.ai We recently concluded a pilot with Universal Music and T-Series (world’s largest music label) alongside Bollywood production houses like Maddock Entertainment, and Collective Artists Network! As part of that, we launched 5 music videos for Grammy and Oscar winning artists like A R Rahman, Ricky Kej and Shankar Mahadevan all crossing 1.5 million views! We've recently built SOTA capabilities in (i) multilingual script to audio to video, (ii) Agentic lip-sync with dynamic movement & (iii) Multi-character consistency.

Bear helps companies capture and convert the highest-intent leads on the internet - visitors clicking from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI agents. Bear owns the entire funnel from agent discovery to conversion.

Bezel helps fashion brands create virtual photo/video shoots with AI. Upload images of clothes, select the human you want to model it, and Bezel generates pictures and videos that rival a full studio production. Every detail of the clothing is rendered flawlessly. Try it for yourself.

Automatic insights on all your company data. Speed up business workflows to visualizations with a 0 learning curve.

Knowlify makes it easy for companies to create animated explainer videos using AI. Upload any document and/or prompt deck to get a professional explainer video in minutes - no designers, animators, or video editors needed. Teams use Knowlify to produce training videos, customer literacy videos, product explainers, onboarding content, and internal communications at a fraction of the traditional cost and timeline. Available as a self-serve platform or a fully managed service.

Doe is where AI agents actually do your work. Connect your tools, tell Doe what you need, and agents handle it. When you want to do something yourself, Doe makes you faster and smarter. The boring stuff disappears. Everything else gets better.

PARES is the single platform commercial real estate brokers need for their entire workflow, from chasing leads to closing deals and everything in between. With our platform, brokers can: 1) Automatically update real-time transaction data in our CRM 2) Create lists of target properties, skip-trace, and easily navigate outbound calls 3) Underwrite deals with our AI Underwriting Agent 4) Create OMs/BOVs in minutes with our AI Marketing Agent Check us out at https://www.pares.ai/

Kashikoi is a simulation engine to benchmark AI agents. We generate CPU friendly world models that autonomously interview agents and generate deep behavioral assessments. We built a similar technology at Moveworks which was used to ship 250+ enterprise agents to customers daily.

The LLM Data Company is training models in data scarce verticals

Cohesive is the agentic CRM for blue collar businesses like janitorial, pressure washing, landscaping, HVAC, and pest control businesses. Cohesive fully automates sales and marketing outreach to local businesses and property owners in the service area, helping local service businesses grow even while servicing clients in the field.

Blueshoe is an AI platform for legal research and reasoning designed to capture the structure of legal thought and allow users to work directly within the logic of caselaw. By combining advanced AI with curated legal and proprietary data pipelines, the system allows users build and test arguments with unprecedented clarity.

Prism is a platform for making short-form videos with AI.

Auctor brings alignment and intelligence to software implementation, enabling every project to deliver its intended value with clarity and precision.

Dollyglot is like Character.ai but with real time video avatars. Turn a photo and a voice into a real friend. Speak with Harry Potter about Hogwarts or brainstorm ideas with Elon Musk!

AI creative tools became powerful quickly. But they also got complicated. Most of them require creatives to do the engineering. Prompts. Parameters. Node graphs. Creative work doesn’t start there. It starts with thinking, exploring directions, and iterating on ideas. With Awen, we’re trying a different approach: A creative partner that turns intent into exceptional visuals through conversation.

Tergle builds AI to replace Auditors.

Truffle AI makes it easy for developers to integrate AI agents into any software application. We do this by exposing agents as simple APIs that can be called from anywhere. Developers have used Truffle to add customer support agents into WhatsApp and analytics agents into Slack.

Emergent builds autonomous coding agents that replace traditional software development by generating, testing, and deploying production applications directly from plain-language intent. Our systems run in production at global scale and are used to build millions of real applications. Since our public launch, Emergent has reached $50M ARR in 7 months making us one of the fastest-growing startups in the world. 5M+ users across 190+ countries have built 6M+ applications on Emergent. We've raised $100M from Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Google, Lightspeed India, Prosus Ventures, Together Fund, and Y Combinator.

assistant-ui helps frontend developers add AI chat to their apps. Our product is used by several dozen companies, like LangChain, Stack AI, Browser Use, and Athena Intelligence. We're building an open source Typescript/React library and a backend as a service, with first class integrations into popular agent frameworks like LangGraph and Vercel AI SDK.

TrainLoop makes it effortless for developers to supercharge LLM performance through reinforcement learning.

Wildcard is the AEO and GEO platform designed specifically for e-commerce and retail brands. We help merchants improve visibility across AI search and AI shopping platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Amazon Rufus. Wildcard tracks how brands, categories, collections, and SKUs appear across AI search results, identifies visibility gaps, and turns those insights into actions. We use AI agents to enrich product data, generate SEO, AEO, and GEO content, create collection and comparison pages, build FAQs, and improve off-site discoverability across Reddit, YouTube, blogs, and other sources. As AI shopping evolves, Wildcard is building the infrastructure brands need to win in agentic commerce, including support for emerging standards like the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).

Calltree makes enterprise-grade AI support reps for call centers. Our AI reps take voice calls and chats like other AI support agents but can also use internal enterprise tools like a homegrown CRM or internal dashboards, like the highly trained humans working there today.

Trava is building AI agents for global trade compliance. Importers lose billions each year to duty overpayments and filing errors. Trava audits customs entries and automates classification to help importers protect margins and stay compliant at scale.

Sennu AI builds AI systems that fundamentally transform how your business operates

City building departments are understaffed and overworked. Meanwhile, builders lobby to remove power from building departments. Because building departments are usually the only profitable/self-sustaining branch of a local government, this is problematic. Permitify allows city build-plan reviewers to 10x their productivity covering the labor shortage, reducing the time required to issue a building permit, and allowing the city government's only profitable branch to stay intact.

a0.dev is a platform that helps mobile developers build high quality apps in days instead of weeks by generating custom react native projects. We've launched top ranking apps that have been used by hundreds of thousands, and now we're creating the tools we wish we had to build faster.

Alice turns generic course materials into personalized learning and exam prep using AI. We’re Duolingo for exams, and more than 10k college students have already used Alice. Kim, the CEO, is a domain expert in education with more than 10+ years of university teaching experience. He is also technical by background. MRR is $20k, growing +10% week-over-week the last 8 weeks Alice's core market opportunity is +$10b, with the global education market being almost $10trillion. As AI starts to disrupt education, Alice will use in-built network effects and virality in its product to create a global winner. Go Alice. Thank you!

Confident AI allows companies of all sizes to benchmark, safeguard, and improve LLM applications, with best-in-class metrics and guardrails powered by DeepEval. Built by the creators of DeepEval (12.6k stars, >3m monthly downloads), Confident AI is able to offer battle-tested, open-source evaluation algorithms while providing the infrastructure needed for teams to stay confident their LLM systems.

Docs are integral to a great customer experience, but managing them is a challenging, multi-team effort. The most successful companies recognize that fantastic docs drive adoption and bad ones cause customers to churn. Promptless is used by fast-growing startups and Fortune 500 enterprises alike to automatically update docs based on feature releases, support tickets, internal Slack conversations, and more. Promptless is designed to be flexible—it can integrate with any docs platform, be triggered automatically from many workflows, and can pull in context from any internal knowledge source. With Promptless, documentation becomes a strategic advantage for growth, not a bottleneck or a liability.

x1 is building the next generation AI app studio for iOS. Instead of generating disposable demos, we provide a structured system that guides builders from idea to a production-ready App Store launch. Our platform replaces chaotic prompt loops with modular, purpose-built studios that handle everything from product design to monetization and growth. We’re turning AI app creation into a disciplined, end-to-end system.

Pearson builds AI agents to automate corporate transactions. Large law firms use us to run gigantic books of businesses with AI, reducing their cost of delivery 40-60%. We work with Orrick as our first design partner, starting with M&A due diligence and financings. $3-6T dollars flow through corporate transactions a year and lawyers take home 1-3% as their cut for every transaction ($150B / year). In the long run, we will capture 50% of the corporate transaction market with the top 30 law firms. We will then provide our AI to companies so they can execute these transactions themselves.

Endstack is a desktop OS optimized for humans and agents running in the cloud. Your desktop is powered by endOS, giving you a real desktop workspace in the browser backed by Linux in the cloud. Files, notes, browser tabs, native apps, terminals, and all your agents in one beautiful, familiar, interface. You get a powerful agent running 24/7, integrated at the system level into endOS that you can also reach via Slack, email, or SMS. Endstack desktops are also natively multiplayer, allowing for realtime collaboration with teammates.

Kura breaks 87% on the WebVoyager Benchmark. That is 31% better than Claude's Computer Use demo and 14% better than the previous State of the Art. In 10 years there will be more AI agents on the internet than humans. Kura is SOTA for giving AI agents the tools for interacting with websites.