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.

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 certifies and insures autonomous AI agents. We audit your agents and back them with AI-native liability coverage. Built for startups bringing AI to enterprise clients, self-serve from day one. The problem: AI agents are taking actions autonomously, buying, emailing, modifying data. AB 316 already holds deployers liable. EU AI Act enforces in August. Cyber insurance is excluding AI claims. Startups shipping agents to enterprise 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 $40M revenue, 5 years managing claims, underwriting, and carrier relationships) + Julien (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.

Dayjob builds autonomous AI workers for transport operations. Our scheduling agent plugs into existing ERPs and continuously re-optimises routes in real time - handling new jobs, driver changes, and exceptions automatically. Customers in waste management see 8%+ efficiency gains from day one.

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 white-label AI builder 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 for B2B vertical SaaS.

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.

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 provides a security agent that monitors your agent. It intercepts tool calls, enforces governance policies, and blocks attacks in real time. Covers prompt injection, memory poisoning, privilege escalation, and more. It sits on top of your existing agent setup with minimal integration.

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 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.

We built the most accurate indirect prompt injection classifier available today, trained by the team behind Microsoft's Prompt Shields. Our model catches the attacks that generic guardrails miss: hidden instructions embedded in documents, emails, tool outputs, and retrieval results that manipulate your agent from the inside. Connect your observability stack and Benchspan monitors every LLM call, tool invocation, and RAG retrieval in production. We learn your agents' normal behavior and flag data exfiltration, unauthorized tool access, and behavioral drift before they cause damage

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 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.

Foaster is building the AI-native partner for AI transformation. We help companies become AI-native by building a deep understanding of how they actually operate, then using that understanding to decide where AI should be deployed, what should change, and how to make the transformation stick. Our AI agents conduct private 45-minute interviews across the organization, in parallel, to capture how work really happens: workflows, tools, handoffs, bottlenecks, dependencies, and what people think should change. From those interviews, we build a living operational map of the company and use it to produce transformation blueprints grounded in real operational data. This is work that, done manually, would have required very large teams working full-time. AI is what allows us to do it with far greater speed, depth, and consistency. And we do not stop at a one-off plan. Every month, our system updates its understanding of the business, tracks adoption, refreshes the operational map, surfaces new opportunities, and delivers personalized AI upskilling to employees based on their exact role and context. Our human experts focus where humans matter most: validating recommendations, building trust, and helping companies execute over time. For enterprise deployments, our forward-deployed engineers help embed AI directly into workflows and systems.

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 - AI voice agents for contact centers. Over half the world's contact center infrastructure still runs on legacy telephony (CUCM, on-prem PBX, carrier-grade SIP) - a $70B+ market where current AI voice platforms can't natively integrate. We plug into these environments without requiring a rip-and-replace. We serve clients across three continents, including brands like DunkinDonut.

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.

Korso builds AI agents that handle the operational work manufacturers still do manually, including processing RFQs, following up on quotes, coordinating with suppliers, and keeping production on track when things go wrong. Our agents plug into your existing ERP and CRM, understand your workflows, and act on your behalf: triaging incoming requests, chasing delayed orders, notifying customers, and escalating only when human judgment is truly needed. We built Korso around the reality that enterprise systems cannot afford mistakes. Every agent action passes through verification layers, tools are scoped, and critical operations go through dry-run validation and secondary review. Full audit trails mean you can see exactly what was done, why, and when. Most AI automation breaks down at the ERP integration layer. Korso's orchestration is built for the messiness of real manufacturing systems, with long-running workflows that span weeks and checkpointing that never loses progress. Instead of replacing your systems, Korso makes them work harder, so your team spends less time on coordination and more time on the work that actually matters.

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.

Fuchsia 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. Our 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