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.

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.

Alchemize is an AI-native customs brokerage. Importers are currently hindered by legacy brokers relying on manual workflows, where hand-keyed entries and slow research result in preventable shipping delays, lack of visibility, and unnecessary costs. Alchemize automates these workflows, delivering expert-level compliance at software speed.

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.

Arctic Health is building AI-native credentialing and contracting for healthcare organizations. We automate the full workflow, from establishing payer contracts to enrolling each provider. We collect and validate organization and provider data according to each state and payer’s requirements, and submit on the organization's behalf. We then monitor status and compliance on an ongoing basis. Tools on the market today either perform small pieces of the workflow or price out small and mid-sized organizations. We handle the process end-to-end regardless of organization type or size. Our browser automations enable AI agents to submit and monitor across hundreds of payer portals, and our system is trained by experienced industry experts who handle every edge case. Healthcare organizations get one simple platform. We handle the rest.

Klarify handles everything therapists do outside the session, 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 reads the session and does the work that comes after it: notes, treatment plans, clinical letters, insurance claims, client homework, supervision prep, and the profile pages that bring in new clients. 5,600 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.

As we shift from user experience to agent experience, the entire way we design, operate, and evaluate our products must be rethought. The first step is to understand how agents use products through MCPs and CLIs, the exact same way we used to understand how users interacted with UIs. Armature automates agent workflow testing. Connect your MCP, CLI and ChatGPT apps and let Armature discover the workflows agents actually run. Armature will then continuously test them across every harness (Claude Code, Codex, Openclaw, etc.) and frontier model and show you how you perform, how you compare to your competitors as well as alert you when something breaks.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 clones of popular SaaS platforms that hold state across requests and behave like the originals, so you catch bugs before your agent does something irreversible in production.

The Imperfect app pulls your data to create a personalized AI coach for your next race. It adapts your training, recovery, and nutrition to how your body is actually responding.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Imagine Wispr Flow got hands. Ara is a voice-first AI agent that lives in the notch of your Mac and actually drives your computer for you. Speak a command and Ara moves the cursor, clicks through apps, fills out forms, and navigates the browser in the background, without taking over your screen. We reverse-engineered Codex-level computer use and reinvented the interface around it: ACP from day one, bring your own subscription.