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.

Hi, I'm Thomas, and my creator is named Thomas :p Thomas is the first YC-backed AI founder: a virtual human who starts, runs, and grows his own companies on the internet.

We believe in the next generation of finance where everyone around the world can access the global market and liquidity from the tip of their hands. We are building the best mobile trading app that will enable this vision. Hyperliquid is the house of all finance, Instinct is the app of all finance. Hyperliquid.

ValCtrl is building the world model for Prediction Finance. Prediction markets contain useful prices about the future, but today those prices are fragmented across venues, titles, rules, and proxy contracts. Users think in beliefs; markets are stored as scattered contracts. Our first product is Kassandre Search. Users type a natural-language belief, and Kassandre maps it to relevant prediction markets with backtrace and quality labels. Existing markets are the first scaffold. The long-term product path is search -> composed exposures -> native quotes -> gated bet/trade placement, with legal/compliance gates respected at each step. We are looking for hard belief-to-market queries from forecasters, investors, operators, and YC founders.

Describe an experiment in plain English, and Infera turns it into a validated, instrument-ready run across the equipment your lab already uses. Infera handles the protocol logic, vendor-specific scripts, data, inventory, and institutional knowledge in one system. An AI-native compiler for the lab: one system from intent to execution.

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.

Soria is an AI-native Bloomberg Terminal for investors who specialize in a particular sector, starting with healthcare. Our agents convert hundreds of the most important public and private sources into an always-on financial model, reviewed by domain experts and delivered to hedge funds, banks, and asset managers through a terminal UI, MCP, API, warehouse sync, and research feed. Unlike our competitors, we own the data layer and expand bottom-up, one sector at a time - additionally our agents proactively do research on behalf of our clients without them lifting a finger or sharing any data.

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.

GUILD is a Neoprime contractor automating defense supply chain end-to-end by vertically integrating with our supplier partners. We integrate artificial intelligence, contracting operations, and capital to source, fund, produce, and deliver defense contracts end-to-end. Operating across the U.S. and NATO markets, we bridge global manufacturing capacity with defense demand and execute with the speed and precision of an AI-driven system. Our mission is to build a modern, new generation defense contracting institution where technology and production operate as one.

AI marketing service for developer tools. We turn your real product into social posts and demo videos in your voice automatically. Think of it as a clone of you that's also marketing your company at the same time. Memoir is one system. It reads your repo, drives your live staging app with an AI agent, generates branded demo videos with synthetic data so dashboards look real and narrates them in a voice cloned from yours. For the social side, we monitor what's actually getting traction in your space right now. The threads going viral on dev-tools X, the posts climbing on HN, the formats your audience is engaging with this week, and we draft posts in your writing voice that ride those currents. You review everything before it goes out. The output is indistinguishable from how you'd write and record it yourself, if you had the time and a full marketing team behind you.

Auxos builds AI customer twins for marketing, product, and research teams to test their hypotheses at scale. We work with companies to create 1:1 replicas of their customers by sourcing and interviewing real people in their ICP, allowing us to accurately model how they behave and make decisions. Currently, market research is too slow and expensive to use on anything but the biggest decisions. Surveys and panels cost a fortune and it takes weeks to recruit, moderate, and gather insights. Auxos provides a 24/7 available customer panel that can give population-scale insights in minutes. The day-to-day decisions surrounding product, pricing, and positioning can now be validated with the same rigor that used to be reserved for the big ones.

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.

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.

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.

Netter (YC P26) helps companies regain control over their data, so teams can pilot their activities with high precision. Most companies are sitting on years of valuable data, spread across different formats and disconnected tools that don't talk to each other. Netter brings technical capacity to companies that don't have an army of data engineers, and tackles their most complex data challenges. - 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 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 is the system companies use to measure and improve how agents discover, interact 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.

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 3-5× more projects without adding headcount. From plan upload to bid package, every part of the workflow gets faster.

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.

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.

HEVN is API primitives for global payments. Companies use our API to build internal tools for paying contractors in 100+ countries, replacing Deel and Rippling with custom workflows tailored to their business. The opportunity is that AI codegen made internal tools cheap to build. A company that used to pay $50 per contract in huge SaaS can now build their own version in days, if they have the financial primitives. We provide those primitives. Team previously built HOT Labs - 15M users, $100M TVL, #1 crypto app on DappRadar for 8 months. Operated companies across SF, UAE, BVI, and HK, and felt all the pain of global payments automation ourselves.

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.

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 is consolidating the IT function into a single platform powered by secure, always-on agents who understand your business. Help desk, access, hardware, on/off-boarding, security, procurement are automated end-to-end inside the channels your team already uses (Slack, Teams, Email, Voice, WhatsApp, Telegram).

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.

TLDR: Mount is building the AI insurance carrier, starting with liability coverage for deployed AI agents. As everyone moves AI Agents into production and gives them more responsibility, we help businesses insure and secure them. Whenever responsibility shifts from human operators to autonomous systems, so too does the liability that accompanies it. The systems also introduce new risks: agentic software failures, prompt injection attacks, autonomous workflow errors, data leaks, and more. Legacy insurance was not built for this. Existing policies are often silent, ambiguous, or exclude autonomous software, and traditional insurers lack the data and technical capability to assess deployed AI Systems. Our first product, the Mount AI Liability Policy, is built for mid-market and enterprise companies deploying autonomous AI agents in real business processes. We scan and red-team AI deployments, quantify operational risk, help fix vulnerabilities, and insure the residual risk with purpose-built AI liability coverage. Mount is best thought of as a highly automated version of today's commercial insurance carriers, which run on manual workflows, layers of intermediaries, and tens of thousands of employees. AI enables automation of underwriting, pricing, policy issuance, claims, fraud detection, customer support, and distribution. We believe that the best way to use this opportunity is to rebuild those processes from the ground up.

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.

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.

Ara is the self-driving IDE for software teams. It watches work in progress, suggests the next step, and executes tasks through non-invasive computer use, background agents, memory, and reusable skills. Ara turns coding into a closed loop: suggest, act, learn, improve.

Sherpa automatically increases website conversion rates by analyzing visitor behavior, building new page variants, and continuously A/B testing them. Customers typically see a 15-20% lift on their primary conversion metric in their first 30 days.

Saudara AI is an AI broker connecting American brands with vetted overseas factories. US brands import $3T in goods a year and lose billions to ghost suppliers, hidden fees, and blown deadlines. The factories that actually deliver sit behind decades-old relationships outsiders can't break into. We were born into them. Every deal runs through a real human broker, supercharged by AI that handles sourcing, quoting, QC, and logistics. 10x faster, at a fraction of the cost. Sourcing is the largest broken market in global trade. We're the on-ramp.

AI Agents to build, debug and automate analog circuit design

Gojiberry is building the AI GTM team for B2B companies. We start with outbound: Gojiberry finds buyers showing intent, enriches them, reaches out, follows up, handles replies, and books qualified meetings. Companies use Gojiberry to replace the old way of doing outbound: buying tools, hiring SDRs & agencies, testing lists, writing messages, and guessing what works. Gojiberry turns it into one AI team that finds buyers and books meetings. Every campaign makes Gojiberry smarter. It learns which buyers convert, which signals matter, which messages get replies, and which actions create revenue. Over time, Gojiberry uses what works across similar companies and industries to help every new customer get better results from day one. Long term, Gojiberry will become the system that finds every revenue opportunity and acts on it: outbound leads, website visitors, inbound leads, old CRM leads, replies, meetings, CRM updates, new campaign ideas, and account expansion. The goal is to make every B2B company able to run a high-performing GTM team without hiring one. We grew from $0 to $2.5M ARR in 10 months, are growing 35% MoM, profitable, and used by 2,000+ customers. Customers get 2-5x more positive replies than traditional outbound.

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