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.

RightNow AI is a research lab building GPU infrastructure that lets teams own their AI stack instead of depending on closed-source APIs. Our platform RunInfra takes any HuggingFace model, auto-generates optimized GPU kernels, and deploys it serverlessly with pay-per-token pricing RightNow AI lab: https://rightnowai.co RunInfra platform: https://runinfra.ai.

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

Hessian is the platform for automating business operations with AI agents. We forward deploy on-site to map the work, and build the agents on our platform to run it end-to-end. Unlike off-the-shelf tools that don't know your business, you get a partner that owns the software and operates it every day. Why now? Coding agents have matured to the point where, combined with our engineering judgment we've built across a decade of shipping production systems, we can scale forward-deployed engagements with minimal headcount. Furthermore, our FDE agents and tooling will accelerate how quickly we automate workflows on our platform. We're already saving our customers hundreds of hours a month. Trillions of dollars a year are spent on knowledge work, and we're building the standard for how every company deploys, operates, and governs the AI agents that do it.

Wato gives AI agents shared memory, reusable workflows, connected tools, and living artifacts so work compounds across a team instead of disappearing into chat threads. Teams use Wato to give every agent access to trusted company context and turn useful runs into knowledge the next agent can build on.

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.

Panacea provides AI-native FDA regulatory services for Biotechs and Medical Device companies. We hire the most experienced FDA consultants in the industry (ex-FDA, decades of experience, hundreds of filings) and pair them with our AI platform to enable the fastest and lowest cost pathway to FDA approval. While other regulatory consultants bill hourly, our pricing model is simple: fixed, outcome-based pricing. Payment is only due when milestones are complete. We support all FDA regulatory pathways including IND, NDA, BLA, ODD, Pre-Subs, 510(k), De Novo, PMA, IDE, BDD, etc.

Incandor detects fraud on banking and fintech platforms by learning how every user physically behaves — mouse dynamics, keystroke timing, scroll patterns, and on mobile, how they hold their phone. Founded by two Stanford engineers and backed by Y Combinator, Incandor builds a behavioral map of every user on your platform — no fraud labels or historical data required. At the individual level, it identifies account takeovers with >99% accuracy. At the population level, coordinated rings, mule operators, and coerced sessions separate out naturally. Rather than a black-box risk score, fraud teams query the map via a programmable API.

Auxos creates simulated audiences for marketing, product, and research teams to test their hypotheses at scale. We build custom audiences for each company to validate product, pricing, and positioning decisions before going live. Currently, customer research is slow and expensive. Surveys and panels cost a fortune and it takes weeks to recruit, moderate, and gather insights. Auxos can get you population scale insights in minutes, at a fraction of the current cost.

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.

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

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

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

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

Pavoot is an AI agent for events that helps marketing and sales teams source the right attendees, personalize each guest’s experience, and turn events into pipeline. Companies spend millions on events because relationships drive revenue. Yet most interactions are never captured, event experiences remain generic, and standard follow-ups fail to convert high-potential attendees. Before the event, Pavoot identifies the attendee profiles most likely to convert and sends personalized invitations. During the event, it helps create relevant introductions and capture important conversations. After the event, it identifies top leads, generates personalized follow-ups, and syncs engagement back into the CRM. === Pavoot turns events into personalized customer journeys. Book a demo: pavoot.com

Clawvisor lets AI agents use apps like Gmail, Slack, and Google Drive without going rogue or ever seeing your credentials. You approve tasks once. Clawvisor enforces them on every request.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Light Anchor (YC P26) builds AI-run consumer brands that run at the speed of compute. Consumer brands have always been limited by the speed of humans: hiring, coordinating, and sleeping. AI agents that now run operations end-to-end break all those constraints, making a new kind of consumer business possible: one capped by compute, not headcount. Today, Light Anchor operates one flagship brand and multiple experiment stores, all run by AI agents on a shared platform that compounds with every new brand launched. The vision is thousands of consumer businesses, operating with little to no human intervention.

PLAN0 is an AI-powered construction cost intelligence platform serving real estate developers, investors, and general contractors. PLAN0 analyzes architectural plans using computer vision models to generate detailed cost estimates and analytics in minutes. Through industry partnerships, the platform is also building a database of historical and real-time localized cost data that power its analytics tools. A developer can test whether switching from concrete to steel reduces cost, a lender can stress-test against historical overrun patterns, and a contractor can lock in steel pricing ahead of forecasted hikes. The vision is to develop the Bloomberg of construction.

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 the automated USD account for global internet companies, built for humans and AI agents. Every international company today runs a fragmented finance stack: Mercury for US banking, Wise for FX, Deel for payroll, and Stripe for revenue. Legacy banks can't be automated, can't move at internet speed, and can't be operated by software. We believe every modern company will need a second account - one built on stablecoin rails, accessible via API, secure by design for autonomous code, and covering all operational primitives of a global business. HEVN is that account: receive USD globally, hold treasury in USD/USDC, and run every payment operation a global business needs - invoices, contracts, contractor payouts, vendor payments, payroll - in local currencies through local banks worldwide, with a single click or API call. 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.

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.

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