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.

Every great investment starts as an idea about the world. Institutions have teams of analysts turning those ideas into positions. Volaren is that team, processing data through fundamentals and quantitative models that can be personalized with AI. Turn your views into trades, portfolios, and strategies, or co-invest alongside top traders and hedge funds. Volaren stays with you from there, showing you what's actually driving each position and what it means for your next move.

The next constraint is not intelligence, it is the energy cost of running it. We deploy custom AI models inside energy companies that ingest SCADA data, work orders, and grid topology, operational data no public model has seen, grounded in physics-informed neural networks and differentiable grid simulators. This creates a flywheel: more operator data → better process understanding → more efficient operations → cheaper energy → cheaper AI → more deployment → more data. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uDH6pMn5OE AI compute doubles every 2.2 years. Data center demand grows from 415 to 945 TWh by 2030. Without near-zero energy cost, AI remains limited by human infrastructure. We are the layer that runs AI at zero energy cost. Energy is a $10 trillion market. The infrastructure layer doesn't exist yet. We are building it.

Applied Kinetics builds and deploys specialized AI employees to handle the coordination work behind America's energy and data center buildout. Our agents chase suppliers, track equipment approvals and delivery dates, and flag delays so project teams can keep critical equipment moving without hunting for updates across emails and spreadsheets.

Autonomous accounting platform for global companies. We close your books and give you financial clarity while you run your business.

AI made software engineers 100x more productive. We're bringing that same transformation to knowledge workers with the AI desktop.

Lark builds specialized AI agents that automate manual workflows for wholesale distributors. Our agents work with existing ERP systems, learning from each distributor’s historical data and the team’s decisions. Together, these agents can run a distributor’s entire operation.

Ignition is an AI-native employee benefits brokerage for companies with under 200 employees. Health insurance is one of the largest line items these companies carry, and employers absorb 15 to 40% rate increases year after year without ever seeing their own numbers. We have rebuilt the sales and back office to be AI-first. This market represents about $500B of market cap, and those businesses have not fundamentally changed in over 50 years. While scaling Plated, I wore every HR hat from doing payroll myself, to managing a PEO, to eventually hiring an employee benefits broker on our way to 1,500 employees. We wasted over $4M on benefits over 5 years, and I'm building Ignition to help companies under 200 employees avoid making my mistakes.

* Ready to Use Instantly: Skip the complex server setup. It comes pre loaded with top AI Agents (like Claude Code and Hermes) so your agents can start working immediately. * Keep Your Work Safe: Unlike other systems that delete everything when they finish a task, these sandboxes remember your files, code, and settings forever until you delete them. * Pay Only for What You Use: Stop paying for idle servers. You pay a tiny fee to store your files, but you only pay for compute power during the exact minutes your AI is actively running. * Zero Infrastructure Headaches: You don’t need to be a senior DevOps engineer or manage complex cloud networks. One simple command handles the entire backend for you. * Connect to Any App: Allow your AI agents to securely log into and interact with everyday tools like Slack, Gmail, and GitHub in just a few clicks.

Papaya is the optimization engine for AI agents. Engineers don't have time to continually improve the agents they've shipped — the context bloat, overly chatty subagents, and broken tool calls sit in production traces nobody reads, quietly hurting agent efficiency. With Papaya they connect their agent directly via SDK, get actionable recommendations on how to improve quality, latency, and cost, and the ones they approve are pushed to production as pull requests. Papaya runs 200+ research-backed analyses across context, prompts, prompt caching, subagents, and tool calls. Every recommendation is ranked by impact and comes with the production runs that produced it — typically a 10%+ quality improvement on the first workflow analysis.

Mirrors provides regression testing for AI agents. Teams shipping agents constantly change prompts, models, and tools, and there's no way to test any of it. Agents call bespoke internal tools and APIs no test framework can reproduce, so most teams ship on vibes. Mirrors rebuilds the tools your agent calls from your own production traces, then replays real sessions against every change before it merges. You see which tool calls changed, which arguments moved, and where state landed differently. And when something fails, we tell you whether your agent regressed or something upstream moved. Built for teams whose agents take irreversible actions. Refunds, record updates, outbound email. Runs in your CI on every PR.

Shepherd Robotics builds general purpose robots for skilled physical work across AI infrastructure and advanced manufacturing. Our robots are powered by robot foundation models and use modular, flexible hardware designed to adapt to different environments and tasks. We train our systems on a combination of real world and simulation data so they can learn complex manipulation skills and generalize across workflows. We are starting with tasks such as data center construction and operations, cable and wire manufacturing, wire harness assembly, kitting, and factory packaging, where traditional automation struggles with variability, dexterity, and changing environments.

Sona8 is a voice agent that talks to every employee about how their work gets done. Consulting, transformation and corporate development teams spend a large part of every project on stakeholder interviews and stakeholder alignment, and still only hear from a small share of the people affected. Each employee gets a link and talks to the agent for about 20 minutes. The agent asks follow-up questions, for example why a step is still done by hand or who else is involved. From the conversations we build process maps and a list of the problems people described, by site and team. During the implementation, the agent goes back to the employees involved after each initiative and asks whether it was implemented and what changed. The result is a project management office that has talked to every employee. Today consulting firms buy it for the stakeholder interviews at the start of an engagement. Transformation and corporate development teams buy it to run the implementation of a change program. Over time this becomes the way a company knows how it runs. Sona8 reads the systems the company already uses, connects them to what employees said, and keeps the picture current by asking again. Before a decision, you ask what it would do across sites and teams and get an answer from the whole company. A small team steers a company-wide program that used to need a large one. And AI agents inside the company come here first to learn how the work is done before they change anything.

ByteAsk is an AI coding agent built for C and C++, the code that runs trading systems, cars, chips, and operating systems. It does not stop at a diff that looks right. ByteAsk builds, debugs, and tests every change with the real toolchain until the change holds. If the compiler, the debugger, or the tests can catch it, then ByteAsk catches it too. It runs from the terminal or inside VS Code, Neovim, and Emacs, and is available fully on-prem.

Build agents that research accounts, find prospects, run campaigns, update your CRM, qualify inbound, and more. Connect them to the systems you already use and let them work alongside your GTM team. Engineer your revenue factory on Frontrunner.

We design and collect audio datasets for training speech models.

Every instance of intelligence occurring in nature is embodied. Scientific intelligence is no different. We are building general-purpose robotic experimentalists: systems that unite scientific reasoning and physical action to iterate toward discovery by observing, hypothesizing and experimenting.

We're building the open benchmark for commerce. Builders submit shopping agents. Independent validators run them against problems that change daily. The best agent earns the rewards, and every run becomes training data.

Hesper AI builds AI agents that investigate P&C insurance claims end to end. Hesper’s agents read the claim file, detect tampered documents, verify facts, check coverage, flag inconsistencies, and produce an audit-ready case file in minutes, so insurers can check every claim. We work with Claims and SIU orgs at Carriers, MGAs and TPAs,

Dreamscale Labs is building the fastest cloud inference platform for robotics. As complex physical AI models become difficult to fit on expensive on-robot GPUs, we let users offload inference to the cloud and serve them with real-time latency. So far, we've hit 40-50% lower latency than existing neoclouds.

Hopper post-trains STT, TTS, and speech LLMs on your production calls, then serves and improves them against your live traffic

OnePatch is a forward-deployed AI SRE. It instruments your services, watches how they actually behave in prod, catches incidents, and drives each one to resolution. Think Datadog, except it doesn't stop at telling you something broke: it keeps going until the fix is shipped.

Frontier is first to grow biological brains at scale, serving biological neural nets with substrate-level colocation of memory and compute, enabling highly cost effective training of large parameter count models. While academia has traditionally been limited to ~1M neurons in vitro, Frontier has built a pathway to scale to 100M+ neurons by circumventing traditional scaling challenges in biological culture, demonstrating this strategy's functionality by training a biological brain using this scaling primitive to play Frogger. Frontier is now growing exascale compute clusters to produce substrates capable of long-horizon language reasoning while operating at much higher sample efficiencies than traditional architectures, and collocating memory with compute to enable significantly larger parameter counts than would be tractable for training within traditional compute clusters.

Intelligent Cloud for AI workloads

Workers IO verifies your entire system across millions of interleaving, faults, and timings to find the exact conditions that break the software properties you care about. Built for teams where 99.99% uptime is table-stakes.

Redoubt is a commercial insurance agency for small businesses. We believe our customers are our most important business partners, and they deserve our full attention. Machines can already handle the boring parts, the next step is to continually learn from experience.

Nobody's built truly proactive AI, because it requires running inference on your entire life. In the cloud, that's insanely expensive and a privacy nightmare. But not on your own chip. Every night, Sentient's on-device LLM wakes your Mac and understands what's new in your life (email, messages, files, Granola transcripts...), entirely locally, and distills it into a knowledge base. You wake up to your work already prepared: the reply you forgot, drafted from your own context; the subscription you never use renewing tomorrow, caught; the report you promised in the group chat, ready to send. Everything is one click from firing through computer use, and nothing fires until you click. Or click your Mac notch anytime and say "finish this for me." Sidekick takes over the thing you were doing with its own cursor while you move on. On-device inference at this scale was supposed to be impossible: devices too slow, and models too dumb. So we built the stack ourselves: a custom LiteRT-LM fork (KV-cache reuse, speculative decoding, custom k-quants) that runs nightly on 8 GB Macs. The user's hardware does ~90% of the compute, and their own ChatGPT or Claude subscription does the rest, so our marginal cost is ~$0, and our servers store nothing. We soft-launched late July with one Reddit post: top of r/macapps, 2,000+ users in 48 hours, $0 marketing. Free and open source for consumers; the same engine on the work stack (Slack, Granola, Linear, Notion) becomes the enterprise business. Sentient OS raised ~$1M in pre-seed, backed by YC, Afore, and the a16z Speedrun scout fund.

Allia is the first full-stack, AI-native clinical group for mental health. We bring independent practices into one national clinical group that can deliver, measure, and improve care at scale - 600+ providers (350+ therapists, 200+ nurses & doctors, 30+ psychologists) across 70 sites in 32 states, plus telehealth nationwide. Every clinician runs on a single intelligent system of record. And, that intelligence coupled with scale unlocks what no single practice could achieve alone.

Studio is a simulation lab studying how humans and societies respond to new ideas, and is building the first software models that can accurately predict that response. Instead of creating digital twins of survey respondents, Studio builds live market models of interconnected audience segments from real, traceable consumer-behavior data. Our simulations match live KPI outcomes like revenue and purchase behavior with over 97% accuracy for consumer-facing enterprises, higher than any synthetic panel, simulation lab, or traditional market research.

OpenTag is an AI coworker in your Slack with full context on your company. It answers questions and takes real work off your plate. It also keeps your wiki up to date automatically, so knowledge never goes stale.

Lantern learns what exceptional looks like for your team, pressure-tests the role against the real talent market, then runs the hiring loop: sourcing, inbound applications, interviews, assessments, candidate communication, and offers.

Callbook AI is a collections agency operated by AI. We collect late stage portfolios by finding, contacting and negotiating with borrowers.

Grocalo (S26) is an AI brain that runs content for creators. We understand their audiences, using video understanding and deep platform analytics to bottle up the taste behind each creator and personalize and distribute content to creator specific audiences. Grocalo generated 2B views and gained 4M followers for our creators in the last 2 months. Some of our clients include Jimmy O. Yang (Comedian, 11M followers), King Bach (72M followers), Leenda Dong (28M followers), Steven He (30M followers), Sheena Melwani (18M followers), and Jeannie Mai (TV host, 6M followers). Content should be personalized and data-driven. We’ve developed the most advanced AI brain replicating viral content for any given audience.

Marker is a platform for rebuilding enterprises agent-first, delivered by forward-deployed engineers. It productizes every step from discovery to production, so every agent we ship makes the next one faster.

antimattr builds a voice-first hardware interface for human-agent interaction that includes a ring and a pair of earphones. Designed to make more of your voice, the ring can record and summarise your conversations, capture thoughts on the go, or control your agents. The earphones use proprietary voice isolation technology to block out background noise entirely, so you can take a clear call from a loud pub or dictate with real accuracy. Reserve early access at https://www.antimattr.one/project-mnemosyne [use code YC at checkout]

Billions of people need tourist visas to travel the world. We use AI agents to prepare applications, verify documents, secure appointments, and handle the visa process end to end.

Touchy is your personal AI assistant that lives on your iPhone. One button press and you're talking to an assistant that sees what you see, remembers what you tell it, and takes action across 1,000+ apps--so you can get back to living in the moment.

Hardware teams burn weeks on procurement. An engineer needs a part. Someone emails five distributors, chases quotes, gets an approval, wires the money, tracks a shipment across three carriers, clears customs, and then nobody knows where the box is or what's actually on the shelf. Waybill runs that entire loop. Send us a part, a spec, or a BOM. We source it, pull quotes, route approvals, pay the supplier, handle freight and customs, track it to your dock, and keep your stock count updated. Take your supply chain for granted. Built by a team that's seen it at LAT Aerospace and WareIQ (YC S20).

Bernard builds AI employees for home and commercial appliance servicers. They work across phone, text, email, warranty feeds, and existing systems to manage customer communication, scheduling, and dispatch, carrying each job through diagnosis, parts preparation, technician handoff, and follow-up. At the center is Pre-ID, which combines the exact appliance and its symptoms with repair history, similar completed visits, manufacturer guidance, and parts data to produce a diagnosis, ranked parts, and follow-up questions. Technicians arrive prepared with the right parts, helping servicers complete more repairs on the first visit. We’re building the world’s most efficient appliance servicers, creating happier customers and a more connected appliance ecosystem. Learn more at https://bernardhq.com/

Dream makes AI cameras that catch damage teams miss. Car dealerships, equipment rental companies, fleets, and more move expensive assets in and out all day, and undocumented damage is a costly leak. Dream cameras are simple to set up and work automatically. Each vehicle or machine that passes is photographed from every angle, identified, and reconstructed into a complete condition record. On return or intake, Dream instantly flags new dents, scrapes, and changes your team might miss, giving one source of truth for every asset's condition over time. Ryland worked at X/xAI and built aerial damage-detection vision at Vexcel Imaging. Alexander worked at AWS and trained edge-camera models deployed in the wild across Africa and India to detect poachers.

We've built voice agents for the largest work comp managed care orgs and specialist PT networks in the country, making >500K calls annually and accelerating the speed at which they coordinate care. On average, our customers see a 40% increase in workflow completion, 10x decrease in cycle times, and >60% reduction in cost. We think voice agents are the starting point for solving slow and fragmented care coordination in this market. Companies that manage an injured worker's care rely on short-staffed contact centres and archaic methods of info exchange: phone, fax, and email. Every delay along the path of care leads to slower rehab of the injured worker, lower throughput for providers, and higher expense for the insurer/employer.

Palisade spins up a personal sales agent for every single visitor to your website. Marketplaces like trading card platforms, vintage stores, and short-term rental operators sell more when each customer works with a personal agent that remembers them.

We enable companies monetize their agents' traces.

Mochi is an app to watch and create anime microdramas: fast paced shows with a cliffhanger every minute. We produce originals with AI, collaborating with writers from Marvel, Cartoon Network, and Toei Animation, and our users can also create in app too - with over 500 episodes created each day from 3,000+ creators.

PRINCEPS is the first purpose-built insurance company for the trillion-dollar compute buildout. We underwrite SLA, GPU residual value, and outage risk, and price the coverage that unlocks cheaper financing for data centers and neoclouds.

Led by former institutional proxy voters and technologists with a collective 20+ years of experience, Pennant gives institutional investors, public companies, and corporate advisors voting and governance intelligence to act on their own principles at scale.