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.

Maingen builds RL environments for industrial operations ($5 trillion slice of the US economy) so frontier labs can train models that actually run factories.

Orvixo uses AI to build reactive end-to-end planning and optimisation models for manufacturers.

Evaluating models for social behavior, safety, and performance through multi-agent simulated games. We use popular games like Catan, Risk, or Poker, and make humans come play them against talking AI opponents, but on the backend we're actually running a multi-agent environment used to evaluate the models for skill and behavior over large sample sizes. You can play in Social Arena and view our preliminary benchmarks today at https://olamlabs.ai/

Last Accounting Company (LAC) is a full-stack AI accounting firm. We sell the same service (bookkeeping, tax filings, etc.) as a traditional accounting firm, but underneath agents handle everything and a certified accountant signs off. Our service is faster, cheaper, and fully integrated, allowing our clients to focus on what matters, not accounting admin. LAC replaces both outsourced accountants and legacy accounting software for startups and SMBs. Our system is fully proprietary, from the general ledger to the accounting agents. This allows us to create powerful self-reinforcing loops and ultimately provide a state-of-the-art accounting service.

Vendo is the customization layer that lets your users build their own features and micro-apps directly on top of your product. Rather than waiting on an ever-growing feature backlog, your users can personalize the product to exactly how they work, create their own automations, and integrate hundreds of external tools, all without your team writing a line of code. Everything runs on your existing API, renders natively in your own theme and components, and executes inside secure sandboxes within your existing security guardrails, so your source code is never touched. Companies can plug Vendo into an agent they already have, or deploy a production-ready agent complete with the ability to take actions in the product, generate UI, and draw on a built-in knowledge base. Vendo is open source and installs with a single command, and we work closely with teams to get it running for their product.

We're scaling self-improving AI scientist teams to ideate/experiment/discover, generating new knowledge autonomously. Their discoveries reduced ARC-1/2 costs by 10,000× while maintaining state-of-the-art accuracy and yielded material advances on combinatorial ML problems. We believe that AI is bounded not by compute, but ideas. Scaling to millions of sessions of discovery enables leveraging its own discoveries and presents a novel training source capable of ushering a new era of self-reliant foundational models.

Field technicians are bad at documenting their jobs, which paralyzes the back office. Kebra ends that. We guide technicians in the field and capture the exact job details the back office needs. Before the truck leaves the driveway, Kebra turns every job into complete notes, warranty claims, parts ordered, and follow-up sales opportunities. Over time, every job feeds your Company Brain, so your best technicians’ expertise never leaves the company. Kebra will power the first $100M-a-year field service company with no back office.

Bizmark is the bespoke operating system for manufacturers. It connects the systems, spreadsheets, and knowledge a company already has, and turns them into optimized decisions and automated workflows: quotes priced in minutes, schedules that reflow when a machine goes down, inventory balanced between service levels and cash. Working product in weeks, not years. Building it with our first customers now.

Billow handles the work of Accounting and FP&A FTEs while keeping teams compliant and audit-ready. We work within existing stacks (NetSuite, Coupa, and 80+ other systems) and complex spreadsheets, chasing down information and coordinating approvals across stakeholders. Built by repeat founders; Joan built and exited an accounting/ERP platform (45,000 businesses in 4 years) and Phil built Bloomberg's financial “brain” data infrastructure, and as CTO of a trading platform ($1B in volume). Advisors include CFOs, controllers, auditors from publicly-traded biopharma, and a Big-4 Accounting firm.

Donkey is the modern trading company. We buy straight from Chinese factories and sell delivered to US importers: one USD price to their dock, duty paid, our own inspectors on the factory floor before the factory gets paid. Most importers buy through trading companies that mark up every container 15 to 30 percent and never reveal the factory. US customs records are public. Almost nobody reads them, so we arrive already knowing their supply lane. They send one photo of a part they reorder. We name the factory that actually makes it and beat their landed cost in 72 hours, or they keep their supplier. We take title, run the inspection, move the money, and offer credit-insured net-45 terms to qualified buyers. The old trading giants ran this coordination with tens of thousands of people. Our machine runs it with a handful, and every settled order compounds the pricing and reliability data the next one runs on. Team in SF and China, English and Mandarin. Know a US importer buying from China? Send them our way: one photo of a part, and we will name their factory. donkey.trade

Daqstra is the AI-native orchestration layer for physical R&D. It saves engineers in Aerospace, Energy and Robotics hundreds of man hours managing test infrastructure by connecting fragmented test hardware, bringing live and historical test data into one place, and by giving engineers an API to orchestrate their entire test setup. We enable teams to spend less time rebuilding test infrastructure and more time improving the hardware they test.

Autonomous software for hotels that takes over all front-of-house and back-of-house tasks with zero integrations, running operations better than your staff would. Axelrod is trusted by Michelin Key awarded boutique hotels and is live across 4 continents.

Rapidfolio helps banks and fintechs fully automate back-office workflows like fraud investigations, KYB/KYC and loan underwriting, with accuracy and auditability. Built by fintech founders and operators, Rapidfolio is on a mission to ensure banks and fintechs scale their customer base without adding another back-office head count.

Rational builds AI coworkers for accounting firms. Our agents onboard themselves to the firm, build a company brain, and do the work, from month-end close to tax prep. In addition, they follow up with clients and communicate with the right members of your team.

Illume is a 24/7 AI personal health & longevity companion that connects your wearables, blood panels, and genomic data to text you personalized and actionable insights. We pull in your health data and fuse it into one secure model. You get daily text updates on what changed, what it means, and what to do next; conversational health Q&A like "What should I do to improve my bloodwork?"; cross-data trend detection that catches patterns individual platforms miss; and a full platform to dig deeper, explore your health data, and text your Illume agent anytime. We're 3 MIT grads & friends, with experience at Windsurf, MIT CSAIL, Eli Lilly, & the Broad Institute.

The promise of AI agents is still unmet in complex, real-world business environments. Our mission is to make it possible for agents to reliably accomplish concrete and useful tasks. That’s why we're building **Alexandria,** the world's largest library of real-world business workflow datasets.

Fabraix builds state-of-the-art AI red-teaming agents that continuously detect security vulnerabilities in customer-facing AI. Our product, Nyx, has already found vulnerabilities in agents at dozens of Fortune 500 companies. On AgentHarm, the leading benchmark for offensive AI security, Nyx achieved a 78% attack success rate, compared with 67% for GPT-5.6 Sol. Companies usually pay for penetration tests one project at a time. They select which systems to include, give a team a few weeks to find vulnerabilities, and receive a report when the project ends. Testing everything this way is very expensive. Globally, penetration tests cover only 26% of the software attack surface. AI agents can change more often than teams can test them. A new model, prompt, tool, permission, or data source can change what an agent does, even when the application code stays the same. The report describes only the version that was tested. AI is also increasing how much software companies produce and how often it changes. We built Nyx to automate this work. It does three things: 1. Nyx connects through the same interfaces customers use. It tests chat, voice, browser, and coding agents without source code or a special integration. 2. It draws on more than 10,000 jailbreaks that we have collected and classified, the largest such library we know of. 3. It uses each response to decide what to try next and can pursue a promising approach for hundreds of turns. In our tests, these adaptive attacks succeeded 20 times as often as attacks that were replayed unchanged or stopped after a fixed number of turns. Nyx often finds its first vulnerability within minutes or hours rather than days or weeks. Because the work is automated, companies can repeat the test with every change and at much lower cost. We're also the team behind ACE (Adversarial Cost to Exploit), a benchmark that measures AI security in terms of how much it costs attackers to break an AI system; providing a game-theoretic framework to understand how motivated a rational attacker would be in exploiting the system.

Assemble accelerates IT teams by performing development work inside core enterprise systems like ERP, CRM, and HRIS. Our agents help IT teams scope dependencies, build logic, and validate changes across your systems.

OneCLI is a credential isolation gateway for AI agents. Agents see placeholder tokens instead of real API keys and OAuth credentials, the real secrets are injected at the network layer, so a compromised or misbehaving agent can never leak them. Teams get per-agent access control, full audit logs, and one-click integrations with Gmail, GitHub, Jira, Slack, and 50+ other apps. OneCLI is open source (2.5K+ GitHub stars, 300K+ downloads), Already the default credential layer for products like NanoClaw.

An open-source toolkit to capture traces, evaluate cheaper models against benchmarks, and ship specialist routes you own. Capture traces from LLM production workflows with a single install that deploys within coding agents you already use. Hosted infrastructure is optional. Evaluate the captured traces and set a benchmark for success. Every future model switch meets or exceeds it in A/B testing. Train and fine-tune a new model on prompts and weights you always own. Start locally and scale into cloud-hosted processes as you see success. Deploy a new model only when the held-out eval is beaten. Serve it wherever you want. Production data feeds back into training and compounds performance over time. Test. Learn. Deploy. Repeat.

Osseus is the secure research brain for R&D teams. Today, research knowledge is fragmented across specialist tools, decisions, conversations, and people's heads. Osseus crafts this into a permissioned memory that grows with every experiment, decision, failure, and lesson learned. Rather than only retrieving the current state of connected tools, Osseus preserves how work evolved: what was tried, what failed, why decisions were made, and who holds the relevant context. Each person gets a personal AI agent that uses this growing history to proactively surface relevant evidence, help prevent duplicated work and repeated mistakes, and identify the exact expert who can unblock the next decision. By preserving both technical history and the organizational know-how behind team processes and decision making, Osseus helps R&D teams move faster before time and money are wasted.

Palette is an interactive multimodal generation platform that helps people create, personalize, and maintain multimedia content at scale. Instead of relying on fragmented creative tools or manual production workflows, Palette enables them to generate, edit, and transform text, images, and video using natural language. Whether creating customer experiences, product content, educational materials, or internal communications, Palette makes professional-quality media generation accessible through a single interface.

Alkera is a data engineering/analysis/science agent that works in your IDE or CLI. If you’re tired of agents that produce false, or even dangerous, reports about your data, then Alkera is for you. Our agent is equipped with your data’s history and lineage, your team’s knowledge, and tailored plugins for data apps such as Snowflake and dbt. Simply install and connect your services to begin doing trusted agentic data work. We also offer VPC & on-prem deployment options for when data can't leave your boundary.

Skymerse is building one AI system for airline flight operations: from planning and monitoring in the operations center to real-time support in the cockpit. It is developing specialized aeronautical models that understand the data, constraints, and procedures behind each flight, replacing fragmented tools and manual interpretation. Notamify, its first product, already serves airline customers and thousands pilots and aviation professionals.

Alloovium is the document intelligence layer for construction 🏗️ It reads every document and piece of data on a project (contracts, specs, drawings, compliance records, conversations), turning them into answers you can trust and actions with real value: every answer cites its exact source sentence, paperwork is checked clause by clause against the builder's own Integrated Management System, and nothing AI-drafted moves without a human sign-off, with it all compliant by default.

Zomma builds Computer Use Agents that do the repetitive screen work in finance: logging into portals, pulling reports, reconciling books, and filling forms across systems that will never get an API. Our agents use the same screens your ops team uses today, so there is no integration project. Every action stops for human approval before anything submits. Hedge funds, asset managers, and fintech firms use Zomma for reconciliation, client onboarding, KYC, and investor reporting: the work that was never automatable until now.

Torus lets engineering firms and project owners build infrastructure 10x faster to reindustrialize America and the West. We're working with multiple Fortune 500 companies to build critical infrastructure including data centers and critical energy installations.

Conifer is one app that connects you to every AI model (local and cloud) and automatically routes each request to the cheapest model that accomplishes your goal. Most requests run free on your own hardware, so teams cut their AI bill by ~80% while replacing a dozen provider contracts with one interface and one invoice. For sensitive material like financials or user data, a secure mode pins everything on-device with no external API calls.

Trope is the AI-native ERP implementation platform that helps partners deliver successful projects faster. Trope understands the entire project lifecycle from pre-sales to go-live and beyond. Agents take action across documents, configurations, and code. For implementation partners, it’s like having a project manager, consultant, and developer working 24/7.

screenpipe record and learns how you work and turns it into a searchable memory, SOPs, and AI agents. Data is stored on your device or where your team choose, open source.

TrustAI provides governance for agents that interact with critical systems. We run evals across six domains: Data Privacy, Hallucinations, Permission Compliance, Robustness at Scale, Accountability, and Security. Through comprehensive pentests, we identify key vulnerabilities, suggest solutions, and analyze cost vs time efficiency.

Robocurve builds open-source tools and independent benchmarks to measure how well robots can do real-world jobs. Instead of relying on unverified demo videos from frontier labs, we score their models on reproducible benchmarks that anyone can trust. Today there are no well-run, standardized robotics benchmarks. Labs evaluate in-house, and no independent group has stepped in to run continuous benchmarking as a service. The result is that no one actually knows how good anyone else is, or where the real frontier sits. Good benchmarks require operating and maintaining physical hardware and real-world setups. Simulation only goes so far, since models that look strong in sim can show large performance gaps once deployed in the real world. Building real-world benchmarks means coordinating job-domain experts, evals engineering, and hands-on robotics all at once. Frontier labs are targeting general-purpose robotics by 2028, yet the field of robotics evals barely exists. Whoever builds the trusted measure of robot capability becomes the reference everyone relies on. We combine backgrounds in AI evals and robotics to build and grow this field as fast as possible. We already shipped v1 of our open-source framework, Inspect Robots, and ran our first pilot scoring a frontier model on a real robot.

LemonLime enables any business to deploy custom AI automations in minutes. It connects to your existing tools to pull information across sources, studies your business, and instantly creates specialized agents designed to support your team across departments. Don't know where to start? LemonLime automatically surfaces suggested automations that can be implemented with a single click.

83 Sciences uses AI to mine discarded experimental data and drive scientific breakthroughs. Working alongside labs, we discover the materials that will power the new Industrial Revolution.

Justinian is an applied AI company changing the way companies and governments work together. Our first focus is building Justinian Government Affairs, an AI-native government affairs firm helping early-stage companies monitor regulations, lobby policymakers, and win government contracts.

Risklytics is an AI-native brokerage for hard-to-place commercial insurance. We route each risk to the carriers that actually want it, collect the right information upfront, and send a complete package to the right underwriters the first time, so more risks bind with less back-and-forth.

Nebula Security is an AI-native cybersecurity company founded by world-class hackers. Nebula Security provides Mythos-level cybersecurity reviews and product security auditing, conducted by our state-of-the-art AI agent and world-class hackers themselves, covering everything from code-level vulnerabilities to architectural weak points. We were the first team to build an nginx RCE and the first to root Android 17. Our co-founders include members of the world’s No. 1 CTF team, DEF CON winners, Black Hat speakers, and PhD in cybersecurity. We have won $400K in bug bounties by exploiting the Linux kernel and Chrome browser. “Audited by Nebula Security” is a mark of serious security credibility: a signal to customers, investors, and partners that your product has been reviewed by the world’s best hackers.

We are building the identity and communication layer for AI agents: giving agents their own email, phone, iMessage, and internet address. Every interaction flows through Inkbox, so agents are enhanced with multi-channel context.

We’re automating robot evaluation– the loop where you wait for your robot to roll out, judge its success, and then reset the scene. We're starting with step one: a success detector that automatically tells you whether your robot actually completed its task along with detailed subtask breakdown. We're MIT computer scientists & friends since middle school, with backgrounds at NASA JPL, SpaceX, and AWS. Book a demo with founders@instancelabs.ai.

Definite builds AI agents that generate the reports banks and financial institutions file with their regulators. Before any number lands in a filing, our verification engine checks it independently. Every line gets recomputed from ledger records and checked against a versioned rulebook, and wrong outputs go back to the agent with the reason, like compiler errors. They don't ship. We met our first year studying computer science at the University of Waterloo, and interned at Meta, Optiver, and BitGo, places where one unverified number in a filing has real consequences. At BitGo, attestations proving customer assets matched the ledger were assembled by hand every period. At Optiver, daily regulatory numbers were rebuilt manually because nothing downstream took them on faith. Today a controller pulls data from the core system into Excel and maps it to the report line by line. By the regulators' own estimate, one quarterly filing takes weeks. The software banks buy for this validates formatting, not truth: a loan mapped to the wrong schedule line passes every check it runs, and an executive personally signs the result. This is hard because verification has to be independent of the model doing the work. Recomputing every number from source records is the only check a regulator or auditor will accept, and it's why DeepSeek v3 with our engine beats GPT-5 on public reporting benchmarks. Every regulated institution files these reports, forever. Whoever proves the numbers owns the layer the filings, the audits, and eventually the books themselves depend on. We build it, and the agents that run on it.

An applied research lab building AI that is 90% cheaper while matching the performance of frontier models. We do this by simulating reality faster and more accurately based on the technology self-driving uses to get near perfect reconstruction fidelity.