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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

We are building a new way for AI to ground itself: a living database of real-time world facts. Our engine watches news, filings, databases, and the open web and compiles what it finds into structured facts. Each fact must compile, checked the way a mathematical proof is, so an agent citing it is citing something formally verified, not something plausible. Agents query it through our API and MCP to answer with what is true right now.

Isengard Industries is not another drone company. We build sovereign production: the means for allied nations to make precision-strike and counter-drone systems by the thousand, on their own soil, at a fraction of what the primes charge. We call it Weapons of Mass Production. The Arsenal of Democracy, rebuilt for the drone age. More to come, and only where it helps. You know how to reach us.

Whitespace is the AI operating system for wholesale distributors. It connects to their systems and inboxes to build a living model of their business, then deploys self-improving AI agents to automate work like inventory planning, customer support, and order entry.

Florin brings banking, payments, cards, and treasury into one account built for startups - so founders can hold, move, and grow their capital without stitching together half a dozen tools. Unlike platforms that resell another bank's rails, we're building the infrastructure ourselves, end to end, so money moves in real time on a single ledger we own. We start with an invite-only membership for venture-backed companies and expand from there. Named after the florin, the coin that anchored global trade for three centuries, with infrastructure built for how money moves now.

Poth is an agentic research platform that connects to your company data, creates hypotheses about what might be causing problems, and validates them using both existing data and adaptive user feedback.

Insurf is the AI-native data and decision layer for health insurance. Our first product, Inveto, automatically turns denied healthcare claims into source-cited, physician-attested appeals, recovering revenue practices lose today. Every claim it resolves builds the coverage-decision graph, the proprietary dataset of real payer behavior that powers our next product, Surely, which prices the true cost of a health plan for employers and brokers.

Bloomy helps students learn more efficiently by using AI to identify exactly what a student should learn and when they should learn it. We provide adaptive and personalized curriculum to K-12, starting with English Language Arts, Math, and Writing.

Cova is an AI-native home care agency, licensed in Michigan. We serve Medicaid, LTCI, and private-pay patients; we pay caregivers the highest base rate in the state; and we help unpaid family caregivers get paid through programs they didn't know they qualified for. Our entire operation runs on AI agents, which means less overhead and more value passed directly to the people doing the real work.

AI agents are starting to act in the real world, but they can't reliably understand it. Geospatial data is complex, fragmented, and unstructured. Ask a model a specific question about a specific place and it guesses. Our API and MCP give agents cited answers about any location. Our mission is to index every inch of the earth, and make it as queryable as the web.

Linzumi is the chat your engineering team uses to direct dozens of AI coding agents. Kick off work, review it, ship it. All from chat. See every agent's work. Unblock the agents that need you from your laptop, your phone, the coffee line. Your teammates see it too. Every decision your team makes compiles into a source of truth - what to build, why it changed, how your agents should act. That same source generates new work and verifies completed work. Deliberative alignment, repurposed from aligning LLMs to aligning companies.

Glen is unified context for every agent and human on your team. Most MCP tools hand an agent a slice, one Slack thread, a single diff, and leave it to stitch the rest together itself. Glen reads from where your work already lives, code and PRs, issues, docs, and meetings, reconciles it, and gives your agents the full picture instead. With Glen a coding agent knows why a line was written, not just what it says. Ask a PR assistant anything about a change and the clarifying-question relay disappears. Bug bots read the intent behind the code before they comment, so they stop flagging deliberate choices as defects and stop repeating mistakes they already made. A sales agent can coach your head of sales off the full account history, how teammates handle similar calls, what was promised, where the deal stalled, etc. As the work gets done, Glen also distills it into skills and offers them back to the next agent, or person, who hits the same task.

Cerenovus is a company brain. We aggregate every kind of file a company produces — documents, PDFs, emails, Slack messages, spreadsheets, meeting notes — and convert them into a single markdown knowledge graph with native AI-agent integration. A company's information becomes uniformly readable both by humans and by the AI agents working inside the graph. On top of that foundation, Cerenovus maps the company as a system, drawing connections between the people, processes, and tools that make up real workflows. From that systems map, it infers where operations are inefficient and how to improve them. In practice, this tool will help executives make better decisions. Whenever a leader has to act on a question — how to restructure a team, whether to keep a vendor, or where handoffs between teams are breaking down — Cerenovus will give them an evidence-backed answer in minutes rather than weeks. Today, that work is done by consultants, by internal analysts, or by the executive asking around informally. Each of those approaches is slow, partial, and goes stale the moment it is delivered. Cerenovus produces the same answers faster, at a fraction of the cost, and keeps them live as the company evolves.

Zenbu is an extensible IDE for orchestrating coding agents. Shape it around exactly how you and your team work.

RealPact builds AI agents that handle the paperwork behind real estate transactions. They find property records like deeds, tax records, permits, parcel data, and MLS information, then use that data to fill out contracts, organize documents, track deadlines, and help brokerages close deals faster. We are starting by automating transactions and will expand into other parts of brokerage operations. Much of the software used across the real estate industry is outdated. With today’s advances in AI, we can build agents that handle this operational work and create modern software around how brokerages actually work. We currently sell to brokerages in New Hampshire and are expanding quickly.

Context.dev gives AI agents structured data from any website through a single API. We help developers build smarter agents & products that depend on accurate, fresh web data. If you need structured data from the internet, you need Context.dev Proud to power agentic products at Mintlify, Super, Vizzy, Klarna, and 280 other companies.

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.

Enjamb runs the entire drug program for biopharma teams, from discovery to FDA approval. Pharma runs on decades of closed legacy systems like Benchling, Veeva, Medidata, and SAS, with no AI layer and no MCP to connect agents to them. So we built that connection layer in one platform. Our agents run on top of their existing systems and data, with no migration, and do the work across the whole program: clinical evidence, trial design, statistical programming, and regulatory submissions. In just 3 weeks since launch, we're already being used by 500+ employees at top pharma companies, including Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie, Bristol Myers Squibb, Merck & Sanofi.

We build modular humanoid robots and the software platform that allows anyone to train, deploy, and scale robots for real-world tasks. Today, teaching a robot a new skill requires robotics engineers, machine learning engineers, training infrastructure, and significant compute resources. We reduce that process to: Record → Upload → Train → Deploy. Our robots are modular and configurable, with interchangeable end effectors, configurable sensors, and multiple deployment configurations. We believe current humanoid embodiments are often overfit for specific use cases, so we're building a platform that adapts to different environments and applications. Long term, we want robotics to be as accessible as software development. Our goal is to become the default platform for training and deploying autonomous robots.

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.

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.

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.

Modern AI agents can send emails, change code repos, and talk with external APIs. Archal verifies your agent takes the right actions, and opens a fix PR when it doesn't.

Inth helps fast-moving software teams prevent privacy failures before they reach production. Privacy risk no longer lives in policy docs, dashboards, and questionnaires. It lives in code: consent flows, data deletion, vendors, logs, AI systems, and agent-written changes that move user data every day. Inth starts with c15t, an open-source consent and privacy SDK with 3M+ npm downloads, used by teams like Zed, Infisical, and Expo. From there, Inth expands into code-native workflows for consent management, data subject requests, policy enforcement, vendor oversight, and audit-ready evidence. We make privacy governance programmable, observable, and compliant by default.

We turn natural Language into Multi-Drone 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.

Enterprise software implementation is broken, and it has been for decades. Every rollout, whether it's a traditional ERP or a new AI system, requires months of manual integration, configuration, and tuning done by armies of system integrators and forward-deployed engineers. Lab0 builds agentic systems that automate this layer, compressing months-long implementations into weeks.