Conversational AI Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Kugel is an enterprise-ready TTS model, available on-prem, with a focus on 25+ languages and low latency.

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.

The product detail page is one of the last unchanged surfaces in commerce. Brands have spent years getting sophisticated at driving traffic there but nobody fixed what happens when shoppers arrive. Kinect is the AI shopping assistant layer for e-commerce. We plug into ecommerce stores and give agents live access to your catalog, inventory, and policies. A brand’s online sales rep that can answer all a customer’s questions, help them find the right products, convince them. The website itself adapts to the shopper’s context: it considers the ads the user clicked on, their searches, filters, scrolling behavior, chat context to all show the shopper what they need to see. We're building for human shoppers today and the AI agents that will shop for them tomorrow. Either way, the product page needs to get a lot smarter. That's Kinect – the product page finally does what it was supposed to do all along.

We build brains for robots. We work with manufacturers like Unitree to make robots listen, speak, and act. You can program your robot out of the box by literally talking to it, no coding involved. Robots running Lightberry are emotionally intelligent, always on, and fully autonomous. Just like in Star Wars!

€5,000 in additional bookings. In 4 weeks. For a 53-room hotel. We help hotel groups turn missed calls into bookings. This it how it works: - They send their missed calls to us. - Our AI answers and takes the booking. - The booking goes right into their PMS. Even with call centers and central reservation departments they are still losing 5% of calls. That is a seven figure revenue leak. Why us? We used to build software that can’t fail for massive companies. We started Codyco after a friend told us how much money he was losing from missed calls. We built the first version just for him. Now we give hotel groups the reliable AI they need, so they never lose a booking on the phone again.

Bolna handles the complexity of voice infra, so enterprises can automate calls faster, better, and cheaper, at scale Bolna is a Voice AI Orchestration platform purpose-built for Indian enterprises. Businesses in India run tens of thousands of calls every day - across sales, support, collections, recruitment, and more. Bolna gives them the power to build and deploy Voice AI Agents directly from their transcripts and FAQs, so they can start automating calls immediately. With Bolna, enterprises get: 1. Full control over agent intelligence, tone, and workflows 2. Cost efficiency at scale with smart routing across providers and price points 3. Enterprise-grade performance on latency, interruptions, multi-language, and multi-accent understanding

Okibi is a web app that lets you create AI coworkers using natural language. It's like Lovable for creating AI agents that talk to your internal software Corporate users lose 2 hours every day doing tasks that can be automated with agents But existing agent builders have janky drag and drop UIs that don’t map to what they want exactiy. Okibi lets everyone use natural language to build the exact agent they want.

PARES is an AI-native real estate services firm, providing investment sales brokerage, leasing, property management, and acquisition advisory to institutional and middle-market property owners and investors across the country. Real estate is an extremely labor-intensive business, often requiring scaling headcount to grow, being extremely local to submarkets, and operating on low margins. With AI, these services can be centralized and delivered better, faster, and at a fraction of the cost. AI-native brokerage: - Prospecting sellers through automated inbound and outbound outreach - Underwriting deals and producing marketing materials with speed and precision - Surfacing hidden buyers, running the marketing process, and negotiating contracts - Handling all back-office, accounting, and additional support AI-native property management: - Communicating with tenants and vendors around the clock - Screening leasing prospects, sending applications, and drafting leases - Collecting rents, making payments, and chasing delinquencies - Running accounting, payroll, and owner reporting Check us out at https://www.pares.ai/

Phases deploys AI agents to oversee clinical trials, improving operational performance, data quality, and audit readiness by identifying risks and taking actions autonomously to solve issues.

Humoniq is building the first AI-Native BPO for the travel & transport industries, which outsource $20B of customer support each year. Our AI-native approach improves speed, accuracy, and satisfaction. Our team is uniquely equipped to solve this challenge. We previously grew a travel management company, Flightfox (YC S12), to $22M/yr. We handled thousands of customer requests each month, which exposed the limitations of traditional outsourcing.

We build Voice Models for regional languages (like Urdu, Bengali, Greek etc) and make them available through simple APIs and SDKs. Developers use us to create Voice-first digital experiences (eg. Voice eCommerce, Voice Banking, Voice AI Tutors etc). We gather our own data, develop our own labelling tools, train our own models, and design our own voice infra. This fully integrated approach enables us to offer the best models and the best developer experience for regional languages. --- People who would previously never use certain digital services (like online ordering), actually use the service when they are given an intuitive Voice based interface. We believe that Voice Interfaces will onboard 100s of millions of new users onto digital services; and double the addressable market for technology companies. Uplift AI will provide the best models to create these Voice Interfaces for 60% of the world's population that only speaks their regional language and represents 42 trillion dollars in GDP.

Stratify is the AI-powered user researcher that discovers the why behind every decision, click, and preference. Our platform uses agentic workflows that instantly recruit participants, conduct user interviews, analyze responses, and provide actionable insights.

Dollyglot is like Character.ai but with real time video avatars. Turn a photo and a voice into a real friend. Speak with Harry Potter about Hogwarts or brainstorm ideas with Elon Musk!

Serno is the AI tool you reach for when one model isn't enough: pricing strategy, market entry, hiring trade-offs, anything you'd normally route to a team. Describe the question and Serno assembles 3–5 AI experts on Claude, GPT, and Gemini, each with a real role and research brief. They debate contradictions and map the answer as a canvas you can navigate, share, or export.

careCycle is an AI workforce for medicare agencies and FMOs - helping leading agencies achieve 5x higher conversions, 37% better retention, and saving thousands of agent hours. We're transforming how Medicare agencies handle member relationships with teams of voice AI agents. We're solving the industry's biggest challenge: 50% annual member churn caused by poor post-enrollment engagement. Our multi-agent AI teams work together to handle the entire customer journey - from initial contact through enrollment and ongoing care. When a lead comes in after hours, one AI agent answers and schedules a callback, another calls at the perfect time, a third captures qualifying information, and a fourth handles the warm transfer to a licensed agent. This approach helped a leading FMO write over $2M in renewals during AEP 2024 while reducing agent talk time by 20% per sale. We've pioneered a purpose-built solution for Medicare's unique compliance requirements. Unlike generic AI platforms, our system features built-in HIPAA/CMS compliance, real-time data structuring, and seamless CRM integration. This enables agencies of all sizes to deliver enterprise-grade member care without massive infrastructure investments. Early metrics show the power of our approach: - 5x increase in after-hours conversion rates - 37% improvement in 90-day retention - 3,000+ agent hours saved in a single AEP - $2M+ in additional renewals during AEP 2024 The Medicare Advantage market represents a massive opportunity, with over $360B in annual premiums and growing 10% year over year. By solving the member retention challenge, we're positioning ourselves to capture significant value by transforming the member care experience for beneficiaries.

Roark helps teams test, monitor, and improve their voice agents. Voice AI is exploding, but reliability is still the #1 challenge. Teams spend hours manually testing agents and still miss failures. In the last 6 months, Roark has processed over 10M minutes of calls, powering monitoring and simulation for teams across the Voice AI ecosystem (including YC companies). We close that gap by combining: 📊 Monitoring & Evaluation - 40+ built-in metrics (latency, instruction-follow, sentiment, etc.), custom dashboards, alerts, and the ability to define your own. Up to 15 speakers with automatic speaker identification. 🎭 Simulations & Personas - end-to-end phone/WebSocket simulations for inbound and outbound agents, with configurable personas (accents, languages, speech & behavior profiles). Define tests as conversations with a graph-based approach, so you can easily branch into edge cases and variants. 🔁 Full lifecycle loop - failed calls automatically become repeatable tests, so every failure makes your agent stronger. Roark is the missing QA layer for Voice AI - helping teams ship agents they can trust.

Leaping AI is the best platform to deploy voice and texting AI agents for customer service, lead qualification and appointment scheduling. We target mid-market and Enterprise companies and industries are: home remodeling, roofing, pay per call, travel, retail, health insurance, Medicare, health and real estate. We automated contact centers employing >100 human agents and now handle their incoming customer support and appointment scheduling calls, end-to-end. All while maintaining 90% customer satisfaction score. Pain points that we solve: missed calls, insufficient speed to lead, not enough call center resources, call center inefficiencies, agents not sticking to the script, etc. At its core, we have a multi-channel outreach campaign feature, whereby our customers can call and text potential leads over an arbitrary time period. If end customers call or text back, the Leaping voice or text AI agent can autonomously schedule appointments and resolve service requests. Some of our differentiating features: most-human like voice in the market, CRM integrations in place (Salesforce, Hubspot, MarketSharp, AccuLynx, JobNimbus, LeadPerfection, Google, etc.) and white-glove onboarding (in-person for larger accounts). Our AI agents can hold 100+ conversations at once, speak multiple languages and be equipped with company specific FAQ. Lastly, we have our own number health monitoring and DNC software.

We’re Toothy.ai. We’re building AI agents for dental practices that handle everything related to patient insurance. The average dental clinic spends over 160 hours a month on insurance tasks like verifying patient policies, billing, and claims processing. Our AI agents automate this entire workflow—including making insurance calls with voice AI—saving clinics time, reducing costs, and ensuring faster reimbursements.

DraftTheRecord Desktop helps court reporters record and transcribe proceedings. Use the app to capture local recording sessions, create enhanced transcripts from audio/video, and review transcript content in a focused workspace designed for court reporting.

Overstand is a data lab that allows our customers to navigate any set of data in just a few minutes. *Enterprise*: For enterprises, we we unify Slack, email, calls, and operational data, then surface the signals that matter — customer needs, risks, and revenue opportunities hidden in everyday conversations. *Legal Firms*: For legal firms, we help them really quickly understand their entire discovery corpus (either before, or after document review), and quickly build out an initial case assessment and facts. Instead of waiting on reports or manual analysis, teams get immediate, evidence-backed answers from the data they already have. Overstand delivers clarity and leverage as your business scales.

A personal AI that can act on direct commands and run persistent directives for you, via voice and text.

Dodo turns client communication into booked appointments, completed workflows, and predictive analytics, powering millions of client interactions annually for hundreds of clinics. Our multi-agent system autonomously runs scheduling, refills, intake, and follow-ups across calls and texts — integrating directly with clinic systems to cut communication overhead ~70% and act like a trained CSR 24/7.

Conveo powers your qualitative research from start to finish, all in one platform. Your AI co-worker designs expert research studies, interviews real people and instantly analyzes your videos. Get robust, actionable insights of consumers, users and audiences at scale. Tell powerful stories to your stakeholders within days.

we are making AI feel more human starting with voice. ai applied research lab training a novel end-to-end model & productizing what makes AI more personal, persistent, and human. frontier AI, like Claude and ChatGPT, are weak on memory, personality, relationship, and human-like interaction...that's our domain.

Marr Labs is making AI-voice agents that are indistinguishable from humans. Han and Dave previously created speech tech company Vlingo that powered the first Siri app and was acquired for $225M. Now they are taking voice to the next level by making AI-voice agents that can handle virtually any phone-based job, from answering calls to schedule appointments to call center sales and support jobs—all at a fraction of the cost of a human agent. In the US alone, businesses handle 17 billion calls a year at an average cost of $5 per call–an $85 billion addressable market.

Zep assembles the right context from chat history, business data, and user behavior so agents are personalized, accurate, and fast. Our open source project Graphiti hit 20k GitHub stars in under 12 months. Sub-200ms retrieval, SOC 2 Type 2/HIPAA certified, used by teams from startups to Fortune 500s.

OneGrep is a DevOps Agent that helps engineers automate manual devops tasks. It works across integrations that teams have to search, correlate, and operate automated tasks like runbook automation during incidents. OneGrep specializes across devops tools to help teams release code faster and more reliably so that engineers can spend more time building rather than being trained in bespoke tools like Observability, Ci/Cd, or Infra. Achintya and Brian are technical co-founders who have deep domain expertise in building and operating systems at scale at Coinbase, Disney, and Amazon. Achintya led the Search Team at Disney enabling DisneyPlus to scale to 70M users in two weeks. Brian was a founding engineer on the team that built the Incident Management Platform at Amazon that helps 30k DAUs in Amazon resolve critical incidents every day. https://www.onegrep.dev

Terrakotta is a power-dialer that lets sales reps leave AI-generated voicemails. Our first customers are Commercial Real Estate brokerages that use Terrakotta to clone their brokers voices, dial prospects and when no one answers, leave an A/B tested, personalized voicemail that gets a callback.

At Toma, we are building the AI software suite for underserved industries, starting with Automotive. We started as a voice AI infrastructure company and still are our own biggest customer to this day. Our product empowers hundreds of businesses with a world-class AI receptionist and customer support platform. Toma’s AI agents engage in thousands of customer interactions every day and generate millions of dollars worth of revenue. Why Automotive first? It is a sleeping giant contributing trillions of dollars to the GDP. The industry and its processes are ready for disruption. Toma is bringing AI to all operations in the industry while working hand-in-hand with some of the biggest names, such as the Car Dealership Guy, and public companies like Lithia Motors and AutoNatio. Toma is backed by the best investors in Silicon Valley, including Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator.

Open is an AI-powered, all-in-one customer support and communication platform — used in production by: Print.com, Mollie.com, Viva.com, More.com, Orderchamp.com, OneCarNow.com, and other major enterprise companies. We specialize in solving and automating complex support cases across email, web, phone, SMS, and WhatsApp. We’re a research-based company currently working on releasing Support-Bench, the world’s most comprehensive AI customer support benchmark. Our team consists of +3 programming language builders, a nationwide cybersecurity competition winner at age 16, and a dentist.

Surface Labs helps B2B companies capture, qualify, and convert inbound leads through intelligent contact forms. We replace tools like HubSpot Forms, Zapier, and Chili Piper with a single platform that embeds on any site with one line of code. Our AI agents handle lead capture, enrichment, routing, follow-up, and CRO testing — automating what used to require full marketing ops teams. Customers see a 30% lift in conversions in under 2 weeks, and our partial response capture feature collects 50% more emails from form drop-offs.

Hyperbound is the leading enterprise-first Revenue Activation Platform, pioneering a new category focused on turning insights into revenue-driving actions. Hyperbound AI analyzes thousands of sales calls to identify the behaviors that lead to closed-won deals, then transforms those insights into realistic, highly customizable human-like roleplays with AI buyers that drive behavior change at scale. Trusted by enterprises like IBM, LinkedIn, Monday.com, Bloomberg, Vanta, Autodesk, and G2, Hyperbound helps revenue teams ramp 50% faster, define what good looks like, and scale top performance across thousands of reps. Interested in trying it out today? Start a free demo simulation at https://app.hyperbound.ai/buyers and book time with our team to learn more.

kapa.ai makes it easy for technical companies to build AI support and onboarding bots for their users. Teams at +150 leading startups and enterprises incl. OpenAI, Mixpanel, Mapbox, Docker, Next.js and Prisma use kapa to level up their developer experience and reduce support. We enable companies to use their existing technical knowledge sources incl. docs, tutorials, chat logs, and GitHub issues to generate AI bots that answers developer questions automatically. More than 750k developers have access to kapa.ai via website widgets, Slack/Discord bots, API integrations, or via Zendesk.

Open source voice AI. Check out our docs for more information: https://docs.vocode.dev

## What is Yuma AI? Yuma is automating customer support by providing an AI Support Agent orchestration platform. Yuma provides autonomous AI agents dedicated to customer service and e-commerce. We integrate directly with help desk software (Zendesk, Kustomer, Gorgias, etc.) and focus on helping large Shopify brands deal with their high volume of support requests. Top merchants using Yuma can automate up to 80% of their support tickets fully autonomously. ## Why do Shopify merchants need Yuma? There are thousands of large Shopify merchants around the world generating $10M+ a year. Most of them have taken over some niches and are great at what they do: selling their products. But they all have one thing in common: they all hate customer support. It's a burden for them and a huge source of cost, as they receive hundreds of requests per day. Some of them have dozens of support agents on staff, usually offshore, and the overall quality is still often pretty poor while staff turnover remains high. Those merchants have been promised automation for years but have always been disappointed by the outcome. As customers, we have all had to live through a terrible support automation experience before, so this is no secret, and everyone knows that the current state of the technology is quite bad. ## Yuma is solving this in a few ways: Yuma isn't just another RAG chatbot. Our platform provides autonomous AI agents dedicated to support and ecommerce. These agents are powered by knowledge, follow processes, and are managed by our in-house AI orchestration technology. This ensures safety, control, and quality at every step. We believe that to truly automate customer support, we must develop a platform that mimics the actions of a human support agent. That's exactly what we've been doing. Currently, our top merchants are automating 60% of their support tickets through Yuma. Yuma can fetch information from external services and take actions in other apps as needed to resolve each ticket. We are laser-focused on building the best AI support agent platform and aim to achieve 80% true automation in the next few months. ## Fun Fact Yuma got started by accident. This is my third YC startup after Socialcam (W12) and Triplebyte (S15). I released Yuma as a prototype for fun in mid-December 2022 and was overwhelmed with demo requests. That's when I knew I was onto something and had to turn this into a real company, once again.

Berry offers an AI CSM that scales customer success for SaaS companies. Every post-sales organization faces the challenge of scaling customer success without having to hire more. Berry combines the best of the two worlds - taking the white-glove onboarding experience and offering it at scale. Our AI CSM onboards, trains and grows accounts for you non-stop. It’s a 10x hire to your team - at a fraction of the cost.

Supadock builds AI workers for logistics operations. In freight, every call, document, and signature exists to prove diligence — not just save time. Check calls, proof-of-delivery reconciliations, ID verification, and invoice audits all ensure compliance, reduce liability, and protect margins. Supadock automates these high-accountability workflows while ensuring accuracy, compliance, and risk reduction. Our AI agents use cameras, voice, email, and document processing to handle tasks like verifying driver IDs, coordinating warehouse entry, assigning shipments to carriers, checking freight status, reconciling pickup and delivery paperwork, and following up on late invoices.

Launched in February 2021, Jasper is an AI content platform that helps creators and companies of all types expand their creative potential. Over 105,000 active customers are using Jasper to break through writer’s block, repackage their content, create original art, and adjust writing for language and tone. The interest in AI continues to grow and we are at the forefront of teaching the world how to leverage artificial intelligence as a creative partner. We are building teams that will pioneer the content generations space even further.

Cozmo AI is building the platform for regulated enterprises to deploy their own AI employees. Cozmo is a system of work for complex enterprise operations. Companies use Cozmo to build and deploy AI employees, which are a collection of agents that own workflows end to end. They talk to customers, read documents, interpret videos, apply company policies and update systems like Guidewire, Temenos and Salesforce, pulling humans into the loop only when real judgment or escalation is needed. Every decision the AI employee makes is logged, including its reasoning and policy reference, providing a complete audit trail for compliance and operations without additional manual effort. This is managed by our proprietary Agent Protocol Engine (APE), the control layer that keeps shared context, enforces policy and ensures every step is tracked for regulated industries. Cozmo is live with 10+ enterprises, including Fortune Global 500s, like Nestlé, and has already handled over 1M production calls and 10M interactions; cutting costs by up to 70% and turning roughly 1 in 13 conversations into revenue.

Backed by Y Combinator, Zoom and Atlassian, Spinach AI is the system of action for conversation data. Industry leaders like Abnormal AI and eToro use Spinach to capture and transform raw conversations into structured knowledge that powers people, agents, and LLMs across the enterprise, driving productivity for workers and strategic insight for leaders.

Quickchat AI empowers companies to build their own Multilingual AI Assistants powered by generative AI models such as GPT. Thanks to our powerful integrations and API they can add the power of conversational AI to any website, product, app, game or smart device. Backed by Y Combinator and other notable investors.

Weekend builds the best AI games and entertainment experiences for TVs. Popular Weekend games include Song Quiz, Jeopardy!, and Wheel of Fortune, and Wit's End. Weekend was founded by Max Child and James Wilsterman and is headquartered in San Francisco.

Luka is a software development company based in San Francisco, California. The company created Luka app, a new messenger with AI-powered chatbots. They help you find places to eat, do web search, make plans together, pick places to eat, play trivia games and lots of other things in a messenger. In 2016 Luka launched a closed testing of Replika, a new app that allows to create a personal AI friend that helps people deal with loneliness. The app is powered by a proprietary deep learning architecture.

Truva handles the busywork intelligently saving your sales team hours each week, so they can focus on what matters most - building and closing deals. Many teams have seen up to 25% increase in sales where Truva's AI agents automated tedious tasks such as email follow up, CRM data entry, and process optimizations.