Retail Tech Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Wildcard is the AEO and GEO platform designed specifically for e-commerce and retail brands. We help merchants improve visibility across AI search and AI shopping platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Amazon Rufus. Wildcard tracks how brands, categories, collections, and SKUs appear across AI search results, identifies visibility gaps, and turns those insights into actions. We use AI agents to enrich product data, generate SEO, AEO, and GEO content, create collection and comparison pages, build FAQs, and improve off-site discoverability across Reddit, YouTube, blogs, and other sources. As AI shopping evolves, Wildcard is building the infrastructure brands need to win in agentic commerce, including support for emerging standards like the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).

Metreecs helps retailers plan, buy, and allocate products using AI-demand forecasting. We prevent overstock and out-of-stock situations, allowing clients to eliminate waste, free up capital, and drive higher sales.

Getcho is a local delivery platform for high-value goods. We are building a high-reliability delivery network on top of high-volume, unreliable fleets, just like how TCP builds reliable end-to-end networking on top of an unreliable base network (IP).

We help distributors and manufacturers turn catalog chaos into launch-ready products. Share vendor data, pull online specs and pricing, fuzzy match to your database, generate images, and output products in your exact schema.

At Matagora, our team brings over a decade of retail experience. Our mission is to empower independent retailers with the tools they need to compete with big box stores and effectively level out the playing field. One of the biggest challenges we see is staffing — many retailers struggle to maintain consistent, reliable, and properly trained team members to handle back-office tasks, marketing, ecommerce, POS management, and basic tech know-how. That’s why we offer affordable, ecommerce expertise as a service. Retailers no longer have to worry about high turnover, constant retraining, or trying to learn everything themselves. Instead, they can stay focused on what they love: curating great products and delivering an amazing in-store experience — while we handle the rest. And since it’s a simple expense, it’s easy to plan for and write off, too.

SwiftSku connects the $650B convenience store industry with management and analytics. SwiftSku’s app connects to point of sales at convenience stores in real time, enabling owners to remotely manage and monitor their stores. We take the guesswork out of running a convenience store with predictive analytics, dashboards, and reports. SwiftSku's CEO, Mit Patel, grew up managing the inventory, pricebook, and reporting of his family’s convenience stores, and, when vendors would come by, he’d bridge the language barrier as a translator. More than 85% of independent convenience stores are owned by Indian families like Mit’s. Solving convenience store owners' pains of today leads to SwiftSku's greater vision of optimizing the supply chain, facilitating a retailer agnostic consumer to brand relationship, and providing real time insights to brands and retailers.

Vori offers a modern operating system designed for the grocery industry. VoriOS helps independent and regional grocers streamline their inventory management, ordering, and supplier coordination, allowing them to operate more efficiently and profitably. The platform integrates real-time data to optimize stock replenishment and improve pricing strategies. Founded in 2019, Vori empowers grocers with technology that levels the playing field against larger retailers.

Standard Cognition is an artificial intelligence platform that allows buyers to grab what they want without having to go to a cashier.

RADAR is an RF Sensing platform built to automate and augment retail store processes. Our technology offers unprecedented speed and location accuracy, which allows stores to: 1) Manage inventory efficiently, through automated inventory counts, improved in-store replenishment and instantaneous customer stock checks 2) Eliminate checkout lines altogether through our autonomous checkout tool. 3) Measure all customer-product interactions, giving physical stores the same insight into consumer behavior and product performance as online stores. https://goradar.com

Drapr lets shoppers try on clothing, online. Apparel brands use Drapr to make more money online.

Caper focuses on compacting Amazon-Go's technology (image recognition, sensor fusion and artificial intelligence) into a smart shopping cart, allowing each shopper to throw her groceries into the cart and self-checkout without cashiers. The technology is looking to fundamentally transform physical retail and rapidly scale into existing grocery stores.

Custora is an advanced segmentation platform designed to help online retailers better understand and market to their customers. We’re on a mission to remove the “mass” from marketing with software tools that focus on customers as individuals with unique needs and interests. Our software employs the state-of-the-art in customer analytics methodologies and integrates directly with marketing tools (ESPs, display, Facebook Custom Audiences, Google Customer Match) to help marketers deliver more relevant, meaningful communications. We’re excited to work with some of the leading retail innovators including Teleflora, Bonobos, 7 for All Mankind, and many more retailers spread throughout the world. Our offices are located in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. We work hard, work together, and care deeply about building a meaningful business, collaborative team, and exceptional culture that we’re proud to be a part of. And yes, we're hiring. Check out https://www.custora.com/careers for details.