Trading Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Spectre Intelligence is a neotrading firm. We create AI traders instead of hiring human ones. Currently trading semis + bio.

Prodigy is the frontier AI trading research lab. We've trained the world's best foundation model for quantitative finance. We've already achieved more than 100% returns in live trading over the course of our YC batch, doubling our capital while major indices were flat. Our founders previously worked on a trading desk at Jane Street, trained frontier AI models at Google DeepMind and shipped cutting-edge AI at Apple to billions of customers. Join us as we use AI to solve the market.

Arbital lets you trade perps, memes, stocks, and run market-making strategies from one place. In our first 7 months, 2,700 traders have traded $1.35B in volume through Arbital, and we're now doing $435M/month. We're building towards a social, mobile-first trading app that brings tokenized equities, crypto, and perps to everyone.

Capital allocation is becoming a more important part of individual economic life. Finance is moving toward a global, onchain, 24/7 future with thousands of markets trading at once. The asset management industry is built around the scarcity of financial expertise and the cost of organizing people around capital. Institutions cover global markets by employing analysts, researchers, and quants around the clock. AI turns this organizational capacity into software. Instinct is building the harness for this transition. Instinct is a proactive team of agents that searches thousands of markets, investigates opportunities, and operates 24/7. The individual becomes the portfolio manager, Instinct becomes the investment firm operating around them. As institutional advantages become widely accessible, the edge concentrates in each trader’s worldview, judgment, and bets. The first one-person investment firm managing $1 billion will emerge within two years. It will run on Instinct.

In investment management, every decision gets graded. The market prints the answer on a date known in advance, and nobody gets to argue with it. Kimpton is financial AI that answers to reality. Kimpton OS is the AI-native operating system for investment teams: it does the research and hands PMs structured trades. EarningsBench is a public benchmark where models forecast quarterly earnings before companies report and the reported numbers do the scoring. Koliseum is the set of point-in-time financial environments we build from that work, for labs to train and evaluate models on. The whole industry is fighting underperformance. Active managers trail their benchmarks, and capital keeps bleeding into passive. AI was supposed to fix that, but it hasn't. Funds either stitch together a dozen point tools or babysit general agents all day, and neither gets them to the trade. Kimpton OS goes straight to it. It ingests a fund's mandate, strategy, and positions, connects to the institutional data the fund already runs on, and returns a structured trade proposal built for that fund. It's built to disagree, because consensus is poison for investment decisions. Instead of telling a PM what they want to hear, it surfaces the breaches and risks they'd otherwise miss. That same work is how we grade AI. Static benchmarks leak into training data. Simulations reward what their authors imagined. A forecast sealed before the outcome exists and scored when the company reports can't be rehearsed or backdated. We started in markets because they're the one place reality answers on schedule. We're two ex-Goldman engineers and an ex-SpaceX engineer. We left to start our own quantitative systematic hedge fund, raised $10M from a family office at 21 and 22, and scaled it to $35M over four years. We learned to trust live results over historical fit. We built Kimpton inside that fund, then productized the stack. We're live with our first institutional client, a $3.3B manager. Our first market is fundamental equity funds from $1B to $10B, and the labs that need to know whether their models can do this work.

Bring us risk. We’ll find the market. Institutional liquidity for event-driven exposure across prediction markets.

QFEX is the 24/7 exchange for traditional financial markets. We let you trade US equities, commodities and FX pairs with (or without) leverages of up to 100x. On QFEX, UX comes first: brokerless market access, seamless integration with traditional payment rails, and ultra-efficient Perpetual Futures offered over all asset classes. Trading has never been simpler, cheaper or fairer than with QFEX. Founded by Quants and Engineers from Citadel & Tower Research who saw an opportunity to make markets how they always should have been, QFEX will eventually replace the entire $100 billion exchange and clearing industry.

Axiom is the trading platform for decentralized finance and currently offers memecoins, perpetuals, and yield. Since launch we've hit 10M MRR and 5M monthly net profit.

Step 1: Build the Prime Radiant Step 2: Apply it to Financial Markets Step 3: Manage the world's assets

We provides two AI trading services - ZenTrade.me is AI trading service for retail traders. - AYC Fund is AI-native crypto hedge fund.

Coinrule Catches the Next Market Opportunity on Your Behalf by Automating Your Investments: Crypto, Stocks, ETFs. Docufilm: https://youtu.be/YitEyKmx8fg Previous Crowdfunding: https://youtu.be/nnYJ4PnSvnU?si

At marketfeed, we're on a mission to help every Indian understand what's wrong with their money and fix it. We're building a new generation of products that turn financial confusion into clear, actionable solutions. Our goal is to empower you to take complete control of your financial future, one smart decision at a time.

Hapi democratizes investing for consumers in Latin America. We let anyone from Latam easily invest in stocks, ETFs and cryptos in under 5 minutes, with no minimums and no commissions.

Kalshi (www.kalshi.com) is the first federally regulated exchange where you can trade on the outcome of events. We built Kalshi because we believe that people should be able to capitalize on what they know and have opinions on. We make this possible by expanding what people can trade on and allowing them trade in the domain of everyday knowledge. Kalshi is developing a new asset class, “event contracts,” and a financial exchange for trading on the outcome of events: we are federally regulated by the CFTC as the first-ever legal futures exchange in the U.S. for trading on a broad category of events.

Fintool.com is a financial copilot for institutional investors. It’s ChatGPT on top of financial documents. Fintool is engineered to discover financial insights that are beyond the reach of human analysis or search software.