Y Combinator Startups in Austin 2026

Our software turns any robot we deploy into an everyday independent worker at your facility. They are able to walk sites, handle instruments, overcome obstacles, collect measurements, and generate auditable compliance records, replacing hours of manual surveys and inspections. Built by Los Alamos robotics veterans and deterministic-manipulation researchers, we're starting in nuclear and expanding to other hazardous industries.

We have sold $1.6m of systems to the DoW. Multiple systems delivered to the DoW. Our first product - EDDA - is a counter drone system - small, low power, low cost fully autonomous-capable. It's designed to be used on vehicles, bases, or carried - to stop group 1 suicide drones. We have multiple contracts, sales, etc. We have 3 more products with demand in various stages of development. More details at https://9mothers.com

An AI-run performance marketing agency. We deploy autonomous agents on a fleet of real mobile phones that create, post, and grow content across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X, Reddit and more operating hundreds of accounts in parallel, indistinguishable from human creators. Brands hire us the way they'd hire a growth agency, but instead of a team of marketers we run the entire pipeline autonomously: ideation, video production, posting, engagement, and audience building. We get paid on revenue share, so our incentives are aligned with our partners' growth. Our first partnership is revenue sharing with a telehealth clinic, where we're driving patient acquisition across dozens of channels we built and operate end-to-end.

Vulcan builds agents for government and government-adjacent work. We currently sell two agents: Justinian and Trajan. Justinian is an AI agent coworker for people who work in and adjacent to American government. To power Justinian, we created the world’s largest legal and policy database and knowledge graph, accessible to our customers via our platform, email, and Slack. Trajan is a public-facing AI concierge built to help governments modernize service delivery. Hosted on a government website, Trajan helps businesses and citizens automatically complete permits, licenses, applications, and answer regulatory and legal questions. In addition to government customers, Vulcan's agents serve regulatory, legal, policy, and government relations teams at major U.S. enterprises.

Perseus Defense is building a mass-manufactured Counter UAS solution for the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Current solutions are one-to-one, too dangerous for use on U.S. soil, and orders of magntiude more expensive than the threats they defeat. Our self-guided missile platform is man-portable and multi-domain capable. It senses, engages, and eliminates threats with drastically reduced cost per engagement over existing kinetic solutions. Solving this critical national security problem requires understanding complex DoD needs along with actual rocket science including aerodynamics, guidance, navigation, control, and much more. Jason and Steve met at Penn State while they pursued their PhD and MS in aerospace engineering, respectively. Their past experiences designing space helicopters for NASA, making Boeing airliners land autonomously, controlling swarms of unmanned autonomous systems, teaching aerospace engineering at Stanford, winning multiple ONR and DOE engineering competitions, and founding an international drone competition makes them the perfect team to create transformative solutions protecting our service members. "If you build this, it will be mandatory equipment for every truck, boat, and convoy in the U.S. Military. We're talking thousands of units." - Former DoD Procurement Officer The White House just released Executive Order, "Unleashing American Drone Dominance" which adds billions of dollars, government support, and streamlined regulations to enable the development of our product. Traction: Jason and Steve used more than 100 end-user interviews across the DoD and DHS to shape the product to something of critical need to both boots on the ground and DoD purchasers. In 8 short weeks following a strict 2-week design-build-test cycle, the team has gone through 4 major guided missile iterations with over 30 live-fire flight tests. They were invited to Ft. Hood to present their platform to the 1st Cavalry Division, and also briefed the Pentagon and U.S. congressmen on current U.S. vulnerabilities to advanced drone technology. Perseus Defense is actively standing up cooperative research agreements with U.S. Army DEVCOM's Applied Research Laboratory, Aviation and Missile Center, Armaments Center, and High Performance Computing Modernization Program.

HealthKey helps doctors offices generate more revenue by finding eligible patients for their clinical trials. We match at-risk patients with cutting-edge treatments, ultimately getting patients access to potentially life-changing treatments faster. Big Pharma pays a lot of money to clinics for each patient they enroll, but finding patients who qualify is an entirely manual process today. We use AI to prescreen doctors’ existing patients against Clinical Trials’ eligibility criteria, making enrollment fast and easy.

Modus helps companies hire and retain only the people they need instead of becoming bloated messes. Modus connects your HRIS, ATS, and analyzes extensive data across your organization so leaders can detect, inspect, and correct their workforce plans - without relying on spreadsheets or complex systems. Lin experienced these challenges firsthand as a VP BizOps at HashiCorp, scaling from 100 employees to IPO, while Chris and Amar faced similar issues scaling 40+ person teams as a fractional CTO. They’re motivated by the belief that companies should have the least number of employees possible.

Residential contractors are drowning in office work. Drillbit automates all of it. We use AI receptionists and an LLM based quoting tool on top of our own CRM to entirely manage jobs from lead, to quote, to scheduling, to staffing, and even collecting payment.

💼 Augment builds AI-powered tools to automate company operations, starting with Roger—an intelligent CRM that acts as your AI-powered sales team. 💼 🚀 Built by experienced founders and backed by Y Combinator, Augment is redefining sales automation with AI-driven workflows that handle prospecting, outreach, and deal management—so businesses can scale effortlessly. How it Works – Roger, Your AI-Powered CRM 📊 A CRM That Works for You Unlike traditional CRMs that require constant manual updates, Roger actively manages your sales pipeline. It tracks interactions, follows up with leads, and keeps your team focused on closing deals instead of admin work. 🤖 AI-Powered Outreach & Engagement Roger automates lead generation and crafts personalized outreach messages across email, LinkedIn, and other channels. It continuously refines its approach based on engagement data to increase conversions. 🎯 Smart Deal Management Roger qualifies leads, schedules follow-ups, and moves deals through your pipeline automatically. It ensures your team never drops the ball on a potential customer. 📈 Seamless Integration & Insights Roger syncs with your existing tools, updating your sales data in real-time. AI-powered analytics provide actionable insights, helping teams optimize sales strategies. By automating tedious sales tasks and making CRM proactive instead of passive, Roger turns AI into your most efficient sales teammate—helping businesses close more deals, faster.

Hamming AI is the complete QA platform for voice agents from pre-deployment testing to production monitoring. 4M+ calls tested. 10K+ agents monitored. Trusted by public companies and the fastest-growing voice AI teams. Connect your agent, auto-generate test scenarios, and run thousands of test calls in minutes. In production, monitor every call with 50+ built-in metrics and get alerts before customers notice. Sumanyu (CEO) was previously Head of Data at Citizen and Senior Staff Data Scientist at Tesla, where he grew AI-powered sales to hundreds of millions in revenue per year. Our engineering team ranks #1 on Weave (https://workweave.ai) across 10,000+ engineers and 100+ teams.

Driver is the context layer that translates your codebase into shared, structured understanding. By computing context ahead of time, Driver delivers symbol‑complete documentation, architecture maps, and history guides so teams and agents can reason across an entire codebase without guesswork.

Surety bonds are financial guarantees that businesses must purchase to comply with government regulations. For example, all contractors must have a surety bond to bid and work on federal construction projects. It is a $8b opportunity in the US. SuretyNow is building the surety bond platform for the 21st century. Businesses can apply for bonds and receive affordable quotes online in minutes. We offer the fastest and simplest online experience for getting surety bonds.

Avery helps property managers fill vacancies faster and resolve maintenance requests automatically. Our AI property manager and leasing agents can be assigned to complete many common tasks, from getting tours scheduled to following up with vendors. There are nearly 300,000 third party property management companies across the US, many of whom are overwhelmed by dozens of repetitive tenant requests streaming in through antiquated software every day. Avery modernizes the property manager’s toolkit with a two-way contact center to provide an excellent resident experience. Learn more at https://averyiq.com

DataShare is a data-as-a-service platform that lets you embed charts, dashboards and exports directly into your product. For example, if you run an accounting startup, DataShare would enable you to embed a full profit and loss dashboard, with downloadable statements. DataShare is backed by an enterprise-grade data warehouse, and can be implemented in fewer than 20 lines of code.

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.

Tank Payments is building modern financial infrastructure for the trucking industry. We offer payables automation software for logistics businesses that make hundreds of payments to trucking businesses every day. For trucking businesses, we provide a best-in-class banking platform, designed to meet the unique financial needs of the trucking sector.

We help security, legal and sales teams get answers in seconds without depending on subject-matter experts. Our AI agent connects to every source that already holds the truth (Google Drive, Notion, Slack, email, website, trust center, SOC 2 docs, etc.). It keeps that knowledge graph fresh on its own and drafts, validates, and formats responses to customer questions, security questionnaires, and RFPs, all in the background, so your team just reviews and ships.

Rima helps accountants automate document and spreadsheet work with accuracy and cell-level audit tracking. For accountants that deal with messy docs and spend their time in Excel, Rima enables them to build workflows in natural language to extract and process financial data from PDFs or ERPs into their Excel templates and reconcile their spreadsheets in minutes. Accountants build these workflows once and our agents do the work for them going forward, preserving their institutional memory and know-how.

MaverickX is a chemical technology company advancing natural resource extraction. The company was founded by Eric Herrera, former Department of Defense scientist, and Jesse Evans, former startup operations manager. As resources become more difficult to extract across the energy and mining sectors, new technologies are needed. MaverickX has a portfolio of chemical solutions -- PetroX and LithX -- to enhance recovery of oil from shale reservoirs and metals from low-grade ores. More oil. More metal. Better chemistry.

Fetii is an AI-driven platform utilizing high-capacity vehicles to move groups with the click of a button. No more splitting up. No more outdated charters. Fetii transports millions of riders each year and operates nationwide.

Disclo is the first software for employers to collect, verify, and manage health disclosures and employee accommodation requests (HIPAA and SOC2 compliant, of course). We help employees secure the enhancements and protections they need to succeed in their careers without having to disclose their underlying medical condition to their employer. We handle the collection of that data, the verification, the secure data management, and much more. Using our patent-pending medical verification system, Disclo validates that an employee's accommodation request is legitimate and required, interacting with medical providers directly, so HR managers can focus on what they do best. We help companies stay compliant with EEOC, ADA, and HIPAA guidelines.

NearWave makes a handheld imaging device that helps physicians select the right therapy for their breast cancer patients. This prevents patients from suffering through months of side effects caused by unsuccessful treatments.

Perl Street is democratizing structured finance through our platform, unlocking billions in financing for sustainable infrastructure and next-generation hardware technologies. Perl Street has already helped multiple hardware startups receive over $140M in debt financing offers from some of the world’s most reputable institutions. Climate change is a massive hardware problem. According to IEA estimates - reaching net zero emissions would require over $4 trillion per year in global clean energy investment. This means we need to upgrade nearly everything with new hardware - from energy storage devices to electric vehicles, charging stations and building electrification. The future of infrastructure is both distributed and resilient. And none of it is possible without financing new hardware.

Akute is an automation-first electronic medical health record system (EMR). It’s a co-pilot for digital health and direct primary care companies that are growing modern practices. Akute’s platform is fully programmable and customizable that enables clinical businesses to cut admin overhead and give time back to providers so they can spend more time with patients. In a space of legacy tech, our team and platform’s agility and exceptional customer support makes us stand out. Join a VC-backed company in its seed stage and help make real improvements to healthcare.

Mergent is a task scheduling API that makes it super easy for developers to schedule and manage background tasks like notifications, data processing, and third-party integrations. We provide a simple well-documented API that any developer can instantly start using straight from our website.

Unlock your trading superpowers wtih HyperTrader. As traders, we reimagined the ultimate trading experience for you. HyperTrader is fast, efficient, accurate, and secure. ✔️ Streamline your workflow with fewer clicks. ✔️ Speed up your trading with fast execution. ✔️ Stay informed with real-time position updates. ✔️ Trade safe with secure encryption.

Anakin is building web data infrastructure for AI agents and data teams. We help them get clean, structured and deterministic data from any website with one API call, at up to 10,000x lower cost than driving a browser. We do that by collecting data and turning websites into documented, self-healing APIs that adapt when sites change. Our engine automatically delivers real-time data from thousands of websites and apps, including the world's hardest, across 100+ countries.

Why Howdy.com? Howdy was founded in 2018 to help Austin startups hire talented engineers who work within US time zones in Latin America. Since then we’ve grown to a team of over 600, and our platform has enabled hundreds of companies to hire individual teammates, set up remote, hybrid or in-office teams, and manage remote equipment assets and benefits. Join over 200 companies, like Coinbase,Truepill, Vanta, and other YC companies that have hired with Howdy to build their tech outpost in Latin America. Better talent: Howdy is deeply involved in the Latin American tech scene, regularly hosting meetups and inviting speakers and industry leaders into our local communities called Howdy Houses throughout Latin America. We get to personally know the top tech leaders who are interested in joining product teams in the US for the long-term. These individuals are not actively seeking jobs through freelancer platforms. 98% retention: Developer churn slows teams down. That’s why, when you hire with Howdy, developers are automatically provided with premium health insurance, top-of-the-line Apple equipment, gym memberships, lunches and the use of class-A office spaces. Your engineering culture: When you partner with Howdy, you're not just hiring individuals; you're gaining access to a skilled local workforce that becomes an extension of your team. We provide full support in all areas, from recruitment to equipment and office spaces, allowing you to build and directly oversee your engineering outpost in Latin America as your team grows.

We help companies embed lending services into their software so they can better serve their customers by helping them access capital, increase engagement in their product, improve retention and expand their revenue per user.

PowerRouter helps sales teams assign leads and contacts to the right reps, instantly within Salesforce. We provide a powerful automation engine with a drag and drop canvas to create routing rules, visually. With actionable metrics to increase speed-to-lead and account based sales support, we make it very simple to stay on top of every lead in your Salesforce CRM.

Mystic’s platform allows companies to easily and reliably deploy ML models on our serverless cloud or on their own infrastructure without requiring a team of MLOps engineers. With our Python SDK, data-scientists immediately get an endpoint from their own model, or any open-source models. Once uploaded, our platform handles routing, multi-cloud scaling, caching, GPU optimization and other features to provide the ultimate ML inference platform.

UpEquity is removing contingencies for home buyers so that they have more negotiating leverage when purchasing their next home.

Your central source of truth from local development to production for every language, stack, and infrastructure. Doppler simplifies secrets management so you can automate security, eliminate config drift, and deliver reliable software fast.

We help Enterprises transform their business processes with RPA workflows and enable structured data extraction from any document types (Intelligent Document Processing, IDP). Awesome YC deals for founders (check out us in 'Deals'). Connect any system, automate any process.

Handoff creates instant construction estimates and automates business operations for contractors with AI. Using generative AI technology and access to localized construction costs, Handoff provides remodelers with a fast, accurate, and intuitive way to create construction cost estimates in minutes.

Method provides connectivity to consumer credit and liability accounts, enabling end-to-end refinance experiences, real-time account data access, and one-click checkout.

We're the creators of Highrise, now featured in the iOS App Store with 50 million users and rapidly growing. We're building bleeding-edge technology for developers and amateurs to create immersive experiences and worlds inside our virtual universe. We believe that the future of virtual worlds is bright, and we're excited to be at the forefront of this industry. As we continue to grow and expand our platform, we're looking for talented individuals to join us on this journey of innovation and creativity. If you're passionate about building the platform to power virtual experiences that bring people together and push the boundaries of what's possible, we want you on our team!

We provides tools, data and systems to facilitate real-time insights, decluttering outbreak detection and enhancing risk mitigation. Our surveillance is used by industry, public heath and consumers globally.

Macromoltek: Revolutionizing antibody design. Description: Macromoltek, a computational de novo drug design company, rapidly produces accurate and credible antibody designs. We have built a proprietary platform that enables design against difficult targets inaccessible by traditional methods and have are already designing antibodies for large biopharmas and smaller biotechs.

Rabbet brings efficiency, accuracy and transparency to the complex construction finance industry. The platform uses machine learning to parse documents and connect information for reduced administrative burden, verifiable compliance, and faster decision-making for real estate lenders and developers. Formerly Contract Simply.

UpCodes simplifies code compliance for architects, engineers, and construction professionals with a centralized, searchable library of 6,000+ state and city building codes. Using NLP to parse complex code adoptions across U.S. jurisdictions, UpCodes powers the first AI-powered code-to-spec workflow, connecting regulations to specifications and a growing product library. The platform also provides an AI solution for building product manufacturers, enabling them to showcase compliant products and reach design professionals at the moment of specification. With 800,000 monthly active users, UpCodes has seen strong product-led growth in transforming how teams navigate construction regulations.

Bloom Institute of Technology is a full computer science education that's free until you get a high-paying job. We invest in our students, train them for free, and take a portion of income if they get a job above a certain threshold. If they never make above that threshold or don't get a job in the chosen field, they never pay us a dime.

NuCypher is one of two founding teams of the Threshold Network, which hosts tBTC, TACo, Random Beacon & tUSD. Since 2017, NuCypher has pioneered cryptographic primitives for end-to-end encrypted data sharing, including Proxy Re-Encryption and Threshold Access Control (TACo), novel cryptoeconomic mechanisms (e.g. Stable Yield). and original network/governance architectures (including a historic on-chain merger). TACo, our flagship product, is running on over 120 nodes with ~$80m of associated economic security, has paying adopting developers and major infrastructure partners (Ceramic, Irys, Textile, Unlock), and has been decentralized from genesis (mainnet launch in Jan 2024).

Mio powers seamless communication between Slack, Microsoft Teams & Webex Teams. The Austin, Texas-based company was founded by Tom Hadfield and James Cundle in November 2015. M.io has raised $12m from investors including Goldcrest Capital, Eniac Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator and Capital Factory. Ready to sync your teams? Learn more and get started at https://m.io/

The Sails Company was founded by the original author and maintainers of the Sails framework. In addition to free and open-source software, The Sails Company offers a full-service web & mobile studio and professional support for the tools we maintain.

CareMessage is the technology non-profit building the largest patient engagement platform for low-income populations in the United States. Powered by the Health Equity Engine™, the platform enables organizations to combine messaging, data, and interoperability to increase access to care, improve clinical outcomes, and address social drivers of health. With 20 million patients reached since 2013, CareMessage is the only patient engagement solution proven to improve health equity at scale. The team, many with lived experiences in these communities, leverages a nonprofit model to reinvest revenue into impact. CareMessage is the partner of choice for organizations committed to advancing health equity.

Cratejoy is the only all-in-one subscription box solution to help you launch, grow and scale your company. We provide the leading subscription box platform that allows you to launch and grow your business faster and more efficiently - no coding or plug-ins required. We support over 2,500 companies on our platform and over 1 million subscribers on the Cratejoy Marketplace. Founded in 2014, Cratejoy is headquartered in Austin, TX