Y Combinator Startups in Los Angeles 2026

Whatnot is the largest livestream shopping platform in the U.S., connecting buyers and sellers in real-time across any category – from collectibles like trading cards to comics, fashion, sneakers, and more.

Honeylove is a DTC startup founded by EDM artist Betsie Larkin. After searching high and low for quality shapewear that made her feel confident on stage, Betsie decided to create her own line of stage-worthy shapewear and launched publicly in 2018. Since then, Honeylove has expanded to tops, bras, and many other garments that have set new standards in their verticals. We apply a technical and artistic approach to problems we see in the fashion industry, creating products that serve our customers of all shapes, sizes, and backgrounds.

Founded in June of 2012, Coinbase is a digital currency wallet and platform where merchants and consumers can transact with new digital currencies like bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin. Our vision is to bring more innovation, efficiency, and equality of opportunity to the world by building an open financial system. Our first step on that journey is making digital currency accessible and approachable for everyone. Two principles guide our efforts. First, be the most trusted company in our domain. Second, create user-focused products that are easier and more intuitive to use.

GOAT Group represents the leading platforms for authentic sneakers, apparel and accessories. Operating four distinct brands–GOAT, Flight Club, Grailed and alias–GOAT Group has a global community of over 50M members across 170 countries. We are backed by some of the leading names in venture capital including Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Matrix Partners, NEA, SV Angel, Upfront Ventures, Webb Investment Network and Y Combinator.

Inflection is building the industrial capacity to manufacture tens of thousands of spacecraft per year for next generation commercial and government space applications. Imagine a factory that looks like an Amazon fulfillment center instead of a NASA clean room.

Ignition is an AI-native employee benefits brokerage for companies with under 200 employees. Health insurance is one of the largest line items these companies carry, and employers absorb 15 to 40% rate increases year after year without ever seeing their own numbers. We have rebuilt the sales and back office to be AI-first. This market represents about $500B of market cap, and those businesses have not fundamentally changed in over 50 years. While scaling Plated, I wore every HR hat from doing payroll myself, to managing a PEO, to eventually hiring an employee benefits broker on our way to 1,500 employees. We wasted over $4M on benefits over 5 years, and I'm building Ignition to help companies under 200 employees avoid making my mistakes.

Aviern builds unmanned airplanes that turn the sky into a geospatial intelligence source. Our fixed-wing aircraft launch, fly, and land from unattended docks along infrastructure corridors, with onboard perception that flags leaks, encroachments, and vegetation risk with no pilot in the loop. We're starting with PHMSA-mandated pipeline patrol, where operators still pay helicopter crews to fly their lines up to 26 times a year, and we sell per mile as a service. The same aircraft, docks, and intelligence stack extend to the power grid, rail, borders, and bases.

Sinter is creating a faster and radically more affordable American plastics pipeline, helping iteration heavy hardware teams evolve from additive prototypes to production parts on week-scale timelines.

Ethos makes silicon on the Moon to power terawatt scale data centers. The Moon's surface is 21% silicon. We melt and electrolyze the lunar surface to make raw materials for solar panels. With solar panels made from the Moon, the constraint that limits data center scaling and everything else in space is gone.

Grocalo (S26) is an AI brain that runs content for creators. We understand their audiences, using video understanding and deep platform analytics to bottle up the taste behind each creator and personalize and distribute content to creator specific audiences. Grocalo generated 2B views and gained 4M followers for our creators in the last 2 months. Some of our clients include Jimmy O. Yang (Comedian, 11M followers), King Bach (72M followers), Leenda Dong (28M followers), Steven He (30M followers), Sheena Melwani (18M followers), and Jeannie Mai (TV host, 6M followers). Content should be personalized and data-driven. We’ve developed the most advanced AI brain replicating viral content for any given audience.

TryNearby connects local businesses with creators who live nearby. Restaurants subscribe monthly and automatically get booked visits from local creators who film, edit, and post a review to the local algorithm. This creates a steady stream of content that compounds into discovery on TikTok, Instagram, and increasingly AI search. Over 100 restaurants and thousands of creators are on the platform across Southern California, with AI agents handling matching, booking, and every creator conversation.

Neuron is crafting the world’s first purpose-built industrial controller for AI, replacing the antiquated PLCs running every machine and factory. We help customers from chemical processing to nuclear reactors compress controls projects from weeks to hours.

The US Warehouse industry spends $75bn on labor each year. Yet, only 10% of US warehouses have any form of automation, because existing robotics are too expensive and hard to integrate. Manifold deploys autonomous robots that handle picking, loading / unloading, and palletizing — priced by pick. Integration in hours. No upfront costs. No retrofitting. No need to rebuild the operation around the robot. Our mission is to make it easy for any warehouse to adopt robotics.

Singularity is answering humanity’s call to engineer counter-weapon systems at scale. We build to protect people on the battlefield and at home.

Hop Aero is building rocket cargo vehicles that deliver to contested environments hundreds of miles away in minutes. Our rockets fly point-to-point into the most austere locations at hypersonic speeds. Hop Aero's goal is to provide the U.S. and allies the asymmetric advantage that deters a future major conflict.

America does not just need more welders. It needs welding knowledge that can scale. The American Welding Society projects 320,500 new welding professionals will be needed by 2029, with about 80,000 jobs to be filled annually from 2025 to 2029. More than 157,000 current welding professionals are approaching retirement. Welders are only a small share of the skilled-trades workforce, but welding accounts for an outsized share of projected capability demand. The market calls it a labor shortage. AMR sees a learning bottleneck. We are building American-made robotic welding cells that combine computer vision to provide real-time seam tracking and post-weld inspection to turn welding from a scarce manual process into a closed-loop manufacturing system that learns from every weld as it happens.

Ornadyne builds flapping-wing drones for reconnaissance that look, fly, and sound like birds. Today’s drones are easy to detect acoustically, visually, and electronically. As counter-UAS systems improve, traditional quadcopters and fixed-wing UAS systems are becoming increasingly ineffective for close-range surveillance. Flapping-wing aircraft have existed for years, but have lacked the performance, endurance, and control required for real-world deployment. We’re changing that by engineering a high-performance, stealth-optimized system built from first principles for efficiency, autonomy, and reliable field use. The final frontier of surveillance won’t look like machines; it will look like wildlife already in the sky. Maybe birds aren't real?

GRU Space is building permanent lunar infrastructure to make humanity interplanetary within our lifetime, starting with the first hotel on the Moon. In just 6 weeks, we built the world's first Moon factory: patent-pending hardware that turns lunar regolith into bricks and inflates modular pressurized habitats designed to withstand lunar temperature and pressure extremes. Our first mission lands on the Moon in 2027 to demonstrate in-situ brick manufacturing and habitat deployment. A second mission lays the hotel's foundation inside a lunar cave, and a third opens the first lunar hotel, targeted for 2032. We don’t stop at Moon hotels. GRU’s long-term plan: 1. Build the first hotel on the Moon. GRU solves off‑world surface habitation. 2. Become the Moon Base Company of America: build roads, mass drivers, warehouses, and physical infrastructure. 3. Repeat on Mars and build the first cities there. 4. Own property on the Moon and Mars as these economies grow. 5. Reinvest profits into resource utilization systems on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and beyond—reaching our final form: Galactic Resource Utilization. GRU Space is backed by investors in SpaceX and Anduril, is part of Nvidia's Inception program, and our launch generated 1B+ views across 60+ countries, earning invitations to the White House, Senate, and Pentagon.

Alt-X is building the AI-native liquidity layer for private markets. Private markets have created trillions of dollars in value, yet remain fragmented, illiquid, and inaccessible. While public markets benefit from exchanges, market makers, brokerages, and data infrastructure, private markets still rely on brokers, spreadsheets, and manual workflows to connect buyers and sellers. Alt-X uses AI to automate the core functions required to make private assets liquid. We streamline diligence, valuation, investor matching, and transaction execution, reducing the friction that makes private-market transactions slow, expensive, and opaque today. Our initial focus is venture-backed secondaries. We source opportunities from founders, employees, and early investors while building a network of accredited investors seeking exposure to the world's most valuable private companies. Over time, we believe every private asset—from startup equity to private credit and alternative investments—will require modern liquidity infrastructure. Building trusted infrastructure for private markets is difficult. Transactions involve complex diligence, fragmented information, transfer restrictions, and significant compliance requirements. Alt-X is focused on creating systems that can support real transactions at scale, not just marketplace listings. Ryan Samadi (Stanford CS/AI, former Citadel commodities trader) and Michael Wachsman (Cornell CS, infrastructure engineer) are building Alt-X because they believe ownership of innovation should be more liquid, transparent, and accessible. Today, Alt-X has sourced over $1.5 million in transaction opportunities and assembled a network of 40 accredited investors representing hundreds of millions of dollars in investable assets. Our mission is to democratize ownership of innovation by building the financial infrastructure that private markets have never had.

Absurd is an online whiteboard for filmmakers working with AI. We use it for our own work: our Kalshi spot "Election Day" did 1M+ views, and our videos average 400K+ organic views. Try it at absurd.com

Flick is an AI filmmaking software that lets people create Hollywood-level short films completely using AI end-to-end. There are many AI tools that can give you 8-second casual clips to post on social media, but when it comes to creating truly high-quality films with coherent storylines, consistent characters, and cinematic aesthetics, they don’t come close due to their lack of flexibility, creative control, and fragmented creative flow. Founded by an award-winning filmmaker and a founding engineer at Instagram, Flick defines an interface specifically designed for native AI filmmaking that feels natural and enables end-to-end creative flows. Think of Flick as Figma for AI filmmaking. There are 4 complete AI short films created using Flick that got 20+ awards in international film festivals already and our early creator residency community are generating several AI short films every week. We are also building a community where we produce our own AI films as well as collaborating with other well-known filmmakers to share their “behind-the-scenes” workflows as resuable templates to inspire users in our community. We not only build product, we also build world-class content. The whole film industry will be revolutionized by AI and our goal is to be “the product” that defines this category.

Icarus is building the modern-day U-2 spy plane. Our autonomous solar aircraft fly at 60,000 feet for weeks at a time, eventually months and years, above weather and below satellites. They deliver persistent intelligence and connectivity for the military at a fraction of the cost of existing systems. The stratosphere is the forgotten frontier.

Relaw powers leading AI-native law firms.

Wardstone builds a low-cost, modular interceptor platform for air and missile defense. Our platform enables the warfighter to right sizes their interceptors against the threat. This allows us to defeat air-breathing and ballistic missile threats at a fraction of the cost of exquisite interceptors, adding affordable magazine depth to existing air defense systems.

PARES is an AI-native real estate services firm, providing investment sales brokerage and property management 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/

MindFort is building fully autonomous AI agents powered by their in-house models that can find, exploit, and patch complex vulnerabilities in web applications at massive scale. MindFort agents use the same principles as human penetration testers to understand their target and figure out the best ways to work together to exploit it. We can do fully autonomous AI web pentesting and bring offensive security to teams out numbered. While security teams were already behind with legacy tools and processes, AI coding is make the problem worse. AI generates code far faster than human teams can secure it; MindFort can match that speed and scale. Our agents will become critical as organizations scale up development with AI.

chrt is a logistics platform for time-critical shipping. We enable businesses to deliver their most critical items same-day. Time-Critical Logistics is a $30B market growing at a 20% CAGR driven by growth in American healthcare and manufacturing. Businesses that place time-critical orders are enterprises who have urgent items they need to deliver ASAP. These orders are critical in nature and often require white glove service -- think therapeutic treatments for healthcare providers or specialized equipment for manufacturers. chrt builds the software for forwarders and professional couriers who pick up and deliver these orders. Couriers use chrt to coordinate and track their shipments, including a driver app and fleet management tools. Forwarders use chrt to dispatch couriers, book flights, and track time-critical orders from start to finish. Shippers use chrt to place these orders with their providers and to monitor everything. In addition, we also sell physical tracking devices that can be used to track valuable cargo or assets. This gives us full control of the shipment and allows us to provide shippers with end-to-end tracking. It also allows us to intervene early if we notice something is going wrong. We’re software engineers that became friends years ago at McKinsey. Kyle is an expert in Time-Critical Logistics, having led strategy at a leader in the space. Aaron is an expert at designing and implementing AI systems to handle complex coordination. We were shipping code together on nights and weekends for years before chrt; now we’re also shipping freight.

We build home humanoids the practical way—an open, mass-produced developer kit powering a real-home teleop data flywheel to autonomy, giving families back 20 hours/week.

Wavedash uses cutting edge browser technology to let gamers play the latest releases with no downloads or installation.

Splash is developing the next generation of autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) to provide National Security and defend critical assets such as oil rigs and shipping terminals. Our long-term vision is to make traditional naval vessels obsolete by creating a fleet of low-cost and versatile boats which will be able to dominate the seas. Our expertise in mass manufacturing, engineering and quickly scaling operations will make this vision a reality.

Artifact is a collaborative IDE for hardware engineers - accelerating every step in the engineering lifecycle: Design → Procurement → Manufacturing → Integration → Test → Sustainment We've raised $3.5M to build an integrated, verifiable AI copilot with an intuitive UI that reflects how hardware actually gets built. Every artifact is auto-generated and traceable to a single-source of truth. We believe hardware engineering should be rigorous, deliberate, and system-aware. We work directly with customers solving the world's hardest technical problems to modernize how complex hardware is engineered. If you're interested, send your resume & contact info to: careers@artifact.engineer

Orbital Operations is developing a high thrust, reusable space vehicle for satellite defense. We protect critical satellites, like GPS and Military communication satellites, from adversarial threats, like China and Russia. Our vehicle will use the exact same propulsion systems that launch vehicles have used for decades by implementing a cryogenic management system. This will give us over 100x the thrust or current in-space propulsion. Ross and I have over 15 years of combined aerospace experience across NASA, Aerojet Rocketdyne, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Relativity Space. We’ve worked side by side for more than 3.5 years developing propulsion systems, turbomachinery, and building our own respective engineering teams. We are currently working on the first demo of our unique cryo management system and intend to launch an operational vehicle by 2027.

Endstack is a full desktop, collaborative workspace built for humans and agents running in the cloud available on web, desktop, and mobile. Each workspace powered by endOS, giving you a familiar channel-based experience augmented by a real desktop environment. The desktop is backed by Linux and ships with a built-in Chrome browser. Files, notes, browser tabs, native apps, terminal, and all your agents in a single beautiful, unified interface. At the center of it all you get a powerful agent running 24/7 that you can also reach via Slack, email, or SMS.

Voker is the Agent Analytics Platform for monitoring and improving your AI agents. Companies like Dutch.com use our SDK to build better agents. Alex and Tyler met at a high-growth E-Commerce startup where Tyler was running Technology & Data. Together, they built AI products that bootstrapped the company profitably to $100MM in Revenue.

Merlin is an AI-powered ERP for construction companies. We provide construction companies with a single, AI-powered platform to manage their entire business operations. Our platform unifies project management, materials management, finance, estimating, and CRM—traditionally scattered across multiple systems—into one cohesive solution. For the first time, construction firms can automate and oversee every aspect of their projects in a single, intuitive system. Today, construction companies pay for 8-17 different tools - that we eliminate the need for. We reduce - Manual work by 60% - Cut software costs by $10,000 monthly - Complete projects 3x faster. Why Now? We're witnessing a perfect storm of factors: decades of stagnation in traditional ERP systems, a multi-billion-dollar industry built on misaligned incentives, and the transformative potential of AI. This confluence creates a rare cyclical opportunity for market upheaval. The last major shift in this space occurred in the 1990s with the advent of digital systems, and now, 30 years later, we're on the cusp of another seismic change. Customers are crying out for innovation and as AI reshapes the landscape, early customer signals indicate an eagerness for smarter, more efficient systems. It's a unique window of opportunity that opens perhaps once in a multi-decade chance to redefine an entire industry's operational backbone. Team: KS, a BITS Pilani grad and successful startup co-founder, and Ayantika, an IIT alumni and tech expert, bring extensive coding and product development expertise together bringing about over a decade of technical expertise. Sneha ( that’s me), with over a decade of experience in supply chain management and lean manufacturing within the construction industry, has lived the pain of using ERPs in this industry.

Superunit deploys AI voice and email agents to complete employment verifications for background check companies—faster, cheaper, and more compliant than internal teams or outsourced call centers. Our agents call and email employers, collect verification data, and log every interaction for audit and compliance. Customers are replacing manual workflows with Superunit to scale without adding headcount or compromising quality. We work with background screeners and banks to process thousands of verifications per month.

Yondu is creating the robotic workforce of the future starting with logistics automation. We're deploying humanoid robots in the first flexible, drop-in picking automation solution designed for 3PLs.

You closed your first few deals on handshakes and Stripe links. Now a customer wants a ramp-up, custom terms, or annual billing — and suddenly you're duct-taping spreadsheets to your CRM. Most CPQ tools are built for 500-person sales orgs with a dedicated RevOps team. Veles is built for you. AI agents handle quoting, approvals, and deal docs end-to-end so you can run a real sales motion without hiring a deal desk. It's free for founders just getting started, and pricing scales with the number of active contracts you manage — so we only grow when you do. No CRM consultant, no six-month rollout. Just connect Salesforce or HubSpot and start closing.

Constructable is the modern alternative to Procore, Autodesk, and Fieldwire. We help mid-size general contractors manage the entire lifecycle of a commercial project from bidding to closeout. With Constructable, teams can accelerate field, project, and financial management in one intuitive system. RFIs, submittals, drawings, daily logs, punch lists, change orders—everything lives in one place, with AI-powered search to find answers instantly. GCs and builders across the U.S. and Canada are already running smoother projects on Constructable. Learn more at constructable.ai

CoAsync by Cognitio Labs is the AI back office for product quality compliance teams. We help mission-critical food manufacturers automate repetitive, document-intensive workflows. We started with Certificates of Analysis (COAs), one of the many workflows quality teams manage before products can ship. Today, this work is still performed manually across PDFs, emails, spreadsheets, and disconnected ERP systems. Other documents we help quality teams respond to 24x7 include supplier audit questionnaires, production schedules, lab reports & changes in product specifications and quality records. CoAsync automates the workflow by: Reading supplier documents Extracting laboratory data Validating product specifications Applying compliance requirements Drafting compliant COAs Organizing audit-ready documentation Results from one of our initial deployments with a mid-market food processor: 85% less QA administrative work 4× more COAs processed per shift 1-2 hours saved per document New product onboarding in under one day COAs are just the beginning. Our vision is to build the AI back office for product quality and compliance across regulated industries by automating the many document-intensive workflows manufacturers manage every day. Backed by Y Combinator and leading investors. Founder Diva Avaya Sharma has presented example AI workflows for product quality and compliance through the World Economic Forum Centre for Advanced Manufacturing and Supply Chains' SmartStart initiative and at the International Telecommunication Union's AI for Good Global Summit, organized in partnership with the United Nations. Know a company shipping food & product urgently? Help them get started with their own document workflows at https://cognitioiq.com

Opensteer creates specialized AI agents in cloud computers that can integrate with anything. Each agent gets customizable browser access, tools, instructions, and guardrails, so it can work 24/7 exactly the way you need.

Pure is the first transparent marketplace for the $11B Rare Coins Sector & $55B Precious Metals sector. We make it easy to buy & sell authenticated rare coins and precious metals such as Gold, Silver, Platinum, Palladium & Rhodium.

Car washing is a $15B market in dire need of disruption. Legacy systems are costly, out of date, and inflexible. We are building modern solutions to help car wash operators manage and grow their business.

SpecCheck is an all-in-one solution that provides accurate prescription eyewear ordering and tracking, seamless billing, and streamlined communication between patients, eye doctors, and their lab partners. SpecCheck’s users work more efficiently and make fewer costly errors, increasing productivity and improving their overall workflow.

Dittofeed is an open-source alternative to platforms like Klaviyo and Customer.io. Self-host us for free, or use our low-cost cloud offering to automate messages across email, SMS, mobile push, WhatsApp, and more. We also offer solutions for embedding Dittofeed in your own SaaS! Instantly provide your customers with automated messaging tools.