Y Combinator Startups in New York 2026

We’re a passionate team of dreamers and builders, determined to liberate small businesses from the not-so-fun aspects of the job so that they can focus on what’s fun and important.

Scentbird inspires fragrance lovers to go beyond the ordinary and sample scents that evoke passion, confidence, and the unknown. Our mission is to revolutionize the way individuals perfume by bringing the ultimate fragrance playground right to their fingertips. By way of a monthly subscription service (starting at $14.95 a month), members can choose from over 500+ designer colognes and perfumes each month! See what we're all about at: www.Scentbird.com // @Scentbird *WE'RE HIRING!: https://www.scentbird.com/careers

SmartAsset is an online destination for consumer-focused financial information and advice. Reaching approximately 59 million people each month (as of January 2024) through its educational content and personalized calculators and tools, SmartAsset's mission is to help people make smart financial decisions. Additionally, SmartAsset powers SmartAsset AMP, a national marketplace connecting consumers to financial advisors. Building on SmartAsset’s relationship with millions of investors, SmartAsset AMP connects financial advisors directly with prospects who meet their target client profile. Our algorithm matches consumers with up to three fiduciary financial advisors. In 2023, SmartAsset helped advisors close an estimated $34 billion.

For decades, finance has been a race to know first. The first traders belonged to the floor; then came quant teams building infrastructure to interpret markets systematically. In the era of AI, as the boundary between human and machine intelligence dissolves, KelAI brings finance into cognitive interpretation at scale. Our autonomous agents read every market move, formulate systematic investment insights and compound knowledge at market speed. Compounding intelligence, trade by trade.

Building the elements of a new ATC system.

WithAI helps institutional investors research stocks and track their portfolio using AI. Today's agents are powerful but insufficient. The training data quality and customization schlep prevent them from being seriously useful for investors. But WithAI has found the right form factor, context management, and consultative sale to help independent asset managers hold their own against the huge platforms' in-house projects. Our first client is "tremendously accelerated" (their words) when months ago they were "existentially threatened." Ben and Ian became fast friends at Princeton co-founding a technology investment firm. Ben became the founding researcher at unicorn Sentient Labs, where he built LLM coordination and security tech. Ian became an investor at Bridgewater Associates, where he spearheaded "how will AI affect the economy?" and "how can we use LLMs to invest?" His contrarian conclusion: the future of work isn't just "managing agents." That form factor works for coding, but non-verifiable work is structurally different. You check whether code is good by running it. But do you check whether a stock is good by shorting it? Fundamental equity hedge funds are elite, time-constrained, un-automatable knowledge workers in dire need of AI augmentation, so they make an ideal customer. But the combination of customization lock-in and huge ACV is not the real prize. If human knowledge work survives this decade, it will be AI-augmented. We're building that augmentation.

Foresight builds AI-powered simulations of human behavior to help companies predict how people will think, react, and choose before making real-world decisions. It lets organizations test countless possible moves in advance, see how each one is likely to play out, and choose the strongest path forward.

Pops lets people play, remix, and share AI games with friends. Discover an infinite feed of games, challenges, quizzes, and other fun interactive experiences made by others. Every play instantly becomes a funny gameplay/reaction video you can send to friends, post online, or use to challenge someone to beat your score. For creators, Pops makes it easier than ever to bring ideas to life and get them played. Instead of learning complex game engines, writing code, or fighting for distribution, anyone can create or remix a playable game in seconds. Bring your ideas, and Pops brings the audience.

Archer lets companies programatically send hyper-personalized physical rewards for any action, milestone, or behavior. Businesses use Archer to automate rewards across onboarding, referrals, sales, retention, partnerships, employee milestones, and customer engagement. Rewards can range from personalized gifts and food deliveries to branded merchandise, surprise packages, team experiences, and custom curated rewards all tailored to the person, milestone, and moment. Archer handles the infrastructure behind sourcing, personalization, delivery, payouts, and triggering so companies can turn rewards into a scalable part of how they grow and retain users using AI agents. Reward. Anything.

Mochatrade lets global traders trade perpetual futures on US stocks with up to 20x leverage. Access 50+ US stocks including TSLA, NVDA, AAPL. Mocha is fully self-custodial and no US brokerage account is needed. Traders on-ramp in local currencies and get professional-grade execution on the world's most liquid equities. Starting with India (140M+ demat account holders), and expanding across other markets.

Standard Signal is the first hedge fund that researches and executes trades purely with AI. Our custom models discover and trade on new fundamental truths about the world before humans can.

Rubric AI (backed by Y Combinator) is the reasoning and verification infrastructure for AI. We're building the human and computational layer that turns expert judgment into training signals for the world's most consequential AI systems.

Cofia learns how your team runs internal operations and automates the highest-ROI workflows, automatically.

Tepali is the AI-native operating system for medspas. We replace fragmented software and manual work with a single system of record powered by AI agents that handle front desk, patient documentation, and lead conversion.

CellType is building an agentic drug company. AI agents that run the full drug discovery pipeline on top of biological foundation models that simulate human biology. Our core technology, developed with Google DeepMind, has already discovered and validated a new cancer treatment signal. We’re working with Top 10 pharma.

Launch crypto deposits in minutes. Unifold is a developer-first API + SDK that makes it easy for any app to accept on-chain deposits – across any chain and token – with less than 10 lines of code. We handle the full deposit flow so teams can ship faster and give users a smooth experience that actually works. If you’re building a consumer-facing on-chain product and want best-in-class deposits (or want to support more chains fast), we’d love to work with you.

Crosslayer Labs detects impersonation attacks on websites and APIs. We provide "outside-in" monitoring of customer infrastructure, comprehensively discovering and monitoring all Internet dependencies, including DNS, BGP, TLS certs, Javascript. We correlate signals from different layers of the Internet stack to identify attack patterns. Our alerts are actionable and contain root cause analysis/remediation recommendations. Our founding team is world renowned for previously inventing the MPIC standard adopted by all the major CAs including Google, Apple, Amazon. The MPIC standard is securing over 700 million websites via the issuance of over 3 billion digital certificates, and is now a global internet standard that protects every single HTTPS connection.

Wayco is building a unified data intelligence layer for medical treatment of legal cases. From the first intake to instant settlement.

Maywood is the first finance-compliant proactive AI that runs 24/7, working across your network, pipeline, and active processes, running constantly in the background and surfacing things you'd otherwise miss. It tracks relationships and sector context to flag when a target is gearing up for a process (and drafts the outreach in your voice), watches network activity across LinkedIn, news, and conference follow-ups, and surfaces where active processes stand, including what's at risk since you last looked. It also auto-updates CRMs and trackers and creates meeting briefs that includes relationship history, recent activity, deal context, external research, talking points that can pull from internal and external data sources. Dealmakers interact with it over email, Teams, or the platform itself.

MouseCat enables companies to automatically detect, investigate, and mitigate emerging fraud trends

Bizzy handles your calls, captures and qualifies leads, and books appointments directly into your CRM. It understands your services better than a receptionist would, routes and escalates calls, and syncs with your existing tools to incorporate complex workflows, all so your team can focus on servicing leads, not qualifying them.

Advertising today is like trading in the 1980s pits: archaic, manual, and iterative guesswork. Humans update bids and keywords with noisy, delayed data using simple if-else rules that both break at scale and ignore stochasticity. Laurence advertises like modern hedge funds trade markets, driving a 15-40% improvement in net profit for Amazon brands within a month of onboarding.

Mantis is a digital twin company that combines LLMs with high-fidelity physics simulations in order to convert rare and difficult-to-access human behavior data into predictive models.

Autonomous is a superintelligent financial advisor at 0% advisory fees. Today, managing your money means one of two bad options: DIY your money: You end up with accounts everywhere (401k, IRAs, brokerage, crypto, savings, equity, secondaries). Your spreadsheet is always wrong. You make expensive mistakes because this isn't your full-time job. Hire a financial advisor: They'll manage your money and charge 1-2% of assets annually. Run that math over multiple decades and you're handing over half your net worth to fees. Neither path can economically deliver the sophisticated, personalized strategies the ultra-wealthy use to compound wealth: strategic tax-loss harvesting across individual securities, systematic risk management, portfolio-backed borrowing to defer capital gains, access to alternatives, etc. These aren't secret – they're just economically impossible to deliver at scale through traditional human advisors. Robos were supposed to fix this, but they were designed in a pre-AI world. In practice they just manage cookie-cutter portfolios. They don’t coordinate across your 401(k), taxable accounts, mortgage, equity, and cash flow, they don’t help with real decisions like job offers, windfalls, or concentrated stock, and they don’t deliver institutional strategies. That’s why, even after a decade plus, the biggest robos are still <$100B AUM while old-school advisors like Raymond James / Edward Jones sit on trillions. We’re doing for financial advising what Robinhood did for brokerages. Think of it as a full-stack, AI-native wealth strategist that brings billionaire-style playbooks to ordinary investors. Autonomous is built around a frontier-scale reasoning engine—an AI that perceives global events as they unfold, understanding their deeper implications for markets and and most importantly, how these events will impact your investments.

F2 is the AI platform for private markets investors. Purpose-built for private credit, private equity, and commercial banking, F2 accelerates diligence, underwriting, and portfolio monitoring, helping teams evaluate deals over 60% faster. F2 turns unstructured deal data into investment-grade analysis and polished memos in minutes. Unlike general-purpose AI, F2 is built with the domain expertise and depth to handle the most complex financial analysis. Already trusted across thousands of deals, F2 makes collaboration easy and retains historical context, so past work compounds into future wins. Headquartered in New York City, F2 is backed by leading investors including NFX, Left Lane Capital, and Y Combinator.

DiligenceSquared delivers AI-powered market due diligence for investment decisions - like the $500k McKinsey reports, but automated, auditable, and at a fraction of the cost. When Private Equity funds evaluate deals, they pay firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Bain $500K-$1M for market due diligence. The process takes weeks, and the output is a static PowerPoint that's impossible to audit. A single large-cap PE fund can spend >$30M annually on this and the total market is $10B per year. Our AI agents conduct expert interviews and synthesize insights with every claim linked to source transcripts. No black box, no "trust me" slides, and no 10x mark-up for human labor. Frederik bought these reports as a Principal at Blackstone. Soren sold them as a Principal at BCG. Harshil is a repeat founder and former Software Engineer at Google. We've seen both sides and know what matters in due diligence - and now we automate it. Our clients already include 8 leading private equity funds with over $2.4 trillion in combined AUM.

Coding agents made writing code fast. But 6 engineers in a room will probably still disagree on what needs to be built. Scott AI is a planning workspace where engineering teams align on what to build before their coding agents start building it.

If you are a trusts & estates attorney, RIA, fintech, or family office interested in Sava, reach us at founders@savahq.com

Overdrive Health offers AI powered medical billing services, helping providers get paid more money in less time. Our technology enables us to provide the best quality insurance and patient billing services for a fraction of the usual cost

Aspect helps creative teams consolidate 5 media tools into one platform. We provide everything a media team needs: file ingest, local file streaming, review and approval, sharing, and archiving. Aspect workspaces come with an agent that has complete understanding of your asset library including comments and revisions. Ask the agent to complete any task in the background: searching for files, setting up folder structures, labeling and organizing footage, and much more. Check out aspect.inc/use-cases to see how different media teams use Aspect to deliver content faster.

We deliver high-quality, cost-effective healthcare to employees through text. Employers cut 10–20% of healthcare spend. Employees get concierge care that improves outcomes. Our AI agents analyze clinical data to identify care needs. We treat common conditions through our integrated virtual clinic. For more complex care, our agents find the best in-network providers using millions of price and quality data points, and handle end-to-end appointment booking.

Caddy is the operating system that works proactively for you. It learns how you work and acts on your behalf, keeping work moving while your context and voice stay intact. Instead of producing generic AI output, Caddy creates real work artifacts that sound like you and fit how you actually work. Today, it operates across the tools you use every day, including email, calendar, Slack, Linear, and Notion. Caddy is built by the team behind Loom’s AI and core product. We believe the next era of computing is software that understands intent, handles ambiguous work, and quietly gets work done in the background.

Nori is a concierge-level AI health coach in your pocket. It takes all of your health data—Apple Health, medical records, wearables, everything—and boils it down into a personalized daily plan. Users love it: “It's truly one of the best apps and I check it first every day. Since using Nori, I've been limiting devices in bed and eating earlier—and I'll be damned if it's not working... I started getting more deep sleep, my resting HR dropped to 43, my recovery improved.”—Jen, Nori user"

Fernstone is an AI-native insurance brokerage: we combine AI with licensed brokers to obtain complex insurance faster, and at better terms. Today, we manage risk for 100+ businesses in construction, security, and the trades.

Amika is infra to build your software factory. We give your team sandboxed AI coding agents in the cloud: the same infrastructure Ramp, Coinbase, and Stripe built in-house. Kick off work from a web UI, CLI, Slack, or API. Use your preferred coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, etc.). Each agent understands your codebase, runs autonomously, and ships real PRs with live previews of the apps it changed. Use it as your daily driver or plug it into your own code-gen pipeline via API.

Structured AI is building the AI workforce for construction design engineering, starting with AI agents that perform quality control on technical documents and drawings. Our agents learn your standards, apply the right building codes, and automatically review your drawings, so you see fewer clashes, fewer inconsistencies, and fewer costly RFIs and change orders. ⚙️ Automates QA/QC across mechanical, electrical, structural and more 🧩 Used by multi-disciplinary design firms to deliver projects faster with less risk 🚀 Mission: Free engineers to focus on creative design, not repetitive admin

Freeport is a trading platform for pre-IPO shares, equities, crypto, and perpetual futures. Our AI analysts turn trusted social and financial media into a real-time feed of market-moving news and actionable trade ideas.

RowFlow replaces clunky web forms with natural conversations that run over text, slack, or wherever your users are. Our platform increases your form’s response rates while cutting your internal overhead in half. With RowFlow, you can take any existing form and instantly convert it into an AI-powered conversation. New flows launch in minutes and reach respondents over your preferred channel or embedded chat. We guide the exchange, follow up automatically, and return clean structured data without extra work from your team. Forms power billions of business interactions yearly. Whether it’s forms for client intake, registrations, compliance, feedback, or surveys, they all follow the same painful pattern: low conversion, messy data, and frustrated users. Teams have long tolerated forms only because there's been no scalable alternative for collecting structured information from people - until now. Our goal is for RowFlow to become the new default way for how organizations collect user data in an AI-first world.

Bezel helps fashion brands create virtual photo/video shoots with AI. Upload images of clothes, select the human you want to model it, and Bezel generates pictures and videos that rival a full studio production. Every detail of the clothing is rendered flawlessly. Try it for yourself.

We build independent and contamination-proof benchmarks that measure real world performance. LLM Stats is the most complete LLM leaderboard. We have the most complete archive of LLM benchmark results and also run independent evaluations that are not the classical ones that are already in the training data of most models. Our mission: become the biggest community dedicated to AI transparency.

Interface is a frontier research lab focused on high-fidelity visual simulation. We build neural systems that model appearance, behavior, and interaction for world-model research.

Prosper builds AI phone agents for healthcare providers. Our agents automate manual, time-intensive workflows like patient scheduling, balance reminders, claims status checks, benefit verification, and prior authorizations. We integrate with 80+ EHRs, go live in 3 weeks, and offer a no-code interface for customization. Today, Prosper handles thousands of daily calls for dozens of providers, reducing costs by 50% and tripling productivity. We’re building the AI-first operating system for healthcare to eliminate the $200B lost to administrative overhead every year.

Frizzle uses AI to grade handwritten math assignments for teachers and transform them into rich analytics and differentiated assessment to help personalize instruction for every student. Teachers spend over 10 hours a week or 25% of all their work grading - Frizzle does it in minutes. Frizzle is the most valuable piece of software for teachers ever, as it eliminates the most time-consuming part of their workflow so they can focus on teaching. Frizzle shifts education from waterfall to agile learning. Instead of waiting for end-of-unit tests to discover gaps, teachers get continuous, real-time insight into student thinking from everyday work. Feedback becomes immediate, instruction adapts weekly, and learning iterates (measure, adjust, improve) so every student progresses faster with less teacher burnout. Frizzle was named an official White House AI Education Partner alongside OpenAI and Meta: https://www.whitehouse.gov/edai/. Frizzle was co-founded by Abhay Gupta and Shyam Sai, who met in high school over 10 years ago.

Fleetline is building the first complete-context algorithmic load planner for mid to large-sized trucking fleets. Today’s dispatchers face an overwhelming task: balancing regulations, customer demands, live fleet data, and individual driver needs, all while coordinating across siloed tools and teams. Mistakes run rampant, and each mistake is thousands of dollars. Even the select fleets using algorithms that have fleet-wide context struggle: the outputs are rigid, hard to interpret, and are blind to real-world nuances like driver preferences and schedule exceptions. Fleetline solves this by combining advanced optimization with LLMs that can easily adapt algorithms to each fleet’s needs and capture driver-specific information. The result is smarter planning truly optimized for every fleet and its drivers.

We use AI to help electricians speed up the time it takes to submit a competitive bid to a job. We do this by scanning complex CAD drawings and 10X-ing the time it takes to estimate a job. This involves using vision models to read and count complex symbols in large PDFs, which typically take hours (sometimes days) to do precisely. Every missed symbol can cost thousands, and our AI can count to 99% accuracy.

AI for account management and customer success. Ambral has already been used to drive $XXm in expansion revenue at multi-billion dollar enterprises and top scale-ups. Ambral synthesizes signals from all customer activity and interactions into AI-powered models of every account. It pinpoints who needs attention and why, and autonomously takes the best next action to drive expansions, prevent churn, and ensure no customer slips through the cracks. Team: Sam (CEO): 2x founder. Led AI at Everlywell and early PM at Wonder (now valued at $7bn). Lived the pain of losing customer intimacy at scale and is obsessed with solving it. Jack (CTO): Ex-SpaceX Flight Software Special Projects, where he developed telemetry routing and analysis systems for the most complex machines ever created. He’s now doing the same for the complexities of customer relationships.

Eden helps sales teams practice the calls they actually need to win. Reps upload or connect CRM notes, past calls, LinkedIn profiles, and company websites, then Eden creates realistic AI buyers they can speak with before the real meeting. After each practice call, Eden scores the rep and shows exactly what to improve.

IronLedger automates property accounting for property managers, developers and contractors, starting with accounts payable. We eliminate more than $70K of accounting costs annually for over 50K multifamily units. https://www.ironledger.ai/