AI (Artificial Intelligence) Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Scale accelerates the development of AI within organizations of any size to deliver critical business insights and operational efficiency. Its data-centric infrastructure platform leverages RLHF (Reinforced Learning with Human Feedback) to help organizations build the strongest AI models that supercharge their business, with customers across industries including Meta, Microsoft, U.S. Army, DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit, Open AI, General Motors, Toyota Research Institute, Brex, Instacart and Flexport.

Podium is the all-in-one AI-powered lead management and communication platform used by more than 100,000 businesses to acquire and convert new customers. At the forefront of Podium’s innovation is its AI employee, who ensures businesses respond to leads instantly, anytime of the day or night—significantly increasing lead conversion rates and revenue. Podium helps businesses obtain more reviews, rank higher on Google, and consolidate lead channels. Businesses can call and text customers from the web and/or mobile app, send payment links, drive repeat business through bulk messages, and more—all managed and delivered from one easy-to-use dashboard. Additionally, with Podium’s AI Employee and automations, businesses can efficiently handle customer inquiries seamlessly across all communication channels, providing timely and accurate responses that drive sales. Podium’s innovative work has gained recognition on top industry lists, such as Forbes’ Next Billion Dollar Startups, Forbes’ Cloud 100, the Inc. 5000, and Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies. Podium was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in Lehi, Utah. It is currently backed by Accel, Summit Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Y Combinator.

Checkr builds people infrastructure for the future of work. And we believe everyone should have a fair chance to work. That's why we've designed a faster—and fairer—way to screen job seekers. For more information on our mission and products, visit https://checkr.com.

Autonomous digital employee that runs back-office operations for e-commerce companies: deliveries, tracking, returns, transport and CS.

Tolmo is an agent-driven security platform that secures every layer — code, CI, cloud applications at the speed of AI changes. Codebases are growing faster than ever, at a rate humans can’t keep up with. Tolmo deploys fleets of AI security agents on a live production knowledge graph that connects data from cloud services, containers, databases, and third-party providers (Observability, Security, etc.). Tolmo agents triage, verify impact, and remediate security issues autonomously, escalating to humans only when truly necessary.

AI agents are starting to act in the real world, but they can't reliably understand it. Geospatial data is complex, fragmented, and unstructured. Ask a model a specific question about a specific place and it guesses. Our API and MCP give agents cited answers about any location. Our mission is to index every inch of the earth, and make it as queryable as the web.

Linzumi is the chat your engineering team uses to direct dozens of AI coding agents. Kick off work, review it, ship it. All from chat. See every agent's work. Unblock the agents that need you from your laptop, your phone, the coffee line. Your teammates see it too. Every decision your team makes compiles into a source of truth - what to build, why it changed, how your agents should act. That same source generates new work and verifies completed work. Deliberative alignment, repurposed from aligning LLMs to aligning companies.

What your best people know, every agent in your org can use. Glen picks it up as the work happens, nothing to write down, nothing to maintain, and it never walks out the door. A day-one hire's agent runs on the same judgment as your most senior person's.

Cerenovus is a company brain. We aggregate every kind of file a company produces — documents, PDFs, emails, Slack messages, spreadsheets, meeting notes — and convert them into a single markdown knowledge graph with native AI-agent integration. A company's information becomes uniformly readable both by humans and by the AI agents working inside the graph. On top of that foundation, Cerenovus maps the company as a system, drawing connections between the people, processes, and tools that make up real workflows. From that systems map, it infers where operations are inefficient and how to improve them. In practice, this tool will help executives make better decisions. Whenever a leader has to act on a question — how to restructure a team, whether to keep a vendor, or where handoffs between teams are breaking down — Cerenovus will give them an evidence-backed answer in minutes rather than weeks. Today, that work is done by consultants, by internal analysts, or by the executive asking around informally. Each of those approaches is slow, partial, and goes stale the moment it is delivered. Cerenovus produces the same answers faster, at a fraction of the cost, and keeps them live as the company evolves.

Care GP is building AI agents to run operations for primary healthcare clinics

Zenbu is an extensible IDE for orchestrating coding agents. Shape it around exactly how you and your team work.

RealPact builds AI agents that handle the paperwork behind real estate transactions. They find property records like deeds, tax records, permits, parcel data, and MLS information, then use that data to fill out contracts, organize documents, track deadlines, and help brokerages close deals faster. We currently sell to brokerages in New Hampshire and are expanding quickly.

We believe in the next generation of finance where everyone around the world can access the global market and liquidity from the tip of their hands. We are building the best mobile trading app that will enable this vision. Hyperliquid is the house of all finance, Instinct is the app of all finance. Hyperliquid.

Describe an experiment in plain English, and Infera turns it into a validated, instrument-ready run across the equipment your lab already uses. Infera handles the protocol logic, vendor-specific scripts, data, inventory, and institutional knowledge in one system. An AI-native compiler for the lab: one system from intent to execution.

Rex is an AI-native service for order to cash. We replace people-heavy operations with AI agents that continuously manage invoices, customers and exceptions. Order to cash is a $60B outsourced function because the work is too messy for traditional automation. Every customer has different context, exceptions do not follow clean rules, and the next step is often buried in emails, portals, handoffs, or someone’s memory. Rex agents run continuously in the background and resolve work to SLA standards so cash keeps moving. We're live with pre-IPO tech companies, managing >$500m in receivables from F100 companies, cutting manual follow-up cycles from weeks to hours. We founded Rex after spending four years building Sequence, an a16z-backed finance ops platform, from zero to Series A — where we saw firsthand that at-scale, O2C still runs on manual labour. Rex is the #1 winner of the Vercel AI Accelerator out of 2,500 teams, selected by Guillermo Rauch and leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Browserbase and more.

We build modular humanoid robots and the software platform that allows anyone to train, deploy, and scale robots for real-world tasks. Today, teaching a robot a new skill requires robotics engineers, machine learning engineers, training infrastructure, and significant compute resources. We reduce that process to: Record → Upload → Train → Deploy. Our robots are modular and configurable, with interchangeable end effectors, configurable sensors, and multiple deployment configurations. We believe current humanoid embodiments are often overfit for specific use cases, so we're building a platform that adapts to different environments and applications. Long term, we want robotics to be as accessible as software development. Our goal is to become the default platform for training and deploying autonomous robots.

GUILD is a Neoprime contractor automating defense supply chain end-to-end by vertically integrating with our supplier partners. We integrate artificial intelligence, contracting operations, and capital to source, fund, produce, and deliver defense contracts end-to-end. Operating across the U.S. and NATO markets, we bridge global manufacturing capacity with defense demand and execute with the speed and precision of an AI-driven system. Our mission is to build a modern, new generation defense contracting institution where technology and production operate as one.

FinalDose is building the first programmable drug - a single smart drug molecule that you can insert any diseased genetic code and it can search and destroy cells upon DNA recognition. Unlocking 80% of undruggable targets today. Starting with all cancers.

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.

Rudus is an AI-powered takeoff and estimation platform enabling concrete contractors to win 3x more projects yearly. It automatically identifies every concrete structure like footings, walls, columns, and slabs on plans, eliminating the manual work and reducing estimation time by 70%. Concrete is the most-used material on earth after water, and demand is surging with the AI infrastructure boom.

Light Anchor (YC P26) builds AI-run consumer brands that run at the speed of compute. Consumer brands have always been limited by the speed of humans: hiring, coordinating, and sleeping. AI agents that now run operations end-to-end break all those constraints, making a new kind of consumer business possible: one capped by compute, not headcount. Today, Light Anchor operates one flagship brand and multiple experiment stores, all run by AI agents on a shared platform that compounds with every new brand launched. The vision is thousands of consumer businesses, operating with little to no human intervention.

GodHands is a deterministic computer use layer that enables AI agents to reliably operate across browser and desktop apps. We make real-world workflows even on legacy or non-API systems more deterministic and predictable, without completely relying on fragile vision-based approaches. By leveraging our infrastructure, your agent can seamlessly operate across new or internal enterprise applications without requiring custom integrations or per-app handling.

Revnu is your AI growth team. Built to run your whole GTM while you focus on building, Revnu is the best way to grow with AI. Our agents run every growth channel: outbound, ads, SEO, social, etc all on one shared intelligence, so learnings from one channel automatically improve all the others. You keep shipping. We run the business.

Archal lets you test agents and code that touch third-party APIs without hitting the real services. We build working clones of popular SaaS platforms that hold state across requests and behave like the originals, so you catch bugs before your agent does something irreversible in production.

The Imperfect app pulls your data to create a personalized AI coach for your next race. It adapts your training, recovery, and nutrition to how your body is actually responding.

We turn natural Language into Multi-Drone Mission execution. Degla is built around a simple idea: once you’ve expressed your intent, the system owns the problem.You don’t babysit drones. You don’t micromanage failures. You don’t rewrite plans. You state the goal, Degla figures out how.

We are making the browser layer for your AI agents. Agents don’t need to see UIs like us humans do. We give agents a semantic understanding of the web instead of brittle visual interfaces. Your agents can perform deep research, large-scale scraping, and complex automation—more efficiently with our knowledge graphs that turns the web into a native protocol for LLMs.

We automate inventory and contents processing for insurance and insurance-adjacent industries, including public adjusters, restoration contents, and insurance companies. We also handle various inventory and estimate adjacent processes that cost many billions of dollars a year and thousands of years of man hours.

Ontora is an AI Agent that interviews every employee to map how work actually gets done and identify bottlenecks. Consultants spend months doing this manually; Ontora does it in hours.

Hub is a distributed real-world data infrastructure company that captures the lived richness of human experience, including voice, nuance, and perspective to train the next generation of AI models. Through HubApp, our global network spanning 150+ countries sources high-fidelity, original data that cannot be found on the public web or generated synthetically. We provide a completely automated pipeline coupled with human-in-the-loop validation to deliver production-ready multimodal data to frontier AI labs and Fortune 500 companies.

Korso builds AI agents that handle the operational work manufacturers still do manually, including processing RFQs, following up on quotes, coordinating with suppliers, and keeping production on track when things go wrong. Our agents plug into your existing ERP and CRM, understand your workflows, and act on your behalf: triaging incoming requests, chasing delayed orders, notifying customers, and escalating when human judgment is needed. We built Korso around the reality that enterprise systems cannot afford mistakes. Every agent action passes through verification layers, tools are scoped, and critical operations go through dry-run validation and secondary review. Full audit trails mean you can see exactly what was done, why, and when. Most AI automation breaks down at the ERP integration layer. Korso's orchestration is built for the messiness of real manufacturing systems, with long-running workflows that span weeks and checkpointing that never loses progress. Instead of replacing your systems, Korso makes them work harder, so your team spends less time on coordination and more time on the work that actually matters.

Ndea is building frontier AI systems that blend intuitive pattern recognition and formal reasoning into a unified architecture. # AI for Scientific Advancement Unlike all life before us, humanity's ascent is a story of ingenuity, not just biological evolution. Our progress has been driven by the curiosity to acquire knowledge, the ability to pass it on, and an intrinsic drive to innovate. We build technology which gives us leverage beyond our biology. We stand at the top of a knowledge and technology colossus that we collectively created over the past ten thousand generations. Scientific progress has helped us overcome burdens that long defined human life — famines, plagues, and widespread illiteracy. Science will continue to redefine the boundaries of the human condition. Today, the acceleration of scientific progress hinges on one factor: AI capable of independent invention and discovery. This capacity is the gateway to advancements beyond our wildest imagination. # A New Research Lab We're starting Ndea — an AI research and science lab. The name - like 'idea' with an 'n' - is inspired by the Greek concepts ennoia (intuitive understanding) and dianoia (logical reasoning), capturing our first goal to merge deep learning with program synthesis. Ndea is entirely focused on developing and operationalizing AGI to realize unprecedented scientific progress in our lifetime for the benefit of all current and future generations. Building AGI alone is a monumental undertaking, but our mission is even bigger. We're creating a factory for rapid scientific advancement — a factory capable of inventing and commercializing N ideas. From our vantage point today, we see many 'known' frontiers like self-driving vehicles, drug discovery, sustainable energy, robotics, and space exploration. While AGI will benefit all of these, the most exciting adventure lies in the 'unknown'. AGI promises discoveries and progress we cannot imagine today.

We automate the entire end-to-end prior-authorization process for private practices for cheaper, and more accurately than they're doing today.

The problem: AI spend is scattered across multiple provider billing consoles that don't talk to each other. Teams can't answer simple questions like "which customer is driving our Anthropic bill?" or "is this feature profitable after AI costs?" without manually pulling data from each provider and stitching it together in a spreadsheet. What SuperPenguin does: SuperPenguin tracks AI spend across 14 providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Modal, Cursor and more). Zero-code setup: connect an API key and costs sync automatically with model-level breakdowns, trends, and forecasts. Per-request attribution: add two lines of Python SDK to tag every AI call by customer, feature, or team. Slack alerts on budget thresholds and spend anomalies. Most teams are set up in under five minutes. We help companies see where their AI money goes and whether it's worth it.

AI SRE agents that automatically learn each customer’s system so they work just like an in-house engineer.

Your agent processed a refund without looking up the order ID, costing you thousands. You only found out three hours later from a support ticket. Evals, output scoring, and observability can reduce the likelihood of mistakes like these occurring - but there's no solution that inspects and prevents an action as it’s about to execute. Salus does that. We’ve built an API that wraps around your agent and checks its actions at run time, blocking incorrect ones and providing immediate feedback to guide retries. Kevin and Vedant were roommates at Stanford, where they both studied computer science.

We build intelligence for cultural institutions. Our first commercial product is for the literature industry with a focus on school and public libraries. It is a AI-native OS for libraries, that helps librarians save time on tedious tasks and lets them focus on their patrons.

Grade is the API for performance-based payroll. Think of us like Deel or Gusto, but our payouts are for work completed, not hours. Companies use Grade to pay AI agents and contractors based on results: tasks completed, targets hit, work delivered. We handle compliance, tax reporting, and global payouts.

The best grid connection is no grid connection. Voxel builds vertically integrated energy generation and storage systems for data centers that bypass utility connection delays. By leveraging the vast supply of second-life EV batteries and our novel DC microgrid architecture, Voxel generates datacenter power on site and drastically reduces system cost and time-to-power.

We are building the world’s largest video library. We've aggregated billions of videos into a searchable index and use agents to find and label the exact datasets a lab needs on demand. If a lab needs 100K hours of cooking videos where someone is holding a pan, with reasoning annotations on top, our agents search the index, extract the matching subset, route it through our labeling pipeline, and deliver a custom dataset in days, not months.

We engineer inexpensive, autonomous strike drones designed to operate in the most contested combat environments on Earth! By combining true hardware modularity with an agentic control system that lowers cognitive load on operators, we enable faster upgrades, broader adoption, and more than 2x reduction in lifecycle cost. Our customers and partners include the UK Royal Marine Commandos, several other units in the UK, and 4 other NATO forces, and we are currently shipping prototypes for iterative feedback. Think of us as Anduril, but with worse weather, and better banter.

Foreman is the all-in-one AI-powered project management platform built for construction contractors and the trade industry. Today, contractors run complex businesses on a patchwork of tools that were never designed for construction — estimates in spreadsheets, plans in email, proposals copy-pasted from old Word docs, photos scattered across phones. Nothing talks to anything else, and the admin work never stops. Foreman replaces that patchwork with a single platform that manages the full lifecycle of a construction job, from first estimate to final invoice. Contractors upload plans, photos, or a project description, and Foreman's AI instantly generates structured takeoffs, scoped estimates, and professional proposals — in minutes, not hours. From there, every customer record, document, permit, photo, change order, and conversation lives in one place, organized around the job. The result: contractors spend less time buried in admin and more time building. They bid faster, manage jobs with less chaos, and close projects cleanly — without duct-taping five tools together to do it.

10x Science develops frontier AI models with deep memory to redefine how scientists understand and engineer biology across the life sciences, starting with drug development. AI-powered drug discovery is flooding the pipeline with new candidates faster than ever. But before any of them can advance to the clinic, scientists must deeply characterize the protein therapeutic to understand whether it will work. Today, that process takes months of manual, error-prone analysis that cannot keep pace with discovery. Our AI-native platform automates it, giving drug developers the confidence to advance the right candidates and stop the wrong ones early. We have strong commercial traction with enterprise pharma customers. Our founding team built the field of next-generation protein characterization out of Carolyn Bertozzi's Nobel laureate lab at Stanford. Collectively, we have 18+ years of collective domain expertise, 47+ scientific publications, and a 2x YC Founder. We move at the highest velocity and are positioned to lead the next generation of modern AI development in the life sciences.

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.

Corelayer is the AI-native platform for production software support, built for data-heavy, regulated industries like finance and healthcare. It continuously monitors alerts, logs, infrastructure, and underlying data for issues and uses agents to debug and suggest fixes. We're helping teams at companies ranging from growth-stage fintechs to S&P 500 financial institutions spend less time on support and more on high-leverage work.

RamAIn can intelligently automate any super complex and repetitive process across applications (Browser & Desktop) super fast. It doesn’t matter whether you have API access or not - if you can see it, RamAIn can do it. Simply chat with it and get your UI task as a composable API - fully managed, self-healing and self-evolving!

Human-assisted development should be for novel ideation, not routine maintenance, bug fixes or incremental updates. Approxima is bringing you that future with agents that can scope work, code, validate their fixes end-to-end in sandbox environments and merge to production. Book a demo: https://calendly.com/ashish-selvaraj/approxima

Haladir is the decisional AI layer for logistics. We sit on top of your WMS, TMS, OMS, etc., unify their data into one operational graph, and embed solver-grade optimization, ML models, and process intelligence into the decisions that power supply chains. Today's AI brought intelligence. The next frontier is judgement.