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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Corvera (YC W26) is the context layer for AI-native CPG brands. We help brands unlock the full potential of AI by making their unified data legible to any AI tool via MCP. As of mid-March 2026, we scaled from $0 to $33k in MRR in 4 weeks, are serving 12 brands, and are growing 130% week-on-week. With Corvera in place, brands can enable anyone in their organization to: - Rapidly deploy AI agents via tools such as Claude and ChatGPT, - Build dashboards and apps using Cursor and Lovable, and - Automate workflows across the entire business, from category management to supply chain. All in a secure, audit-logged, and access-controlled environment, without the need for a team of data engineers or AI specialists, in a simple plug-and-play solution. We're founded by Chris (2x Founder; ex-CEO at Better Nature; Forbes 30U30), Dirk (ex-Google Data & AI Lead), and Matthew (ex-Head of Product at Rosemark; Princeton MEng in CS). To-date, we’ve raised $6.2M and are backed by YC, firstminute capital, 6 Degrees Capital, 20VC, Rebel Fund, Duke Capital Partners, and more. Our ICP are omnichannel retail-focused CPG brands at the $100M+ revenue inflection point. Our mission is bold: to enable the next generation of unicorn CPG brands to be run by teams of less than 10 people. Our vision is even bolder: to be the system of intelligence for the $5.4T global CPG industry. Visit www.corvera.ai to learn more!

Use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini safely without leaking sensitive data. LogosGuard redacts your private information before the prompt ever leaves your device.

We’re building AI agents that speed up drug trials by automating the manual consolidation and document prep required for every IND submission. Today, biotechs spend months stitching together reports from contractors and internal teams just to file and get to their first-in-human trial.

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.

Sol is a browser where developers can orchestrate agents from their tabs. Ship 100x from a single place where agents can see, navigate, and act on your workspace.

Anto is building a foundation model for microbial communities, making the gut microbiome computable for the first time. We predict drug toxicity and efficacy across diverse populations and fix drugs so they work for everyone — solving the hidden root cause of most drug failures. Founded by Arvid (Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Nature-published researcher who pioneered quality-aware, goal-directed sparsification) and David (Harvard Medical School Gastroenterology, J&J), second-time founders who published the breakthrough at leading machine learning AI conferences and Nature.

Norra helps nursing facilities manage equipment operations. Every year, ~$80 billion are spent on medical equipment like beds, concentrators, and wheelchairs. Nursing facilities continue to operate with zero visibility which leads to $15 billion in equipment waste annually. We use physical trackers and AI agents to eliminate this.

Lemma catches the silent, semantic failures your observability tools miss, where your AI agent looks like it worked but didn’t. We scan every trace to surface issues before users complain, identify root causes, and help you fix them without manual digging, so your agents improve over time.

Moss is building the real-time semantic search runtime for conversational and multimodal AI. Our system enables voice agents, copilots, and chat interfaces to retrieve, reason, and respond in sub-10 ms, delivering the responsiveness that makes AI interactions feel truly natural. If you’ve ever built a conversational or voice AI product, you’ve felt the lag. That moment when an agent pauses and the illusion of intelligence breaks. The bottleneck is almost always retrieval. Each query hops across networks and databases, adding delay and cost. Moss eliminates that gap by keeping retrieval close to where the agent runs. Moss runs natively across browsers, mobile devices, and servers with an optimized vector index built in Rust and WebAssembly. It enables teams to build AI products that feel instant, contextual, and adaptive. The experiences that sustain engagement and unlock new kinds of interaction. For our customers, this translates into tangible business value: stronger user retention, higher conversion, and entirely new product categories made possible by real-time understanding. Moss is already powering production pilots across voice AI and developer platforms, achieving sub-10 ms retrieval and 70–90% token savings compared to traditional pipelines.

Bron is the ChatGPT for sports betting. Find +EV bets across 150+ sportsbooks and prediction markets, build parlays automatically, and surface the best bets of the day — in seconds. Download Bron on the App Store here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bron-ai-sports-analysis/id6761323087

An AI companion that chats and plays with children inside games like Minecraft, helping them learn a new language while they play. Kids already spend hours each week in their favorite games, and now parents can turn that game time into learning time.

Sciloop creates expert-level math and physics problems that frontier AI models can't solve, then sells the data to AI labs for training and evaluation. Our problems are created by IPhO and IMO medalists — the top 0.01% of STEM talent globally. On our benchmark, models like GPT 5.4 Pro and Gemini 3.1 Pro score 0-5% on our hardest problems. We work with AI labs to supply continuous, fresh training data that pushes the frontier of mathematical and scientific reasoning. Founded by Bilal and Osman, International Physics Olympiad medalists from MIT with hands-on ML research experience at MIT CSAIL.

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.

Allus builds next-gen vision foundation models that bring real intelligence to manufacturing. Enabling factories to see, understand, and improve production in real time.

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"

Boom reaches out to your customers before you lose them. We run proactive outbound conversations at scale: recovering churned users, re-engaging drop-offs, and protecting revenue you thought was gone. AI agents hold real conversations with your customers over SMS, email, WhatsApp, or phone, in their language, on the channel they actually answer. Every month, companies lose 5-15% of revenue to churn, and more walks out through abandoned signups and failed onboarding. The tools built to fix this don't work. Win-back emails get ignored. Cancel flows only catch people at the door. Hiring humans doesn't scale. Boom does the one thing that works: a real conversation. 1,000x the reach of manual outreach, and the customer can reply.

Lapis gives businesses the ability to run end-end ads on AI platforms, starting with ChatGPT Ads. With Lapis, businesses can rapidly iterate on ad copies and A/B test at scale without being bottlenecked by design and creative capacity. Lapis can also be used on traditional ad platforms like Google and Meta, where marketers can use Lapis to generate ad creatives, headlines, and get feedback on what ads actually work. Lapis is used by 1,000+ marketing teams, from big businesses like Hyundai and Tata to small businesses around the world, and supports 15+ languages including English, Spanish, and Italian.

Aside is an AI browser that acts on your behalf. Give it your passwords, browsing history, and browser context. It gets real work done end to end in the apps you already use, with no integrations required. - 🌐 Browser-native automation: Works directly in Gmail, Notion, Slack, Figma, banking apps, and internal tools, without any integrations. - 🔑 Passwords into tools: Lets AI use logins, sessions, passkeys, and credentials to take action. - 📚 Browsing history into memory: Gives AI persistent context across sessions. - 🧡 Push notifications into a heartbeat: Lets agents react to events and resume work in real time.

We help construction teams eliminate rework, delays, and drawing confusion before construction starts.
We analyze PDF plans, detect clashes and inconsistencies across disciplines, and create draft RFIs so teams can resolve issues early. This saves construction companies hundreds of hours and millions of dollars. What we do: - Automatically detect clashes, missing information, and drawing mismatches - Align architectural, structural, and MEP plans so everything matches across sheets - Generate draft RFIs from issues we find - Replace long page-turn meetings with instant drawing analysis - Reduce rework and prevent schedule delays before boots hit the ground We integrate with:
Procore, Autodesk, email, and the tools teams already use Teams use us to: - Save hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per project - Catch design and coordination issues early - Reduce RFIs and prevent field fixes - Keep projects on schedule with fewer surprises Contact us at [email protected]

Compyle is a less autonomous coding agent that asks before it acts. We're like Cursor or Claude Code - but you won't need to rewrite your codebase every time you use it for more than a small task. We built Compyle because we were frustrated with the direction other coding agents are headed. They're all racing to be more autonomous, running for hours without human input. This doesn't work for real production code. When agents run autonomously, they make countless small decisions that pile up in your codebase. Engineers lose ownership - they don't know what was implemented, can't effectively debug or maintain it, and struggle to build on top of it. The code becomes a black box, and they're forced to throw it away. Compyle keeps engineers in the driver's seat.

Cortex AI builds the world’s most diverse and large-scale real-world workplace robot & egocentric dataset — where the physical world becomes the next training and evaluation set for embodied AI. We power frontier labs developing robotics foundation models and general-purpose robots by providing the data they need: 1️⃣ Egocentric Data — real-workplace human video with hand/body pose, depth, and subtask labels. 2️⃣ Robot Data — trajectories collected from manipulators and humanoids in real industry settings. 3️⃣ Human-in-the-Loop Rollouts & Evals — real-world deployments with remote operators who recover robots when they fail, capturing data that feeds back into training and continuously improves models. Additionally, through the Cortex Marketplace, workplaces get paid to host data-collection and evaluation sessions, while labs access the in-the-wild data that truly matters. This draws on Lucas’s previous experience as co-founder of Carousell, a C2C marketplace that scaled to a $1B+ valuation.

Understand user patterns and find silent failures in your AI agents. The Context Company helps teams analyze AI agent conversations to surface user behavior patterns, performance trends, and moments where agents struggle - so teams know what’s working, what’s not, and what to improve next. We turn raw conversations into structured signals: topic clustering, user feedback analysis, custom pattern tracking, and alerts. All alongside traditional observability like traces, tool calls, latency, and costs. Get started in less than 10 lines of code.