Generative AI Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Strand AI builds foundation models that predict missing biological data from measured readouts.

ARC Prize builds AI benchmarks that measure general intelligence. Our benchmark, ARC-AGI, has been used by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI. Founded by Mike Knoop and Francois Chollet, we inspire open source artificial general intelligence (AGI) research through benchmarks (the ARC-AGI series), global competitions, research grants, community, and content, we exist to guide researchers, industry, and regulators on the path to AGI. We believe that AGI requires more than just scaling up existing AI models. It demands a fundamental shift towards systems capable of genuine fluid intelligence, the ability to adapt to novel challenges and solve problems efficiently, much like humans do.

Crow lets users control your app through chat. Connect Crow's AI agent to your product, and users can type what they want instead of clicking through menus. Crow connects to your APIs and data sources, navigates your UI, and executes real actions. Set guardrails, define workflows, track every interaction, and deploy in under a week—no rebuilding required.

Martini is a collaborative, AI-native platform for professional filmmaking in the era of generative media. By integrating the best generative models into professional workflows, we enable world-class creatives to harness generative AI as a legitimate medium for film.

Ritivel is an AI-native workspace for regulatory and medical writing teams at life sciences companies. Our AI agents draft CTDs, CSRs, INDs, and BLAs in minutes instead of weeks, helping drugs reach patients faster. Every month a drug is delayed from reaching the market costs pharma companies ~$45M in lost revenue and more importantly, delays treatment for thousands of patients who need it. Yet regulatory teams are stuck in a painful, months-long process: synthesizing thousands of pages of clinical data, hunting through SharePoint folders for the right documents, chasing colleagues for missing inputs, and manually drafting submissions. Ritivel deploys AI agents that transform how regulatory teams work. Our agents generate comprehensive first drafts directly in Microsoft Word, following FDA formatting requirements and pulling from your existing clinical data and prior submissions. Every data point includes citations linked back to the original source, so reviewers can verify with one click. Connected to SharePoint and Veeva, our agents automatically source the right documents. Integrated with Outlook, they handle reminder emails and follow-ups automatically. We're engineers who previously built AI copilots at Microsoft Research. After 50+ conversations with pharma professionals, we discovered the critical bottleneck in regulatory submissions and built Ritivel to solve it.

Current multimodal models can see and hear. But they talk when they shouldn't. They can't tell if you're speaking to them or someone else. We are building an AI that knows when to stay silent, yet still understanding what's going on in your conversation, so it can best assist when you do need it in real time. Our first version, fern-0.1: provides real-time expert opinions on demand, instant task delegation, zero interruptions. All as fast as ChatGPT voice and Gemini live.

We’d like to automate monitoring. To advance that mission, we’re building Sonarly. Software has two phases: build time and run time. Coding agents are getting great at build time, but production is still a mess of charts, logs, and noisy alerts. Sonarly triages production alerts, deduping - prioritizing, and attaching the missing context - so teams can trust what pages them and fix the right issue fast. As you deploy new code, Sonarly keeps alerts and investigations up to date automatically.

At AutoSitu, we’re building coordinated AI agents that live inside cities’ cross-department development review workflows—doing the heavy lifting, escalating judgment calls, and letting staff focus where human expertise actually matters. AutoSitu provides expert-level guidance and catch issues in minutes, helping cities and design firms/developers navigate an increasingly complex and fragmented regulatory environment. We serve as a strategic partner to forward-thinking public agencies and design teams across the country and are backed by Y Combinator (W26).

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.

Expected Parrot helps companies simulate their customers with AI agents to explore pricing, product, marketing, communications and other scenarios at scale. Our open-source library and no-code web app let you design custom agent personas and conduct interviews and surveys with them using LLMs of your choice to generate results and reports. Everything is cached and reproducible, and you can send the same surveys to human respondents to validate results in the same interface.

Absurd makes AI brand and performance ads at scale. Our last video for Kalshi ("Election Day") did 1M+ views, and our videos average 400K+ organic views. Companies like Replit, Brex, Whop, Reforge, and Micro1 use Absurd to create production-quality videos in 72 hours. We do it with a multi-agent orchestration layer, working closely with your team from concept to final cut. Try it at absurd.com We're hiring: absurd.com/careers

LunaBill is building AI Voice callers for healthcare billing teams. Insurance claim follow-up calls account for the 80% of the daily workload of a healthcare billing team, with each call averaging 30 minutes. Since our launch in July we are now at $764K in contracted ARR, of which $428K is live revenue and the rest will go live by January 2026. Our customers see a 10x increase in claims followed up per biller in the first week and we have converted 100% of pilots to paying customers. We have automated 50,000+ calls and signed partnerships with top healthcare leaders like UC health systems, Mayo, Experian Health and more. The founders have known each other for over a year. Suhail is a 2x founder, with 3+ years of experience building in healthcare including operating a medical billing company with 200+ healthcare clients. David founded Skiesoft, Taiwan’s biggest healthcare AI scribe company, used by 120k+ healthcare professionals. He also worked as a data scientist at UCSF, building models to audit medical-coding accuracy. Yash was a researcher at various hospital systems including Mayo Clinic.

Pixley is the first platform where kids can turn their drawings and ideas into fully animated cartoons in minutes. In just 3 weeks after launch, over 1000 families across 75 countries have already started creating stories. We’re starting with a clear wedge: personalized kids’ entertainment. Parents are tired of overstimulating, low-value content from YouTube and Netflix. Pixley gives them safe and personalized stories that encourage learning and imagination. But kids’ cartoons are just the beginning. As video generation improves, all video content will shift from manual production to being personalized and generated. Our long-term goal is to build the AI Netflix: a platform where shows and movies aren’t recommended, but instead generated around each viewer’s interests and habits. We’re 19 year old CS dropouts who’ve known each other since elementary school and won 4 hackathons at 15. After seeing AI flood the internet with low-quality content, we created Pixley – a safe, personalized way for kids to turn their ideas into animated stories.

Koyal is an Agentic AI Filmmaking Platform that allows you to seamlessly convert script or audio into personalized, visually compelling stories. We’re a team from Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Meta, with experience in AI video generation. https://koyal.ai builds directly upon our published research at the AI conference NeurIPS in December. We’ve been covered in the international press for our patented secure personalization protocol CHARCHA: the genAI captcha. Announcement: https://x.com/meh_agarwal/status/1965866965425348687 Demo: https://x.com/meh_agarwal/status/1965137062119752099 We currently have paid pilots with the biggest global music labels, podcasts and production houses, and just launched our public beta at beta.koyal.ai We recently concluded a pilot with Universal Music and T-Series (world’s largest music label) alongside Bollywood production houses like Maddock Entertainment, and Collective Artists Network! As part of that, we launched 5 music videos for Grammy and Oscar winning artists like A R Rahman, Ricky Kej and Shankar Mahadevan all crossing 1.5 million views! We've recently built SOTA capabilities in (i) multilingual script to audio to video, (ii) Agentic lip-sync with dynamic movement & (iii) Multi-character consistency.

Bear helps companies capture and convert the highest-intent leads on the internet - visitors clicking from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI agents. Bear owns the entire funnel from agent discovery to conversion.

Outsourced IT is a $350B industry running on 10-20% margins. We're building AI employees to help them solve support tickets faster and increase margins to 70-80%. Yolanda worked as a Senior Support Engineer at Netflix. Her team ran 3x more efficiently than average outsourced IT companies. We're now bringing the automation Netflix has to 150K companies globally.

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.

Automatic insights on all your company data. Speed up business workflows to visualizations with a 0 learning curve.

Our mission is to build self-improving AI agents. We're here to close the last mile reliability gap. Through calibrated llm judges and automatic evaluations, we help companies optimize their agents 10x faster than doing manual experimentation.

Qualify.bot helps commercial lenders and loan brokers process business loan applications with 4x higher conversion rates. Our AI voice calls eliminates 8+ hours of manual work per loan, from lead qualification to document collection & follow-ups.

Doe is where AI agents actually do your work. Connect your tools, tell Doe what you need, and agents handle it. When you want to do something yourself, Doe makes you faster and smarter. The boring stuff disappears. Everything else gets better.

PARES is the single platform commercial real estate brokers need for their entire workflow, from chasing leads to closing deals and everything in between. With our platform, brokers can: 1) Automatically update real-time transaction data in our CRM 2) Create lists of target properties, skip-trace, and easily navigate outbound calls 3) Underwrite deals with our AI Underwriting Agent 4) Create OMs/BOVs in minutes with our AI Marketing Agent Check us out at https://www.pares.ai/

Cleon's AI voice agents work 24/7—answering every incoming call right away and making outbound calls when you need them. They chat like real people, handle FAQs, book appointments, take orders, and pass the complex stuff to your team when needed.

Kashikoi is a simulation engine to benchmark AI agents. We generate CPU friendly world models that autonomously interview agents and generate deep behavioral assessments. We built a similar technology at Moveworks which was used to ship 250+ enterprise agents to customers daily.

The LLM Data Company is a research lab studying post-training data. We work with frontier AI teams to create bespoke tasks, rewards, and environments for models to play and learn at scale.

Cohesive is the agentic CRM for blue collar businesses like janitorial, pressure washing, landscaping, HVAC, and pest control businesses. Cohesive fully automates sales and marketing outreach to local businesses and property owners in the service area, helping local service businesses grow even while servicing clients in the field.

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Blueshoe is an AI platform for legal research and reasoning designed to capture the structure of legal thought and allow users to work directly within the logic of caselaw. By combining advanced AI with curated legal and proprietary data pipelines, the system allows users build and test arguments with unprecedented clarity.

Auctor brings alignment and intelligence to software implementation, enabling every project to deliver its intended value with clarity and precision.

LineWise is building an AI assistant for manufacturing teams to operate and resolve production issues, from defects to breakdowns. LineWise automatically extracts frontline know-how from live video recordings, turning them into structured SOPs and training guides. It also ingests generated SOPs, machine manuals, and past breakdown logs to suggest the most probable root causes when issues occur. Operators receive step-by-step guided troubleshooting, and as they confirm outcomes, LineWise learns from each resolution - converting every fix into a reusable playbook and proactively recommending preventive actions to cut future downtime.

Dollyglot is like Character.ai but with real time video avatars. Turn a photo and a voice into a real friend. Speak with Harry Potter about Hogwarts or brainstorm ideas with Elon Musk!

Instead of navigating complex menus or learning new tools, creatives can simply describe their vision in natural language—“Draw me a Swiss mountain lake. Now make it sunset. Add a boat. Now animate it.” Awen leverages AI reasoning to understand creative intent through voice. Our goal is to redefine how creatives engage with AI technology, balancing power and ease of use for both professionals and newcomers.

Tergle builds AI to replace Auditors.

Truffle AI makes it easy for developers to integrate AI agents into any software application. We do this by exposing agents as simple APIs that can be called from anywhere. Developers have used Truffle to add customer support agents into WhatsApp and analytics agents into Slack.

Emergent builds autonomous coding agents that replace traditional software development by generating, testing, and deploying production applications directly from plain-language intent. Our systems run in production at global scale and are used to build millions of real applications. Since our public launch, Emergent has reached $50M ARR in 7 months making us one of the fastest-growing startups in the world. 5M+ users across 190+ countries have built 6M+ applications on Emergent. We've raised $100M from Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Google, Lightspeed India, Prosus Ventures, Together Fund, and Y Combinator.

assistant-ui helps frontend developers add AI chat to their apps. Our product is used by several dozen companies, like LangChain, Stack AI, Browser Use, and Athena Intelligence. We're building an open source Typescript/React library and a backend as a service, with first class integrations into popular agent frameworks like LangGraph and Vercel AI SDK.

TrainLoop makes it effortless for developers to supercharge LLM performance through reinforcement learning.

Wildcard is the infrastructure platform for e-commerce brands to succeed in ChatGPT and AI shopping. We give brands SKU-level visibility into how their products appear and perform inside AI assistants—showing when they surface, why they don’t, and how to fix product attributes to improve discovery and conversion. As AI shopping standardizes, Wildcard will help merchants activate next-generation experiences through the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP).

Calltree makes enterprise-grade AI support reps for call centers. Our AI reps take voice calls and chats like other AI support agents but can also use internal enterprise tools like a homegrown CRM or internal dashboards, like the highly trained humans working there today.

Operand builds and deploys AI systems that help companies run their business better—using data, machine learning, and decision systems to drive day-to-day strategy execution. They work with leading retailers, manufacturers, distributors, and capital allocators on guiding everything from pricing, forecasting, allocation, diligence, and more.

Trava is building AI agents for global trade compliance. Importers lose billions each year to duty overpayments and filing errors. Trava audits customs entries and automates classification to help importers protect margins and stay compliant at scale.

Sennu AI reviews every pull request with full context of your Salesforce codebase like a senior Salesforce architect would

Paragon is the AI growth engine for distributors and manufacturers, freeing up staff and growing revenue on autopilot.

City building departments are understaffed and overworked. Meanwhile, builders lobby to remove power from building departments. Because building departments are usually the only profitable/self-sustaining branch of a local government, this is problematic. Permitify allows city build-plan reviewers to 10x their productivity covering the labor shortage, reducing the time required to issue a building permit, and allowing the city government's only profitable branch to stay intact.

a0.dev is a platform that helps mobile developers build high quality apps in days instead of weeks by generating custom react native projects. We've launched top ranking apps that have been used by hundreds of thousands, and now we're creating the tools we wish we had to build faster.

ThirdLayer is an applied research and product lab building the next interface for human–AI collaboration. Our first product is Dex, an AI copilot for the browser. Think Cursor for knowledge work, optimized for speed and embedded directly where you work. Most web agents are built for set-and-forget tasks. But real work is fluid and messy—spread across tabs, tools, and evolving decisions. Dex transforms your browser into an intelligent, multimodal workspace that understands your intent through voice, text, and action. It enhances familiar interfaces, automates tedious steps, and removes the friction of handoffs. Beneath the surface, Dex is more than a browser agent — it’s a foundation for: ● Long-term, cross-modal memory grounded in real workflows ● A new interaction layer to replace static UI with a collaborative canvas ● Personalization: understanding how individuals approach tasks and navigate software We're building the infrastructure for adaptive, intent-aware systems that work the way you do.

Alice turns generic course materials into personalized learning and exam prep using AI. We’re Duolingo for exams, and more than 10k college students have already used Alice. Kim, the CEO, is a domain expert in education with more than 10+ years of university teaching experience. He is also technical by background. MRR is $20k, growing +10% week-over-week the last 8 weeks Alice's core market opportunity is +$10b, with the global education market being almost $10trillion. As AI starts to disrupt education, Alice will use in-built network effects and virality in its product to create a global winner. Go Alice. Thank you!