Y Combinator Startups in the San Francisco Bay Area 2026

Deel is the all-in-one payroll and HR platform for global teams. Built for the way the world works today, Deel combines HRIS, payroll, compliance, benefits, performance, and equipment management into one seamless platform. With AI-powered tools and a fully owned payroll infrastructure, Deel supports every worker type in 120+ countries—helping businesses scale smarter, faster, and more compliantly. Discover how Deel makes global work simple at deel.com.

Newfront is building the modern insurance brokerage. Transparent data delivered real-time translates into a lower total cost of risk and greater insights. We work with 20% of US unicorns, 100s of YC startups, and 150+ public companies on their Business Insurance and Total Rewards. Headquartered in San Francisco, Newfront has more than 800 colleagues and offices throughout the US.

Brex is the AI-powered spend platform for modern companies, from startups to enterprises. Combining corporate cards, expense management, travel, business accounts, and bill pay, Brex makes it easy to control spend before it happens with unprecedented efficiency and accuracy. Our mission is to empower employees anywhere to make better financial decisions, so we designed our platform to make expenses almost effortless with unrivaled automation of manual expense work and real-time tracking. Brex supports more countries and currencies than any other spend solution. Brex has tens of thousands of customers, including some of the most successful, high-growth companies, such as DoorDash, SeatGeek, Coinbase, ScaleAI, MasterClass, Indeed, Allbirds, and Superhuman. Brex offers: - Corporate cards with 10-20x higher limits - Business accounts with easy wires, same-day liquidity, fast global payments, and $6M in FDIC insurance - Reward options that include billboards, offsites, and coaching - Founder-friendly financial modeling tools - Special events and masterclasses for founders - Advanced spend management software as startups grow that includes global capabilities, travel, bill pay and more.

Faire is an innovative online marketplace that uses machine learning to match local retailers with the brands and products that uniquely fit their stores. We are using the power of technology to connect brands and independent retailers from all over the world, building a thriving community of hundreds of thousands of retailers, which has resulted in over 7 million new connections to date. Faire was founded on the belief that the future of retail is local. Our mission is to empower brands and retailers to strengthen the unique character of local communities. Our data-driven approach unburdens retailers from decades-old obstacles by helping find the right products for their shop. Plus, our straight-forward financial terms level the playing field by eliminating inventory risk and providing access to capital—key offerings previously only available to big box chains. For brands, our platform provides powerful sales, marketing, and analytics tools that simplify their business and allow them to focus on what they love: making great products.

We exist to lift as many people up the socioeconomic ladder as possible. We dramatically improve lives by letting professionals turn extra time and ambition into career growth and financial opportunity. We achieve this with our app-based marketplace that connects workplaces and professionals, allowing professionals to book on-demand shifts and workplaces to access on-demand talent.

Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and Finance. It brings together all of the workforce systems that are normally scattered across a company, like payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers. For the first time ever, you can manage and automate every part of the employee lifecycle in a single system. Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365—all within 90 seconds. Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.2B from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks and Bedrock.

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.

In today’s environment, employees need training to ensure business compliance, skill development and to support an engaged workforce. Go1 brings together content from the world’s top training providers and makes it easy to access in whichever platform your organization uses. This makes it easier to deliver, manage and engage with training. Go1 also works with existing LMS, HRIS, and business systems to make learning simpler and more effective.

GitLab is the first single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle. Only GitLab enables Concurrent DevOps, unlocking organizations from the constraints of today’s toolchain. GitLab provides unmatched visibility, radical new levels of efficiency and comprehensive governance to significantly compress the time between planning a change and monitoring its effect. This makes the software lifecycle 200% faster, radically improving the speed of business. GitLab and Concurrent DevOps collapses cycle times by driving higher efficiency across all stages of the software development lifecycle. For the first time, Product, Development, QA, Security, and Operations teams can work concurrently in a single application. There’s no need to integrate and synchronize tools, or waste time waiting for handoffs. Everyone contributes to a single conversation, instead of managing multiple threads across disparate tools. And only GitLab gives teams complete visibility across the lifecycle with a single, trusted source of data to simplify troubleshooting and drive accountability. All activity is governed by consistent controls, making security and compliance first-class citizens instead of an afterthought. Built on Open Source, GitLab leverages the community contributions of thousands of developers and millions of users to continuously deliver new DevOps innovations. More than 100,000 organizations from startups to global enterprise organizations, including Ticketmaster, Jaguar Land Rover, NASDAQ, Dish Network and Comcast trust GitLab to deliver great software at new speeds.

GrubMarket is the AI-powered technology enabler and digital transformer of American Food Supply Chain industry. Our mission is to build and provide the eCommerce and software technologies to this industry, to transform this completely offline and highly manual industry into modernized online industry powered by software technologies, and improve the efficiency of American food supply chain.

About Oklo Inc.: Oklo Inc. (Oklo) is developing advanced fission power plants to provide emission-free, reliable, and affordable energy. Oklo received a Site Use Permit from the U.S Department of Energy, has performed successful prototypic fuel fabrication, was awarded fuel material from Idaho National Laboratory, developed the first advanced fission combined license application accepted and docketed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and is developing advanced fuel recycling technologies in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and national laboratories. Oklo has been featured in Time, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Popular Mechanics, Wired, Architectural Digest, Hyperallergic, POWER Magazine, has been the subject of a Harvard Business School case, and is featured in the Oliver Stone documentary Nuclear, among other features.

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.

Our mission is to make every search interaction meaningful & rewarding, through developer-friendly and enterprise-grade APIs. Algolia is the leading Search & Discovery API for websites and mobile apps. We help the most innovative companies across e-commerce, media and SaaS industries create powerful, relevant and scalable discovery experiences for their users. Unlike other solutions, our hosted platform reduces the complexities of building and scaling a fast, relevant digital experience and helps teams accelerate development time. More than 9,000 companies like Under Armour, Twitch, Periscope, Medium and Stripe rely on Algolia to manage 50+ billion search queries a month. Founded in 2012, we're backed by $184M in funding from Accel Partners, Alven Capital, Point Nine Capital and Storm Ventures. The team is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Paris, London, New York, and Atlanta. To learn more, visit www.algolia.com. --- We’re looking for talented, passionate people to build the world’s best search technology. As an ownership-driven company, we seek team members who thrive under autonomy and diversity. We're committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace. We care about each other and the world around us, and embrace talented people regardless of their race, age, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, color, veteran status, disability and socioeconomic background

Founded in 2013, we believe trade can move the human race forward. That’s why our mission at Flexport is to make global trade easy for everyone. What the internet has done for bits and bytes, Flexport is doing for physical goods: giving every business the ability to connect to any customer, wherever they are in the world. That sounds pretty straightforward, but a fragmented and inefficient global supply chain has held the world back from untapped growth and innovation. By connecting everyone in the global economy we can unlock commerce, creativity, and human progress. To do so, we’re building the platform for global logistics—empowering buyers, sellers and their logistics partners with the technology and services they need to grow and innovate. Today, we work with more than 40,000 customers and their suppliers across industries like manufacturing, retail, electronics, consumer goods, tech, apparel, and beauty. Companies of all sizes—from emerging brands to Fortune 500s—used Flexport technology to move nearly $19B of merchandise across 112 countries in 2021. Interested in joining our team? Check out our open job postings on careers site and apply directly today! https://www.flexport.com/careers/jobs/

Founded in 2014, Bellabeat is a data-centered wellness femtech company behind some of the most fashionably designed tech-powered wellness products and one of the fastest-growing wellness subscription services for women. Throughout the years, Bellabeat built the go-to wellness brand with a compelling ecosystem of solutions and services focused on women’s health. The success of the Leaf and Ivy wearables enabled the brand to expand to international markets and kickstart industry discussions on the importance of innovating in the design and development of tech products. Today, Bellabeat is leading the market shift with hyper-personalized holistic wellness offerings aligned with a women’s menstrual cycle.

Webflow is the leading no-code visual web development platform. It seamlessly generates sophisticated code so anyone can build powerful web-based businesses and adapt to changes without developers or months of building. From entrepreneurs and creative agencies to Fortune 500 companies, Webflow makes the internet a more inclusive place by making the tools to build on it more accessible to more people, fueling business growth. Webflow powers websites for innovators like Discord, Monday.com, IDEO, Orange Theory Fitness, TED, and Dropbox. Webflow is backed by Y Combinator, Accel, CapitalG, Silversmith, and other awesome investors.

Founded in 2013, DoorDash is a San Francisco-based technology company passionate about transforming local businesses and dedicated to enabling new ways of working, earning, and living. Today, DoorDash connects customers with their favorite local and national restaurants in more than 600 cities across the United States and Canada. By building intelligent, last-mile delivery technology for local cities, DoorDash aims to connect people with the things they care about — one dash at a time. Read more at blog.doordash.com, and find us on Glassdoor.

Fivetran automates data movement out of, into and across cloud data platforms. We automate the most time-consuming parts of the ELT process from extracts to schema drift handling to transformations, so data engineers can focus on higher-impact projects with total pipeline peace of mind. With 99.9% uptime and self-healing pipelines, Fivetran enables hundreds of leading brands across the globe, including Autodesk, Conagra Brands, JetBlue, Lionsgate, Morgan Stanley, and Ziff Davis, to accelerate data-driven decisions and drive business growth. Fivetran is headquartered in Oakland, California, with offices around the world. 

Instacart is the North American leader in online grocery and one of the fastest-growing companies in e-commerce. Instacart’s same-day delivery and pickup services bring fresh groceries and everyday essentials to busy people and families across the U.S. and Canada in as fast as an hour. Since its founding in 2012, Instacart has become an essential service for millions of families, while also serving as an immediate, flexible earnings opportunity for hundreds of thousands of shoppers across North America. The company partners with more than 350 retailers and delivers from more than 25,000 stores across more than 5,500 cities in North America. Today, Instacart is accessible to more than 85% of households in the U.S. and more than 70% of households in Canada.

Biotechnology is rewriting life as we know it, from the medicines we take, to the crops we grow, the materials we wear, and the household goods that we rely on every day. Biotech R&D is radically transforming our world, but to move at the new speed of science, scientists need better technology. Benchling’s mission is to unlock the power of biotechnology. The world’s biotech leaders and innovators use our R&D Cloud to power the development of breakthrough products and accelerate time to milestone and market.

Founded in 2011, Zapier is the #1 workflow automation platform for small and mid-sized businesses. By connecting more than 6,000 of the most popular work apps, Zapier empowers its users to make the most of the tools they already use—and to focus on what matters most.

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

Scribd gives you access to millions of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, podcasts, and more — all in one place, for one price. OUR VISION Inspire the world through stories and knowledge. OUR MISSION Build the largest and most accessible library connecting storytellers with their audience. If you love working with smart, motivated people, you’ll love working at Scribd. We value our employees, we demonstrate accountability, and we take action. We’re one team with a common goal: helping our customers flourish.

Dropbox is building the world’s first smart workspace. Back in 2007, making work better for people meant designing a simpler way to keep files in sync. Today, it means designing products that reduce busywork so you can focus on the work that matters. Most “productivity tools” get in your way. They constantly ping, distract, and disrupt your team’s flow, so you spend your days switching between apps and tracking down feedback. It’s busywork, not the meaningful stuff. We want to change this. We believe there’s a more enlightened way to work. Dropbox helps people be organized, stay focused, and get in sync with their teams.

Founded in August of 2008 and based in San Francisco, California, Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world — online or from a mobile phone. Whether an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month, Airbnb connects people to unique travel experiences, at any price point, in more than 33,000 cities and 192 countries. And with world-class customer service and a growing community of users, Airbnb is the easiest way for people to monetize their extra space and showcase it to an audience of millions. No global movement springs from individuals. It takes an entire team united behind something big. Together, we work hard, we laugh a lot, we brainstorm nonstop, we use hundreds of Post-Its a week, and we give the best high-fives in town. Headquartered in San Francisco, we have satellite offices in Dublin, London, Barcelona, Paris, Milan, Copenhagen, Berlin, Moscow, São Paolo, Sydney, and Singapore.

Mixpanel is analytics for builders that need answers from their data at their fingertips. When everyone in the organization can see — and learn from — the impact of their work, they are poised to make better decisions. Companies like OpenAI, Netflix, Pinterest, sweetgreen, CNN, samsara, Uber, and Yelp use Mixpanel to understand their customers, measure progress, and endeavor to make better decisions.

Launched out of Y Combinator’s 2009 Summer batch, Stripe is a global technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. Businesses of every size—from new startups to public companies—use our software to accept payments and manage their businesses online Stripe is a proud partner of YC companies—from Airbnb (S09) to Defog (W23)—to help them grow their businesses and increase the GDP of the internet.

PagerDuty is an operations performance platform delivering visibility and actionable intelligence across the entire incident lifecycle. Their SaaS-based solution empowers over 10,000 small, mid-size and enterprise global customers such as Comcast, eHarmony, Slack and Lululemon with the insight to intelligently respond to critical disruptions for exceptional customer experience. PagerDuty was founded to deliver a new and innovative approach to increase business response and efficiency. When brand reputation depends on customer satisfaction, PagerDuty arms businesses with the insight to proactively manage incidents and events that may impact customers across their IT environment.

Since graduating from YC, Amplitude (W12) has made it to IPO and beyond by helping cutting edge startups become category leaders. We’ve pioneered the digital analytics category to become the go-to solution for AI pioneers (Cruise, Midjourney), apps that touch millions of consumers (Doordash, Coinbase), and the best in B2B (Atlassian, Rippling, Canva). With product analytics, experiment, CDP, session replay, and more, Amplitude’s digital analytics platform shows you what your users love, where they’re getting stuck, and what keeps them coming back. You want to build a generational business, and we have the capabilities and pricing plans to guide you every step of the way. Check out our special deal for YC companies and get started on your analytics journey.

Matterport is an immersive media technology company that is shaking up the 3D / VR world. Our team has built the first end-to-end system for creating, modifying, distributing, and navigating immersive 3D and virtual reality (VR) versions of real-world spaces on web and mobile devices. Matterport offers the world's most inexpensive and simplest way to capture 3D spaces. Our products include: - Matterport Pro Camera for capturing real spaces in 3D. It collects accurate visual and spatial data to map entire areas in minutes and is all about automation and ease of use. - The Matterport Cloud for processing and hosting 3D models - Matterport Portal, our system for viewing, editing, and managing models; collaborating with colleagues; and sharing models with others - Matterport 3D Showcase, a browser-based 3D media player, which allows anyone to view 3D models in their browser with no additional software - Matterport Core VR: All Spaces can be converted to VR and experienced on Samsung Gear VR or Google Cardboard (in beta), with additional device support coming soon. Matterport 3D media solutions power industries from real estate (residential, multi-family and commercial) and travel and hospitality (hotels, vacation rentals, and venue booking), to business listings, architecture, engineering and construction, news and entertainment, and everything in between. We’re growing fast. If you’re passionate about solving cutting-edge problems in computer vision and hardware design and creating order-of-magnitude improvements in the ability to easily create and share 3D models of real world spaces, we want to talk to you. See open positions at matterport.com/jobs. Try Matterport for yourself at matterport.com/try.

Launched in 2012 as ZenPayroll, Gusto serves more than 300,000 businesses nationwide. Each year we process tens of billions of dollars of payroll and provide employee benefits—like health insurance and 401(k) accounts—while helping companies create incredible work places. Through one refreshingly easy, integrated platform, we automate and simplify your payroll, benefits, and HR, all while providing expert support. You and your employees will get the peace of mind you need to do your best work.

Founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, Reddit is an online community where users submit, vote, and comment on content, news, and discussions. Nicknamed "the front page of the internet,"​ Reddit is one of the top ten sites in the United States (source: Alexa), with hundreds of millions of users each month on desktop, mobile web, and our official Android/iOS apps. Interested in joining our growing team? Check out about.reddit.com/careers

At Optimizely, we're on a mission to help people unlock their digital potential. We do that by reinventing how marketing and product teams work to create and optimize digital experiences across all channels. With Optimizely One, our industry-first operating system for marketers, we offer teams flexibility and choice to build their stack their way with our fully SaaS, fully decoupled, and highly composable solution. We help companies around the world orchestrate their entire content lifecycle, monetize every digital experience and experiment across all customer touchpoints – all through Optimizely One, the leading digital experience platform that powers every phase of the marketing lifecycle through a single, AI-accelerated workflow. Optimizely has nearly 1500 employees across our 21 global offices and has 700+ partners. We are proud to help more than 10,000 businesses, including H&M, PayPal, Zoom, and Toyota, enrich their customer lifetime value, increase revenue and grow their brands. At Optimizely, we live each day with a simple philosophy: large enough to serve, small enough to care. Learn more at optimizely.com.

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.

Agent-first development environment. Emdash enables engineering teams to develop software faster, by running multiple coding agents in parallel. We're an open-source and provider-agnostic desktop application.

We are building a "manipulate anything" model with the robot hardware that embodies it. We designed a hand-based data-collection device and a high DOF, direct drive robotic hand that match each other exactly, enabling us to eliminate embodiment gap and collect real-world data and deploy it directly. We want to scale real world manipulation data by deploying our devices "in the wild" like manufacturing factories, logistic centers to collect Tesla like data, use these data to train our model and then provide automation solutions to these industries.

Infrastructure for voice-native commerce. Add secure, conversational checkout to AI agents with a single API.

Robby is an AI growth engine for home services businesses that uncovers revenue opportunities and collects additional data from every technician visit. Our AI combines customer and third party data to generate dozens of new leads every day, and then arms the technicians with talking points to increase close rates, giving GMs a single command center to manage and drive revenue. We have several paying customers that are each uncovering 6 figures in additional revenue opportunities every week. On our first day of launch, we helped close $40k in new business within an hour. Our team has spent the last few months riding along with dozens of technicians and shadowing every position in the office to best understand the industry. We're also studying for the EPA 608 exam to become certified technicians ourselves. Vineet and Feroze have both built critical products and infra at prominent startups (Ironclad, Porter, Affinity, Uber, Cloud Health Systems). Joe previously consulted PE firms on software acquisitions and led home services growth projects at Bain. We all met at Harvard Business School, and dropped out to work on Robby full-time.

Unisson is building trusted AI subject-matter experts for teams that are responsible for customer deployments (technical customer success, implementation, sales engineering). Within 20 minutes, our agents learn to use any product and can be used by teams in Slack, text, or email. Our agents gather requirements and context from existing tools enabling them to handle complex tasks like customer health audits, onboarding, product administration, and custom integrations. With Unisson, customer-facing teams have 24/7 access to an AI SME, allowing them to scale and save thousands of hours every month.

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.

BeeSafe AI is a fraud-prevention platform for enterprises that helps them protect their customers against trust-based attacks like "pig butchering" and impersonation. By engaging fraudsters at the source in real-time, the AI system identifies and shuts down channels by extracting deterministic data on mule accounts and attacker infrastructure. Our intel has already enabled financial services and government agencies to intercept scammers mid-transaction and prevent victim losses.

Autumn is building the first real-time signal intelligence platform for GTM teams. We monitor posts, commits, blogs, and announcements, surfacing buying signals the moment they appear. Define your ICP and the signals that matter, and we deliver a condensed, real-time feed filtered by intents.

Lucent automatically watches your user sessions and alerts you when users hit bugs or UX issues. You're recording thousands of sessions but nobody's watching them. Lucent does - catching silent issues breaking your product that you'd otherwise never know about.

Ditto Bio discovers drugs for autoimmune diseases by harnessing parasite biology. Viruses, ticks, and worms have experimented over millions of years to create proteins that control the human immune system. We use AI to identify these proteins and engineer them into next-generation autoimmune therapies.

sitefire helps companies win customers on ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI agents. We identify the content that drives AI visibility, and recommend actions that work: third-party sites, UGC content, and new blog posts. But we don’t stop there. sitefire synthesizes the top-cited web pages into AI-optimized, ready-to-publish web pages. You just publish and start winning leads.

Designing novel regulatory DNA (e.g., enhancers and promoters) to program precise therapeutic gene expression patterns - for diseases like cancer, CNS disorders and more. We're building the largest proprietary dataset of synthetic regulatory sequences across diverse cell-states.

Vela is the AI Scheduling Assistant built to handle the ambiguity that breaks scheduling. It has taste: it knows to prioritize a client over an internal catch-up, and it understands "Let's do early next week" without setting specific parameters. You just add Vela to the conversation, and it handles the white-glove negotiation as a member of your team, even at scale. Today, Vela is already used by professionals with the most complicated scheduling workflows. Enterprise recruiters are using Vela to schedule thousands of multi-party interviews and large sales teams rely on Vela to coordinate cross-functional calls.

Samora runs multilingual voice operations for organizations with high-volume calling without requiring engineering teams, call centers, or AI expertise. Many important tasks still depend on phone calls, including customer support, outreach, follow-ups, screening, and intake. But voice AI often fails in production because real callers interrupt, go off-script, switch languages mid-sentence, and speak in local dialects. Teams also worry about safety and compliance, especially when an agent can accidentally make the wrong promise. Samora solves this with voice agents that sound local and follow strict rules. Samora agents handle inbound and outbound calls, collect information, and update internal systems like CRMs, ticketing tools, and ATS platforms. When a call becomes sensitive or uncertain, the agent hands off to a human. It can also follow up over WhatsApp, SMS, or email when needed. With Samora, teams get: 1. Voice agents that work in real conversations, including dialects and code-switching 2. Strict safety controls so agents don’t make unauthorized offers, discounts, or promises 3. Calls that result in completed actions, system updates, and safe human handoff

Sentrial is the observability platform for AI agents in production. When your agent loops indefinitely, hallucinates, or frustrates users, Sentrial detects it in real-time, diagnoses the root cause, and recommends specific fixes. We provide the monitoring, evaluation, and debugging infrastructure that traditional tools weren't built for, so teams can ship agents with confidence and iterate based on real production behavior, not just evals/benchmarks.

Get your personal OpenClaw instance on the cloud and connected to your Slack or other messaging app in 3 minutes. Pre-installed security features and common skills.