Y Combinator

Signals

• Garry Tan President, CEO, and Group Partner
• Eric Bakan Head of Data
• Steven Pham Head Of Media
• Ryan Choi Head of Post Batch Operations and Software
• Uzair Afzal Partner, CFO
• Harj Taggar Managing Partner
• Xiaolin Li Partner, CFO
• Tayler Princeau Executive Assistant
• Megan Ehrlich Executive Assistant
• Lauren Field Executive Assistant
• Kelley Tighe Executive Assistant
• Renee Mars Head of HR & Workplace

+ 6 more tracked

Portfolio

HappyRobot River AI HyperProbe Coasty Agnost AI Zeit AI AfterQuery LemonLime BillionToOne Naïve Prized Context.dev TesterArmy Drafted Intuned Rudus Adam Transload Superset Hypercubic Hebbian Robotics Speko Stoa Markets Scape Graphify Labs Superset Naïve Inc. Fathom

Latest developments

The fix for rogue AI agents could be more AI TechCrunch · 1 day ago · 21 Launch HN: Skillsync (YC W26) – AI chat sessions made portable across agents Hacker News · 1 day ago · 35

Superhuman acquires YC-backed notetaker Fathom as productivity platforms push for agentic work TechCrunch · 4 days ago · 20

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants U.S. open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too TechCrunch · 1 week ago · 5 Zeit AI raises €5M to give Europe’s mid-market its own data engineer Tech.eu · 2 weeks ago · 18

Ex-Palantir founders’ Zeit AI raises €5M, backed by a World Cup winner and a former German minister Tech Funding News · 2 weeks ago · 19 Launch HN: RonanRX (YC S26) – Personalized Peptides and GLP-1s Hacker News · 2 weeks ago · 33

AfterQuery reportedly hits $3.2B valuation, becoming Y Combinator’s fastest-ever unicorn Tech Funding News · 2 weeks ago · 31

Q3 2026

◆ Security researchers used Anthropic’s Claude to chain vulnerabilities and gain access to OpenAI employee accounts and the company’s private repositories, prompting OpenAI to patch related issues and revoke tokens. Incident

◆ OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company would not go public in 2026, citing AI safety and controllability concerns Funding

◆ Y Combinator invests in Zeit AI Funding

◆ Zeit AI, a Munich AI startup, raises a €5 million seed round to expand its autonomous data engineering product ZeitMind Funding

◆ AfterQuery reportedly raised a financing round valuing the company at $3.2 billion, reaching unicorn status Funding

◆ Y Combinator invests in Hypercubic Funding

◆ Y Combinator invests in Speko Funding

◆ Blacksmith Software raised a $45 million Series B to expand its AI-assisted code testing and validation platform Funding

◆ River AI, a startup founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, raises a $1.1 billion seed/Series A round led by General Catalyst Funding

◆ Y Combinator invests in Stoa Markets Funding

◆ Naïve raises a $28.5 million Series A funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners to build infrastructure for autonomous AI agents Funding

◆ HappyRobot raises $150M Series C funding at $1.2B valuation Funding

◆ Y Combinator invests in HappyRobot Funding

◆ Two YC S26 startups launch cloud platforms for AI coding agents: Hoplite for deployment and testing, HyperProbe for production debugging Product launch

◆ Y Combinator invests in Prized Funding

◆ Screenpipe launches as Y Combinator S26 company offering local screen recording for AI agents Product launch

◆ Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, an open-weight large language model Model release

◆ Y Combinator invests in Coasty Funding

◆ Y Combinator invests in Agnost AI Funding

◆ Y Combinator S26 Batch: Multiple AI Agent Infrastructure Startups Launch Product launch

◆ Manufact and Y Combinator announce a partnership Partnership

• 17 Sep The fix for rogue AI agents could be more AI
• 17 Sep Launch HN: Skillsync (YC W26) – AI chat sessions made portable across agents
• 14 Sep Superhuman acquires YC-backed notetaker Fathom as productivity platforms push for agentic work
• 11 Sep Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants U.S. open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too
• 3 Sep Zeit AI raises €5M to give Europe’s mid-market its own data engineer
• 3 Sep Ex-Palantir founders’ Zeit AI raises €5M, backed by a World Cup winner and a former German minister
• 2 Sep Launch HN: RonanRX (YC S26) – Personalized Peptides and GLP-1s
• 2 Sep AfterQuery reportedly hits $3.2B valuation, becoming Y Combinator’s fastest-ever unicorn
• 1 Sep AfterQuery reportedly becomes Y Combinator’s fastest-ever unicorn, now valued at $3.2B
• 1 Sep Launch HN: Nori Robotics (YC S26) – A low-cost humanoid robot for development
• 31 Aug Launch HN: Hebbian Robotics (YC S26) – Build scalable robotics data pipelines
• 27 Aug Launch HN: Salem Robotics (YC S26) – Software for industrial inspection robots
• 26 Aug Launch HN: Risklytics (YC S26) – Insurance brokerage for frontier tech companies
• 26 Aug The first vibe-coded startups are coming up for sale, are buyers ready to value them?
• 20 Aug Launch HN: Vendo (YC S26) – Let users build features on top of your product
• 18 Aug Launch HN: machine0 (YC S26) – Persistent CPU and GPU VMs from the CLI
• 18 Aug Hypercubic raises $5.3M to map out and rewrite legacy COBOL apps with AI agents
• 17 Aug Launch HN: Speko (YC S26) – OpenRouter for Voice AI
• 14 Aug He built an open-source tool AI coding assistants couldn’t ignore
• 12 Aug Sam Altman thinks working at Goldman Sachs ‘sounds unbelievably terrible now’ and admits he was ‘peer pressured’ into accepting an internship there
• 12 Aug Blacksmith raises $45M to aid AI code validation as agentic development grows
• 11 Aug General Catalyst leads $1.1B round into 2-month-old River AI
• 11 Aug Launch HN: Keet (YC S24) – An app to create video courses on anything
• 10 Aug Launch HN: Stoa Markets (YC S26) – A Marketplace for GPUs and AI Servers
• 7 Aug Naïve bags $28.5M in funding to automate the creation and day-to-day running of almost any business
• 5 Aug Launch HN: HyperProbe (YC S26) – Agents that do read-only debugging in prod
• 5 Aug Y Combinator‑backed AI startup is under fire after its founder offered instant interviews to partygoers who got company tattoos, then apologized
• 4 Aug Launch HN: EdotEnv (YC S26) – Quant Trading RL Envs to Teach LLMs Research
• 4 Aug HappyRobot lands $150M Series C to scale agentic AI for enterprise operations
• 4 Aug Y Combinator Open-Sources QM: An MIT-Licensed Multiplayer Agent Harness That Runs In Slack And The Web
• 3 Aug Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents
• 2 Aug Open letters about AI development
• 30 Jul Launch HN: Prized (YC S26) – Let non-engineer staff build secure internal tools
• 30 Jul Dili raises $21.7M to bring AI compliance to the infrastructure boom
• 29 Jul Launch HN: Tokenless (YC S26) – Automatic model switching to save money
• 24 Jul Y Combinator startup Scape emerges from stealth with $3.2M to rethink email
• 23 Jul Launch HN: Screenpipe (YC S26) – Record how you work and turn that into agents
• 22 Jul Launch HN: Unlayer (YC W22) – Add email and document builders to your app
• 20 Jul Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12
• 20 Jul Together AI and Y Combinator partner to launch the first dedicated GPU cluster for the YC community
• 16 Jul Launch HN: Traceforce (YC S26) – Company-wide security monitoring for AI apps
• 15 Jul Launch HN: Coasty (YC S26) – An API for computer-use agents
• 14 Jul Launch HN: Agnost AI (YC S26) – Extract user feedback from agent conversations
• 9 Jul Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website
• 2 Jul Launch HN: Manufact (YC S25) – MCP Cloud
• 1 Jul Launch HN: Parsewise (YC P25) – Reason Across Documents with an API

Q2 2026

◆ Y Combinator invests in TesterArmy Funding

◆ Y Combinator invests in Adam Funding

◆ Two Y Combinator-backed startups launch AI-powered design generation tools for architecture and CAD modeling Product launch

◆ BitBoard and Y Combinator announce a partnership Partnership

◆ Y Combinator invests in Intuned Funding

◆ Hyper and Y Combinator announce a partnership Partnership

◆ Y Combinator invests in Rudus Funding

◆ Minicor and Y Combinator announce a partnership Partnership

◆ Y Combinator invests in Superset Funding

• 18 Jun Launch HN: TesterArmy (YC P26) – Agents that test web and mobile apps
• 17 Jun Launch HN: Adam (YC W25) – Open-Source AI CAD
• 15 Jun Launch HN: Drafted (YC P26) – Models for residential architecture
• 12 Jun Launch HN: BitBoard (YC P25) – Analytics Workspace for Agents

Relationships

Investment & ownership

• Invests in Zeit AI · 2 sources
• Invests in Scape · 1 source
• Invests in Graphify Labs · 1 source
• Invests in HappyRobot · 1 source
• Invests in LemonLime · 1 source
• Invests in Prized · 1 source
• Invests in Coasty · 1 source
• Invests in TesterArmy · 1 source

Products & technology

• Develops QM · 1 source

Partnerships

• Partnered with OpenAI · 1 source
• Partnered with Anthropic · 1 source
• Partnered with xAI · 1 source