Tagged: ai
30 results
Robots in the Real World: Four CEOs on the Machina Stage
At the Machina conference in Paris, All-In host Jason Calacanis sits down with the leaders of four of the world's top robotics companies—ANYbotics, 1X, Boston Dynamics, and Agility Robotics. Across four rapid-fire interviews, the CEOs explain why four-legged 'dog' robots conquered industrial inspection first, why humanoids are finally doing useful work, how teleoperation and internet-scale video data are training the next generation of machines, and where the real money and the real dangers lie—from explosive oil rigs to weaponized robots coming out of China. The through-line: robots are no longer research demos, they're deployed assets measured by ROI, and 'hard takeoff' where robots build robots may be as little as three years away.
Sky Yang
Sky Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Imagine AI (YC F25), a San Francisco company that reverse engineers B2B growth by building coordinated content systems for executive teams on LinkedIn. Before startups, he was the youngest-ever elected student body president at UC San Diego, where he represented 32,000 students and helped secure $150M in state housing funding, and he founded the pandemic-era nonprofit Break the Outbreak, which grew to 400+ people across 53 cities and 18 states.
Stephen Campbell
Stephen Campbell is the CEO and co-founder of Revamp (YC S23), a San Francisco AI startup that stitches together Klaviyo and Shopify data to build smarter customer segments for eCommerce brands and agencies. A USC computer science graduate and former Airtable engineer, he built Revamp with longtime friend Amin Akhtar to turn days of manual data wrangling into insights that generate in seconds. He is known for a lean, capital-light approach to building - his 'raise early and raise small' philosophy - and for helping seed the Bay Area's generative-AI community through The GenAI Collective.
The Experience Center
A UJET brand film reframes the contact center as an 'experience center' - not a cost to minimize but the richest customer signal a company owns. The video walks through five moves (channel blending, mobile SDK and biometric auth, AI automation and routing, agent assist, and real-time CRM sync) that turn support from a ticket-closing utility into a loyalty and revenue engine.
Wilson Spearman
Wilson Spearman is the co-founder and CEO of CreativeMode (YC S24), an AI-powered, no-code platform that lets anyone build Minecraft mods without writing code. An MIT computer science graduate who worked on AI cloud infrastructure at Crusoe and procurement tools at Settle, he now leads a small San Francisco team that has helped players create hundreds of thousands of mods - by the company's account, more Minecraft mods in nine months than in the game's previous seventeen years combined. When he is not shipping software, he is an aspiring ski mountaineer chasing alpine glacier routes.
Yoeven Khemlani
Yoeven Khemlani is the CEO and co-founder of Interfaze, a Y Combinator-backed AI company building a purpose-built model for deterministic developer tasks like OCR, web scraping, classification and speech-to-text. A second-time founder, he previously built JigsawStack, a suite of small, custom AI models for backend engineering, and before that was CTO and co-founder of the Southeast Asian prop-tech startup Stayr/Staytion, which he scaled and exited. A former game developer and edge computer-vision researcher, he moved from Singapore to the San Francisco Bay Area to build AI infrastructure that prizes reliability over raw intelligence.
AICE
AICE is a San Francisco defense-tech startup building autonomous swarms of modular underwater drones to monitor and protect naval assets and coastal infrastructure. Backed by Y Combinator (P26), the company was founded by ex-NASA MIT aerospace engineer Gregoire Chomette and European robotics champion Remi Bouteiller, who pivoted from commercial-building energy sensors to subsea defense after talking to submariners about the gaps in current underwater robotics.
Autostep
Autostep is a San Francisco startup building a desktop app that installs across an organization to map how people actually work, surface repetitive high-cost tasks, and rank them by cost and impact so leaders know what is worth automating. Framed as "the P&L for knowledge work," it measures the ROI of both human effort and AI agents, then recommends whether to build an agent, change a process, standardize a workflow, or use software the company already pays for. Founded by Aidan Pratt and backed by Y Combinator (Spring 2026 / P26) and Neo.
Axross
Axross is a Singapore-based, Y Combinator W22 climate-tech company that builds AI-driven HVAC control systems for industrial facilities. By layering machine-learning optimization, IoT sensing, and building-management-system integration on top of existing cooling infrastructure, Axross helps manufacturers in energy-intensive sectors like pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and precision manufacturing cut HVAC energy use by up to 30%, lower Scope 2 emissions, and hold production environments precisely stable - without ripping out the equipment they already own.
b12 Labs
b12 Labs is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator S25) building AI agents for pharmaceutical and biotech chemistry. Its platform designs synthesis routes, plans and optimizes reactions, and turns those plans into robot-ready code for automated labs, aiming to compress early-stage drug discovery from years to months. The company was founded in 2025 by chemists Zlatko Joncev and Andres Bran, who met at EPFL's Lab of Artificial Chemical Intelligence.
Bizmark
Bizmark is a Y Combinator (S26) startup building an operating system for companies that make, move, or sell physical goods. It connects to the systems, inboxes, spreadsheets, documents, and know-how already inside a business and turns that context into automated quoting, dynamic scheduling, and inventory forecasting - shipping a working product in weeks rather than years.
Burt
Burt (YC W26) builds AI teammates for logistics. The San Francisco company helps freight brokers and forwarders deploy AI coworkers that handle repetitive, manual work end-to-end - check calls, document processing, covering loads, invoicing - by reading emails, making calls, logging into portals, and updating the customer's TMS, following each team's own processes. Founded by Bobby Zhong and Kurt Sharma, both of whom grew up in logistics families, Burt started by training specialized models that beat frontier models on cost and latency, then focused those models on freight operations.
Cignara
Cignara builds AI voice and chat agents that run sales and customer support end to end for large B2C enterprises. Instead of answering FAQs, its agents ingest a company's knowledge base, policies, workflows and customer profiles to take governed, policy-bound actions - and to spot upsell, cross-sell and churn moments in the middle of a conversation. Founded by two-time YC founder Nalin Gupta (previously Auro Robotics, acquired by Ridecell), the company launched in Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch after rebranding from Bujo AI, and counts Fortune 500 brands like LG among its users.
Cone
Cone is a YC S22 B2B SaaS company building an AI-powered work operating system for accounting and professional service firms. It unifies proposals, engagement letters, billing, payments, project management and client engagement into one platform so firms can go from proposal to payment without stitching together separate tools.
CreativeMode
CreativeMode is a no-code, AI-powered platform that lets Minecraft players build their own mods by describing what they want in plain English. It generates ready-to-play mobs, items, blocks, weapons and structures for both Java and Bedrock editions, then lets creators publish, share and compete with them. Founded in 2024 by three ex-Crusoe engineers and part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, CreativeMode says players have made more than 450,000 mods on the platform.
Curacel
Curacel is an AI-powered insurance infrastructure company building the rails for insurance in emerging markets. Its cloud APIs let insurers automate claims processing and catch fraud, waste and abuse, while its Grow product lets banks, fintechs and e-commerce platforms embed insurance into their own apps. A Y Combinator Winter 2022 company founded in Nigeria, Curacel works with insurers such as AXA Mansard, Old Mutual and Jubilee across roughly ten African markets.
DiligenceSquared
DiligenceSquared is a New York AI company that automates commercial due diligence for investors. Its AI agents run expert interviews with customers, competitors, and market specialists, then synthesize the findings into interactive reports where every claim links back to a source transcript. Founded by two ex-Blackstone and ex-BCG private equity operators plus a former Google engineer, it delivers consulting-grade market research for a fraction of the $500K-$1M that firms like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG typically charge.
Exla
Exla (YC W25) is a San Francisco startup building Libra, an AI site-reliability engineer that watches production logs, traces and deploys around the clock. When something breaks, Libra detects the failure, finds the deploy that caused it, opens a fix pull request with a regression test, and verifies recovery in production - so engineers do not have to wake up at 3am. The company began as an SDK for running large transformer models on edge devices and pivoted to autonomous incident response.
Matt Clare
Filmed on the expo floor of CCW 2026, this CX Today conversation with UJET's Matt Clare cuts against the deafening tradeshow chorus of 'automate everything.' Instead of using AI to stop customers from reaching out, UJET's newly acquired Spiral analyzes 100% of customer conversations to explain WHY customers are calling, so companies can fix the underlying problem. Clare argues that people still trust people, that AI's real job is to superpower human agents rather than replace them, and that customers deserve choice in how they get help. The talk touches on UJET's brandable mobile and chat SDK, its analytics-to-action loop, and the emerging world of agentic experience orchestration.
FlowManual
FlowManual is an AI platform for the back office of construction contractors. It reads specs, contracts, quotes, and invoices and automatically marks up scope, prices, deadlines, and exclusions, then compares bids against signed contracts and invoices against locked buyout prices to flag every scope change and price drift by severity and dollar impact. Founded in 2026 by Harvard dropouts David Shijoon Bae and Michael Lin, the company is part of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch and aims to cut the repetitive manual work of pre-construction so contractors can bid more and deliver at a higher standard.
Gigacatalyst
Gigacatalyst is a Y Combinator-backed (P26) startup that embeds AI agents inside B2B SaaS products so non-technical sales and customer success teams can build the missing features a customer needs just by describing them in plain English. Its agentic builder reads the host product's own APIs and design system, then generates working microapps in about a minute, closing the feature gaps that stall enterprise deals and drive churn.
hiloop
hiloop is a San Francisco startup building infrastructure for automated research - the compute and observability layer that lets AI agents propose, run, and verify their own experiments. Teams hand hiloop a task, a model or agent, and a metric; hiloop runs snapshottable, forkable compute where every run is captured as a single queryable trace, then returns the best verified improvement across training, data, prompts, tools, and systems. Founded in 2026 by Karan Brar and Thomas Boser, it is part of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch.
HUD
HUD is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator W25) that builds infrastructure for evaluating and training AI agents. Its platform lets teams wrap real software - browsers, spreadsheets, terminals, apps - into reinforcement-learning environments and evaluations, then run agents against them at scale to measure whether they actually work. HUD ships an open-source Python SDK plus a cloud platform and a vendor marketplace that connects environment builders with frontier AI labs.
Industrial Next
Industrial Next builds AI-defined factories: robotic work cells powered by proprietary foundation models that connect vision, task context, and motion so a production line can be retooled in minutes instead of weeks - no programming required. Founded in 2021 by former Tesla autonomous-manufacturing leads Allen Pan and Lukas Pankau, the San Francisco company aims to bring Tesla-grade autonomous factory capabilities to automakers and electronics manufacturers.
Integuru
Integuru is a San Francisco startup (YC W24) building an AI agent that reverse-engineers the internal APIs behind websites and apps that have no official API, then generates fast, production-ready integration code. Instead of brittle browser automation, Integuru analyzes network requests and cookies to produce direct API calls that complete in about three seconds with 99.9%+ success. The open-source agent has over 4,700 GitHub stars, and the hosted managed service powers more than a million API calls a month per platform across healthcare, logistics, proptech, and legal.
Interfaze
Interfaze is a San Francisco AI startup building a model purpose-built for deterministic developer tasks - OCR, web scraping, speech-to-text, object detection and classification - where consistency and verifiable output matter more than open-ended chat. Its hybrid architecture fuses specialized neural networks (CNN/DNN) directly into a transformer decoder, and the model ships as an OpenAI-compatible API with confidence scores, bounding boxes and metadata so developers can build rule-based systems on top. Founded by Yoeven Khemlani and Harsha Vardhan Khurdula, Interfaze is part of Y Combinator's 2026 batch and grew out of the team's earlier developer-API company, JigsawStack.
Kaelio
Kaelio is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator, 2025) building the open-source context layer that makes AI data agents reliable. Its core project, ktx, auto-builds a governed layer of business knowledge and executable metric definitions from a company's data stack - Markdown wiki pages plus YAML that declares tables, joins, grain, measures and filters. Instead of an agent writing raw SQL that looks right but returns wrong numbers, it asks ktx for a metric and ktx plans the joins and compiles warehouse SQL. Kaelio ships ktx (Apache 2.0), a hosted ktx Cloud with governance and observability, and a managed Data Agent that answers questions in Slack, web and email with source-backed results.
Koyal
Koyal is an agentic AI filmmaking platform (Y Combinator F25) that turns a script or an audio clip - a song, a podcast, a voiceover - into a finished, personalized video with consistent characters, settings and camera work. Founded by CMU/MIT/Meta alumni siblings Mehul and Gauri Agarwal, the company follows a Pixar-style 'audio first, visuals second' approach and has run paid pilots with Universal Music, T-Series and Bollywood studios, producing music videos for artists like A.R. Rahman, Ricky Kej and Shankar Mahadevan.
Landeed
Landeed is a Hyderabad-based proptech company building India's digital infrastructure for property intelligence. Its app and API let owners, agents, developers, lenders and lawyers pull encumbrance certificates, sale deeds, RTC, 7/12, Patta and other land records from dozens of state and federal sources in seconds, turning a slow, physical, middleman-heavy process into an instant, queryable search. Founded in 2022 by Sanjay Mandava, ZJ Lin and Jonathan Richards, it is a Y Combinator company serving over a million users across 24+ states.
Modern
Modern is a San Francisco startup building an AI-native IT function - a single platform where always-on agents automate help desk, access, hardware, on/off-boarding, security and procurement inside the tools teams already use, such as Slack, Teams, email and voice. Founded in 2026 by Seb Poole and Aleks Tomovski and backed by Y Combinator (P26), it positions itself as a ServiceNow alternative that resolves requests end-to-end rather than routing tickets, claiming 80%+ automation of inbound IT requests.