A student side project in Cologne became the live chat behind Toyota, Nivea and Hermes - and then bet its future on AI that answers before a human has to.
BaseFrame is a San Francisco AI startup from Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch, founded by UC Berkeley classmates Anshul Paul and Vaibhav Agrawal. The company has iterated quickly across the AI stack - launching first as an AI copilot that catches hardware design flaws before boards are built, then as a desktop app that scans a team's own work history to find what AI can automate, and most recently pivoting to Clam, a 'Semantic Firewall' that adds enterprise-grade security around broad-access AI agents. Across all three, the thread is the same: make powerful AI safe, useful, and grounded in real work.
chromie.dev (YC S26) is an all-in-one business development, capture, and proposal platform that helps firms find, qualify, and win federal and state, local, and education (SLED) government contracts. Built on the founders' 'deterministic stack for web agents' - browser agents that pair LLM reasoning with the reliability of RPA - the platform continuously scrapes procurement portals, fit-scores opportunities, predicts recompetes before they hit the market, extracts buried requirements from RFPs and SOWs, and drafts compliant proposals, with every parsed field traced back to its source clause for audit and QA.
Revise Robotics builds AI-enabled robotic systems that test, refurbish, and resell used electronics, starting with laptops. Its machines slot into e-waste recycling and IT asset disposition facilities, where they inspect devices, wipe drives, photograph units, and list them on online marketplaces - hundreds of laptops a day, across any model, manufacturer, or operating system, without human intervention. Founded in 2024 by Rupesh Jeyaram and Antonio Monreal and backed by Y Combinator (W25), the New York company aims to unlock the residual value trapped in discarded electronics and keep more devices out of landfills.

Yogi Goel is the co-founder and CEO of Maxima, an agentic AI platform that automates the month-end accounting close for enterprises. He spent two decades in the office of the CFO - auditing at EY, running M&A and IPOs at Citi and Barclays, and seven years at Rubrik as a strategic finance leader, where he helped scale the company from $5M to $900M in ARR through its 2024 NYSE IPO. In 2024 he founded Maxima with Akshaya Srivatsa and Jack Liao, raising $41M from Redpoint Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Audacious Ventures to rebuild accounting operations around AI agents that reconcile, post journal entries, and co-prepare financial reports alongside human teams.
Cassidy is a New York-based enterprise AI platform that lets non-technical teams build AI agents and multi-step automations powered by their own internal company data. By connecting large language models to a business's knowledge base, tools, and real-time data, Cassidy automates complex, context-heavy workflows - customer support triage, RFP responses, CRM updates from sales calls, lead qualification and internal knowledge sharing - without writing code. Founded in 2023 by Justin Fineberg and Ian Woodfill, the company raised a $10M Series A in 2025 and is used by more than 20,000 teams.
Lightyear is a New York-based enterprise software company building a 'Telecom Operating System' that digitizes how large organizations buy and manage network services. Founded in 2019 by Dennis Thankachan and Ryan Schrack, the platform automates telecom procurement, network inventory management, and bill consolidation across a marketplace of 1,000+ carriers, replacing a process that has traditionally relied on phone calls, spreadsheets, and weeks of waiting. It serves 300+ enterprises and 5,000+ users, including Palo Alto Networks, Five Guys, Alo Yoga, Pandora Jewelry, and Teladoc.
PixieBrix is a New York-based software company that started as a low-code browser extension for customizing and automating web apps, and has evolved into a browser-native platform for monitoring, guiding, and securing the actions people and AI agents take inside their web applications. Deployed as a lightweight Chrome/Edge extension, it lets teams add context-aware automations, AI assistance, and real-time policy enforcement on top of any website - originally aimed at customer support and contact-center productivity, and more recently at agent oversight, compliance, and safe AI-agent browsing.
Justin Fineberg is the co-founder and CEO of Cassidy, a New York-based platform that lets non-technical teams build AI agents and automations powered by their own company data. He got early beta access to OpenAI's GPT-3 in 2020, left a product role at Blade in 2022, and teamed up with engineer Ian Woodfill to launch Cassidy. Alongside building the company, he grew an audience of more than 400,000 followers across TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube by explaining how AI reshapes business. Cassidy raised a $10M Series A led by HOF Capital in 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $13.7M.
Cogent Labs is a full-service software and AI studio that deploys practical, 'boring' AI automation for small and mid-size businesses - the kind that quietly removes repetitive manual work like data entry, status updates, and report generation. Founded by CEO Ehmad Zubair, the team blends web, mobile, and generative-AI engineering (Python, Django, React, React Native) with a fixed-price consulting model that maps a company's operations, prioritizes the highest-ROI automations, and ships production-ready workflows in weeks rather than six-month pilots.
Elevance Systems, Inc. is a Cupertino, California-based, AI-enabled healthcare IT managed services and consulting firm. It provides US healthcare providers with IT infrastructure support, enterprise and clinical application implementation and maintenance, cybersecurity and risk mitigation, identity and access management, data and automation, and digital and cloud transformation - delivered through staff augmentation and AI-enabled automation across a global footprint spanning the Americas, UAE, and India.
Genesys is a global customer experience and contact center software company that helps more than 8,000 organizations across 100+ countries orchestrate personalized, AI-powered interactions across voice and digital channels. Its flagship Genesys Cloud CX platform combines omnichannel routing, self-service, conversational and agentic AI, and workforce engagement management into a single cloud service. Founded in 1990 as a computer-telephony integration startup, Genesys today operates an 'Experience Orchestration' model with roughly $2.4 billion in annual revenue and Genesys Cloud ARR approaching $2.2 billion.
Jade Global is a San Jose-based IT services and digital transformation firm founded in 2003 that helps mid-size to large enterprises implement, integrate, and manage business platforms from Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, NetSuite, Workday, Boomi and more. With roughly 2,000+ consultants, a global delivery center in Pune, India, and 400+ customers across high tech, life sciences, healthcare, manufacturing and financial services, the company pairs enterprise application expertise with cloud, data/analytics and AI - including its Kanverse.ai document-automation subsidiary.
Milestone Technologies is a Fremont, California-based global IT services and digital solutions company founded in 1997. It helps large enterprises run and modernize their technology at scale - spanning digital workplace services, IT service desk and NOC operations, cloud and infrastructure, application and digital engineering, AI/automation, and platform work on ServiceNow and Salesforce. The company employs roughly 2,600-3,100 people, serves more than 200 clients across about 31 countries, and is majority-owned by The Halifax Group with a minority stake held by Two Sigma Impact.
Automat is a San Francisco AI company building agents that operate computers the way people do. Founded in 2023 by CMU design alumni and ex-Google Creative Lab designers Lucas Ochoa and Gautam Bose, it pairs a transformer-based RPA engine with intelligent document processing so enterprises can automate manual back-office work - from KYC checks to mortgage disclosures to medical-claims processing - by simply showing the software a recording of the task. It positions itself as a modern, AI-native alternative to legacy RPA tools like UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.
Gumloop is a no-code AI automation platform that lets any employee build, deploy, and manage AI agents and workflows by dragging modular nodes onto a canvas. Where legacy tools like Zapier treat AI as one node among many, Gumloop makes AI orchestration the core primitive - connecting a company's internal data to leading AI models to complete complex, repetitive work. Founded in 2023 by McGill classmates Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal, the company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch and raised a $50M Series B led by Benchmark in March 2026. It counts Shopify, Ramp, Gusto, Instacart, Samsara, and Opendoor among its customers.

Minna Song is the cofounder and CEO of EliseAI, a New York company that builds conversational AI for property managers and, more recently, healthcare providers. She started the company in 2017 after taking a front-desk job at a real estate firm to see the workflow up close, and in 2025 raised a $250 million Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.2 billion valuation. EliseAI now serves roughly 70-75% of the fifty largest U.S. rental operators and crossed $200 million in annual recurring revenue.

Vinay Patankar is the co-founder and CEO of Process Street, an AI-powered workflow and compliance operations platform used by thousands of companies to run recurring checklists, onboarding, and standard operating procedures. A three-time founder and Y Combinator alum (W15), he was the youngest Cisco engineer in Australia at 16, left Sydney at 24 with a copy of The 4-Hour Workweek, and spent roughly a decade as a digital nomad building remote-first businesses before Process Street. The company has raised about $15M from Accel, Salesforce Ventures, and Atlassian and has been remote since day one.
ModSquad is a Sacramento-based digital engagement company that provides on-demand customer support, content moderation, trust and safety, community management, and social media services for global brands. Founded in 2007 as Metaverse Mod Squad, it built a distributed network of vetted freelance moderators - called Mods - spread across 90+ countries and 55+ languages, letting clients scale coverage up and down without the overhead of a traditional call center. Its clients range from game studios and children's entertainment to e-commerce, media, and the U.S. Department of State.
ActionAI is a New York- and Israel-based enterprise software company building reliability infrastructure for AI. Its platform lets companies build, run, evaluate and improve mission-critical AI workflows with a human in the loop, mapping data across the AI stack for granular testing and using an 'Explainable Exceptions' system to catch model errors before they cause damage. Founded by Stanford-trained engineer Miriam Haart, the company raised a $10M seed round in April 2026 to serve regulated sectors like finance, insurance, legal and logistics where accuracy is non-negotiable.
Caddi is a Seattle-based AI company that turns screen recordings into working automations. Its 'record-to-code' platform watches a professional demonstrate a repetitive back-office task - client intake, document filing, billing, data entry - and generates deterministic, API-driven code that runs the workflow across 80+ tools. Aimed at law firms, financial advisors, accountants and consultants, Caddi pitches itself as a way to do more work at the same headcount without asking teams to learn yet another complicated tool.
Clad is project management and billing software purpose-built for infrastructure. It unifies project operations and finance so telecom operators and construction subcontractors can track production in the field, automate invoicing and payments, manage vendor compliance, and handle 811 utility locate requests - all in one place. Founded in 2022 by ex-Instagram product manager Jason Rudin and backed by Y Combinator (W23), Clad aims to help the companies rebuilding America's internet and power networks build faster and get paid faster.
Periti Digital is a HubSpot Elite Partner and AI consultancy headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, that handles the messy, complicated CRM work most agencies avoid - migrating tangled data, wiring HubSpot into ERPs like SAP and NetSuite, and building AI automations on Anthropic's Claude. Founded in 2022, it has grown to serve 400+ HubSpot customers across offices in Dublin, London, Munich, Rotterdam, Lisbon, Boston and New York, and was ranked among the top three global HubSpot partners in 2024.
VectorShift is an AI platform that started as a no-code builder for generative AI workflows and has sharpened into an 'AI operating system for private market investors.' Founded in 2023 by Harvard classmates Alexander Leonardi and Albert Mao and backed by Y Combinator, it lets firms turn scattered deal documents, diligence notes, and institutional memory into working AI - data-room analysis, IC memos, portfolio monitoring, and LP reporting - through a drag-and-drop interface or a Python SDK, without hiring a machine-learning team.
Continual is a San Francisco AI company building a platform for running business operations with agents. Founded by repeat ML founders Tristan Zajonc and Tyler Kohn, it launched in 2021 as a declarative machine-learning platform on the modern data stack, then pivoted into the AI copilot and agent era - letting teams connect their tools and data, automate workflows across agents and people, and turn repeatable processes into agent-powered applications. Backed by $18.5M+ from Innovation Endeavors, Amplify Partners and others.
TravelJoy is an all-in-one software platform for travel advisors and agencies, bundling a CRM, itinerary builder, branded proposals, automations, and secure payments into one workspace. Founded in 2018 by Dayo Esho and Chris Kline, the San Francisco company helps independent travel entrepreneurs run their businesses and compete with DIY booking sites - and now facilitates more than $1 billion in annual customer spend.
Alejandro Castellano is the co-founder and CEO of Caddi, a Seattle AI startup that turns a screen recording of someone doing their job into working, API-driven automation - a method the company calls 'record-to-code' or 'automation by demonstration.' Born in Lima, Peru, where he wanted to be an inventor, he started his first company at 19, learned to scale businesses inside a family office he calls his 'on-the-streets MBA,' then earned a master's at Cornell Tech focused on computer vision and machine learning. Caddi emerged from the AI2 Incubator and raised a $5M seed round in 2025 to free lawyers, accountants and financial advisors from repetitive back-office work.

Alex Kelleher is the founder and CEO of Quantum Rise, a Chicago AI consulting startup that raised a $15M seed in 2024 to pursue what he calls 'Consulting 2.0' - replacing billable-hours advice with heavy engineering and automation for mid-market companies. An Oxford-trained experimental psychologist, he has founded four data and decisioning software companies, with exits including Touch Clarity (to Omniture/Adobe), Cognitive Match (to Magnetic), and Vivid Edge. He went on to serve as Global CMO at Deloitte Digital and Chief Data Officer / President of Intelligence at Advantage Solutions. He is also a TED Global speaker and an exhibited artist.
Alex Leonardi is the co-founder and CEO of VectorShift, a New York no-code AI automation platform that lets teams build enterprise-grade LLM applications, search engines, chatbots and workflows by dragging and dropping instead of coding. A Harvard statistics-and-computer-science graduate who built generative AI capabilities at Blackstone, he launched VectorShift in 2023 through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch and raised a $3M seed in February 2024. The company has since sharpened its focus into an AI operating system for private market investors.
Bimohit Bawa is the co-founder and CEO of TrueCare24, a San Francisco-based health and wellness marketplace that connects families and employers with vetted nurses, caregivers, and clinicians for in-home care, telehealth, and on-site COVID-19 testing and vaccination. A software engineer by training - IIT Roorkee, a master's from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from Berkeley Haas - Bawa spent nearly a decade building systems at Cisco and ServiceSource before joining TrueCare24 as its founding technical lead in 2015. He has since steered the company through 500 Startups' accelerator, a pivot into pandemic-era testing logistics, and a current chapter rebuilding senior care around AI and automation.