human-in-the-loop
(47)
Tim Cherkasov
Tim Cherkasov is the co-founder and CEO of Trace (YC S25), an AI-native workflow orchestration platform that routes tasks between human teams and AI agents. A serial founder since age 17 with a fintech and data science background, he built and shut down the crypto-portfolio startup Clustr before pivoting into Trace, which topped the YC Launchpad leaderboard for the Summer 2025 cohort and raised a $3M seed round in early 2026.
Zakariea Sharfeddine
Zakariea Sharfeddine is the co-founder and CEO of InLoop Robotics (YC P26), a startup building AI-native warehouse fulfillment powered by robotic arms you hire by the month. A KIT-trained informatics engineer who did machine learning work at Bosch and BMW and reinforcement learning research at RoboTUM, he now leads a team deploying bimanual robots that pack, kit, and fulfill orders, with remote human operators stepping in on edge cases so the line never stops.
Avea Robotics
Avea Robotics builds Sentinel, ultra-low-latency software that lets a human operator step into a robot from anywhere in the world. When an autonomous robot gets stuck on an edge case, an operator teleoperates it back on track - keeping fleets running and capturing the intervention data that makes the next model better. Founded in 2026 by UIUC engineers Ary Indarapu and Vikram Vadrevu and backed by Y Combinator (P26), the company reports roughly $18K MRR and has helped deploy close to 30 robots.
Invofox
Invofox is an AI document-processing platform that turns invoices, receipts, payslips, and shipping papers into clean, structured JSON through a single API. Built for software companies rather than end users, it pairs high-accuracy OCR and machine-learning models with human-in-the-loop verification so fintechs, accounting platforms, lenders, and logistics operators can automate payments and bookkeeping without anyone re-typing a document. Founded by three Spanish mathematics and computer-science graduates, backed by Y Combinator (S22), and now processing tens of millions of documents a year.
LumiBot
LumiBot (YC W22) builds AI copilots for factories. Its current product uses a camera and computer vision to watch operators' hands during manual assembly, catching mistakes in real time before a defective unit moves down the line. Founded by Aswin Andrison and backed by Y Combinator, Monk's Hill Ventures, Alpha JWC and Goodwater Capital, the company grew out of earlier work automating repetitive back-office and procurement workflows for industrial and e-commerce operators.
Trace
Trace is a workflow orchestration platform that gives AI agents shared context about how a company actually works, then routes each task to whichever worker fits best - human or AI. Founded in 2025 by Tim Cherkasov and Artur Romanov and backed by Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch, Trace connects to tools like Slack, Jira, and Notion, builds a knowledge graph of the organization, and turns plain-English process descriptions into visual workflows with AI-automated steps and human approval gates. It raised $3M in seed funding and was the most upvoted startup in the YC S25 cohort.
Alaffia Health
Alaffia Health is a New York-based healthtech company that uses agentic AI paired with expert clinicians to help health insurers detect and stop waste, fraud, and abuse in medical claims. Its Autodor platform forensically reviews complete patient medical records against submitted claims to power payment integrity, utilization management, and appeals workflows - reviewing complex facility claims up to 20x faster than manual processes while keeping humans in the loop for defensible, explainable outcomes.
Autonomize AI
Autonomize AI is an Austin-based healthcare technology company building an AI-native platform - the 'Autonomize Intelligence Platform' - that embeds governed, agentic AI directly into clinical and operational workflows for health plans, providers, and life sciences organizations. Founded in 2022 by Ganesh Padmanabhan and Kris Nair, the company turns mountains of unstructured healthcare data into structured intelligence, deploying pre-built AI agents and copilots for tasks like utilization review, prior authorization, care management, and clinical chart review. It says its systems save roughly 36,000 clinical hours per month across Fortune 100 healthcare customers, and it raised a $28 million Series A in June 2025 led by Valtruis, The Cigna Group Ventures, and Tau Ventures.
RapidCanvas
RapidCanvas is an Austin-based enterprise AI company that helps businesses move from concept to production-ready AI solutions in weeks rather than months. Founded in 2021 by veterans of Simility (acquired by PayPal), it pairs a proprietary agentic AI platform with human experts through what it calls the Hybrid Approach - AI agents automate data preparation, modeling and workflow execution while human specialists handle strategy and governance. The company targets non-technical business users across manufacturing, financial services, retail, energy and logistics, and has raised over $23.5M including a $16M Series A led by Peak XV Partners.
iMerit Technology
iMerit is a global AI data solutions company that supplies the labeled, enriched and expert-refined data used to train, fine-tune and evaluate machine learning and generative AI models. Founded in 2012 by Radha Basu, it pairs a specialized human workforce with its Ango Hub annotation platform and its Scholars network of domain experts to serve Fortune 500 clients across autonomous vehicles, healthcare, geospatial and financial services. In June 2026, enterprise-AI firm EXL agreed to acquire iMerit for up to $310 million.
LeadGenius
LeadGenius is a Berkeley-based B2B contact-data and buyer-intelligence company that blends machine learning with a globally distributed team of human researchers to build custom, compliance-first datasets for revenue teams. Rather than reselling a static database, it sources contact and account data on demand for each client, verifying every record before delivery, and layers in signals like role changes, technographics and buying-committee mapping. Spun out of the crowdsourcing startup MobileWorks in Y Combinator's 2011 class, the company pairs its data business with a social mission: it was the first crowdsourcing firm to tie worker pay to local living wages.
ASAPP
ASAPP is a New York-based enterprise AI company that builds an AI-native Customer Experience Platform for contact centers. Its flagship product, GenerativeAgent, autonomously resolves complex customer interactions across voice and chat, while agent-assist tools like Auto-Summary and real-time transcription boost the productivity of human agents. Founded in 2014 by Gustavo Sapoznik after a nearly three-hour call with his cable provider, ASAPP serves Fortune 500 enterprises in telecom, airlines, banking, insurance and retail - including JetBlue, American Airlines and Dish - and has raised roughly $380 million from investors such as Fidelity and Dragoneer.
Cline
Cline is an open-source, autonomous AI coding agent that runs inside VS Code and other editors. It reads a codebase, plans changes, edits files across a project, runs terminal commands, and drives a browser - asking for the developer's approval at each step. Built to be transparent and model-agnostic, it lets teams bring their own API keys or run local models, and has grown into one of the most-installed AI coding tools with a Fortune 500 enterprise offering, Cline Teams.
Kaedim
Kaedim is a San Francisco- and London-based AI company that turns 2D images and concept art into production-ready 3D models. Founded in 2020 by Konstantina Psoma and Roman Bromidge out of the University of Bristol, it pairs machine-learning tools with an in-house team of artists - a 'human-in-the-loop' approach - to deliver game-ready assets faster and cheaper than traditional outsourcing. Kaedim serves 250+ enterprise studios and thousands of creators, and raised a $15M Series A led by a16z Games in March 2024.
Legion Intelligence
Legion Intelligence is a San Francisco company building a governed, agentic AI platform for national security and regulated enterprises. Formerly Yurts, it lets defense agencies and Fortune 500 teams deploy and orchestrate AI agents across cloud, on-prem, air-gapped, and classified networks (IL-2 through IL-6) using any large language model, with human-in-the-loop control and full auditability. Its platform has been fielded at U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. Army, and the Department of Energy, where it cut intelligence-summary creation time by 94% and saved staff hundreds of hours per week.
Orkes
Orkes is an enterprise workflow orchestration company built by the creators of Netflix's open-source Conductor engine. It offers a fully managed, cloud-hosted platform that lets developers build, run, and scale durable workflows across microservices, APIs, and - increasingly - AI agents, giving companies a reliable way to put long-running, event-driven, and agentic processes into production without reinventing the underlying orchestration plumbing.
Scripted
Scripted is a content-marketing company that pairs vetted human writers with AI tooling to help businesses plan, produce and measure written content at scale. Founded in San Francisco in 2011 as a marketplace connecting brands with freelance writers, it has since rebuilt itself around an 'agentic AI content intelligence' platform - letting customers toggle between AI drafts and human experts, generate content briefs and headlines, research keywords, and track how published content performs. Now headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, Scripted has raised roughly $14M in venture funding and serves hundreds of business customers.
ActionAI
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.
Amplifier Security
Amplifier Security is an AI-native workforce security company that turns the noisy gap between finding and fixing security problems into an automated, employee-friendly workflow. Its agentic platform builds a per-employee Human Risk Graph, then deploys AI agents that engage workers directly in Slack, Teams and the browser to remediate device, app, identity and behavior risks - with humans kept in the loop. Founded in 2023 by Shreyas Sadalgi (CEO) and Tommy Donnelly (CTO), the company has raised roughly $9M and counts security-industry founders and CISOs among its backers and early customers.
Biometrica (aka Safience)
Biometrica - now operating under the name Safience - is a Las Vegas-based public-safety and identity-intelligence company that helps law enforcement, casinos, schools and critical infrastructure find specific threats and missing victims without watching everyone. Its platform pairs a law-enforcement-only database of verified identities (UMbRA) with edge sensors (RTIS/RVIS) that capture a single still image, purge non-matches immediately, and store no biometric data on the device. The company's pitch is deliberately contrarian for its industry: public safety without mass surveillance, summed up in its tagline 'Being Big Brother Is a Choice.'
Pareto.AI
Pareto.AI is a San Francisco-based, talent-first human data platform that connects AI labs with a deeply vetted network of expert labelers to produce premium training data, RLHF, and evaluation signals. Founded by Thiel Fellow Phoebe Yao, the company started as a bootcamp for women and work-from-home mothers, pivoted into AI data labeling in 2023, and now positions itself as the 'verification layer' for reinforcement learning on real-world expertise, turning specialist judgment into durable reward signals under the banner 'Expert data for AGI.'
Reflex Robotics
Reflex Robotics builds a wheeled, general-purpose humanoid that does real work on warehouse floors. Founded by MIT alumni with hardware chops from Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Anduril and Oculus, the company designs and ships affordable humanoids that start with a human-in-the-loop and learn their way to autonomy. Their robots are deployed in pilots with GXO and other Fortune 100 logistics operators, with a manufacturing footprint planned in Nuevo Leon, Mexico.
Phoebe Yao
Phoebe Yao is the founder and CEO of Pareto.AI, a talent-first human data platform that recruits and trains the top sliver of expert labelers to produce high-quality training data for the world's leading AI labs. A Chinese-American immigrant, classical violist, 2020 Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, she dropped out of Stanford during the pandemic to build what began as a bootcamp training women as remote virtual assistants and pivoted in 2023 into the human-data backbone for AI research. Her companies have worked with the likes of Character.AI and Imbue and researchers at Stanford and UPenn, all anchored by a single conviction: the humans behind AI deserve to be treated as experts, not anonymous clickworkers.
Yiorgos Nikoletakis
Yiorgos Nikoletakis is the co-founder and CEO of 100mentors, an Athens- and San Francisco-based edtech company that started as a platform connecting young people with mentors worldwide and has since pivoted into generative-AI skilling for organizations. A Fulbright scholar with degrees from AUEB, Ohio State, and Columbia, he describes his job as teaching people to ask better questions, use GenAI well, and keep humans in the loop. His personal motto: arguing like he's right, listening like he's wrong.
NEWWORK Software
NEWWORK Software is an enterprise AI company building the Digital Workforce Platform - a new category of enterprise software that lets organizations create, deploy, govern and scale teams of AI-powered 'digital employees' that work alongside human staff. Founded in 2023 in Palo Alto by former SAP and Workday leaders, NEWWORK pairs an AI-native ERP and a FLOW automation engine with an Agent Operating System, role-based controls, approval workflows and audit trails so autonomous agents can execute real business work safely across HR, finance, CRM and service operations.
Thoth AI
Thoth AI is a Singapore-headquartered global AI data solutions company that builds the high-quality datasets, evaluation frameworks, and human-in-the-loop operations that production AI systems depend on. Spanning 200+ languages and 100+ countries, it handles data collection and annotation across images, video, 3D point cloud, text, and audio, along with RLHF, model evaluation, content moderation, and multilingual customer experience for teams building LLMs, VLMs, multimodal systems, and applied AI like robotics.
CopilotKit
CopilotKit is an open-source company building the interface layer between humans and AI agents. Its SDK and the open AG-UI protocol let developers embed agents directly inside apps - rendering interactive UI, sharing state, and supporting human-in-the-loop workflows - instead of bolting on a text-only chatbot. Founded in 2023 by brothers Atai and Uli Barkai and headquartered in the Seattle area, the company raised a $27M Series A in May 2026 and counts Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and a large share of the Fortune 500 among adopters of its protocol.
Duckbill
Duckbill is a Boston-based service that combines AI with trained human assistants - called copilots - to take the dreaded everyday tasks and endless life admin off your plate. Members hand off to-dos like disputing a bill, booking appointments, researching long-term care, or planning a party via text, email, app, voice memo, or chat, and a copilot, supported by AI, researches and executes them. Founded in 2022 by Meghan Joyce and Emi Gonzalez, the company raised a $24.75M Series A in 2023 led by Forerunner Ventures.
Wow AI
Wow AI is a US-registered, end-to-end AI training-data company that supplies high-quality, multilingual datasets and human-in-the-loop services - data collection, transcription, annotation, validation and RLHF - to teams building large language models, voice assistants and computer-vision systems. Its crowdsourcing network spans 170,000+ contributors across 120+ languages, with 100,000+ hours of audio and domain datasets for finance, healthcare and retail. The founding team has since extended the vision into AIxBlock, a decentralized platform for building, training and deploying AI, and WowDAO, a community-owned AI ecosystem.
Meghan Joyce
Meghan Verena Joyce is the co-founder and CEO of Duckbill, a Boston startup that pairs AI with human experts to act as an executive assistant for your personal life - booking appointments, filing claims, and clearing the to-do list. Before founding Duckbill in 2022, she ran Uber's biggest East Coast markets, served as COO and EVP of Platform at Oscar Health, and advised the U.S. Treasury during the recession. She has raised $33 million for Duckbill, led by Forerunner Ventures, and sits on the boards of The Boston Beer Company and Guardant Health.