productivity
(55)
Coach.me discovered that a checkmark needs company
The habit app began with points and became a marketplace for human encouragement. Its wager: a small daily action gets easier when someone notices.
Plaud put a price on forgetting
A small recorder, a paid AI service, and a surprisingly consequential button. Plaud is building a business around the part of work that happens before anyone opens a document.
Scribe
The San Francisco startup turned the tedium of writing instructions into a single click - and quietly became the record of how work actually gets done inside 94% of the Fortune 500.
Nuclino
A modern, simple, and blazingly fast way to collaborate - bring knowledge, docs, and projects together in one place.
Jotform
Twenty years, 35 million users, and not a cent of venture money: how Aytekin Tank turned a coder's most boring chore into a form-building empire.
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.
Blue
Blue is a Y Combinator-backed (S25) startup building a voice-first way to operate an iPhone. Its shipping product is the Blue Smart Dictation Keyboard, an iOS keyboard that turns spoken thoughts into polished text and is pitched as roughly four times faster than typing. The longer-term product is a small USB-C dongle plus app that lets you speak a task - send a follow-up, book something, reply to a thread - and have Blue open the right app and carry it out hands-free. The founding team previously worked on Google Assistant, Google DeepMind, and Apple Vision Pro.
Caddy
Caddy is a personal AI for everyday work that lives in your text messages and responds to voice. Built by the team that led product and design for Loom's AI suite, it connects to the tools people already use - email, calendar, Slack, Linear, Notion - and gets work done without forcing anyone to open yet another app. You text or talk; Caddy handles the tickets, reminders, scheduling and follow-ups. The company is part of Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch and is based in New York City.
jo
jo is a voice-first personal AI agent for macOS that runs on your Mac and a private, per-user cloud machine. Rather than waiting to be asked, it proactively summarizes what is on your screen, drafts emails, manages your calendar, clips relevant content, and keeps up with the loose ends of work and life. Built natively in Swift for Apple Silicon and backed by Y Combinator (W24), jo reaches users across Mac, web, iMessage, Telegram, and WhatsApp while keeping personal data local and out of model training.
Logical
Logical is a proactive desktop AI copilot for knowledge workers. Instead of waiting for prompts, it watches what you are working on across apps like Gmail, Slack, Excel and Apple Mail, carries context between them, and suggests actions - drafting emails, detecting to-dos, taking meeting notes and answering questions - with a few clicks. Founded in 2025 by childhood friends Sam Karu and Anushka Idamekorala, it is widely reported as the first startup with an entirely Sri Lankan founding team admitted to Y Combinator (Fall 2025 batch).
Slidely AI
Slidely AI is a Y Combinator-backed (S22) startup building an AI copilot that lives inside Microsoft PowerPoint. Instead of exporting to a web builder, users generate, redesign, reformat and proofread fully editable slides from a natural-language prompt, and the tool learns a company's existing fonts, colors and layouts so output looks on-brand rather than generic. Founded in 2022 by Apoorve Singhal and Nikhil Shah, the company targets consultants, corporate teams and students who live in PowerPoint and want to cut the time spent formatting decks.
Gumdrop
Gumdrop is a Boston-based AI meeting assistant that preps you before a meeting and handles the follow-up after it. It pulls context from past meetings, recent emails, and your contact history to build a short briefing that lands about five minutes before you walk in, then runs an AI notetaker during the call that turns spoken promises into a list of action items. Built by Kayak co-founder Paul English, it also handles the boring scheduling logistics through booking links and an email address you can CC to find a time.
Height
Height was a New York-based software company that built an AI-native project management and collaboration tool for product teams. Founded in 2018 by ex-Stripe designer-engineer Michael Villar, Height combined tasks, chat, and adaptive workflows in one keyboard-first app, then pivoted to an 'autonomous' model in which an AI agent called Copilot handled the routine legwork of building software - triaging bugs, updating specs, pruning backlogs, and drafting standups. Backed by roughly $18.3M in venture funding, Height competed with Linear, Asana, and Jira before winding the product down in 2025.
Switchboard
Switchboard was a cloud coworking platform built for remote and hybrid teams. Instead of screen-sharing and tab-juggling, it put video and live, editable web apps - Google Docs, Figma, Jira, Trello and more - side by side in persistent virtual rooms, so a team could return to a project exactly where it left off. Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Amir Ashkenazi, the company raised roughly $38 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Icon Ventures, Spark Capital and HubSpot Ventures, and held five patents. In late 2024 Ashkenazi wound down Switchboard and pivoted the company into Airtop, an AI web-agent and browser-automation platform.
Thrive Global
Thrive Global is a behavior change technology company founded by Arianna Huffington in 2016 to help end the stress and burnout epidemic. It embeds science-backed 'Microsteps' - tiny, sustainable habit changes - directly into the daily workflow of employees at more than 200 organizations across 160+ countries, pairing behavioral science with AI to improve health outcomes and productivity for frontline workers and executives alike.
Magic
Magic is a San Francisco-founded, remote-first company that matches businesses and busy professionals with dedicated remote assistants backed by an AI layer. Founded in 2015 out of Y Combinator by the team behind Made in Space, it launched as a viral SMS 'text us for anything' concierge service and has since evolved into a platform for full-time and part-time executive, admin, customer-support and bookkeeping assistants, plus an always-on 'Magic 24/7' human-plus-AI service. Every assistant is equipped with Magic AI, an in-browser tool wired to premium models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Magical
Magical is a San Francisco software company building AI agents and browser-based automation that move data between apps and websites without formal integrations. It started life as a free Chrome extension for text expansion and form autofill used by roughly a million people at companies like Amazon, Airbnb and Netflix, then pivoted toward agentic AI that runs multi-step operational work - increasingly focused on healthcare revenue-cycle and patient-access tasks. Founded in 2020 during the COVID lockdown by the husband-and-wife team of Harpaul Sambhi and Rosie Chopra, the company has raised roughly $41 million, led by a $35M Series A from Coatue.
Obvious
Obvious is a San Francisco AI company, formerly known as Flatfile, that builds an AI agent workspace under the tagline "Less Chat. More Work." Instead of returning chat answers, the Obvious agent collaborates with users to produce finished artifacts - docs, slides, sheets, dashboards, apps, timelines and code - while transforming data, running deep research and building on-demand integrations. Founded in 2019 by David Boskovic and Eric Crane, the company built its reputation on Flatfile, a widely used data-onboarding product, then rebranded to Obvious in 2025 to launch a broader agentic platform. It has raised roughly $87M-$95M across Seed, Series A and a $50M Series B led by Tiger Global.
Superhuman
Superhuman is a workplace AI company built from three well-known productivity brands. It began in 2014 as a fast, keyboard-driven email client founded by Rahul Vohra. In 2025 the app was acquired by Grammarly, and that October the combined company - which also owns the writing assistant Grammarly and the workspace tool Coda - renamed itself Superhuman and launched an AI assistant called Superhuman Go. The company, led by CEO Shishir Mehrotra, now positions Superhuman as a suite of AI agents that work across email, documents and writing to amplify how people get work done.
Ideaflow
Ideaflow is a Palo Alto-based AI company building an 'intelligence amplification' layer for knowledge work. Its flagship product is a notebook that augments your thinking as you type, letting people capture and stitch together fragments of information. The company has since expanded into team knowledge tools - Base, which surfaces context from Slack, meetings, and documents, and meeting intelligence - aiming to become an organization's collective memory. Founded around 2015 by MIT Media Lab designer Jacob Cole and Etherpad/Meteor veteran David Greenspan, it has raised roughly $11M in seed funding from First Round Capital, 8VC, StartX, Naval Ravikant, and Tim Draper.
MiChamba
MiChamba is a Mexico-founded startup that turns WhatsApp into an operational management platform for frontline and deskless teams across Latin America and the US Hispanic market. Instead of forcing workers onto a new app, it layers AI agents - led by an assistant named MarIA - on top of the messaging tool people already use, converting informal chats into trackable tasks, reports, and productivity data. It raised a $2.25M pre-seed round in 2025 and counts Hilton, Pemex, and Repsol among 50+ customers in construction, hospitality, logistics, and industrial sectors.
Moonlight
Moonlight is a San Francisco seed-stage startup founded in 2023 by Stanford MBA and former Activision product manager Siran Jiang. It began as Moonlight Focus, a science-backed productivity and biohacking app built around ultradian rhythms, live focus tracking and flow-state interventions, and has since evolved toward Moonlight AI - a personalized learning platform that turns any topic into gamified, AI-generated quests for children. Across both incarnations, the through-line is the same: use behavioral science and playful mechanics to help people direct their attention on purpose.
Optiverse
Optiverse is a Swiss AI meeting platform that turns everyday conversations into structured, actionable work. Its assistant, OptiAgent, transcribes meetings, writes custom summaries, extracts action items, pushes updates into CRMs, and makes past calls searchable across a company. Founded in Zurich in 2024 by researchers from ETH Zurich, EPFL, MIT and HSG, the company positions itself as the 'digital brain of the enterprise' and reports supporting over 1,000 companies while emphasizing Swiss-hosted, privacy-first data handling.
Plus AI
Plus AI is a Seattle-based software company that builds an AI presentation maker working directly inside Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint. Rather than trapping users in a separate web editor, Plus generates and edits native slides - drafting decks from a prompt, converting documents like PDFs and Word files into presentations, rewriting and remixing existing slides, and matching custom brand templates. Founded in 2021 by former Madrona venture capitalist Daniel Li and ex-BCG and Webflow product leader Chloe Qi, the company has raised roughly $8-10M in seed funding and says its tools have been installed by more than a million users.
Productive.ai
Productive.ai (legally Phoneic, Inc.) is a San Mateo, California startup that turns ordinary cell phone calls into finished work. Its AI Call Assistant records and transcribes business calls, then automatically generates summaries, notes, tasks and calendar events and logs everything into the user's CRM - so that when the call ends, the paperwork is already done. Founded by messaging-and-voice veteran Enlai Chu, the company targets real estate agents, salespeople, recruiters, mortgage and medical professionals, and won the National Association of REALTORS 2023 Pitch Battle.
Roger
Roger (legally Iris Technologies) is a Salt Lake City-based construction-tech startup building an AI-powered collaboration workspace for construction project managers. By syncing with email tools like Microsoft Outlook and Gmail and layering on task boards, material trackers, and submittal logs, Roger turns the chaos of coordinating 50+ stakeholders into structured, trackable work. Its AI drafts follow-up emails, chases vendors on long-lead items, updates logs, and keeps details from slipping through the cracks - aiming to make every project run like a team's best project.
Willow
Willow is a San Francisco startup building voice-first interfaces that turn natural speech into polished text across every app on Mac, Windows, and iPhone. Founded in 2024 by Stanford dropouts Allan Guo and Lawrence Liu and backed by Y Combinator, Willow promises roughly 3x the accuracy of built-in dictation with ~200ms response time, automatic filler-word removal, style-matching, and an AI mode that reshapes rough spoken notes into finished messages. The company raised $4.2M in seed funding and has grown roughly 50% month over month, with early enterprise users including Uber, Heidi Health, and Zego.
Fundamental Research Labs
Fundamental Research Labs (formerly Altera) is a San Francisco applied AI research company building autonomous, socially intelligent agents - what it calls 'digital human beings.' Founded by former MIT computational neuroscientist Dr. Robert Yang, the company ships consumer and prosumer products including Shortcut (a superhuman Excel agent) and Fairies (a general-purpose AI assistant), and raised a $33M Series A in August 2025 led by Prosus Ventures.
NinjaTech AI
NinjaTech AI is a Palo Alto-based generative AI company building autonomous AI agents that complete real, multi-step work. Its consumer product, Ninja (myninja.ai), packages 24+ frontier models into one workspace; its flagship SuperNinja agent plans, codes, researches, and executes entire workflows inside a dedicated virtual machine. Founded in 2022 by ex-Google and ex-AWS leaders, the company runs on AWS Trainium and Cerebras silicon.
Please
Please (formerly MultiOn) is a Palo Alto consumer AI company building a thinking reminders and planning app that captures ideas, connects the dots between them, and nudges users at the right moment so they never miss a thing.