Tagged: y-combinator
30 results
Marlon Misra
Marlon Misra is the cofounder and CEO of Assembly (formerly Copilot), a Y Combinator-backed New York software company building a client-portal platform - often described as 'Shopify for service businesses.' Assembly raised a $10M Series A, serves more than 1,000 firms and roughly a million of their clients, and rebranded from Copilot in September 2025 alongside the launch of an AI assistant for professional services firms.
Nick Macario
Nick Macario is co-founder and CEO of Verifiable, an Austin-based healthcare credentialing platform that replaces weeks of paperwork with API-driven verifications and, more recently, an autonomous AI agent called CredAgent. A multi-time founder (Branded.me, Remote.com, Dock.io), he raised a $27M Series B from Craft Ventures in 2023 and is backed by Sam and Jack Altman.
Sam Li
Sam Li is co-founder and CEO of Thoropass, the New York-based information security compliance and audit platform formerly known as Laika. He grew up in Shanghai, studied computer science and economics at the University of Virginia, worked at Goldman Sachs and Google, dropped out of Harvard Business School to run a YC-backed insurtech called Zinc Platform, watched it die, spent a year as an EIR at Bain Capital Ventures, then in 2019 co-founded a company to make SOC 2 audits less miserable. Thoropass has raised roughly $98 million across four rounds and now combines software with a licensed audit practice.
Almond ObGyn
Almond ObGyn is a Los Angeles-based, tech-enabled obstetrics and gynecology practice that set out to be the 'One Medical for women's health.' Founded in 2021 by Tara Raffi and Carly Allen and backed by a $7M seed round out of Y Combinator's S22 batch, Almond blended in-person clinic visits with telehealth, 24/7 text access to clinicians, and membership pricing to cover the full arc of reproductive care - from birth control and annual exams to PCOS, fertility, group pregnancy care, and menopause.
AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ is a San Francisco AI-search optimization platform that helps brands see, measure, and improve how they appear inside generative engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Founded in 2025 by ex-Google Search and DeepMind PM Andrew Yan and ex-ServiceNow engineer Alan Yao, the Y Combinator-backed company treats GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) as the successor to traditional SEO, analyzing millions of AI responses to tell companies whether AI models recommend them - and what to change if they don't.
Atlas
Atlas is an AI-first customer support platform that pitches itself as a modern replacement for Intercom and Zendesk. It combines ticketing, an omnichannel inbox (chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, Slack Connect, Discord), session recording, customer timelines, a help center and AI agents (Autopilot and Copilot) so support teams can resolve issues faster by understanding customers more completely. Founded in 2021 by Jon O'Bryan and Rahul Asati and backed by Y Combinator (W22), Atlas is built around the idea that great support drives growth rather than being a cost center.
Duranium
Duranium is a Y Combinator (S25) advanced-materials company reshoring U.S. production of critical metals - titanium, magnesium, aluminum, zirconium and hafnium. It modernizes carbochlorination metallurgy with a novel reactor that recirculates CO and chlorine streams back into feedstock and spins off a saleable co-product (bleaching agents/hypochlorite), aiming to match Chinese-level pricing without subsidies while eliminating direct emissions. Founded in 2025 by CEO Brenden Prins-McKinney and CTO Berkley Noble, the company targets a pilot facility by June 2026 and roughly 12% of the U.S. magnesium market by 2029.
Fintesa
Fintesa is a San Francisco-based fintech SaaS platform that lets any business compliantly collect payments in more than 200 countries within about ten minutes, while issuing cards that let merchants manage spending, earn cashback, and skip conversion fees across 143 currencies. Founded by CEO Khalid Alomari and backed by 500 Global (S23) and Sanabil Investments, the patent-pending company grew to 4,800+ merchants, 53+ partnerships and $100M+ in GMV on a lean $300K of capital.
Hapi
Hapi is a Peruvian-founded, YC-backed fintech that lets people across Latin America invest in U.S. stocks, ETFs and cryptocurrencies from their phones - with zero commissions, no minimums and an account you can open in about five minutes. Built to knock down the high fees and paperwork that historically kept Latin Americans out of the U.S. markets, Hapi has grown from 10,000 users in 2022 to a reported 500,000-plus clients across roughly 20 countries.
Pirros
Pirros is an AI-powered content intelligence platform for architecture and engineering firms that lets designers find, compare, reuse and standardize Revit details and families across every project, team and office. Founded by former structural engineers Ari Baranian and Peter Johann, the Los Angeles company automatically ingests a firm's historical drawing sets and makes them searchable by geometry - no manual tagging - so designers stop digging through cluttered server folders and start reusing vetted work. Often described as 'GitHub for construction,' Pirros integrates directly with Revit and Autodesk ACC/BIM 360 and serves over 300 firms and 15,000+ users.
Redbird
Redbird is a New York-based, AI-powered workflow automation and analytics platform that lets non-technical business teams connect their data, run analysis, and generate reports through a conversational, ChatGPT-like interface - no code required. Founded by the husband-and-wife team of Erin and Deren Tavgac (originally as Cube Analytics), the company builds AI agents that automate roughly 90% of the repetitive analytics, operations, and reporting work that normally clogs enterprise teams. Backed by Y Combinator and a $7.6M seed round led by B Capital, Redbird counts eight Fortune 50 companies among its customers.
Jon O'Bryan
Jon O'Bryan is the CEO and Co-founder of Atlas (YC W22), an AI-first customer support platform built to replace legacy tools like Zendesk and Intercom. A PhD physicist turned serial entrepreneur, Jon previously co-founded PadSplit - a co-living marketplace that housed 23,000 people across 18 U.S. cities - and Blanket Homes. At Atlas, he is on a mission to transform customer support from a cost center into a revenue driver, bringing together session recording, omnichannel ticketing, AI copilot, and customer timeline tools in a single ergonomic platform backed by Y Combinator and angel investors including Parker Conrad (Rippling), Jack Altman (Lattice), and Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox).
Khalid Alomari
Khalid Alomari is the founder and CEO of Fintesa, a San Francisco-based SaaS platform that lets businesses collect compliant payments across 200+ countries in roughly ten minutes. A computer scientist by training and a cybersecurity engineer by trade, he moved from Amman to San Francisco to take Fintesa through 500 Global and Y Combinator's startup school, building cross-border payment rails for merchants tired of conversion fees.
Kennan Frost
Kennan Frost is the founder and CEO of Icon, a New York-based AI advertising company backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. Previously he solo-founded Skio, a Shopify subscriptions startup that reached $32M ARR and a $105M cash exit. A former top-200 North American League of Legends player who dropped out of college at 19, he is one of the most outspoken solo-founder operators in consumer tech today.
Judd Schoenholtz
Judd Schoenholtz is the co-founder and CEO of Deferred.com, a technology-driven qualified intermediary that pioneered the No Fee 1031 Exchange. A repeat real estate founder, he previously built Open Listings (YC W15, acquired by Opendoor in 2018) and Balance Homes (acquired 2023), drawing on a decade of design leadership at the global digital agency Huge.
Karn Saroya
Karn Saroya is the co-founder and CEO of Re, a decentralized reinsurance protocol built on Avalanche that connects alternative capital to the nearly $1 trillion global reinsurance market. A Canadian-born, MIT-trained Fulbright scholar, he previously co-founded the YC-backed insurtech Cover and worked as a financial-services consultant at Oliver Wyman before deciding the insurance stack itself needed to be torn down and rebuilt on-chain.
Kivo Health
Kivo Health delivers virtual pulmonary rehabilitation for people living with COPD. Patients receive a Kivo Kit - a cellular-connected iPad, Bluetooth pulse oximeter, and exercise bands - then join live small-group video sessions with licensed respiratory therapists twice a week from their living rooms. The Y Combinator-backed, San Francisco company partners with health systems like UCLA Health, UCSF Health, Cedars-Sinai, and Novant Health to keep Medicare members out of the hospital while improving symptoms, activity, and mood.
Legion Health
Legion Health is an AI-native psychiatry practice that delivers world-class mental health care covered by insurance. The company automates the administrative work behind clinical care - and became the first to receive regulatory authorization for AI to prescribe psychiatric medications, starting in Utah.
Mindee
Mindee is a Paris- and San Francisco-based AI company building an API-first platform that turns any document - invoices, receipts, passports, bank statements - into clean structured JSON. Founded in 2018 and backed by GGV Capital, Alven and Y Combinator, it gives developers pre-trained OCR endpoints plus a no-training-required custom builder called docTI.
MixerBox
MixerBox is a Palo Alto-based super-apps company building a constellation of daily-essential mobile apps - from OnePlayer and FreecableTV to AlarmTunes, NewsDash and a suite of AI tools that became the largest single developer on the ChatGPT Plugin Store. Founded in 2012 by Taiwanese-Australian Harvard alum John Lai and backed by Y Combinator, the company has crossed 300 million downloads worldwide.
ProjectX
ProjectX is a San Francisco-based, Y Combinator-backed startup building Infinity (InfinityOS) - a cloud-native, distributed operating system where every app runs on its own independent compute and GPU inside a single browser tab. Designed for the multi-agent, GPU-native era, it lets humans and AI agents run Blender, Unreal, Isaac Sim, DaVinci, and VS Code side-by-side in one shared workspace.
Pulse
Pulse is a San Francisco AI company building production-grade document extraction for enterprises. Its vision-language models and OCR pipeline turn messy PDFs, scans, and spreadsheets into clean, structured, LLM-ready data - powering RAG, automation, and analytics across finance, healthcare, insurance, legal, and supply chain.
Spellbrush
Spellbrush is a San Francisco generative AI studio building anime games and AI tools for artists. The team behind niji・journey - the anime model co-developed with Midjourney - and games like Arrowmancer, Cake Duel, and Waifu Labs. A Y Combinator W18 alum led by Cory Li, focused on using deep learning to help human artists create high-quality anime visuals.
Piero Risco
Piero Núñez Del Risco is the founder and CEO of Pana (YC S22), a cross-border neobank building borderless USD accounts and a zero-fee remittance network for the 62 million Latinos living in the United States. A Dominican operator who spent more than a decade inside Caribbean banking - including leading a 130-person team that rebuilt Scotiabank's digital platform for 2 million customers across 11 countries - he left the corner office to attack the 6% fee that immigrants pay to send money home. Pana lets people open a US bank account with just a passport, and has grown into a 'global bank on chain' blending fiat and stablecoins across 125 countries.
Prodigal
Prodigal is a Mountain View-based AI company building the only intelligence platform purpose-built for consumer finance. Trained on more than a billion real U.S. lending and collections interactions, its AI agents and applications - proAgent, proCollect, proPay, proScore, proNotes, proAssist and the PIE intelligence engine - help banks, lenders, auto-finance firms, collections agencies and healthcare revenue teams collect more payments, cut costs and stay compliant. More than 100 companies run on Prodigal, which has processed over a billion consumer interactions to date.
The CEO who spent $500,000 on a first name
Aaron Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Alex (alex.com), the AI recruiter that runs autonomous phone screens and video interviews at scale. He started the company as Apriora in 2023 with John Rytel, then paid more than half a million dollars for the alex.com domain and renamed both the product and the company after its AI agent. A Brown University graduate in computer science, applied math, and economics, Wang previously worked at Facebook AI Research and as a quantitative analyst at a hedge fund. Alex conducts thousands of interviews a day for Fortune 100 firms, banks, restaurant chains, and Big 4 accounting firms, and has raised roughly $20 million, including a $17 million Series A led by Peak XV Partners.
He Taught a Machine to Sit Across the Table From You
John Rytel is the co-founder and CTO of Alex (formerly Apriora), a San Francisco startup that builds an agentic AI recruiter which conducts live, real-time video interviews with job candidates. A Brown University graduate in computer science and applied mathematics, Rytel teamed up with Aaron Wang to launch the company in 2023, went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, and has helped raise roughly $20M from Peak XV Partners and 1984 Ventures. He is the builder behind the engine: the person who writes the code that lets an AI named Alex interview thousands of people at once.
Benjamin Encz
Benjamin Encz is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ashby, a San Francisco-based AI-native recruiting platform used by companies like OpenAI, Shopify, and Snowflake. A German-born software engineer turned recruiting-infrastructure builder, he spent 80% of his time on recruiting operations as Director of Engineering at PlanGrid before co-founding Ashby in 2018. Under his leadership, Ashby has grown to 2,700+ customers, 380 employees, and $142.5M in total funding including a $50M Series D in 2025.
Artie
Artie is a San Francisco-based, fully managed real-time data streaming platform that uses change data capture (CDC) and log-based replication to move production data across databases, warehouses, search systems, and vector stores with sub-minute latency and zero pipeline maintenance. Founded in 2023 by Jacqueline Cheong and Robin Tang and backed by Y Combinator, Artie pitches streaming-first data movement as the default for AI-era systems, replacing brittle batch ETL and self-managed Kafka.
Dots
Dots is a San Francisco-based global payouts infrastructure company that lets marketplaces, platforms, and service businesses pay workers, sellers, and creators anywhere through a single end-to-end API. One integration unifies bank transfers, PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, and stablecoins, and bundles recipient onboarding, KYC/anti-fraud, and tax form collection so platforms can move money to over 1 million payees across 190+ countries without building payment rails themselves.