yc-s24
(46)
Junyoung Park and the Problem of Getting AI to Behave Twice
Before Weavel became Typa, Junyoung Park was building tools to make AI instructions easier to test, revise, and trust. His path runs through Seoul National University, open-source software, and a research question about doing more with fewer trainable parameters.
Shan Mohta’s most useful design was a change of plan
He built hardware at Microsoft, Apple, and Skydio. With Vendra, Shan Mohta had to learn a different engineering skill: letting go of a product so he could get closer to the parts.
Ege Kaan Duman and the art of letting other people build
A Rhodes Scholar, poet, and Orca co-founder follows a stubborn question from Oxford to Minecraft: how much work should stand between an idea and the people who want to try it?
Walid Mah'd and the wallet that needed a passport
A payments consultant went backpacking and found himself on the wrong side of the checkout. With Moreta, Walid Mah'd is building a way for travelers to use the QR payment networks already serving the people around them.
Joseph Thalinjan Is Rewriting the Most Stubborn Date in Business: The First
The former McKinsey consultant found a calendar problem hiding inside commercial real estate. With RentFlow, he is building a payment layer for businesses whose revenue refuses to arrive on schedule.
Dylan Allen-Arnegård Is Turning the Humble Review Into AI Search Currency
He learned rejection door to door in Argentina, built NFC experiments in a Utah garage, and moved to San Francisco to help local businesses become legible to machines. Now the Cheers co-founder is betting that a five-star review can be both a thank-you note and a data point.
Armel Talla Is Building the Boring Layer Robots Cannot Scale Without
Before Miru, Armel Talla turned a dorm-room podcast problem into a product used by thousands - then opened the code and started again. Now he and the same college friends are building the quiet control layer behind fleets of working robots.
Andrew Chung Is Building an AI That Starts With Your Voice
He left Seoul National University to build, entered Y Combinator after a run of LLM experiments, and turned a founder's recurring blank-page problem into Typa. His wager is simple: the future of AI-assisted content begins with a conversation, not a prompt box.
Terrell Marshall
Terrell Marshall is the founder and CEO of Passage (YC S24), a San Francisco startup building an AI co-pilot for customs brokers and trade compliance teams. Before Passage, he worked on AI products used by more than a billion people at Google, including Google Photos, Google Payments, and Hotels Search, and was a software engineer at Workday. He co-founded Passage with Aditya Nadkarni, a college friend with whom he also holds a patent for an AI physical therapy platform. Passage automates the manual data entry and email correspondence that customs teams spend hours on, pulling data from commercial invoices, bills of lading, and packing lists to pre-fill entry filings and validate compliance.
Vardhan Kapoor
Vardhan Kapoor is the CEO and co-founder of FirstWork (YC S24), an AI-native HR and compliance platform built for frontline and seasonal workers. Before founding FirstWork in 2024, he ran strategy and operations at Deliveroo during its hypergrowth years and served as Head of Region for APAC at Remitly, where he built a business approaching $100M in annual recurring revenue and helped take the company public on NASDAQ. FirstWork raised a $5M seed round in early 2025, led by Gradient, to cut onboarding time for high-turnover workforces by more than 75%.
Walid Mah'd
Walid Mah'd is the co-founder and CEO of Moreta (YC S24), a San Francisco fintech that lets international travelers pay with local QR networks in Asia without a bank account in every country. A former Mastercard Advisors payments consultant and Ivey Business School graduate, he built the company after feeling the friction of paying while backpacking across Southeast and East Asia.
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.
Affil.ai
Affil.ai is an AI-powered compliance and monitoring platform for financial affiliate marketing. It automatically reads the blogs, comparison sites and partner pages where affiliates promote a company's products, flags regulatory violations across thousands of pages, and turns each issue into a trackable ticket - letting banks, fintechs and other regulated brands scale affiliate programs without drowning in manual review. Founded in 2024 by John Ta, Vivek Olumbe and Vishal Vinjapuri, the company went through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch and has raised about $500K.
Apten
Apten is a Y Combinator (S24) startup building omni-channel AI agents that engage and nurture leads across SMS, voice, email, and webchat. Aimed at B2C enterprises in home services, insurance, education, healthcare, and financial services, its agents hold one continuous memory across every channel, follow up at the right moment, transfer live calls to humans, and plug into CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot. The company says its conversational approach converts previously dead leads into sales opportunities at a much higher rate than robocalls or static drip campaigns.
Cheers
Cheers is a Y Combinator (S24) startup building a full-stack Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platform for local service businesses. It helps HVAC, plumbing, roofing, solar and smart-home companies get recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT and by Google, by auditing their AI visibility, fixing their web presence, and turning frontline employees into a review engine using NFC tap tools with per-employee attribution.
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.
FirstWork
FirstWork is a San Francisco-based, YC S24 enterprise AI company building autonomous agents that automate workforce operations for frontline and seasonal labor. Its platform handles document verification, credentialing, continuous compliance, and worker onboarding inside a company's existing systems, cutting time-to-hire and onboarding by up to 80%. Founded in 2024 by Vardhan Kapoor (ex-Remitly, Deliveroo) and Shubham Choudhary (ex-Deel, Rippling), FirstWork raised a $5M seed round led by Gradient and serves staffing, logistics, delivery, and care companies including Deel, Job&Talent, Relay, and Wonolo.
Handled
Handled is an AI operations platform that automates the manual, reactive work that piles up after an online order is placed - order processing, shipment tracking, exception handling, returns, and invoice reconciliation - for omnichannel consumer-brand teams and the third-party logistics providers (3PLs) that fulfill for them. Founded in 2024 out of Y Combinator's S24 batch by Audrey Djiya and Peter Nsaka (legally Zimi, Inc.), the company connects to the ERPs, 3PLs, sales channels, and carriers a brand already uses and does the busywork around the clock.
HeroUI
HeroUI (formerly NextUI) is an open-source React and React Native component library that pairs the accessibility of React Aria with the utility-first styling of Tailwind CSS. Founded by Junior Garcia and backed by Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, it ships 75+ web components plus a native library, and positions itself as a UI framework built for both human developers and AI coding agents.
Intryc
Intryc is an AI-powered quality assurance platform for customer support teams. It evaluates up to 100% of support interactions in real time - human and AI-handled - using customizable scorecards, sampling rules and LLM-driven analysis, then turns those evaluations into coaching, training simulations and performance insights. Founded in 2023 by three ex-Revolut, Confluent, Amazon and Meta operators, Intryc went through Y Combinator's S24 batch and raised a $3.1M oversubscribed seed round in early 2025.
Kastle
Kastle is a San Francisco startup building AI voice and messaging agents purpose-built for consumer lending, starting with mortgage servicing. Its agents answer borrower calls, take payments, chase delinquent accounts, qualify loan inquiries and score every interaction against lending regulations like FDCPA, TILA and RESPA. Founded in 2024 by Rishi Choudhary and Nitish Poddar and backed by Y Combinator (S24), Kastle plugs into existing systems of record such as ICE MSP and works with large mortgage servicers, including Carrington Mortgage Services.
Kontigo
Kontigo is a USDC-based neobank built for Latinos in the U.S. and Latin America. It pairs a self-custody stablecoin wallet with a card, no-fee cross-border transfers, yield on balances, and an AI banker over WhatsApp - aiming to give people in high-inflation economies a dollar account that works across borders. Founded in 2023 and part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, it reported roughly 1 million users and over $1 billion in payment volume before raising a $20 million seed round in December 2025.
Miru
Miru is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator S24) building configuration and deployment infrastructure for robotics and IoT fleets. Its platform lets engineers version, validate, and push software configs to thousands of devices as easily as pushing a change to GitHub, replacing the manual SSH scripts and homegrown tooling most robotics teams rely on today.
Moreta
Moreta (Moreta Pay) is a Y Combinator S24 fintech building a mobile wallet that lets international travelers, expats and digital nomads pay local merchants by scanning QR codes across Southeast Asia and Latin America - using their own currency, at real exchange rates, without needing a local bank account. It connects to national QR networks like Indonesia's QRIS, Thailand's PromptPay and the Philippines' QR Ph so a Western visitor can pay at street stalls and cafes the same way a local does.
Orca
Orca is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator S24) that lets anyone build, host, and play Minecraft games without writing code. You describe a mod, plugin, or world in plain English and Orca's AI writes the code, generates textures, compiles a real mod, tests it, and can deploy it live to a free 8 GB server in seconds. The company frames its ambition as building a Roblox-style creator platform on top of Minecraft's 300M+ player base, playable from a browser or a free desktop client.
Passage
Passage is an AI co-pilot for customs brokers and freight forwarders that automates the tedious paperwork of clearing imported goods. Founded in 2024 by former Google and Flexport engineers Terrell Marshall and Aditya Nadkarni, and backed by Y Combinator's S24 batch, the software reads commercial invoices, bills of lading, and packing lists, checks them for consistency, classifies products under HTSUS tariff codes, drafts filings, and handles routine email correspondence - work that entry writers otherwise do by hand for hours each day.
RentFlow
RentFlow is a New York fintech, part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, that builds a 'Buy Now, Pay Later' layer for commercial rent. It pays landlords their full rent on the 1st of the month, then lets business tenants repay in smaller installments synced to their real cash flow. The company pairs payments infrastructure with AI underwriting that reads transaction-level and behavioral signals to price flexibility, aiming to keep otherwise-healthy small and medium businesses from being pushed into default by a single fixed lump-sum bill.
Rowboat
Rowboat (YC S24) is a San Francisco and Bengaluru startup building open-source AI agent software. It began as a pre-trained customer-support LLM agent, grew into a widely starred open-source IDE for building multi-agent systems on the OpenAI Agents SDK, and is now 'your AI coworker, with memory' - a local-first desktop app that turns your emails, meetings, and notes into an editable knowledge graph so agents can actually get work done. Founded by the team behind Agara (acquired by Coinbase in 2021).
Sensei Robotics
Sensei Robotics (YC S24) is a San Francisco startup building the data layer for robot learning. It pairs a sub-$300 sensorized exoskeleton arm with a distributed network of trained human operators - 'Senseis' - who perform real-world manipulation demonstrations on demand. Robotics and AI teams submit a task like folding cloth or loading a dishwasher, and Sensei returns curated, labeled human-demonstration data. The company positions itself as 'the Scale AI for robotics training data,' claiming roughly a tenth of the cost and twice the speed of conventional teleoperation setups.
Spaceium Inc.
Spaceium is a Y Combinator (S24) aerospace startup building unmanned refueling and servicing stations in orbit - what its founders call service stations along a 'space superhighway.' Its proprietary cryogenic storage system holds multiple metric tons of fuel for up to a decade in orbit without boil-off, and its high-precision robotic arm transfers propellant and performs repairs. The goal is to let spacecraft top up in space instead of carrying all their fuel from launch, extending missions and lowering costs for satellites, orbital transfer vehicles, and eventual Moon and Mars missions.