yc-s24
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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.
Jarren Reid
Jarren Reid is the 21-year-old CEO and co-founder of Usul, a Y Combinator (S24) startup building an AI platform that helps companies find, pursue, and win government contracts. Usul monitors roughly $8 trillion in annual government spending across 60+ nations, matching companies to opportunities in defense, IT, energy, and healthcare. Reid worked for defense contractors including Palantir and MITRE while still young, dropped out of Stanford to build Usul after seeing how broken the acquisition process was, and has become one of the youngest CEOs working with the U.S. government today.
Catheryn Li
Catheryn Li is the co-founder and CEO of Simple AI, a San Francisco voice-AI startup building phone agents that sell. After four years at Y Combinator - where she led the software team behind Startup School, the YC Library, and Co-Founder Matching - she and Zach Kamran started Simple AI in the 2024 YC batch. Their agents are trained on top human reps, know every product SKU, and the company says they outperform trained live reps by 30% on conversion and upsell. Simple AI raised a $14M seed round led by First Harmonic with Y Combinator, True Ventures, and Massive Tech Ventures. Li holds degrees in computer science and mathematics from MIT.
Emily Choi-Greene
Emily Choi-Greene is the co-founder and CEO of Clearly AI, a Y Combinator (S24) startup in Seattle that automates the slow, paperwork-heavy security and privacy reviews enterprises dread. She spent five years at Amazon leading Alexa AI Security and later owned data security and privacy at Moveworks, performing hundreds of reviews by hand before building the tool she wished she had. A Dartmouth computer scientist who graduated with High Honors, she runs the company alongside her husband and CTO Joe Choi-Greene, whom she met in 2019 over an Alexa security review. Clearly AI has raised roughly $8.4M and counts Fortune 500s and global brands among its early users.
Penny Chen
Penny Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Pax, the Y Combinator (S24) startup rebuilding duty drawback - the U.S. program that refunds import tariffs - as an AI-native brokerage. An MIT PhD and former research scientist at Amazon and Flexport, she stumbled on duty drawback while building supply-chain algorithms and saw a math problem hiding inside a bureaucratic one: each year roughly $10-15 billion in eligible refunds go unclaimed because legacy brokers take 10-20% and won't touch claims under $100k. Pax turns the rulebook into algorithms and LLM data extraction, promising a TurboTax-style experience that cuts filing from 9-12 months to a few weeks. The company raised $4.5M in seed funding led by Initialized Capital in April 2025.
Sid Manchkanti
Sid Manchkanti is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pulse, a production-grade document intelligence platform that converts complex unstructured documents into LLM-ready structured data. A Berkeley CS graduate with experience at NVIDIA and D.E. Shaw, he co-founded Pulse in 2024 after going through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch. The company raised a $3.9M seed round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and has processed over one billion pages for Fortune 100 enterprises across finance, healthcare, insurance, legal, and supply chain sectors.