Machine Learning Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) in the San Francisco Bay Area 2025

Cruise is building the world’s most advanced, all-electric, self-driving car technology to safely connect people with the places, things, and experiences they care about. Self-driving cars will help save lives, reimagine cities, redefine time in transit, and restore freedom of movement for individuals who live in dense urban settings. Acquired by GM in 2016.

Scale accelerates the development of AI within organizations of any size to deliver critical business insights and operational efficiency. Its data-centric infrastructure platform leverages RLHF (Reinforced Learning with Human Feedback) to help organizations build the strongest AI models that supercharge their business, with customers across industries including Meta, Microsoft, U.S. Army, DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit, Open AI, General Motors, Toyota Research Institute, Brex, Instacart and Flexport.

Sapling offers an API and SDK to help businesses integrate language models into their applications. Its messaging assistant sits on top of CRMs and messaging platforms to help users more efficiently compose responses.

We build software to manage, analyze, and optimize bioprocessing data. Our initial customers are bio-industrial companies, who produce various products in bioreactors.

Healthcare needs good data. At PicnicHealth, we are building deep real-world datasets fueling cutting-edge research while giving patients control of their own medical record data. These complete, clinically-rich datasets produce unique insights — across dozens of diseases — to ultimately get the right treatments into patients’ hands faster. We work directly with patients and leverage state of the art machine learning to transform messy medical records into structured, research-ready datasets. To date we’ve helped tens of thousands of patients securely access their records and proactively contribute to advancing research in diseases that impacts their lives.

Pachama is a leading climate-tech company harnessing cutting-edge technologies such as computer vision and satellites to drive funding to effective reforestation and conservation projects that sequester carbon, enhance biodiversity and enrich local communities around the world. Through a tech-verified marketplace that counts as customer the likes of Amazon, Airbnb, Netflix and Nespresso, the company drives capital to forests in Brazil, Mexico, India, the USA and beyond. The company is backed by top investors such as Bill Gates' BEV, Chis Sacca's LowerCarbon, Amazon Climate Pledge among others. The company is fully remote and driven by a strong sense of purpose.

Revl is an experience technology company and Y Combinator 2016 Winter Batch member launching the Revl Arc smart action camera. Designed in coordination with frogVentures, Sony, Ambarella and leading engineers with backgrounds at NASA, HP and Sikorsky Aircraft, the Revl Arc is available for preorder and will begin shipping in December. Revl was founded in 2015 and is based in San Francisco. For more information, please visit www.revl.com

Novel quantitative virtual microscopy for early detection of Alzheimer's disease from non-invasive MRI.

Atmo is the leading company bringing artificial intelligence to meteorology for governments, militaries, and corporations. Atmo builds state-of-the-art AI weather forecasts that are up to 50% more accurate, 10x more detailed, and run 40,000x faster. Atmo has rapidly become the trusted AI meteorology partner for high-stakes users worldwide, such as the US Department of Defense, top aerospace companies, the Philippines, and the United Nations. Today, Atmo forecasting systems protect vital infrastructure and enhance economic activity for its partners, including disaster response, renewable energy, agriculture, transportation, and national security.

MTailor is an ipad or iphone service for men to capture their shirt size dimensions and have tailor made shirts made and delivered.

SmartSpot is a post Series-A stealth startup backed by Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures that uses computer vision to deliver an unparalleled fitness training experience to your home. Our unique hardware solution gives amazing trainers the ability to see their class participants in real time and deliver detailed advice that was previously only possible in person.

Soteris is a YC-backed company with a four-person team and a great investor base building a first-of-its-kind data ML pricing system for insurance, starting with personal auto.

Proven is a data powered skincare company that creates personalized skincare products based on more than 47 factors about an individual's skin, genetic background, lifestyle and environment. Our formulations are rooted in the largest beauty database in the world, the proprietary Skin Genome Project, built in-house by Proven's cofounder Amy Yuan, a computational physicist from Stanford. The database has won MIT's AI Technology of the Year award and encompasses more than 20Million consumer datapoints and thousands of scientific articles on skin. Our challenge now is to tell the story of Proven, and share our industry leading personalized skincare products with the world.

Sift is the leader in Digital Trust & Safety, empowering digital disruptors to Fortune 500 companies to unlock new revenue without risk. Sift dynamically prevents fraud and abuse through industry-leading technology and expertise, an unrivaled global data network of 70 billion events per month, and a commitment to long-term customer partnerships. Global brands such as DoorDash, Twitter, and Wayfair rely on Sift to gain a competitive advantage in their markets.

Short Story is a style discovery platform to help petite women find clothes that fit. The average American woman is 5'4" and petite, yet this remains an enormously underserved segment. We’re a team of curators passionate about finding style, quality, and fit for petite women. Our mission is to remove the “ugh” from the shopping equation and support petite women in telling their stories, stylishly and confidently.

Directed Edge delivers Amazon-like "People who bought this also bought..." and "We think you'd also like"-style recommendations to other sites, using existing data being collected such as purchase or click histories. Recommendations are served in real-time via a REST API, with language bindings in several programming languages to make integration easy.

We’re on a mission to optimize the agricultural industry. When we started Bountiful in 2015, the grape error rate for predicting production was 30 percent. Why? We found that many farmers in the specialty crops space were still using traditional pencil-and-paper techniques to predict yield. These low-fidelity forecasting methods weren’t giving them a clear enough understanding of their production until it was too late, leading to waste and inefficiency throughout the supply chain. We saw a problem we wanted to solve. Today, Bountiful is using advanced data science to help farmers forecast more accurately, so they can make better decisions. In the last three years, we’ve combined the latest in machine learning with weather, satellite, geographic, and historical data. The result is a user-friendly platform that transforms volumes of complex agricultural information into simple, actionable insights farmers can use to run more economically and environmentally sustainable farms. More recently, we’re working to open the dialogue between buyers and sellers, remove uncertainty, and provide clarity to the supply chain to meet global food demand. Our ultimate goal is to close the agricultural margin of error. Not only will this make individual farms more efficient, profitable, and sustainable, but it will help optimize the global food supply chain. That means healthier people and a healthier planet.

Chaos Genius is a DataOps Observability platform for Snowflake. Enable Snowflake Observability to reduce Snowflake costs and optimize query performance.

Accept and reconcile B2B payments seamlessly.

Mach9 is at the forefront of leveraging advanced machine learning and computer vision techniques to transform geospatial data into actionable insights for urban development and infrastructure management. Our cutting-edge technology automates the detection and analysis of key urban features, aiding in the planning and maintenance of transportation networks.

We are building an open-source standard to monitor ML models in production. The tool is used by enterprise data science teams to operate their models reliably and detect and resolve issues.

HypaHub is a Cloud-Based Bioinformatics and AI Platform. It is the first HIPAA-compliant Bioinformatics SaaS that runs natively on users' clouds, providing both operation- and price-transparency. Our product is a one-stop shop to access complex technologies designed for scientists building data applications or performing data analytics to extract insights. It automates the creation and manages the operation of computing resources, eliminating the need for enterprises to set up and maintain a high-end R&D cloud infrastructure.

Artemis Search is a vector database search with a twist. We use special-purpose deep-learning models instead of using textual / semantic similarity to evaluate how good a search result is. This enables us to actually reason how well search results match the intent of the search query, eliminating the problems that come from evaluating search results on how much they look like the search query.

Pomello maps your organizational culture on a team-by-team basis, and integrates with your existing recruiting process to allow you to find the candidates most likely to thrive within your organization. Founded at Stanford University, Pomello’s technology is based on 30 years of research in Organizational Behavior, which has been validated over time across multiple industries.

CrowdAI equips enterprises of all sizes with the power of deep learning and the approachability and speed of no-code software. Our easy-to-master platform allows users of all technical abilities, from business operators to data scientists, to power real-time decisions from their visual world. Recognizing data as the new code, CrowdAI is the only vision AI platform to truly provide organizations with the infrastructure for the entire AI-lifecycle, empowering you to label data systematically, train models efficiently, scale models iteratively, and power decisions continuously.

Theorem conducts independent underwriting of consumer loans originated by banks, credit cards companies and other lenders. We utilize this information to manage institutional capital and securitize loans

SigOpt is the optimization platform that amplifies your research. SigOpt takes any research pipeline and tunes it, right in place. Our cloud-based ensemble of optimization algorithms is proven and seamless to deploy, and is used by globally recognized leaders within the insurance, credit card, algorithmic trading and consumer packaged goods industries.

At Phiar, we are building the first AI-powered AR navigation driving software solution that runs on a smartphone and in-vehicle displays, utilizing our ultra-lightweight road understanding AI that runs completely at-the-edge, in real-time, all on just a smartphone-level compute. Our mission is to enhance driving safety, facilitate more intuitive wayfinding, and connect drivers with their surrounding environments.

Homeroom helps investors provide affordable housing while making a 22% ROI. We do this by sourcing properties, arranging capital, managing construction, vetting tenants and collecting rent by the room. To date, Homeroom has brought on 85 property investors, growing 6X annually, are bringing in 420K in annualized net-revenue How it works: We help investors buy homes in cities that are attractive to young people, but lack affordable housing options. We then renovate and after about 20 days, the home is ready and we find qualified renters by the room. We launched in 2018 in Kansas City with 1 home. We now have 105 homes in 31 cities. In 2021, we grew rental GMV to $1.8M (300% YoY growth). Our average rent across every property is $458, which is about 50% lower than market comps, and our investors see returns up to 50% higher. We are HomeRoom. Johnny is the financial analyst/domain expert. Thomas is a cereal entrepreneur with a PHD in ML, and Mike hacked growth for Airbnb and Facebook.

LiftIgniter uses cutting edge data science to help publishers and retailers optimize their websites and mobile apps in real-time. Machine learning personalization puts the perfect piece of "content"​ (video, article, item to buy) in front the user at the exact moment when they are most likely to engage or convert - no tags or manual work required. The machine learns and updates itself so that's it's always perfectly in sync with your users and your "content."​ We average 50% improvements in CTR, engagement and conversation - with only a day's work on your part. Imagine creating a truly dynamic, real-time digital property that enables the perfect experience for that user impression at that moment in time. That is LiftIgniter! Our team of PhDs has direct experience building state-of-the-art personalization systems at the petabyte scale for some of the largest companies on the planet. Unless you plan on hiring your own team with deep experience (not likely since very few people with that experience exist), you should contact us to talk about how we can supercharge your digital experiences.

Pachyderm is a tool for production data pipelines. If you need to chain together data scraping, ingestion, cleaning, munging, wrangling, processing, modeling, and analysis in a sane way, then Pachyderm is for you. If you have an existing set of scripts which do this in an ad-hoc fashion and you're looking for a way to "productionize" them, Pachyderm can make this easy for you.

We help teams that may or may not have machine learning expertise quickly turn their data into deployed computer vision models. Example applications include security camera monitoring, automating data entry, interpreting web scraped images, validated user photo inputs, augmented reality and mobile product scanning. If you have visual or scanned data that you wish your software could interpret at scale, we can turn around a first proof of concept in under a week. Reach out and see how computer vision can change your business.

There is more text generated than any one person or team can read. A single product team can not hope to sift through their thousands of feedback responses and determine the signal amongst the noise. Hyperglue enables operators, product managers, and analysts to instantly access machine intelligence on large text datasets without the engineering or headcount overhead required to deploy natural language AI within their business.

Tule helps farmers make irrigation decisions. Using UC Davis research-based technology, our hardware sensor provides growers with field-scale crop water use measurements (i.e., actual evapotranspiration), crop water stress measurements, applied irrigation measurements, and irrigation recommendations. Using the latest AI technology and our unprecedented crop water stress dataset, our latest product, Tule Vision, provides growers with the water stress of their plants just by taking a picture with their mobile phone.

ML models are only as good as the datasets they're trained on, and that means that most improvement to model performance comes from improvement to the quality and diversity of their datasets. Our tooling makes it easy for ML teams to find anomalies + failure patterns in their datasets and fix these problems by editing / adding the right data. So the next time you retrain your model, it just gets better.

It combines the latest adaptive learning and Natural Language Understanding technology with pedagogical content as well as on-demand human instructors to offer its students affordable, personalized, 1:1 learning. Based in San Francisco, the company was funded by General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Google Assistant Investments Program, and several other investors. Over 800 thousand students have improved their English with Edwin. In early 2020 Edwin merged with MyBuddy.ai. The resulting company kept the name “Buddy.ai”. Headquartered in San Francisco, it focuses on building a virtual English conversation partner for over 500 million children around the globe who are trying to learn English, but can't reach fluency because they lack genuine practice speaking the language. The company doubled down on its mobile app Buddy, the voice-based English tutor for kids, organically combining solutions developed by Buddy.ai and Edwin.