Top 17 Y Combinator Companies Applying AI for a Better Future

The Omdena “Impact Tech Startups Series” is comprised of game-changing startups, stories, and thought-leadership pieces from leading impact ventures solving real-world problems.

Y Combinator is probably the world´s most well-known startup accelerator. Identifying the top startups from thousands of Y Combinator companies isn’t an easy task. If you are looking to explore which companies are the best representation of artificial intelligence, we’ve got you covered with this top YC companies list of who is applying AI for a better future.

YC has continued to cover AI topics. More specifically, Y Combinator and its backed startups are using AI to make healthcare, education, and transportation advancements, solve real-world problems and improve lives, often creating entirely new industries.

What is Y Combinator, and what does it do differently for startups

Y Combinator is an American seed accelerator program that provides startups with seed funding, advice, and connections to help them succeed. It has many notable alums, including Airbnb, DropBox, Stripe, and Reddit. Regarding what it does differently for startups, the Y Combinator website says they provide three things: seed money, advice, and connections. They provide seed funding for talented entrepreneurs that can’t or won’t take money from angel investors or venture capitalists. There are over 310 top companies in the Y Combinator database on their website at the time of this writing. These include Scribd, Zapier, Instacart, Optimizely Inc., Treinta, Paystack,  Daily.co., Lively Inc., Monzo Bank, and Helion Energy.

Y Combinator’s unique process for selecting companies

To get selected by Y combinator, firstly, you need a solid idea for your company – but don’t worry if it’s not perfect yet. You also need to have a scalable business plan to keep up with any changes that may happen along the way. Finally, you need to be ready for an interview session where they only give each applicant 10 minutes to answer thought-provoking questions about their company’s goals and strategy.

The application process is relatively simple. Head to their website, create an account, and fill out the form about your startup and its founders. Be as detailed as possible, but don’t lie. After you’ve completed all of that, go over it with close friends who will know if there are any ambiguities or mistakes in the questions – because these people might not fully understand what the project entails if they haven’t already heard of it from other sources. Once you apply, you wait—and this waiting period can last up to a month! Use this time wisely by building up your company and refining your product until you’re ready for an interview when (if) one comes along.

What makes Y Combinator so successful?

YC is well known as one of the most successful startup accelerators in Silicon Valley. What makes it so successful? One reason is its focus on companies from the outset. More so, according to Forbes, they invest thousands of dollars into each company and provide them with office space and support for several months. They also offer founders the opportunity to receive feedback from some of the world’s leading experts, including Paul Graham (founder), Jessica Livingston (co-founder), and Michael Seibel (president).

Top Y Combinator AI Startups in 2024

Check out our top y combinator startup list below…

1. Hello Ello

Ello revolutionizes how children learn to read by combining real books with artificial intelligence technology and giving each child an expert teacher. Ello employs evidence-based reading instruction, which helps kids when they get stuck while using motivational psychology to encourage them to keep going.

– Country: United States

– Industry: Education

– Founded: 2019

– Founder(s): Catalin Voss, Elizabeth Adams, Tom Sawyer

– Application or project:

• The Ello App

Ello is an artificial intelligence that provides instruction and motivation for those struggling to read. With Ello, there are no limits to what one can achieve when they’re given feedback on their progress and encouragement from someone who understands.

2. Eva

Eva develops an innovative way to detect breast cancer risks without invasive procedures. The company develops a wearable device to measure the risk of breast cancer.

– Country: Mexico

– Industry: Healthcare

– Founded: 2015

– Founder(s): Jose Antonio Torres, Jose Lavariega-Gomez, Julian Rios Cantu

– Application or project:

• EVA PACS

Eva Pacs’ toolset provides specialists with an AI-powered breast cancer diagnostic evaluation, which could save up to fifty percent of the time spent making such an evaluation. The Image Archiving and Communication System offers accessibility that is superior to comparable systems.

3. Reality Defender

Reality Defender is a deepfake detection system for enterprises to identify fake users and fraudulent content (audio, video, and images). We provide real-time risk scores, PDF reports, email alerts, and forensic reviews.

– Country: USA

– Industry: Information Security

– Founded: 2021

– Founder(s): Gaurav Bharaj

– Application or project:

• Enterprise-Grade Deepfake Detection Platform

Comprehensive deep fake scanning with actionable results. Continuous security developed by the world’s top AI research teams. The Reality Defender portal scans for and collects information about your company’s performance from media outlets, social media sites, and websites worldwide.

4. WhiteLab Genomics

WhiteLab Genomics specializes in developing digital tools that make gene and cell therapy drugs cheaper and more effective.

– Country: France

– Industry: Pharmaceutical

– Founded: 2019

– Founder(s): Julien Cottineau and David Delbourgo

– Application or project:

• WHITELAB’S CORE APPLICATIONS

Advanced-Data Science and Machine Learning Solutions for DNA and RNA Therapies Design. 

5. Instacrops

Instacrops is a full-stack platform that seamlessly integrates technologies for providing timely recommendations to farmers based on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

– Country: Chile

– Industry: Agricultural 

– Founded: 2014

– Founder(s): Fabian Martinez, George Cargill, Mario Bustamante

– Application or project:

• Imagery And Sensors As A Service

Instacrops can detect pests, weeds, diseases and crop density using Artificial Intelligence. With a patented process from their friends at Taranis, they can achieve 0.5 mm resolution when imaging crops.

• Crop Advisor

With the INSTACROPS technology deployed on the farms, they collect minute-by-minute data to gather relevant information for decision-making.

• SkyCrops

SkyCrops is a diagnostic tool that gives updated information about your crops through drones or satellite images.

• Instaflow

InstaFlow is a controller connected directly to the irrigation shed to track, program and control water flows easily and remotely.

• Instafrost

InstaFrost is a frost alert service that predicts ambient temperature and occurrence of frost from agroclimatic records captured by Instacrops stations: InstaWeather Standard / Plus and InstaSoil Temp / Plus.

6. SmartHelio

SmartHelio wants to be the doctor for solar plants: we remotely diagnose existing problems, predict faults and prescribe solutions in real-time. Our team comprises highly skilled engineers and scientists with deep domain knowledge of solar technology and data science.

– Country: Switzerland

– Industry: Solar 

– Founders: Govinda Upadhyay

– Founded: 2019

– Applications and projects: 

Predict solar assets’ fault: Innovative diagnostics and predictive solutions. This solution prescribes timely actions to help manage solar assets proactively.

7. Starling Medical

Starling Medical is developing the world’s first continuous at-home urine diagnostic remote patient monitoring platform that seamlessly integrates into anyone’s bathroom routine. By monitoring changes in urine over time, we aim to prevent hospitalizations from chronic conditions like recurrent UTIs, BPH complications, as well as other non-urological conditions like diabetes.

– Country: USA

– Industry: Healthcare

– Founders: Alex Arevalos, Drew Hendricks, Hannah McKenney

– Founded: 2019

– Applications and projects: 

• StarStream

Starling Medical RPM platform, StarStream, improves patient health while generating new revenues for clinicians and lowering their clinical management burden.

• UrinDx

Starling Medical is building an at-home urine diagnostic remote patient monitoring platform that can seamlessly integrate into anybody’s bathroom routine.

8. TouchandPay Technologies

TouchandPay Technologies provides payment and transaction services.

– Country: Nigeria

– Industry: Finance

– Founders: Olamide Afolabi, Michael Oluwole and Kabir Yabo

– Founded: 2019

– Applications and projects:

• Cowry

Transport Made Easy With Cowry. Help people move freely around Lagos, Nigeria, on their own time. They can pay for their bus trips with the Cowry card or app.

9. Voize

Voize is an app for care documentation via voice input.

– Country: Germany

– Industry: Speech Recognition

– Founders: Fabio Schmidberger, Marcel Schmidberger and Erik Ziegler

– Founded: 2020

– Applications and projects:

• Voize App

With voize, caregivers can freely record documentation on their smartphones. voize automatically generates the correct care reports, vital signs entries, movement logs, and more.

10. DynamoFL

DynamoFL enables machine learning teams to train highly personalized ML models without ever having to collect user data.

– Country: USA

– Industry: Technology

– Founders: Christian Lau and Vaikkunth Mugunthan

– Founded: 2021

– Applications and projects:

• DynamoFL

Distributively train ML models across diverse, siloed datasets – all while preserving privacy.

11. Pina Earth

Pina Earth is building a suite of digital tools for data collection, monitoring, and certification of forest carbon projects. With Pina Earth, forest owners can start high-quality carbon projects on their properties and use the new income stream to prepare their forests for a changing climate.

– Country: Germany

– Industry: Agriculture

– Founders: Gesa Biermann, Florian Fincke and Jonas Kerber

– Founded: 2021

– Applications and projects:

• Pina Earth: Financing forest adaptation with carbon credits

Pina Earth quantifies the carbon storage performance and handles the certification and sale of the carbon certificates. This allows the user to focus entirely on forest management.

12. Activeloop

Activeloop provides an optimized format for unstructured data, so users can stream their machine learning datasets while training models in PyTorch and TensorFlow. Activeloop acts as a data lake for deep learning on unstructured data and offers in-browser dataset visualization, querying, and version control. On top of those features, Activeloop integrates with experimentation and labeling tools to allow rapid iteration on computer vision datasets.

– Country: United States

– Industry: SaaS

– Founder: Davit Buniatyan

– Founded: 2018

– Applications or projects:

Drones and Satellite Imagery – Process Drones and Satellite Imagery Data for Computer Vision. Easy to store and efficiently process aerial imaging data of any size and structure, including geospatial data.

Self-Driving Cars & Robotics – Self-Driving Cars & Robotics Data for Computer Vision. Store and build data pipelines collected from autonomous cars and IoT devices using our best-in-class ingestion and preprocessing technologies.

Biomedical Data Science – X-Ray, DICOM, Microscopy Images. Store and build data pipelines collected from biomedical images, including microscopy, MRI, or X-ray.

Activeloop also worked with several data scientists and machine learning freelancers from Omdena and supported their platform in various projects. For example, the World Resources Institute hosted a two-month project where a global team of 50 Omdena changemakers built a model to predict economic well-being in India. The project used publicly available satellite imagery and other ground data. 

13. Protex AI

Protex AI is on a mission to protect the industrial workforce! They’re building a proactive computer vision tool for workplace safety – empowering industrial Health and Safety (HS) teams to identify risk and danger before it becomes a problem.

– Country: Ireland

– Industry: B2B

– Founders: Dan Hobbs and Ciarán O’Mara

– Founded: 2020

– Applications or projects:

• Protex AI

Protex AI monitors existing port, logistics, and manufacturing cameras to ensure compliance and identify safety issues.

14. Powerhouse AI

Powerhouse AI is taking the first step with its AI-based phone application that enables warehouse operators to verify and count warehouse inventory automatically. The operator simply needs to take pictures.

– Country: Singapore

– Industry: Logistics

– Founders: Kushal Pillay and Ivo Verhaegh

– Founded: 2021

– Applications or projects:

• Powerhouse AI app

A phone application that can take over manual counting, verification, and administration at inventory count, inbound and outbound. 

15. Zeit Medical

Zeit Medical leverages the power of AI and wearable sensors to deliver peace of mind for those affected by stroke.

– Country: USA

– Industry: Healthcare

– Founders: Urs Naber and Orestis Vardoulis

– Founded: 2019

– Applications or projects:

• Smart Headband

Zeit smart headband constantly monitors the brain’s electrical activity and gets help immediately, should a patient need it.

16. Coulomb AI

Coulomb AI is building Predictive Battery Analytics software for Electric Vehicles to significantly boost their battery performance and extend their lifetime.

– Country: India

– Industry: Climate

– Founders: Santanu Mondal and Khushboo Shrivastava

– Founded: 2020

– Applications or projects:

• Battery Observability Platform

A system that optimizes batteries.

• Battery Health Assessment

Get a Comprehensive Report on Battery Behaviour and Health

17. EduRev 

EduRev is like Netflix for Education with a layer of social networking. The company wants to make the process of education and to learn so well that individuals, parents, and their kids don’t feel the need to go to a school/college/coaching.

– Country: India

– Industry: Education

– Founders: Kunaal Satija and Hardik Dhamija

– Founded: 2018

– Applications or projects:

• EduRev App

Children’s learning application.

Conclusion

After looking at the Y Combinator companies that have applied artificial intelligence to make the world a better place, we can see that more and more startups are employing these technologies. The future is bright and filled with limitless possibilities if we create the change we aspire to see.