Y Combinator is showcasing 60 AIOps-focused startups in the 2026 cohort and recent batches, highlighting how Artificial Intelligence is being applied to automate and harden production operations across industries. The companies range from small 2 employee teams to more established ventures with up to 40 employees, with a heavy concentration in San Francisco, CA, USA and other North American and European tech hubs. Many of these startups are positioned as “AI-native” layers on top of existing infrastructure or workflows, targeting reliability, compliance, and cost challenges that emerge when Artificial Intelligence systems move from experiments to business-critical use.
A cluster of companies is building observability, evaluation, and improvement platforms purpose-built for large language models and agents. Sentrial provides monitoring for Artificial Intelligence products in production, detecting loops, hallucinations, and user frustration in real time, then diagnosing root causes and recommending fixes. Middleware offers a full-stack cloud observability platform with AI-based anomaly and error detection and GPT 4-based error resolution, while Laminar focuses on open-source observability for Artificial Intelligence agents. Tools like Baserun, Helicone, Athina, Janus, Atla, Keywords AI, Lucidic AI, ZeroEval, and Wordware’s Sauna workspace help teams trace, test, evaluate, and continuously optimize agents and LLM features, frequently combining real-time monitoring, offline evaluations, and simulation environments to close reliability gaps.
Another major theme is infrastructure and orchestration tailored to Artificial Intelligence workloads. Cumulus Labs is a serverless GPU cloud with a proprietary inference engine that assigns containers in seconds, scales to zero when idle, and bills by the second for exactly the compute used, positioning itself as faster and cheaper than self-hosted inference or managed API providers. TensorPool, PoplarML, Hyrex, Pipeshift, LiteLLM, LanceDB, Luminal, Kestrel AI, and Pipeshift focus on GPU orchestration, vector search, inference speedups, and modular MLOps stacks that support 100+ LLM APIs or billion-scale vector search on a single node. Products like Hyrex and Terminal Use present task and agent orchestration frameworks that treat databases or filesystems as core primitives, while Agentic Fabriq and Alter tackle secure permissioning, identity, and zero-trust access for Artificial Intelligence agents as they interact with tools and sensitive data.
Many startups embed Artificial Intelligence-driven ops directly inside vertical workflows and business processes. Corvera positions itself as the last ops hire for CPG brands with an Artificial Intelligence workforce that processes orders, forecasts demand in real time, and prevents stockouts, and reports that in its first month full-time it has raised $2M and secured 15 design partners with a pipeline of 30+ brands. Wordware, backed by Spark Capital, Felicis, and Y Combinator, has raised a $30M seed round to build Sauna, an Artificial Intelligence workspace that connects to tools like Gmail, Calendar, and Slack to draft documents, summarize threads, and act on users’ behalf. SubscriptionFlow offers an Artificial Intelligence-based revenue management platform to reduce churn for subscription businesses, while Lumina’s Lumibot combines Artificial Intelligence and human-in-the-loop automation starting at USD 13/hour with additional services at USD 2-6/hour and a fully-refundable deposit from as low as USD 500^. Other companies such as Domu, Callback, Elevate, MochaCare, Adaptional, RedBrick AI, Sage, and Lumina apply the same AIOps principles to sectors including debt collection, BPO, private equity roll-ups, home care, insurance underwriting, radiology, and subscription analytics.
A significant portion of the list targets data layers and training pipelines that underpin reliable Artificial Intelligence operations. Besimple AI is building an audio-focused data layer with millions of hours of proprietary conversational data for Automatic Speech Recognition, and The LLM Data Company collaborates with frontier Artificial Intelligence teams on post-training tasks, rewards, and environments to improve models at scale. Tools like mlop.ai, NuMind, Automorphic, Query Vary, and Cognitio Labs serve data scientists and developers with platforms for model tracking, NLP model creation, fine-tuning beyond context window limits, and no-code LLM-powered automation. Across this YC-backed AIOps landscape, the common thread is turning Artificial Intelligence from a black-box capability into a controlled, auditable, and continuously improving operational asset for enterprises, spanning infrastructure, security, observability, and domain-specific automation.
