AI Assistants

Companies per batch

How many companies in each YC batch belong to this group. Batches with none are left out.

About this formation

What counts as an "AI assistant" in this batch has quietly shifted from a chat window that answers questions to software that takes over an entire job function inside a specific, unglamorous industry. Bernard runs home appliance repair companies, Sidekick handles frontline manufacturing texts, Arzana automates manufacturer quoting and invoicing, and Marble aims to run the restaurant back-of-house, none of which look like the generic productivity chatbots the category name suggests. Tasklet makes the underlying complaint explicit: assistants that only answer questions but can't touch your tools or keep running after you close the tab are no longer good enough, which is why so many of these are built around persistent agents wired directly into warranty feeds, POS systems, and CRMs like item. That narrowness is also the tell on timing, since this kind of deep, tool-connected autonomy only became practical once 2023-2024 era function-calling and longer-context models made it reliable enough to let an agent act on real business data unsupervised rather than just summarize it. The academic interest tracking this is centered on human-AI agent interaction and co-creation rather than companion chatbots, which matches the direction these companies are heading: fewer conversations, more delegated work, in industries like appliance repair and manufacturing that AI tooling had mostly ignored until now.

Model-written summary (claude-sonnet-5, 2026-10-24), grounded in the companies below. Any sentence on why this is happening now comes from the model’s general knowledge, not from this dataset.

The companies behind the signal 9

Newest batch first.

• Summer 2026
  Bernard

  AI employees that run home appliance repair companies. Bernard builds AI employees for home and commercial appliance servicers. They work across phone, text, email, warranty feeds, and existing systems to manage customer communication, scheduling, and dispatch, carrying each job through diagnosis, parts preparation, technician handoff, and follow-up. At the center is Pre-ID, which combines the exact appliance and its symptoms with repair history, similar completed visits, manufacturer guidance, and parts data to produce a diagnosis, ranked parts, and follow-up questions. Technicians arrive prepared with the right parts, helping servicers complete more repairs on the first visit. We’re building the world’s most efficient appliance servicers, creating happier customers and a more connected appliance ecosystem. Learn more at https://bernardhq.com/

• Summer 2026
  Sidekick

  AI agent that handles frontline operations over text. Sidekick is an AI assistant for frontline manufacturing workers. Sidekick lets workers text problems, photos, or voice memos in any language; it answers from the company's own documents, creates and routes the work order, and syncs with software the company already runs. Sidekick captures the tribal knowledge in veterans' heads - the know-how that usually walks out the door when they retire - into a searchable knowledge base the company owns. No app, no login, works on any phone.

• Summer 2026
  Marble

  The autonomous back-of-house for restaurants.. Marble is the first AI-native operating system for the restaurant back-of-house. Restaurants, cafes and bars still run on a patchwork of disconnected point solutions, spreadsheets, clipboards and tribal knowledge, which costs the industry billions each year in stockouts, food waste, and lost profit. Marble replaces that entire stack with one system. Computer vision and voice AI capture real-time inventory levels 90% faster than manual counts, ML models forecast item-level demand at 97% accuracy, and AI agents run dozens of end-to-end workflows autonomously, from procurement and invoice reconciliation to scheduling, food prep, menu engineering, and more.

• Spring 2026
  HeyClicky

  The simplest interface in the world to talk AI models + spawn agents. HeyClicky sits right next to your cursor and sees everything you see. ask a question out loud and it walks you through whatever you're working on. Or say “HeyClicky Agent” and it'll spin up an agent to build, research, or do whatever for you in the background.

• Spring 2026
  Arzana

  Adaptive AI built for manufacturers. Arzana trains custom models on manufacturers' operational data to automate their quoting, order entry, invoicing, and other repetitive office work. We've saved our customers over $1.5M in avoided staff costs. In the future, we'll expand into shop-floor automation, sending instructions to machinery and robots to produce the orders that our office agents processed. By 2035, we aim to fully automate 10,000 American factories.

• Spring 2026
  Tasklet

  Agents that own the work. AI chatbots can answer questions, but they can't do your work — they aren't connected to your tools, can't take actions, and stop running when you close the tab. Meanwhile, knowledge workers are still spending most of their day switching between dozens of SaaS apps, manually stitching together workflows that should be automated. Tasklet is the AI agent that actually does the work. It connects to every tool you use — via thousands of built-in integrations, any HTTP API, or MCP servers — and takes real actions on your behalf: pulling reports, updating CRMs, triaging emails, processing data, and more. When it needs a UI, it generates one on the fly. When it needs to crunch numbers or do bulk operations, it writes and runs code in a cloud sandbox. When it needs to interact with a website that doesn't have an API, it uses a real browser. And because it runs in the cl

• Winter 2026
  Cofia

  AI automations that implement themselves. Cofia learns how your team runs internal operations and automates the highest-ROI workflows, automatically.

• Fall 2025
  item

  The AI-Native CRM that works for you. item connects to all your customer tools, gathers and enriches context automatically, and becomes your company’s source of truth — one place where your team and your AI agents share the full picture to act autonomously. At the center is the Assistant — your sidekick for daily work. It can send follow-ups, research leads, or add deals with a simple prompt. No complex UI, drop-downs or fields, simply ask. For repeatable work, you build Agents that you can train like new hires, simply by writing documents that describe your processes. item Agents run business processes across sales, support, and account management autonomously.

• Fall 2025
  Velvet

  Infra and data for interactive AI.. Infra and data for interactive AI.