YCombinator News on LinkedIn

Paul Graham from Y Combinator once said: “Do things that don’t scale” And oh boy, we did 😭 For context, we’re building OnScene.pk, Pakistan’s first live shopping marketplace where sellers go live directly from their phones and sell to viewers in real time We built the app, launched on Play Store & App Store, crossed 4M+ views across social media, reached around 10k users. Everything sounded amazing then reality hit: FAKE ORDERS So we introduced advance payments from buyers. but here’s the funny part: The entire payment process was manual 😭 Every order meant personally DMing users, confirming payments, sending details manually, following up ourselves, literally becoming the payment gateway, completely unscalable, But that’s when I finally understood what “do things that don’t scale” actually means. At an early stage, perfection doesn’t matter as much as proving behavior. And yesterday, during a 60-minute scene, we got 15 orders!!! manually handled, manually confirmed but real. That’s the part people don’t see when they talk about startups.. Before automation, comes survival Before scale, comes validation Now back to fixing the chaos 😭 #ycombinator #startups #pakistan #livecommerce #onscenepk

Most code review agents forget everything between sessions. I just fixed that. Spent Saturday at Y Combinator launching GBrain, Garry Tan's new persistent memory layer for AI agents. I extended my project ScarTissue, a PR review agent that mines a repo's git history for past bug fixes and warns when a new PR is about to reintroduce a pattern that caused a real bug before. The original version stored the scar tissue index in a vector DB, which works but doesn't compound well across repos. So I rewired the memory layer onto GBrain. Every fix commit, revert, and hotfix now gets ingested as a typed entity in the brain. The graph auto wires fixes to files, authors, and incidents, and the reviewer agent queries GBrain through MCP before flagging risk on a new diff. The nice property is that the brain compounds. The more git history a team feeds it, the sharper the reviewer gets, and the same brain can sit across multiple repos rather than being trapped inside one. Genuinely impressed by how fast GBrain is to spin up. PGLite locally, under a minute, no accounts. The MCP integration with Claude Code felt clean from the first call. If you're building agents that need memory beyond a single session, worth a look. Shout out to Garry Tan and his brother James Tan for hosting this event. Truly a good experience. #GBrain #YCombinator #AIAgents #MCP #ClaudeCode #BuildInPublic #MLEngineering

The reality of a 31-day solo development sprint: 10% coding new features, 90% fighting cloud deployments on a Friday night. 😅 A few weeks ago, I made a hard pivot. I completely paused my previous project to go all-in on building ARKA—a sub-100ms semantic routing engine designed to kill outrageous LLM API bills. The goal? A battle-tested MVP and a Y Combinator application by June. This weekend was the ultimate stress test. I had the perfect local build, but my Vercel frontend and Render backend were completely out of sync in the cloud. After hours of debugging an "impossible" caching issue, I realized the truth: I was pushing my production code to the wrong Git repository. Typical solo founder moment. 🤦‍♂️ But here is the win: The proxy is officially live and stable. ➡️ Complex code dynamically routes to DeepSeek V4. ➡️ Heavy data analysis hits Gemini Flash. ➡️ General chat defaults to OpenRouter free tiers. By open-sourcing this core logic, we hit a 6,600% spike in community impressions this week alone. It turns out, a lot of builders are looking for ways to stop burning runway by sending simple JSON formatting tasks to expensive frontier models. As I gear up to finalize the YC application next month, I want to aggressively stress-test this infrastructure with the community. If you are building an AI agent and your API costs are leaking, drop your core stack (e.g., Next.js + GPT-4) in the comments. Let's see if ARKA can slice that bill in half without touching your core logic. 👇 #BuildInPublic #Startups #FinOps #SoftwareEngineering #YCombinator #AI

I pitched ShowWork to a Y Combinator Partner at YC Startup School India. His reaction caught me off guard. I recently attended YC SUS India held in Bengaluru. 2,000 handpicked founders, engineers & builders. One city. One room full of ambition. People literally flew in from different parts of India just for this one event. And honestly? Worth it. Attending Y Combinator’s first-ever Startup School India was one of the most intense founder environments I’ve experienced till date. Got the opportunity to hear insights directly from leaders like Mukund Jha (Emergent) and Aadit Palicha (Zepto). The networking? Absolutely wild. Met founders, cracked conversations with developers, exchanged ideas with builders younger than me creating unreal things. But one moment that’ll stay with me for a long time: Pitching ShowWork to Jared Friedman (General Partner @Y Combinator) and getting genuinely positive feedback on what we’re building. That hit different. Because when the people who’ve helped build companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox & Reddit see potential in your direction - it pushes you harder. Still processing the conversations, the energy & the level of ambition in that room. We’re entering a very interesting era for Indian startups. And honestly - we’re just getting started. #YCombinator #StartupSchoolIndia #Founders #YCSUS #StartupEcosystem

Not one, not two, but three Brisbane-based companies are joining Y Combinator's S26 batch! A new record for both the city and the state. 🔥 Huge congratulations to all three founding teams. I'll let them announce themselves when they're ready. For everyone else building in QLD: this matters. The talent here is exceptional. The ambition is real. And people outside Australia are starting to notice. If you've been sitting on an application, to YC or anywhere else, take this as the nudge. #founder #entrepreneur #startup #venturecapital #vc #ycombinator

I won the Y Combinator GStack Hackathon.... Yesterday, on May 16, I participated in YC GStack & GBrain Hackathon as a solo team. The prize for 1st place was YC S26 interview and 1:1 with Garry Tan, President of Y Combinator. Yeah, I didn't win the 1st place but only won the cash prizes and awards from hosts But more importantly, I got a chance to talk to Garry Tan and pitched my startup, Roatify, Inc. And you know what, he liked it like a hell and even shared his phone number. Told me that he'll look into our YC application and might be able help us with that. Damn!!!! 🔥 He also liked what I built for hackathon and nominated me for prizes from sponsors Even if I didn't get the main prize, I got the better reward which is meeting with best CEO in the world and got his contact info from himself. That's why I like everything about Y Combinator because you never know what happens. #Tech #IT #Startup #Technology #AI #Hackathon #YC #YCombinator #CEO #VC #VentureCapital

1 engineer. 400 times the output. That's not a typo. Day 3/100 of #100DaysOfDeepLearning ⚡ Two things that happened today: 1. Joined Social Summer Of Code: Season 5 Excited to contribute throughout this summer alongside my deep learning journey. Here is the link for you to start contributing: (https://lnkd.in/gyarTDhA) 2. Studied: "𝗧𝗼𝗸𝗲𝗻𝗺𝗮𝘅𝘅𝗶𝗻𝗴: How Top Builders Use AI To Do The Work Of 400 Engineers" — Y Combinator This talk completely reframed how I think about AI-assisted engineering. The key ideas: → The best builders 𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻'𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 engineers with AI: they're multiplying them → 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹: AI that plans, scopes, implements, and iterates — not just autocomplete → Scope expansion vs scope reduction: knowing WHEN to let AI go big and when to constrain it → "𝗗𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗠𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴": Describe where your system should be in 12 months, then work backward → 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝟭𝟬𝘅 𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗰𝗸: "What's the version that's 10x more ambitious and delivers 10x more value for 2x the effort?" One method that stood out was plan-mega-review. (I have Attached the image for reference.) The idea: before writing a single line of code, you run a plan review through these modes. Expansion challenges you to think 10x bigger. Hold scope demands rigour. Reduction forces you to ship the minimum that delivers value. It's how top builders scope work before handing it to AI agents. Resources - [x] [Y Combinator — Tokenmaxxing: How Top Builders Use AI To Do The Work Of 400 Engineers] (https://lnkd.in/gK2JsjvZ) - [x] Joined SSoC Season 5 as Contributor — [GitHub: Alphabeast1707](https://lnkd.in/gyarTDhA) #100DaysOfDeepLearning #OpenSource #SSoC #SocialSummerOfCode #AI #YCombinator #AgenticCoding #BuildInPublic #LearningInPublic #MachineLearning #DeepLearning

Interesting shift highlighted by Y Combinator: Services became SaaS. SaaS became AI copilots. Now AI-native companies will directly deliver the service itself. Not just software tools — actual execution. Examples: • AI accounting firms • AI compliance companies • AI healthcare ops • AI insurance brokerage The next billion-dollar AI companies may look less like SaaS startups and more like AI-powered service operators. #openai #SaaS #Aiservice #ycombinator

Our team is at Y Combinator HQ in San Francisco today for the Call My Agent (YC x AgentPhone) Hackathon. It's going to be a long, intense day of coding, but we're ready to push the limits of what these AI voice agents can do! Huge thanks to the Regis University Innovation Challenge for sponsoring this trip and making this whole thing happen. Time to ship some code! #YCombinator #AgentPhone #BuildInPublic #AlAgents #Hackathon #SanFrancisco # Founders Nathaniel Deryl Okraku Ofei Agyekum Stallone Musigah Regis University Anderson College of Business and Computing – Regis University

From high school dropout to Y Combinator General Partner at just 24. 🚀 In our latest Women in Business spotlight, we’re diving into the incredible journey of Harshita Arora. Her secret? A mindset that favors curiosity over credentials and relentless execution over endless planning. Harshita didn't wait for the "perfect" time or a piece of paper to tell her she was ready. She built, she learned, and she moved fast. Here’s what every founder can take away from her story: • Credentials are nice, but results are everything. • Don’t get stuck in the planning phase: start doing. • Curiosity is your most valuable asset. At The Right Hand Bureau, we’re obsessed with that same spirit of execution. We know that as a founder, your time should be spent on the big moves, not buried in administrative tasks. We handle the projects and the day-to-day operations so you can focus on scaling, just like the trailblazers at Y Combinator. Ready to stop planning and start winning? Let’s get to work. #WomenInBusiness #Entrepreneurship #YCombinator #FounderMindset #SmallBusiness #Execution #TheRightHandBureau

Innovation knows no age limit, and Harshita Arora is proof. At 25, Harshita has become the youngest General Partner at Y Combinator. Her journey is truly inspiring: - Started coding at 13 and left school at 15 to build products. - Launched a successful crypto-tracking app by age 16. - Co-founded AtoB, a major fintech player in the trucking industry. Now, as a GP at YC, she’s helping the next generation of founders succeed. Her story shows that bold vision paired with grit leads to incredible impact. At The Right Hand Bureau, we’re inspired by leaders who challenge the status quo. We know that every great visionary needs a solid support system. Whether it’s administrative help or project management, we’re here to handle the details so you can stay focused on your mission. Huge congratulations to Harshita on this milestone. The future of tech looks bright! #Innovation #Leadership #YCombinator #Entrepreneurship #SmallBusiness #TheRightHandBureau #WomenInTech https://lnkd.in/eBe-4dPw

𝗬 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗯𝗶𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗮’𝘀 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘄𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗹𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽 𝗲𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺 Y Combinator reflected on its recent India engagement, highlighting the country’s rapidly expanding startup ecosystem and growing global influence across AI, SaaS, fintech, robotics, and deep technology innovation. Through founder interactions, ecosystem events, and startup collaborations, the accelerator reinforced India’s importance as a major hub for globally scalable entrepreneurship. India continues producing a strong pipeline of technical talent, AI-native founders, and globally competitive startups building across enterprise technology, developer infrastructure, and digital platforms. As international investors and accelerators deepen their presence in the region, the country is increasingly positioning itself as one of the world’s most important centers for startup innovation, technology leadership, and venture-backed growth. Y Combinator Community | Y Combinator #YCombinator #Startups #IndiaTech #AI #Innovation #Entrepreneurship #VentureCapital #StartupEcosystem

How to get incubated by Y Combinator ??? I have two projects that will interest Y Combinator more than anything you'll see next summer. I'm making this post to gather the details, feedback, and connections I need to better manage them until the batch. Here's a glimpse of my jewels unbeatable in their respective categories. I am an elite technical founder. I built TWO category-defining projects completely solo. UMC is the ffmpeg of AI models: convert any model to any format, instantly, with mathematical guarantee of zero loss. Neurax is the Figma of AI models: design, simulate, and optimize architectures before training, with 70+ real-time metrics and no GPU required. Together, they form the first complete design-to-deployment platform for AI. I'm looking for MLOps engineers, AI infrastructure folks, and founders who've raised recently. If you can help me structure this vision before Y Combinator, let's talk. #AI #MLOps #DeepLearning #YCombinator #Startup #Rust #OpenSource Francis Pouatcha Enow Scott Paul Graham YCombinator Coach YCombinator Coach

Y Combinator is ready to invest in you, if you're building something really effective in #Agritech For decades, modern agriculture scaled on one thing: - Chemicals - Spray more - Kill more pests - Increase yield And for a while, it worked, but now the cracks are impossible to ignore. Pesticide residues are showing up everywhere: food, water, soil Meanwhile, weeds and pests are evolving faster than the chemicals designed to stop them, so farmers spray more and - Costs rise - Effectiveness drops - Margins shrink It becomes a dangerous loop: - More chemicals → resistant pests → lower efficiency → more spending → more risk, and farmers can’t simply stop using pesticides because if pests win, crops die and If crops die, food prices rise That’s why one of the most important #YC Summer 2026 ideas is: #AI for Low-Pesticide Agriculture. What changed recently is that multiple technologies matured at the same time: • AI vision models can now identify weeds and pests in real time • Sensors and cameras became cheap enough to deploy at scale • Robotics became precise enough to treat one plant instead of an entire field • Biological alternatives like microbes and RNA-based solutions are becoming commercially viable This changes the economics of farming, instead of spraying 100% of a field, you target only the areas that actually need treatment - Lower chemical usage - Lower costs - Healthier soil - Higher yields And this is where it gets interesting from a startup perspective: Agriculture is one of the largest industries in the world and unlike many industries, farmers adopt fast when ROI is obvious If a startup can genuinely: • reduce pesticide use by 70-90% • increase yield • reduce operational costs …adoption won’t be slow. This isn’t just an #agritech opportunity. It’s AI, robotics, biotech, climate and infrastructure combined into one category. The startup that helps the world grow more food with fewer chemicals won’t just build a big business, It could reshape one of humanity’s oldest industries and that’s exactly the kind of company YC wants to back. #YCombinator #StartupIdeas #AI #Agriculture #AgriTech #FoodTech #ClimateTech #Robotics #Biotech #Startups #FounderInsights #FutureOfFood #MachineLearning #VentureCapital #Innovation

Just got accepted into Y Combinator's AI Startup School taking place in San Francisco this July. I'm deeply humbled and this opportunity is a result of mentors who believed in me before I believed in myself. To everyone who has poured into me, this one is for you too. The journey is just getting started. If you're building in AI or attending YC Startup School, I'd be eager to connect and stay in touch. #YCombinator #AIStartupSchool #Founder #AI #Startups #research #innovation #software #claude #nvidia #openai #meta #facebook

He grew up in a village in Kazakhstan with 2 mb/s internet. At 17, he raised $300K from Afore Capital and a16z scouts and is moving to San Francisco. Meet Igor Martynyuk, the dropout founder who turned a four-hour bus commute into a coding classroom. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗩𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗞𝗶𝗱 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗚𝗹𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗺𝗯𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Growing up in a small village in Kazakhstan with internet speeds as low as 2 mb/s, Igor bridged rural isolation with the global tech scene through pure grit. At nine, he built a Counter-Strike trading platform. To scale it, he needed to code. With no mentors, he turned his four-hour daily bus commute into a classroom, teaching himself programming on a mobile phone. By 13, he became a competitive programmer. 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗪𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 Igor led a hack team that dominated international stages with victories at NASA and Google hackathons. When the Telegram ecosystem exploded, he shipped: → BirdTon, reaching 12 million active players globally → Traffy, generating over $300,000 in GMV at age 15 Success brought burnout. Constant context-switching across multiple projects pushed him to the edge. 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 So he built his own solution: TabAI. An AI-powered productivity layer that kills context-switching. TabAI automatically aggregates tasks from Slack, Gmail, and Notion, and acts as an intelligent operating system for focus. His raw "build in public" approach caught the attention of Silicon Valley. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 → Secured a Y Combinator interview without referrals → Invited to YC Startup School (fully covered) → Received offers from top accelerators like Founders Inc → Became an ambassador for Cursor AI → At 17, raised $300,000 from Afore Capital, a16z scouts, and tier-1 angels → First founder from Kazakhstan accepted into Afore's prestigious FIR U program 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝗡𝗲𝘅𝘁 Now packing his bags for San Francisco to scale TabAI. Igor proves that it doesn't matter where you start. It only matters how fast you ship. From a village in Kazakhstan with 2 mb/s internet to raising $300K from top-tier US investors at 17. Starting small. Growing honestly. What's one obstacle you turned into an advantage? 👇 Building something? DM "FEATURE" to share your story #FoundersFromZero #FounderStory #Entrepreneurship #TabAI #YCombinator #AforeCapital #a16z #AI #Productivity #SiliconValley #Kazakhstan #YoungFounder

Y Combinator 2026 Cohort Shows Growing Focus on Generative AI Specialization 📌 The Y Combinator 2026 cohort marks a pivotal transition from general-purpose chatbots to the rise of the Agentic Era. Instead of simple text generation, new startups are building autonomous systems designed for high-stakes industries like life sciences, logistics, and semiconductor design. This strategic shift focuses on specialized reasoning and agentic observability, signaling that the next wave of AI value lies in executing complex, multi-step workflows within professional ecosystems. 🔗 Read more: https://lnkd.in/d3Bk8s7U #Ycombinator #Generativeai #Agenticworkflows #Verticalai

San Francisco bound this morning! Our team is heading to the Y Combinator Call My Agent Hackathon, joining a room of 200+ builders, former YC founders, leaders from major tech companies, and speakers from Fortune 500 organizations. A huge thank you to the Regis University Innovation Challenge and Ken Sagendorf for sponsoring our team and giving us the opportunity to represent Regis University and Anderson College of Business and Computing – Regis University on stages like this. Excited to learn, build, connect, and win 1st place! #YCombinator #Hackathon #RegisUniversity #Innovation AgentPhone Nathaniel Deryl Okraku Ofei Agyekum Stallone Musigah

I wish I had this years ago. If business was a gunfight, I've been showing up to the fight with a banana. The CEO of Y Combinator gave away his personal AI system on GitHub. It's called Gbrain. It's smart because it reads everything he does. Meetings. Emails. Calendar. 13 years of notes. Then learns overnight while he sleeps. You probably can't run the full thing unless you're technical. That's fine. The principle is the move. Write down 10 things Claude should know about your business. Put them in a file it reads at the start of every conversation. That's the version of Gbrain you can start today. #ClaudeAI #AIWorkflow #YCombinator #SmallBusiness #ProductivityHack

Y Combinator’s CEO just open-sourced G Brain, a personal AI agent that builds its own knowledge graph while you sleep. It outperforms standard RAG by 31 points with 34 autonomous skills. Write "Brain" in comments to get the framework. #OpenSource #AIAgents #YCombinator #KnowledgeGraph #IkramRana