Y Combinator funds and coaches startups in groups called batches. Its Winter 2026 batch gives a quick view of what the next wave of AI companies may be built around. The clearest answer is AI agents, software that can carry out tasks by itself. The official YC directory lists 198 companies in the batch. A public analysis counted 56 of them building AI agents, which gives the batch its main shape.
The agent companies point in one direction. They build new AI software around work that already exists inside businesses, the tasks, handoffs, approvals and checks that need people to keep pushing them forward. The pitch is to turn slow manual steps into software-led work.
Healthcare is the next major cluster, with 22 companies in the same analysis, and a large group of founders is pointing automation at it from many angles. Its daily work runs on calls, records, billing and forms. Much of that work is valuable, repetitive and hard to coordinate, which gives agent builders real workflows to automate.
AI built around one industry or workflow, known as vertical AI, carries the same pattern beyond healthcare. The analysis describes companies going after industries with clunky software and expensive manual labor. In those industries, work moves through old systems, spreadsheets, emails and manual checks. Starting from one real process gives an agent a specific job, and it makes the product easier to understand than a broad AI promise.
A market is also forming around the agents themselves, with companies working on monitoring, security and guardrails for them. Once agents work inside a business, the business needs ways to see what an agent is doing. It also needs to control what the agent can access and set limits before it acts.
Financial technology, or fintech, follows the same direction. Of the 17 fintech companies counted, many focus on payments that AI agents start or handle. Payments are where software starts touching money, and if agents become part of business workflows, some of that work will involve transactions.
A YC batch is a narrow sample of startups, and its categories can be counted in different ways. The agent, healthcare and fintech counts all come from one public analysis of that single batch.
