Oct 02, 2026

Building AI Agents for Everyone

Gumloop co-founders Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal discuss how a visual workflow builder evolved into an enterprise agent platform, what they learned from more than 1,100 customer calls, how a power user at Instacart opened the door to enterprise sales, and why the people who understand a task should be the ones automating it. The conversation covers enterprise requirements, pricing transparency, model neutrality, and the IT-led buying dynamics that shape adoption.

Oct 01, 2026

Better AI Starts With Better Verification

Halluminate, a Y Combinator S25 company, builds RL environments and benchmarks that teach AI models to do non-coding knowledge work, starting with financial services. In this fireside with YC Partner Jon Xu, co-founders Jerry Wu and Wyatt Marshall trace their pivot from evals to training environments, explain why verification quality matters more than task volume, and outline a roadmap toward multi-agent simulated companies. They also address reward hacking, alignment as an industry-wide responsibility, and what they look for in new hires.

Sep 18, 2026

The AI Employee for Banks

Kastle founders Rishi and Nitish discuss their journey building AI employees for banks, from a difficult pivot before YC Demo Day to processing billions in transactions. They share insights into finding product-market fit in a highly regulated industry, ensuring AI reliability and compliance despite non-deterministic LLMs, and their vision for automating financial operations.

Sep 04, 2026

Open Models Change The Economics of AI

Ollama Co-founder Jeffrey Morgan discusses the enterprise shift to open models, driven by cost, customization, and coding agents, leading to a 150X token growth. He highlights the dominance of Chinese models in cloud consumption, the hardware renaissance enabling local LLMs, and the rise of ultra-efficient "flash" models. Morgan also shares Ollama's journey, from its YC pivot to its monetization strategy, and reflects on lessons for building AI companies.

Sep 03, 2026

Paul Graham On Startups, Ambition, and Great Founders

Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, provides insights into the evolution of startups, emphasizing the increasing ambition of founders tackling "frighteningly ambitious ideas." He reveals that fear of failure, not wealth, primarily motivates entrepreneurs and defines the crucial trait of a "formidable" founder. Graham also shares his unique perspective on the unexpected development trajectory of AI, describing AGI as a "jagged frontier," and reflects on YC's consistent core principles over 21 years.

Sep 01, 2026

Building AI That Optimizes AI

Wafer (S24) is a fast AI inference cloud that runs open-source models at industry-leading speeds by using AI agents to optimize GPUs across the entire stack. This unique approach allows them to deliver the low cost of open source with the latency of much smaller models. The company recently raised a $40 million Series A after achieving rapid growth by making GLM 5.2 run 2-3x faster than competitors, driving significant customer adoption due to speed, not just cost, which is crucial for latency-sensitive applications like voice agents.