AI Agents Worth Building: Lessons from 122 YC Companies
Validated AI agents niches and ideas from Y Combinator's startup directory
122 companies in YC's 2025 cohort are building AI agents—representing 30% of all startups.
This analysis covers what they're building and which niches are still wide open.
Last week I published an analysis on the 407 companies that have been selected by YC this year(2025).
One of my finding there was that ~90% of the cohort comprises AI companies. As an AI Agency owner, I was curious to discover which companies are building AI agents to solve problems in different niches.
From the above dataset, 122 companies are specifically building AI agents across various domains. These companies are developing:
Types of AI Agents Being Built:
Customer Service & Support Agents - Voice and chat agents for customer support
Sales & Marketing Agents - Automated outreach, lead generation, and CRM management
Development & Coding Agents - Automated coding, testing, and debugging
Healthcare Operations Agents - Patient intake, insurance verification, clinical workflows
Financial Services Agents - Claims processing, compliance, accounting automation
Legal & Compliance Agents - Document review, contract analysis, compliance monitoring
Browser & Web Automation Agents - RPA, web scraping, workflow automation
Research & Analysis Agents - Market research, data analysis, investment research
Complete Company Categorization by Domain
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