What Types of Agents are Companies Building? A YC Analysis

An in-depth analysis on Agentic AI startups using data from the YCombinator startup accelerator.

Hey Victor, what types of use cases are being built with AI agents?

I get this question a lot.

To understand the emergent agentic era, we must carefully study what types of companies are being built around agents, and what use cases are being addressed. This post covers an in-depth analysis using data from YCombinator (YC) — a leading startup accelerator. While YC's portfolio represents a specific slice of the startup ecosystem (with biases toward scalable tech companies and Silicon Valley networks), it provides insights into which agent-focused companies are gaining traction with this influential accelerator.

TL;DR: As part of research for my upcoming book, I analyzed data on 5,304 YC companies. Results suggest 726 building true AI agents (13.7%) - a setup where AI drives tools that accomplish tasks on the user’s behald.
Agent-focused companies in YC cohorts have grown from 5.9% in 2020 to 50.8% in 2025. Three core value propositions emerge from clustering analysis: productivity enhancement for knowledge workers, business process automation (with some nuance), and healthcare operations. This analysis reveals YC's increasing focus on agent-based startups.

Code for the analysis and an interactive visualization tool for exploring the data is provided in the post below.