The Top 12 DevTech Startups in YC W26

YC's Winter 2026 batch is heavy on developer infrastructure, with a clear theme: the tools developers use are being rebuilt for a world where AI agents write, test, ship, and even secure code. Here are the top 12 DevTech startups worth watching.

Orthogonal — Agentic Payments for APIs

Orthogonal gives AI agents and developers instant access to hundreds of paid APIs through a single MCP or SDK, handling key management, billing, and auth in one layer. Developers buy Orthogonal credits and the platform handles paying the underlying APIs. Co-founder Christian Pickett previously worked on payments at Coinbase and billing at Vercel, while Bera Sogut worked on reCAPTCHA and Maps APIs at Google and is a two-time ACM ICPC World Finalist.

OpenSpec — Plan mode for complex features

OpenSpec is an open-source, spec-driven framework that helps developers plan complex features by creating lightweight spec documents that serve as durable context for coding agents. With 20K+ GitHub stars, it integrates with over 20 AI tools including Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf. Founded by Tabish Bidiwale, previously a team lead at Q-CTRL, where he joined as an early engineer and helped build the core platform from seed to a $113M Series B.

The Token Company — Compression middleware that improves LLM outputs

The Token Company builds a compression layer that strips useless tokens from LLM prompts in milliseconds using a fast ML model (not a generative LLM). It can compress 100K tokens in under 100ms. In a blind LLM arena case study, compressed requests increased user preference, lowered costs, and lifted purchase volume by 5%. Founded by Otso Veisterä, an 18-year-old ML researcher and national physics champion.

Byteport — Global upload acceleration for 1GB-100TB files

Byteport has built a file transfer protocol called DART (Dynamic Accelerated Record Transfer) that the company says is typically 10x faster than TCP. On unreliable connections like cellular, LTE, or satellite, Byteport claims speedups of 1,000x. The target customers are robotics teams, AI companies needing faster data pipelines, and SaaS companies distributing large datasets. Founded by Jayram Palamadai, who previously worked at CERN and Netflix.

Jinba — Automate any enterprise workflow through chat

Jinba lets enterprise teams build AI workflows by chatting instead of using drag-and-drop interfaces. The platform includes enterprise-grade permissions, audit logging, and on-prem deployment. The company serves 40,000 enterprise users at major financial institutions including Fortune Global 500 companies in banking and insurance. Co-founded by Shoya Matsumori, who holds a Ph.D. in CS, and Takuya Norisugi, a former McKinsey manager and ML engineer.

Mendral — Your CI fixes itself now

Mendral is an AI DevOps engineer that autonomously handles CI failures, flaky tests, slow builds, and broken releases. It observes, diagnoses, acts, and learns continuously, evolving into what the team describes as a self-improving delivery system. Co-founders Sam Alba and Andrea Luzzardi previously co-founded Dagger (W19) and were founding engineers at Docker, where Alba was VP of Engineering and Luzzardi wrote Docker's earliest code. The company says it's already managing CI/CD in production for 15 teams, with 5 paying customers including PostHog.

21st — Infrastructure and UI building blocks for the agentic internet

21st.dev started as a React component registry and has grown into a full infrastructure layer for deploying AI agents in production. The platform is used by 1.4M developers (200K MAU) and provides sandboxed code execution, credential security, streaming, billing, and observability out of the box. Founded by Serafim Korablev, who previously co-founded a cross-chain crypto routing protocol with $1.5B in gross transaction volume, and Sergey Bunas, a former senior software engineer at Deel (W19) who solo-built a Figma competitor and a Perplexity-like product that hit #1 on Product Hunt in 2022.

Overshoot — AI infra for real-time vision applications

Overshoot is a platform that lets developers connect live video feeds to vision language models with three lines of code and get responses in under 200ms. The team says that's 10x faster than existing inference platforms. Co-founded by cousins Zakaria and Younes El hjouji, Zakaria spent 7 years at Uber building pricing algorithms and wrote GPU kernels at Meta AI, while Younes was a founding engineer at Cosmonio (later acquired by Intel), where he built a computer vision training and serving platform from scratch. Over 1,000 developers are using the platform today.

Moda — The reliability and monitoring layer your AI agents need

Moda surfaces patterns across agent hallucinations, laziness, forgetfulness, and tool call failures while providing analytics on user frustration, NPS, retention, and churn. It turns conversations and tool traces into actionable signals with trace-first drilldowns, conversation segmentation, and regression tracking. Co-founders Mohammed Al-Rasheed and Pranav Bedi previously built AI agents and infrastructure at Shopify, Notion, and Clio. Both are University of Waterloo dropouts.

Crow — Let users control your app through chat

Crow lets software companies add a chat-based interface to their product so users can type what they want instead of clicking through menus. Unlike a standard chatbot, Crow connects to APIs and data sources, navigates UI, and executes real actions. Co-founders Aryan Vij and Jai Bhatia met at UC Berkeley. Vij previously worked at Qualcomm and Shasta Health (S23), while Bhatia has worked at five startups.

CodeWisp — Anyone can create real games with AI

CodeWisp is a browser-based game creation platform where users describe the game they want in plain English and CodeWisp generates the code, structure, and assets. It supports 2D, 3D, and multiplayer browser games. The platform has over 2,000 weekly active game creators and 17,000+ games created. Founder Elvin Fu has been making games since age 10, taught game development to 22 million people on YouTube, and built two game engines from scratch.

Hex Security — Agentic Offensive Security at Scale

Hex Security builds AI agents that run continuous penetration tests against apps and infrastructure, replacing the traditional once-a-year pentest cycle. The team says their agents have already found critical vulnerabilities across dozens of YC companies, including SQL injection exposing billions of records, and have prevented an estimated $3B+ in potential damages. Co-founded by Huzaifa Ahmad (previously at PlayAI, AWS, and Capital One), Ahmad Khan (a University of Waterloo math grad whose robot became the first to ring the NASDAQ bell), and Prama Yudhistira (previously at Codegen and AMD).