Top Tech Startups in California, US in 2026

Instrumentl is the best platform for nonprofits and grant writers looking to grow revenue (YC S16). Through a personalized process, grant seekers can discover, research and track their grants all in one place.

We’re an engineering company using AI to help companies collect their cash (Accounts Receivable). We're backed by a16z, Khosla, Activant, 1984 and Page One Ventures.

Backpack Payment Technologies, Inc. is a financial technology company that specializes in building API-driven payment gateways for 529 College Savings Plans. The company collaborates with OMB Bank, a Member FDIC, to provide banking services. Backpack focuses on simplifying the process of managing and contributing to 529 accounts, making it easier for families to save for education expenses. The platform integrates various financial services to offer a seamless user experience for its clients.

Galvix's core platform streamlines the sales tax compliance process, empowering SaaS companies to stay fully compliant while saving valuable time and resources. Galvix automates everything from sales tax calculations to filing returns, ensuring accurate and timely compliance with state and country-specific tax laws. By leveraging cutting-edge technology, we provide a comprehensive solution that helps businesses avoid penalties, mitigate risks, and focus on their core operations.

MOLTEN is a cloud platform that streamlines core operations of media and entertainment enterprises. MOLTEN digitizes and transforms rights, content, and licensing operations across enterprises, empowering teams with real-time insight and automation tools to do more, accelerating deal-making and content monetization worldwide. MOLTEN offers multiple integrated cloud-based services to power back-end operations for media and entertainment enterprises, which include content rights, storage, delivery and licensing management.

PhrasIQ is building decision infrastructure for enterprise finance. Enterprises have invested heavily in Systems of Record to store data, Systems of Analytics to understand data, and increasingly Systems of Intelligence to generate answers. Yet critical business decisions remain slow because finance teams must reconcile fragmented data, validate assumptions, investigate variances, and defend their reasoning before action can be taken. We call this decision latency. Our core belief is that trust, not AI capability, is the primary bottleneck in enterprise decision-making. Rather than applying AI directly to fragmented enterprise data, PhrasIQ establishes structured truth first through deterministic reconciliation, lineage tracking, governance, and auditability. On this trusted foundation, our decision intelligence platform delivers explainable forecasts, variance analysis, anomaly detection, and decision recommendations. Beyond helping teams make faster decisions, PhrasIQ captures the assumptions, reasoning, decisions, outcomes, and learnings behind every decision, transforming them into persistent organizational decision intelligence. We believe this represents the next foundational enterprise software category: Systems of Decision. We are initially focused on enterprise finance, where trust, accountability, and auditability are mission-critical, with a long-term vision of becoming the decision infrastructure layer for modern enterprises.

Method has built the most modern way to connect to consumer financial accounts. Combining real-time liability connectivity with instant payment execution, Method’s API is designed to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. We have helped 45+ million users connect 350+ million liability accounts credential-less and processed over $2.5B in payments, helping users save millions in interest. One in every three credit cards in the United States is in the Method ecosystem and leading financial institutions like SoFi, Bilt, Cleo, Sezzle, Figure & Aven rely on our APIs to build magical experiences for millions of consumers. We’re a team of 50+ people spread across offices in Austin, SF, New York City, and Washington D.C! We’re excited to continue the momentum working alongside our investors and advisors from Andreessen Horowitz, Emergence Capital, Y Combinator, Avra, and Ardent. To learn more about us, check out our blog!

At 4Catalyzer we strive to transform 21st century medicine by solving today’s most challenging problems – across life science research tools, medical devices and therapeutics. We aspire to create significant societal impact and are motivated by the idea that our products will change the lives of people we love. Fundamentally, we are focused on developing new types of sensors and pairing them with deep learning to get a window into biology and medicine that nobody has ever had before. We have audacious plans – but we have an unbeatable team and a founder that has disrupted biomedical science successfully more than once. If you have experience in image reconstruction, mixed-signal IC design, high-speed electronics, nanophotonics, microfabrication, MEMs, biophysics, biochemistry, molecular biology, deep learning, cloud computing, embedded systems, or hold any dual degree with distinction along with computer science please contact us and “put a dent in the universe”.

We feel that the best way to work towards eliminating the tobacco-related harm is twofold: intelligently designing tobacco-free nicotine products and making them easy for customers to buy online. Our small team of entrepreneurs, scientists, and nicotine enthusiasts has served over 100,000 customers who, like us, knew there had to be a better way to enjoy nicotine.