Top Tech Startups in Chicago, IL in 2026

We're building the data platform to power safe and fair decisions. Checkr provides fast, accurate information to power informed decisions. Our innovative technology and robust data platform help customers assess risk and ensure safety and compliance to build trusted workplaces and communities. We’re a team that thrives on solving complex problems with innovative solutions that advance our mission. Come join us!

RevenueCat removes the headaches of building and scaling in‑app subscriptions. Since graduating from YC’s S18 batch we’ve grown into the default monetization platform for mobile: we’re in >40% of newly shipped subscription apps, we process $12B+ in annual purchase volume, and we help everyone from a solo dev in Brazil to the OpenAI mobile team understand and grow their revenue. We’re a remote‑first crew of 150+, spread across 25+ countries, and guided by values we actually practice: Customer Obsession, Always Be Shipping, Own It, and Balance. If you want your work to touch hundreds of millions of end‑users (and help the developers behind them get paid), you’ll fit right in.

Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small businesses take care of their teams. On top of full-service payroll, Gusto offers health insurance, 401(k)s, expert HR, and team management tools. Today, Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York serve more than 100,000 businesses nationwide. Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.

AssemblyAI is a remote-first company building powerful AI models for developers, startups, and enterprises to transcribe and understand their audio data. Our mission is to make production-ready, state-of-the-art AI models accessible to developers and product teams at extremely large scale through simple APIs. Customers, including Spotify, Algolia, Dow Jones, Happy Scribe, BBC, The Wall Street Journal, and NBCUniversal, use our APIs to transcribe and understand millions of videos, podcasts, phone calls, and zoom meetings every day. Our APIs power innovative products like conversational intelligence platforms, meeting summarizers, content moderation, and automatic closed captioning. We're growing at breakneck speed, and recently announced our Series B round. We've raised $63M in total funding, backed by leading investors including Insight Partners, Accel, Y Combinator, Patrick and John Collision (Founders of Stripe), Nat Friedman (Former CEO of GitHub), and Daniel Gross (Entrepreneur & Investor in companies including GitHub, Uber & SpaceX). Our team is made up of problem solvers, innovators, and top AI researchers from companies like DeepMind, Google Brain, Meta AI, Amazon and Apple. They conduct cutting-edge AI research and develop novel algorithms and techniques to continually push the state-of-the-art in speech recognition and NLP. Join our world-class, remote team and help us build an iconic deep learning company!

We build best-in-class WordPress and Drupal sites with agile workflows, scalable infrastructure, and a lightning-fast content delivery network. We run your sites on the fastest WebOps Platform on the planet. This includes our unrivaled speed, uptime, and scalability make our high-performance WebOps platform the best place to host WordPress and Drupal sites. We are the only hosting platform to include fully managed and free HTTPS certificates, automated backups, and one-click updates for all WebOps platform plans.

SIGNIFYD’s full-service cloud platform simplifies fraud detection through a financial guarantee, allowing businesses to increase sales while reducing fraud losses. SIGNIFYD is in use by multiple companies on the Fortune 1000 and Internet Retailer Top 500 list.

Caribou is a fast-growing, mission-driven fintech that delivers financial security and peace of mind to consumers by providing better auto refinancing, insurance and financial protection products. Through our partnerships with top local and community lenders, we bring customers great rates and lower monthly payments. Our secure, digital platform makes it easy for our customers to see exactly how much they can save and complete the refinance process quickly, all from the comfort of their home. What's more, we do all the heavy lifting, including paying off the old lender as well as re-titling the vehicle, saving our customers those dreaded trips to the DMV.

C3.ai is a leading enterprise AI software provider for accelerating digital transformation. The proven C3 AI Suite provides the comprehensive services to build enterprise scale AI applications 40x to 100x faster than alternative approaches. The core of the C3 AI Suite is a revolutionary, extensible, model-driven abstraction layer that dramatically enhances data scientist and application developer productivity. The C3 AI Suite supports any value chain in any industry with pre-built, configurable, high-value AI applications for predictive maintenance, fraud detection, sensor network health, supply network optimization, energy management, anti-money laundering, and customer engagement. c3.ai

We are a technology company that builds coordinated care networks of health and human service providers. Our company was founded to help the people who risked their lives to protect us all, and we continue to meet the needs of veterans—never forgetting where we started. With us, providers across sectors can send and receive secure referrals, track every person’s total health journey, and report on tangible outcomes across a full range of services in a centralized, cohesive, and collaborative ecosystem. Also, our dedicated team builds authentic, lasting partnerships to ensure their networks have a solid foundation, launch successfully, and continue to grow and thrive. This social infrastructure helps communities transform their ability to work together and measure impact.

Altinity is the leading service and software provider for ClickHouse - an open source SQL data warehouse offering industry-leading query speeds on petabyte-scale data. Altinity offers the highest expertise on the market to help customers deploy and run the most demanding analytic applications. We also provide innovative software to manage ClickHouse in Kubernetes, cloud, and bare metal environments.