research · 2026-10-14 · dataset v1 Save as PDF

State of YC startup design, 2026

Reviewed by Atul Khola, creative advisor

We fetched the public homepage of every company in YC's Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall 2026 batches — 718 companies, 705 reachable sites — and looked at what founders actually ship. Not opinions: HTML.

Everyone is an AI company, and it shows

428 of 705 homepages put "AI", "agent" or "LLM" in the first thing you read. When six in ten companies open with the same word, the word stops doing any work. The sites that stood out in this set were the ones that led with the outcome and let the model be a footnote.

Pricing is still a secret

Only 127 sites (18.0%) link to a pricing page. "Book a demo" is the most common call to action (229 sites), ahead of "Get started" and "Talk to sales". For B2B that's expected; for the consumer and developer tools in the set it's a missed chance — founders in these batches have told us that visible pricing is the single biggest driver of qualified demo requests.

The stack: Next.js on Vercel

Half the batch builds its marketing site the way it builds its product. Framer and Webflow — the tools most design agencies sell — together account for under 8% of YC 2026 homepages. If you're designing for a YC company, expect to hand off to engineers, not to a site builder.

Type: Inter, then monospace everything

Inter is on 120 sites. What's more telling is what follows it: four of the next six most-used families are monospace (JetBrains Mono, Geist Mono, IBM Plex Mono). The 2026 YC look is a grotesk for headlines and a mono for everything that wants to feel technical. Serif headlines (Instrument Serif, Fraunces, Cormorant Garamond, Newsreader) are the minority position — and the easiest way to look different in a Demo Day scroll.

Dark mode is a minority

Of the sites that declare a theme colour or colour scheme, 137 are light and 116 are dark. The "dark AI startup" cliché is real, but it's a third of those who declare, not the default.

By batch

Basics still get skipped

• 77.9% have a social share image (og:image). The other 22.1% post a blank card every time a founder tweets the link.
• 96.3% have a meta description.
• 97.6% declare a favicon.
• Median homepage: 76 KB of HTML and 15 script tags.
• Median hero headline: 6 words.

20 homepages that do it well

chosen by rule, not taste

Every site below passes the same checks, applied by a script, with no human picking favourites: reachable; has a share image, a meta description and a favicon; links to pricing or uses a specific call to action ("Get started", "Try free / sign up", "Download", "Get early access"); hero headline of nine words or fewer; doesn't lead with "AI"; and the headline isn't just the company name. 46 sites qualify; these are the first 20 ordered by pricing link first, then a named web font, then shortest headline, then name. Nothing here is a client of ours and nobody paid to appear.

A few H1s we liked

• Less counting. More bidding. — Bidflow, Winter 2026
• The AI store associate that turns buyers into regulars — Signals, Winter 2026
• No more worrying about — Overdrive Health, Winter 2026
• Everything you need to know about anyone — Autumn AI, Winter 2026
• Email Paul your work. Get it done, your way. Email Paul your work. Get it done, your way. — Pollen, Winter 2026
• The fastest way to get things done with voice AI — Button Computer, Winter 2026
• Own your intelligence. No single lab owns the frontier . — Velum Labs, Winter 2026
• Let your agents move freely. Within bounds. — Agentic Fabriq, Winter 2026
• Retrieval your agents can trust. — Captain, Winter 2026
• The audit, accelerated. — Oxus, Winter 2026
• AI-Native Law Firm for Companies & Investors — Vector Legal, Winter 2026
• Securing web infrastructure — Crosslayer Labs, Winter 2026

Method

Company list from the public YC directory (via the yc-oss open mirror), batches Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall 2026, fetched 2026-10-14. One GET per homepage with an identified user agent; we read the served HTML only (no JavaScript execution), so client-rendered text can be under-counted. Builder and host are inferred from markup and response headers. "AI in hero" = the word AI, agent(s)/agentic or LLM in the title, H1 or meta description. Fonts are families referenced in CSS or Google Fonts links, de-duplicated per site. 13 sites were unreachable or blocked the fetch. Sample of one — we'll re-run after each Demo Day.

Download the aggregate data (JSON). Cite freely with a link.

Cut by industry, tag and batch

The same data sliced: all cuts, or start with fintech, healthcare, developer tools, the fonts YC startups use and what they build with.

In a batch now? Grade your homepage against these signals, or see the Pre-Demo-Day Sprint.