The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni and students are leading the AI revolution following their success in Y Combinator's Fall 2025 cohort. Eight startups founded or co-founded by Illinois students and alumni successfully completed the highly competitive accelerator program, bringing AI innovation to industries from construction and filmmaking to health care and cybersecurity. Students or alumni from The Grainger College of Engineering co-founded seven of the eight startups.
Y Combinator, known for backing companies like Airbnb, Instacart, Reddit, DoorDash and many more, has invested in over 5,000 companies that have a combined valuation of over $800 billion since its inception in 2005. The Fall 2025 cohort concluded with demo day in early December, where approximately 157 startups from around the world pitched to investors after launching with $500,000 in seed funding from Y Combinator in exchange for equity.
Among the cohort's early success stories, Multifactor, co-founded by Grainger Engineering alumnus Vivek Nair, announced a $15 million seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners. Multifactor lets you manage passwords, passkeys, 2FA codes and more in one secure, unified vault.
Illinois-Founded Startups
Articulate — Construction Coordination AI Platform
Articulate, founded by computer engineering alumnus Milind Sagaram, is an AI platform that helps construction and solar contractors catch design discrepancies and avoid costly rework before construction begins. The platform also streamlines communication between crews and automates procurement in addition to request for information generation for construction projects.
Co-founded by alumnus Kevin Le (M.S. in computer science and B.S. in computer engineering), Clad Labs has built a high-productivity modern coding editor, Chad IDE (integrated development environment), which integrates AI coding workflows into your IDE. Imagine integrating gaming, scrolling and entertainment directly into your agentic coding loop — an AI’s iterative process of planning, writing, testing and refining code autonomously.
Flick — Redefining Filmmaking Workflow with AI
Flick, co-founded by computer science alumnus Ray Wang, is an AI filmmaking software that enables creators to produce high-quality short films using AI, end-to-end. Unlike tools that generate casual eight-second clips for social media, Flick offers the flexibility, creative control and cohesive workflow needed to create short films.
KaigoHealth is transforming outpatient care management specifically for older adults. Co-founded by alumni Peter Chien (B.S. in mechanical engineering) and Kazuki Shin (M.S. in computer engineering), Kaigo’s AI care agents help health-care providers stay connected with patients between visits. The platform handles routine outreach, monitors progress and escalates when human attention is needed, helping care teams scale support substantially without scaling headcount. The result is fewer readmissions, higher quality scores and healthier patients.
Mod AI — Automating Invoice Processing
Co-founded by current students Jeet Chugh and Evan Meyer (B.S. in computer science and statistics), Mod AI automates invoice processing for growing enterprises. As companies scale and invoice volume increases, they typically face a choice between adding headcount or outsourcing to expensive temporary workers. Mod AI eliminates this bottleneck by helping accounting teams streamline their workflows through automation.
Multifactor — Secure Authentication Unified Vault
Co-founded by computer science alumnus Vivek Nair, the platform allows users to securely and revocably share online accounts with AI agents while maintaining fine-grained permissions and detailed event history.
Nori — AI Health Coach
Co-founded by alumnus Harish Agarwal (B.S. in physics), the Nori platform aggregates all your health data from wearables, nutrition apps, labs and medical records into a personalized daily plan with actionable insights.
Sava — Centralized Document Vault
Co-founded by computer science alumnus Nimit Maru, Sava is building a platform that uses AI agents to make trust administration more efficient, compliant and scalable. The platform serves financial technology companies looking to embed trust and estate services, estate attorneys working to meet tax deadlines and financial advisors seeking real-time interface access to client positions.
Two Illinois-founded startups from the Y Combinator Fall 2025 cohort, Multifactor and Clad Labs, were also featured in a Forbes story highlighting top startups from the batch. “These are founders building the rails for the AI era — not just riding it,” states the Forbes story.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign students and alumni have been routinely selected in the Y Combinator program, building on a legacy of turning breakthrough research and bold ideas into successful ventures. As these Illinois-founded companies progress beyond Y Combinator, they join a growing community of Illinois alumni entrepreneurs who are shaping the future of technology and innovation across diverse industries.