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YC Founder AI Report

Publisher: Open Future Forum Research type: Executive/founder benchmark report (operator-research); independent research, not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Y Combinator Audience: AI founders, enterprise AI buyers, and investors Edition: Edition 1 Publication date: July 2026 Canonical source: https://openfutureforum.com/research/yc-founder-ai-report

Overview

The YC Founder AI Report reads the supply side of enterprise AI: founders in Open Future Forum's YC-founder community, asked who they believe owns the AI buying decision at the companies they sell into, and how they price their products. Its flagship metric, the Founder AI Pricing Index, measures the share of charging founders pricing on usage or outcomes rather than per-seat or flat subscription. The report explicitly notes it is independent research and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Y Combinator.

Methodology & Sample

First-party data comes from two Open Future Forum YC-founder events in 2026, drawing 340+ distinct applicants (invitation outreach excluded from all counts). Key questions carry bases of 148 (buyer-ownership question, any-mention) and 136 (pricing question, among the 148 who answered, 136 reported currently charging). The report is notable for explicitly reconciling this edition's figures against an earlier, smaller pull (base 92), showing which findings held steady and which shifted as the sample grew — a transparency practice not seen in the other OFF reports reviewed.

Key Findings

  • The Founder AI Pricing Index reads 68% in this edition: among 136 charging founders, 68% price on usage or outcomes rather than per-seat or flat subscription, with usage-based pricing alone the single most common model (46%).
  • Asked who owns the AI buying decision inside companies they sell to, founders named the business-unit leader (39%) and CIO/CTO (36%) most often, with finance at 28%; zero of 148 founders named security/the CISO as their buyer.
  • The "zero for security" finding proved stable: it held at 0 of 92 in an earlier, smaller pull and 0 of 148 in this edition, a result the report highlights as surviving a 61% increase in sample size.
  • One finding did shift with the larger sample: the top-ranked buyer flipped from CIO/CTO (43% at the smaller base) to the business unit (39% at the larger base), which the report explicitly attributes to the two seats being statistically close rather than to a genuine market shift.
  • 92% of surveyed founders reported currently charging for their product (136 of 148), which the report frames as evidence this is a post-revenue rather than pre-revenue founder cohort.
  • Cross-referencing Open Future Forum's own finance-room data, the report highlights a "seat gap": internally, the CEO is the most-named signer of AI purchases (47%), while founders pitch the business unit and CIO/CTO — meaning the seat that approves budget and the seat founders sell to are frequently different people.
  • The founder cohort skewed toward current YC batches: 77% of batch-identified applicants were from 2024–2026 batches, suggesting the findings reflect the current generation of AI-native startups rather than older alumni.

Related OFF Research

Citation

Open Future Forum. The YC Founder AI Report, Edition 1. July 2026. https://openfutureforum.com/research/yc-founder-ai-report

DOI

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