Collar Is Joining Y Combinator's Fall 2026 Batch

Collar AI has been accepted into Y Combinator’s Fall 2026 batch, joining the accelerator that backed Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase and OpenAI at their earliest stages. The acceptance comes with $500,000 in funding and three months of working directly with YC’s partners in San Francisco.

For us the milestone carries some extra weight. Collar was founded in Singapore by Jamie Yau and Kazel Koh, both polytechnic graduates. There is a well worn script for how deep tech companies are supposed to start, and we did not follow it. YC looked at the product, the customers and the pace of shipping, and that was enough.

What we told them

Collar builds domain expert AI agents for general partners at venture, private equity and private credit funds. The agents own due diligence end to end. They read every document in the dataroom, apply the fund’s own criteria, flag the risks and produce the memo the investment committee actually reads. Everything runs on the fund’s own infrastructure, on premise or in a private cloud, because diligence data should never leave the perimeter.

The pitch to YC was the same one we make to customers. A fund’s edge lives in the judgment of a few people, and that judgment is trapped in calendars. Collar multiplies it.

The coverage

The Straits Times covered the story of how two poly grads landed a place in the batch, and what it signals for founders in Singapore who took the less conventional route. You can read the piece at The Straits Times.

We fly out for the batch in October. Between now and then we are doing what we always do, shipping for the funds that trusted us early. If you want to see what a Collar agent does to a dataroom, the demo takes twenty minutes.