San Francisco-based Klaimee, which builds insurance and certification infrastructure for autonomous AI agents, has been accepted into Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch. Co-founder and CEO Ines Boutemadja is the first Algerian woman to join the programme.
Boutemadja co-founded Klaimee with her husband Julien Catonnet in March 2026. The company audits AI agents' architecture, processes and failure modes, then backs them with AI-specific liability coverage through a self-service platform aimed at startups deploying AI agents to enterprise clients.
The initial focus is on AI voice agents, with the broader thesis that scaling autonomous AI agent deployment requires a new framework for risk, liability and trust that does not currently exist.
Before Klaimee, Boutemadja spent five years as General Manager of Nomad Insurance at SafetyWing (itself a YC W18 alumnus), bringing insurance infrastructure experience to the new venture.
She previously worked as a product manager at logistics company Cubyn and in sales and product-market fit at Kraaft, a voice communications startup incubated at Station F in Paris. She studied at HEC Paris.
Boutemadja is the third Algerian-heritage founder to pass through Y Combinator, and each has arrived with a meaningfully different profile.
Yassir, the Maghreb super-app co-founded by Stanford PhD Noureddine Tayebi and Mahdi Yettou, was the first Algerian startup accepted into YC in its Winter 2020 batch. The company has since raised approximately $200 million, including a $150 million Series B led by BOND, and operates across six countries.
Elevate (formerly Bloom), the fintech providing FDIC-insured US dollar accounts to freelancers and remote workers in emerging markets, was co-founded by Algerian Youcef Oudjidane and Yemeni Khalid Keenan, is based in Dubai and London and has raised approximately $10 million.
Bilal Dahlab, who is half-Algerian and grew up in Geneva, also went through YC with Moneco, a banking platform for the African diaspora in Europe.
