Y Combinator Picks 3 NewMods: General Legal, Arcline, LegalOS

Legendary investor and incubator, Y Combinator, has picked three AI-first, NewMod startups for its Winter 2026 batch. They are: General Legal, co-founded by the former CTO of Casetext, Ryan Walker; Arcline, which handles startup legal work; and LegalOS for immigration needs.

Here is some info about all three of them:

General Legal – ‘General Legal is an AI-native law firm solving commercial contracting for founders. We save founders $100s–$1000s per contract, turn around contracts in hours instead of days, and our clients love the practical, real-time guidance they get from our experienced attorneys.’

Arcline – ‘Arcline provides AI-native legal services to startups. Our AI does 80% of the work, so you pay our lawyers only for the final 20%.

They said: ‘We’ve built a bench of top-tier startup lawyers – folks from top schools (Harvard, Stanford, Oxford) and leading firms (Cooley, Goodwin, Fenwick).

‘Our lawyers start with first drafts generated with AI, and then do final revisions, which ends up reducing the work by 80%. This means you pay less, but more importantly, your legal matters can often be handled same-day.’

LegalOS – ‘We’re an AI-native immigration law firm that combines AI with 40+ years of legal expertise. We’ve studied 12,000 successful petitions to design our process – which allows us to deliver top-quality visa applications in as quickly as 48 hours.

‘Our unique approach works. We’ve filed dozens of visa applications and have a 100% approval rate so far.’

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It’s really a sign of the times when Y Combinator picks not one, but three, NewMod law firms that combine AI and lawyers, as part of its famous incubator cohort.

As AL explored last year, NewMods are certain to make more of an impact this year as the realities of combining fixed fees, super-structured workflows, curated data, lots of AI, as well as experienced lawyers, all in one package, starts to filter through the market.

If it were just AI alone, then naturally you would need a legal team to leverage that tech and data. But, with lawyers as part of the offering, then we have a whole different ball game.

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One other member of this year’s Y Combinator 2026 Winter group is Veriad, which offers ‘AI compliance officers’.

It explained that: ‘Marketing teams are being held back by manual content reviews. Veriad automatically checks whether content is compliant with brand and legal guidelines so they can publish 10x faster.’

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Congrats to all involved!

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If you’re interested in the cutting of legal innovation and want to meet pioneering law firms, inhouse teams, and also investors, then come along to Legal Innovators California – more info here.