Indian legal-tech nonprofit Adalat AI has been selected for Y Combinator’s Fall 2026 batch, as it looks to expand its AI-powered courtroom infrastructure across India and the Global South.
The company said it is the first nonprofit backed by Y Combinator in nearly five years and one of the first Indian-founded nonprofits to join the accelerator. YC’s first nonprofit was healthcare crowdfunding platform Watsi, which joined the accelerator in 2013.
“We’re the first nonprofit YC has backed in nearly five years—and one of the first Indian-founded nonprofits in its history,” Adalat AI said in a LinkedIn post announcing the selection.
Founded by Utkarsh Saxena and Arghya Bhattacharya, Adalat AI is building technology for courts where manual processes, limited digital infrastructure and shortages of courtroom staff contribute to delays. Its products include AI-powered speech-to-text transcription, case-flow management, document navigation and paperless workflows.
The company said its technology is currently used across 11 states and more than 6,000 courtrooms in India. Its website currently reports deployments across nine states, more than 3,000 judges reached and coverage of 10–15% of India’s judiciary, suggesting that its footprint has expanded rapidly and that deployment figures vary by product and measurement period.
Adalat AI’s speech-recognition system has been built for Indian courtroom conditions, including legal terminology, accents and regional languages. The company has previously said its models were trained using legal terminology from more than 1,00,000 court orders across 11 Indian languages.
The technology has already received mandates from Indian courts. In Kerala, the High Court directed trial courts across the state to use Adalat AI’s speech-to-text tool for recording witness depositions from November 2025, following a pilot in Ernakulam.
Adalat AI has also expanded beyond transcription. Its case-flow system gives judges a single interface to manage cases at different stages, while its document-navigation technology allows users to locate specific passages in long legal documents using voice commands.
The latter was also presented as a research system at the 2025 Natural Legal Language Processing workshop.
Saxena brings a legal and policy background to the company. He previously worked as a Supreme Court law clerk, practised law in India and worked with government and policy institutions on judicial reform.
Bhattacharya, Adalat AI’s CTO, has a background in computer science and AI from IIIT Hyderabad and previously worked as the founding engineer at customer-feedback intelligence startup Enterpret.
Adalat AI has also been building technology for people interacting with the judicial system. The company recently launched an AI-powered national case-information helpline on WhatsApp, allowing users to search for cases, check status and hearing dates, review case history and access court orders. The system uses Anthropic’s Claude API.
The YC backing comes as Adalat AI prepares for its next stage of expansion. The founders will be based in San Francisco from September through December and will work with the YC team during the programme.
“With YC behind us, we're taking this work across India and the Global South,” the company said.
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