Clicks Launches "AI-Native BPO" to Replace Traditional Back-Office Outsourcing
A new Y Combinator–backed startup wants to rewrite the economics of the business process outsourcing industry from the ground up. Clicks, a Fall 2025 YC company, is building what it calls an AI-native BPO: a service layer that replaces traditional offshore teams and shared service centers by deploying AI agents that operate customers’ existing tools and follow their existing processes – all wrapped in the compliance posture that enterprise buyers expect.
Clicks’ thesis is that AI business process automation has finally caught up to what RPA promised but never delivered – and that back-office work like invoice processing, claims handling, data entry, ticket triage, and document reconciliation is ready for agents that actually finish the job end-to-end. Where RPA required brittle, hand-coded scripts and constant maintenance, and where traditional BPOs rely on large human workforces paid by seat-hour, Clicks deploys AI agents that learn the customer’s workflow, use the same SaaS tools the team already pays for, and execute work end-to-end. The pitch: higher accuracy, faster turnaround, and a fraction of the cost of a seat-based contract. Importantly for regulated buyers, the company has built for SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA compliance from day one – table stakes for any startup hoping to unseat incumbents with healthcare, financial services, and insurance clients.
The co-founding team pairs deep AI research credentials with hands-on enterprise deployment experience. Dominik Helmreich is an ETH Zurich CSE graduate, a former Stanford AI researcher, and an ex-BCG consultant – an unusual trio of credentials that positions him to think about both model behavior and the operating reality of large services organizations. Oliver Knapp is a repeated AI founder who has shipped more than ten enterprise AI applications in the past two years alone, after studying physics at ETH Zurich. Together, the two have assembled an early team of four and are already hiring for three critical roles: a Founding Customer Success Manager, a Founding GTM Lead, and a Software Engineer – a hiring plan that reads like a company preparing to scale enterprise deployments quickly.
The market Clicks is chasing is enormous. Global BPO spending runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and a large slice of that work – document-heavy, process-driven, and well-defined – is structurally suited to AI agents that can operate inside existing tool stacks. Traditional providers have added automation around the edges, but Clicks is positioning itself as something categorically different: a services company whose core labor force is software, priced and delivered like a modern SaaS business rather than a staffing firm. For CFOs evaluating a decade of outsourcing contracts, that pitch is compelling; for BPO incumbents, it is a clear shot across the bow.
Founded in 2025 and based in San Francisco, Clicks joins a Fall 2025 YC batch heavy on agentic enterprise software – but its positioning is sharper than most. Rather than selling a horizontal agent platform, Clicks is selling an outcome: AI business process automation with the accountability and compliance guardrails of a real services vendor — the same back-office work enterprises already buy, now delivered by software.