Every week the YC Group Partners meet and discuss the current batch. One common area of discussion is ideas — what kind of ideas are these founders having the best luck with? Which ones are they pivoting away from?

These discussions also do a good job of helping us notice the gaps. Ideas that should be made real — and that we’d want to fund! — but that we aren’t seeing many people work on or apply with. In a recent discussion like this, we realized it was time to put together an entirely new Request for Startups.

The RFS is a YC tradition — you can find examples going back as far as 2009. Each one offers up ideas we’d want to see made real, in spaces that we believe will be important in the coming decades. The world is full of founders with expertise that could be tapped into something new and great; our hope is that this list inspires some of those people to do so — or if they’re already building, to apply to YC.

This new RFS lists 20 categories, each suggested and explained by at least one YC Group Partner:

• Applying machine learning to robotics
• Using machine learning to simulate the physical world
• New defense technology
• Bring manufacturing back to America
• New space companies
• Climate tech
• Commercial open source companies
• Spatial computing
• New enterprise resource planning software (ERPs)
• Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools
• Explainable AI
• LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises
• AI to build enterprise software
• Stablecoin finance
• A way to end cancer
• Foundation models for biological systems
• The managed service organization model for healthcare
• Eliminating middlemen in healthcare
• Better enterprise glue
• Small fine-tuned models as an alternative to giant generic ones

These are by no means the only ideas we’ll accept — many of the best ideas are the ones we would never expect — but if you aren't sure what you want to work on, these RFSs should provide a useful jumping off point to begin your ideation process.

Applications for the YC Summer 2024 batch are open now and the early deadline to apply for the batch is February 21. Apply here.