Hardware Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Flock Safety provides the first public safety operating system that empowers private communities and law enforcement to work together to eliminate crime. We are committed to protecting human privacy and mitigating bias in policing with the development of best-in-class technology rooted in ethical design, which unites civilians and public servants in pursuit of a safer, more equitable society. Our Safety-as-a-Service approach includes affordable devices powered by LTE and solar that can be installed anywhere. Our technology detects and captures objective details, decodes evidence in real-time and delivers investigative leads into the hands of those who matter. While safety is a serious business, we are a supportive team that is optimizing the remote experience to create strong and fun relationships even when we are physically apart. Our flock of hard-working employees thrive in a positive and inclusive environment, where a bias towards action is rewarded. Flock Safety is headquartered in Atlanta and operates nationwide. We have raised $150M in our Series E led by Tiger Global at a $3.5B valuation.

Tenet Industries is building low-cost, mass-manufacturable strike drones. We have developed our own HW and SW platform optimized for automated manufacturing, enabling hyperscaling of production across multiple strike categories (FPV, fixed-wing, shahed-type, missiles). We're using design-for-automation and first principles to reimagine how a defense product is developed and manufactured. Thereby lowering the cost and filling the arsenals of the west. Our first product is a kamikaze quadcopter.

AICE Power makes a new generation of sensors that give commercial buildings full visibility into their energy consumption. We deploy on any site in one day with no disruption, at 5% the cost of traditional Building Management Systems. The platform automatically detects anomalies and alerts teams in real time, before inefficiencies show up on the bill.

Prototyping.io is a manufacturing intelligence platform that understands mechanical designs, identifies manufacturability issues early, provides actionable insights and delivers custom mechanical parts (CNC machining, sheet metal, 3D printing, injection molding, etc.) with faster lead times, lower cost, and high quality.

We know how to improve cancer outcomes by 8x-10x: you catch it early. MRI is the most robust and powerful cancer-detection tool in the world, yet systems cost millions to purchase, take months to install, and require high levels of technical skill to operate. We've redesigned MRI from the ground up with new physics, algorithms, and hardware, all to bring cancer screening to the entire world. Our mobile MRI is an imaging clinic on wheels. No equipment to buy, no infrastructure needed. For a flat per-scan fee, any medical site can offer MRI cancer screening. Starting with prostate cancer. Then everything else.

Fuchsia handles hardware compliance end to end, making the process as fast and painless as software compliance has become. Product safety requirements are fragmented across dozens of regional and industry-specific standards (FCC, FDA, FAA, CE, UL, ISO, RIA) and thousands of codes, leaving companies to spend months and tens of thousands in consultant fees just figuring out what applies. Our AI agents surface every relevant requirement in minutes, drafts the technical documentation, and matches teams with the right testing labs.

We are making AI weapon systems for the modern battlefield. Our first product EDDA is a small, low power, low cost fully autonomous-capable counter drone system. It's designed to be used on vehicles, bases, or carried - to stop group 1 suicide drones.

The best grid connection is no grid connection. Voxel builds vertically integrated energy generation and storage systems for data centers that bypass utility connection delays. By leveraging the vast supply of second-life EV batteries and our novel DC microgrid architecture, Voxel generates datacenter power on site and drastically reduces system cost and time-to-power.

We're building inexpensive, autonomous strike drones designed to stay operationally relevant as warfare evolves. By combining true hardware modularity with an agentic control system that lowers cognitive load on operators, we enable faster upgrades, broader adoption, and more than 2x reduction in lifecycle cost. Our customers and partners include the UK Royal Marine Commandos, several other units in the UK, and 4 other NATO forces, and we are currently shipping prototypes for iterative feedback. Think of us as Anduril, but with worse weather, and better banter.

Tensr is building fully autonomous robotic factories that make scaling hardware as effortless as scaling on AWS. We’re a group of Berkeley graduate robotics researchers who previously won a full scale autonomous IndyCar competition at 160mph.

Tornyol builds micro-drones that kill mosquitoes. We use smartphone microphones, car park assist sensors and some clever DSP and control to transform 40-gram toy drones into mosquito killers. Because these drones are so cheap and fast, we will lower the cost of mosquito control by 100x which will enable the eradication of mosquitoes from cities, saving more than a million people each year from Malaria, West Nile, Dengue, etc.

Norra helps nursing facilities manage equipment operations. Every year, ~$80 billion are spent on medical equipment like beds, concentrators, and wheelchairs. Nursing facilities continue to operate with zero visibility which leads to $15 billion in equipment waste annually. We use physical trackers and AI agents to eliminate this.

We build brains for robots. We work with manufacturers like Unitree to make robots listen, speak, and act. You can program your robot out of the box by literally talking to it, no coding involved. Robots running Lightberry are emotionally intelligent, always on, and fully autonomous. Just like in Star Wars!

Always-on intelligence and connectivity for Defense. Icarus builds autonomous, solar-powered aircraft that fly at 60,000 feet for weeks at a time, above the clouds harnessing the power of the Sun, but never too close. It’s the modern-day U-2 spy plane, except each costs $100K and is built by the thousands. The future of warfare is in the Stratosphere.

Our agents run hardware engineering tasks that normally take hours or days in just a few minutes, allowing engineers to process 100x more data and information. Our platform allows hardware engineers to orchestrate agents for tasks such as analyzing failures across entire test campaigns, pulling the right data and KPIs from their databases, checking how conditions (like temperature or load) affect performance and reliability, and then document findings in reports and dashboards.

Testing and certifying the hardware of the future

Everyone pays someone to handle the parts of their life that don't need them personally. The cleaner, the bookkeeper, the lawn service. Nobody could handle what lives in your phone. Until Blue. Blue is a small USB-C dongle and iPhone app. Plug it in and say what needs doing. The follow-up you haven't sent, the appointment you haven't booked, the reply you owe. Blue opens the right app, does the work, and tells you when it's done. You don't touch your phone. Works with every app already on your iPhone. The team brings complementary experience at scale: Omar Abdelaziz led Google Assistant’s transition to LLMs and holds one of earliest patents in LLM-based computer control; Peter Krogh spent decades designing voice-first dialog systems and was most recently a design lead at Google DeepMind building actions for Gemini Live; Muhammad Farhan Hossain helped ship Apple Vision Pro, is named on dozens of hardware/systems patents, and has led products from prototype to mass production. We’ve built systems used by billions. Now we’re on to defining the next era of computing.

SigmanticAI is building an AI-native hardware development assistant that automates the entire RTL design flow, from natural language to synthesizable HDL and testbenches, inside a seamless VSCode fork. Powered by fine-tuned Verilog LLMs, reinforcement learning, and real compiler feedback, SigmanticAI iteratively refines code until it compiles and passes synthesis, no matter how complex the design. It’s like the Cursor for HDL design. In addition to code generation, SigmanticAI can generate token-level annotations and onboarding documents to accelerate ramp-up for new engineers. With support for both cloud and on-prem deployment, it integrates with existing EDA tools to dramatically reduce debug time, improve collaboration, and accelerate hardware design across teams

GD&T takes years to master. Engineers must encode their design intent into a dense syntax that manufacturers must decode, and not everyone gets it right. Put ten engineers in front of the same drawing and you may get ten different interpretations. Which means errors often surface later in interface stack-ups, manufacturing, or in the field - when they’re far more expensive to fix. That’s why we built F4 - the platform that analyzes GD&T to determine whether your designs are ready for production. Drop in your drawing and 3D file. F4 analyzes every element of your GD&T to assess whether your design is clear, manufacturable, and production ready. To make the drawing easier to understand, engineers can visualize their datums, reference frames, and tolerance zones directly on the 3D model. F4 also calculates tolerance stack-ups instantly - directly from the drawing. What once took hours of manual work now takes seconds. When issues are found, F4 flags them and guides engineers toward resolving the problem. After analyzing your drawing, F4 also automatically generates design and inspection reports - stack-up tables, FAI reports - ready to share with your team. And it does all of this locally on-device with no AI used for analysis. Producing deterministic results engineers can trust.

Embedder is a coding agent that can write, test, and debug firmware.

Flywheel AI converts any existing excavators for contractors to enable remote ops to increase safety and productivity, and use robotics context dataset to train autonomous policies.

Boost Robotics is building autonomous mobile manipulation robots to remotely perform manual tasks in data centers. The surge in AI applications is pushing data centers to scale faster than they can manage, leading to suboptimal operations and staffing shortages amid rising power and compute demands. We save data centers millions in insurance premiums and SLA violations by increasing the frequency of inspection and maintenance while reducing the time it takes to triage and address failures.

PowerMatrix provides the MOST efficient and compact next-generation high-performance power supplies for emerging technologies, such as GPUs, xPUs, AI server, datacenters, drones, EV, aerospace, etc. Based on patented circuit topology, embedded packaging, and novel magnetics, our power supply systems can reduce energy loss by up to 50%. We have developed several prototypes and are collaborating with world-leading customers.

Photonium is building software to automate optical system design. We supercharge optics experts with intelligent tooling to reduce costs and deliver faster. We handle the full design stack — from optimization, verification, sourcing, to prototyping — for AR/VR, quantum, biotech, metrology/chip fab, LiDAR, and more.

What if every experiment you wanted to run could be modeled using AI? Godela is an AI-powered physics engine that gives engineers faster, cheaper replacement to simulations and physical prototypes. No set up, no wait. Just ask—and get simulation quality result.

Cascade Space is building a turn-key communications system for lunar and deep space missions. Our ground station network and integrated software tools work together to maximize uptime and availability, while reducing spacecraft iteration cycles from weeks to hours.

We build humanoid robot arms for AI researchers and AI-first robotic companies.

Steinmetz is an electric vehicle platform company based in San Francisco. We use new power electronics techniques to significantly improve power densities (kW/kg, kW/L) bringing down vehicle system costs and even unit costs. Our first products are Inverters/motor controllers with industry-leading power densities while remaining cost competitive.

Inversion Semiconductor is developing the next-generation chip fabrication machine, to create the most powerful chips 15x faster. Our vision is to reshore advanced chip fabrication capabilities in the West. We're building a lithography machine. Lithography uses light to pattern circuit features on silicon. We're scaling transistors to their physical limits by shrinking particle accelerators 1000x, to create a high power light source. Using our light source we will double transistor density for a given numerical aperture and 3x throughput.

Mentra is building the open source operating system for smart glasses. The smart glasses hardware is finally ready, so we're building the OS and app store to power the next computing platform.

Pickle is a personal, memory-based operating system, the missing layer of AI that continuously learns your real-world context, preferences, and intent, enabling AI to evolve with you and become truly proactive rather than reactive. Our system spans both software (Chat, our web-based creative intelligence app) and hardware (Pickle 1, our AI-powered AR glasses) to capture different layers of personal context. Together, they form the foundation of a real personal intelligence.

Adam is building AI CAD. It transforms text into parametric designs so engineering teams can ship 10x faster. Our mission is to eliminate the gap between engineering and reality so more great ideas come into existence.

Forge Automation runs software enabled factories that deliver custom metal parts in four days or less. Instead of mechanical engineers having to wait two to three weeks for their low volume CNC parts, they can simply upload a CAD model on our platform and we will ship it out in four days or less. We aim to give mechanical engineers the "Amazon experience" for custom metal parts.

Mobius is the safe spot market for electronic components like microcontrollers and capacitors. We help electronics manufacturers buy and sell chips quickly, safely & at market prices.

camfer is the AI CAD tool. Now, engineers can create parametric designs with natural language.

Autumn Labs delivers a developer-friendly platform for monitoring and managing modern manufacturing lines. Seamlessly integrating with robotic stations—automated test stations, robotic assembly cells, and industrial arms—it ensures full traceability, live data monitoring, and secure data transport. We prioritize streamlining factory operations, boosting production quality, and preventing supply chain disruptions, all while offering an effortless onboarding experience for engineers and manufacturers.

Vendra makes sourcing custom parts from US manufacturers effortless. Submit one RFQ and we automate the entire sourcing process - matching you with the right suppliers, handling outreach, and collecting competitive quotes. Full transparency and no middleman markups - just smarter sourcing. Visit www.vendra.io and submit an RFQ today!

We build underwater data centers to cut power usage by up to 30%, operating GPUs cheaper and more sustainably. Our 1 MW capsule is being tested underwater in the SF Bay

Zetta is building the next NVIDIA, energy-efficient chips ("XPUs") for AI training and inference, offering superior speed and energy efficiency compared to traditional GPUs and TPUs. Our XPUs are reconfigurable, capable of optimizing the dataflow of each model, making them faster and more energy-efficient than the current SOTA chips on the market. This saves data centers *billions* in cooling and energy costs.

Diode automates circuit board design. We work with hardware companies to get them the PCBs they need, fast.

Sorcerer is deploying a global network of persistent airborne sensors to fuel advanced weather forecasting. Our high-altitude balloons collect 1000x more data than existing systems and are already used daily by meteorologists to track extreme weather across the US and Central America.

Saphira is the easiest way for hardware products to get safety certified and reach market faster, such as industrial robots and heavy machinery.

atopile is a new language to design electronic circuit boards with code. We replace point and click graphical interfaces with code to bring software level automation and reuse to the field of hardware design. Our project is open source on GitHub! https://github.com/atopile/atopile

Identifying performance bottlenecks and strategizing ways to solve them takes 4-8x longer than actually writing the code to fix them. We're building an agent that is an expert at analyzing the performance GPU systems like inference engines at all levels of the stack - from CPU-GPU interactions down to GPU kernels. Pairing our agent with Cursor / Claude Code allows you to automate both the reasoning and code implementation steps of performance optimization. What used to take weeks can now be done in days. Along with our AI agent, we have features such as running diffs on system traces as well as sharing and collaboration features that make our VSCode extension the most powerful way to work on performance optimization.

We make Air Purifier and filters that is certified to eliminate COVID-19 and most other viruses and bacteria. Our technology is independently lab tested, EPA certified and FDA registered. Our air purifiers are already found in homes, businesses and government facilities around the world to help protect their customers and employees from airborne pathogens.

Metalware develops advanced firmware security solutions for critical infrastructure, protecting industries like aerospace, defense, automotive, telecom, and healthcare from cyber threats. Our product is an automated, intelligent binary fuzzer that enables organizations to efficiently discover and remediate security weaknesses in hardware products before deployment.

Hubble is building a global satellite network that any Bluetooth-enabled device can connect to, even without cellular reception. Our mission in life is to get a billion devices connected to the network and unlock a new era of human-machine collaboration.

Velontra is building a hypersonic space plane that can takeoff from anywhere in any weather. This horizontal takeoff increases launch reliability and enables customers to directly access any orbit. Our air-breathing propulsion system is up to 6 times more fuel efficient than any rocket, and uses oxygen from the air which creates thousands of pounds of additional payload capacity. We have millions in current government/commercial contracts and LOI’s. We have assembled a team of industry experts, government senior executives, and a NASA astronaut. The hypersonic space plane will work by taking off from any runway with a jet propulsion system. Next, it will climb to over 100,000’ and Mach 5. At this point, it will launch a 2nd stage rocket directly into the desired Low Earth Orbit. Velontra is “boldly going where no one has gone before.”

Integrated Reasoning builds efficient computer processors that are tailored to the memory access patterns of Karp's 21 NP-complete problems. We’re making it 100x - 10,000x faster to perform computations like scheduling airline pilots or optimizing packing layouts for shipping containers.