Industrials Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

About Oklo Inc.: Oklo Inc. (Oklo) is developing advanced fission power plants to provide emission-free, reliable, and affordable energy. Oklo received a Site Use Permit from the U.S Department of Energy, has performed successful prototypic fuel fabrication, was awarded fuel material from Idaho National Laboratory, developed the first advanced fission combined license application accepted and docketed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and is developing advanced fuel recycling technologies in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and national laboratories. Oklo has been featured in Time, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Popular Mechanics, Wired, Architectural Digest, Hyperallergic, POWER Magazine, has been the subject of a Harvard Business School case, and is featured in the Oliver Stone documentary Nuclear, among other features.

Twolabs is building socially intelligent robots for caregiving. Our semi-humanoids go into nursing homes, senior living communities, and care facilities to support elderly residents, handling everyday tasks like feeding, dressing, medication, and object retrieval, while providing genuine social and emotional companionship. We build the full stack in-house: the robot hardware and all the AI that makes it socially capable, so one caregiver can do more for more residents in a field facing chronic staffing shortages. While the rest of robotics is working on object manipulation like moving boxes and folding laundry, we're focused on what we think is the most meaningful problem: how people and robots can work together.

We built the fastest VR teleoperation software on the market, so you can control your robots from anywhere in the world. We help robotics companies collect Physical AI data and scale their deployments.

Arlo Industries is building a network of sensors that precisely tracks stealthy drones and aerial threats better than radars. This capability does not exist yet because traditional radars are built on past war doctrines designed to protect single, centralised assets. Modern warfare, however, demands wide-area, persistent coverage that is both passive and economically scalable. By utilising a mesh architecture, Arlo Industries unlocks unprecedented asymmetric economics. The network is fundamentally built to scale: the cost of adding sensors grows linearly, but the tracking accuracy increases exponentially, delivering highly resilient, persistent coverage for a fraction of the cost of legacy systems. Deo founded Arlo Industries after spending over 6 years in the Israeli defence ecosystem, where he lived through multiple conflicts and experienced the Iron Dome and other systems in action against ICBMs and the infamous Shahed drones. Learning exactly how these defence systems could be improved after a Shahed exploded close to his apartment, he built Arlo Industries around the core philosophy that conflict should be concise & precise. The people behind Arlo1 includes a PhD in drones and autonomy and military experts. Arlo Industries has actively showcased this technology directly to Ukrainian militaries on the frontlines, as well as to operators across Europe and the USA.

America does not just need more welders. It needs welding knowledge that can scale. The American Welding Society projects 320,500 new welding professionals will be needed by 2029, with about 80,000 jobs to be filled annually from 2025 to 2029. More than 157,000 current welding professionals are approaching retirement. Welders are only a small share of the skilled-trades workforce, but welding accounts for an outsized share of projected capability demand. The market calls it a labor shortage. AMR sees a learning bottleneck. We are building American-made robotic welding cells that combine computer vision to provide real-time seam tracking and post-weld inspection to turn welding from a scarce manual process into a closed-loop manufacturing system that learns from every weld as it happens.

Building the elements of a new ATC system.

Surtr builds ParallaxOS, the open operating system for counter-UAS. It takes sensor data from any radar, RF detector, camera, or acoustic array and fuses it into a single unified picture with AI-driven threat classification and engagement recommendations. One interface, any hardware, human in the loop.

Aseon Labs builds robotic pitstops for self-driving cars. A depot in a box for charging, cleaning & inspecting autonomous fleets directly in operating zones. Autonomous driving is working. The operational layer around it is not. Today, fleets lose significant time and money traveling to centralized depots for charging, cleaning and servicing, creating dead miles, lower uptime and operational bottlenecks that limit fleet scale. Aseon Pods are modular, rapidly deployable robotic pitstops that keep autonomous fleets operating near demand. By bringing charging, cleaning and inspection directly into operating zones, we help fleet operators increase uptime, reduce operational overhead and scale markets more efficiently without relying on large centralized depots. We’re second-time founders and mobility infrastructure operators. Previously, we built and scaled Pushme to 5,000 stations across 40 cities before its acquisition by TIER–Dott ($600M raised). Aseon Labs is backed by Y Combinator and headquartered in Redwood City.

Madrone builds cooling systems for data centers. In Texas, where most new sites are, Madrone can cool using 30% less power and water, thanks to novel dew-point cooling technology.

Strawberry farming is a $3B industry in California alone with 60% labor cost using 40-year old software. Synphony provides strawberry picking robots and software services including: bed-level analytics, data pipeline integration, and agentic solutions. Synphony's "side hustle" is selling data, evals, and viral demos to robot foundation labs while building capacity for general robot deployments. We've started with strawberry farming for great margins and outdoor data moat, but also received requests for robots in semi-conductors and autonomous space labs. Synphony's team has won over 15 hackathons together (taking home 4 Jensen-signed GPUs!). Sean did ML research at NVIDIA and led AI products used by IRS and Citibank. Lucas' research spanned robotics, IoT devices, and neuromorphic computing. Alex architected an app with 400k users.

Robotics is the new paradigm. With hardware converging, Intelligence is the biggest bottleneck. Our world was built for humans and we're giving robots the ability to reason and act like us. The way we learn any task - by seeing, doing, and feeling - is how we train robots. We're building general intelligence that works on any robot and fits seamlessly within our world.

Ornadyne builds flapping-wing drones for reconnaissance that look, fly, and sound like birds. Today’s drones are easy to detect acoustically, visually, and electronically. As counter-UAS systems improve, traditional quadcopters and fixed-wing UAS systems are becoming increasingly ineffective for close-range surveillance. Flapping-wing aircraft have existed for years, but have lacked the performance, endurance, and control required for real-world deployment. We’re changing that by engineering a high-performance, stealth-optimized system built from first principles for efficiency, autonomy, and reliable field use. The final frontier of surveillance won’t look like machines; it will look like wildlife already in the sky. Maybe birds aren't real?

We turn natural Language into Multi-Drone Search & Rescue Mission execution. Degla is built around a simple idea: once you’ve expressed your intent, the system owns the problem.You don’t babysit drones. You don’t micromanage failures. You don’t rewrite plans. You state the goal, Degla figures out how.

We're building robots that just work and use them to deliver autonomous services at scale. Our first use case is semi-humanoid robots for manufacturing and logistics. Unlike traditional robotics companies, we don't sell robots, we provide physical agents for hire where companies pay for the robots based on usage, decreasing the barrier to entry and expanding the robotics market as a whole.

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 defense categories (FPV, fixed-wing, shahed-type, missiles). We're using design-for-manufacturing and first principles to reimagine how a defense product is developed and manufactured. Our first product is a kamikaze quadcopter.

We are building the next generation of underwater defense systems: autonomous swarms of modular marine drones to secure naval assets and coastal infrastructure against evolving underwater threats.

We are building AI-native fulfillment powered by robotics. Warehouses without human labor that get better, faster, and cheaper with every order. Most robotics companies wait until their system is perfect before deploying. We don't. We ship imperfect policies into real warehouses, detect failures in real time, recover automatically when we can, and bring in a remote human operator when we can't. Every failure becomes training data. Every intervention makes the system better. The result is a fulfillment system that continuously learns from production.

Prototyping.io turns CAD designs into real mechanical parts through an AI-driven manufacturing system. We analyze designs for manufacturability and automate production workflows to deliver high-quality parts faster and at lower cost.

We build AI scientists that discover new materials for the semiconductor industry - specifically datacenters and fabs. Finding novel materials today takes 10+ years of lab work. We aim to compress that timeline to months, using a swarm of AI agents. Akash completed his PhD at Stanford on material discovery for semiconductors. The materials he discovered for nanoscale interconnects have been adopted into the roadmaps of Intel and TSMC. Advaith was the founding applied scientist at Persona AI (acquired by Luma Labs), where he built long horizon autonomous agents for major telecom and crypto companies. Power consumption and heat release from AI chips is doubling every year. The semiconductor industry needs new materials to keep this exponential going - Matforge will help find them.

Dispatch is building refurbishable reentry vehicles that host and return payloads for companies making ultra-high-value materials (semiconductors, biotech, and pharma) that can only be manufactured in space. Right now, these companies have no practical way to manufacture and get their products back to Earth. We solve this bottleneck. We just returned from the Mojave Desert testing our first full-scale reentry heat shield designed to protect the satellite as it returns from space at Mach 20+, built in an apartment for 100x cheaper than competitors. To test, we held it behind a rocket engine to simulate the forces of atmospheric reentry. IT WORKED! Watch here - https://youtu.be/dhlQmnIoptg To scale, we anchor permanent infrastructure in orbit - building high power Autonomous Space Stations designed from day one for "lights-out" manufacturing serviced by the reentry vehicles.

Ventura builds the AI workforce for distributors and manufacturers, starting with quoting and order entry. It plugs into your existing ERP, follows your SOPs, and learns your team's tribal knowledge - getting smarter with every completed task.

Ndea is building frontier AI systems that blend intuitive pattern recognition and formal reasoning into a unified architecture. # AI for Scientific Advancement Unlike all life before us, humanity's ascent is a story of ingenuity, not just biological evolution. Our progress has been driven by the curiosity to acquire knowledge, the ability to pass it on, and an intrinsic drive to innovate. We build technology which gives us leverage beyond our biology. We stand at the top of a knowledge and technology colossus that we collectively created over the past ten thousand generations. Scientific progress has helped us overcome burdens that long defined human life — famines, plagues, and widespread illiteracy. Science will continue to redefine the boundaries of the human condition. Today, the acceleration of scientific progress hinges on one factor: AI capable of independent invention and discovery. This capacity is the gateway to advancements beyond our wildest imagination. # A New Research Lab We're starting Ndea — an AI research and science lab. The name - like 'idea' with an 'n' - is inspired by the Greek concepts ennoia (intuitive understanding) and dianoia (logical reasoning), capturing our first goal to merge deep learning with program synthesis. Ndea is entirely focused on developing and operationalizing AGI to realize unprecedented scientific progress in our lifetime for the benefit of all current and future generations. Building AGI alone is a monumental undertaking, but our mission is even bigger. We're creating a factory for rapid scientific advancement — a factory capable of inventing and commercializing N ideas. From our vantage point today, we see many 'known' frontiers like self-driving vehicles, drug discovery, sustainable energy, robotics, and space exploration. While AGI will benefit all of these, the most exciting adventure lies in the 'unknown'. AGI promises discoveries and progress we cannot imagine today.

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.

Robots for microgravity research and manufacturing.

One Robot builds simulation environments that are realistic to see and realistic to interact with, so robotics teams can train and evaluate robot policies without being bottlenecked by robot time. Today, improving a VLA often means more real-world hours: setting up the scene, running trials, resetting, and repeating. This loop is slow, expensive, and hard to scale. For example, material handling and manufacturing assembly tasks, models need far more training and evaluation data than teams can collect in the real world. We use task-specific data to build world model-based simulation environments for hard manipulation tasks (for example, textiles and box folding). These environments help teams run more training and evals, find failure modes faster, and accelerate iteration on action policies with less dependence on real-world data collection and robot availability.

Terranox is the first vertically integrated AI-powered uranium exploration company. We find high-grade uranium deposits in North America using AI trained on 70+ years of exploration outcomes. Our mission is to find the fuel we need to power the next century with nuclear energy.

At Congruent, we build radars for end-to-end autonomous systems. The most advanced autonomous systems are trained as a single neural network from raw sensor data to navigation actions. For a sensor to be included in these pipelines sensor stacks requires two key properties: access to raw sensor data and a high-fidelity sensor simulator. Current automotive radars have neither, they output heavily processed point clouds and no raw radar simulator exists for driving scenes. Congruent solves both problems: a radar architecture that exposes raw data, paired with a world model based radar simulator. Radar is the only depth sensor at a price point that scales to every car on the road and works in all weather conditions. Congruent is building the radar compatible with the training architectures that will make mass-market vehicles autonomous.

Asimov collects real-world human movement data from households and businesses to train humanoid robots. Unlike factory datasets that capture the same tasks in the same environments, we deliver the full diversity of real human environments, thousands of hours a day to leading labs.

Robotics foundation models are bottlenecked by data. The internet is saturated with cooking tutorials and unboxing videos, but it has almost nothing on the tasks that actually matter for industry: wire harnessing, SMT rework, surgical suturing, mechanical assembly, food prep at scale. Lab teleoperation and handcrafted sims try to fill the gap, but they collapse to archetypal motions in sterile environments and miss the contact-rich, force-modulated messiness of how work actually gets done. We're solving this by going to the source: we pair head-mounted capture with wearable tactile sensors to record synchronized vision, proprioception, and contact forces from people doing real work on real job sites. Our privacy-first pipeline guarantees anonymization, with end-to-end encryption in transit and at rest. Our proprietary annotation stack delivers contact events, hand poses, and drift-corrected trajectories at a granularity that off-the-shelf tooling can't match.

We are building a "manipulate anything" model with the robot hardware that embodies it. We designed a hand-based data-collection device and a high DOF, direct drive robotic hand that match each other exactly, enabling us to eliminate embodiment gap and collect real-world data and deploy it directly. We want to scale real world manipulation data by deploying our devices "in the wild" like manufacturing factories, logistic centers to collect Tesla like data, use these data to train our model and then provide automation solutions to these industries.

Condor helps large electricity consumers - C&I and data centers - cut electricity costs by helping the grid. We are former electricity traders and energy physicists. We build an AI-powered software that our clients use to optimize their energy procurement - making sure they always have access to cheap & reliable power.

At Beyond Reach Labs we are building solar panels for Space that grow from the size of a dining table to a football field in orbit. Mitch and Pele met 13 years ago as freshmen at UPenn studying mechanical engineering. Mitch recently got his PhD at Carnegie Mellon working with NASA on kilometer-scale deployable structures, and Pele spent seven years at SpaceX leading Dragon parachute engineering, safely returning astronauts from space. The collective satellites today use around 20MW, roughly the output of a datacenter on earth, but by 2030 there is a demand for over 10GW, a 500x increase, largely driven by orbital datacenters, space stations, and lunar outposts. If you want more power, your only option is to launch larger solar panels, which quickly become fragile or impractically expensive. As a result, power constraints already determine whether missions or industries can exist at all. But at Beyond Reach Labs we have introduced a new class of deployable solar panels giving satellites 10x more usable power without increasing launch mass or volume. This works because our patented deployable design changes geometry in space, allowing for us to reach 10x longer while remaining rigid.

Kyten Technologies is building a factory to manufacture custom aerospace-grade battery packs. 100,000+ drones, submarines, and satellites are being built in the US, but the legacy supply chain can't keep up. During our six years at Starlink, we put 5,000+ battery packs into space. Now, we're bringing rapid development and volume production of aerospace-grade battery packs to the entire industry.

You’re wasting millions of dollars on custom industry robots that take months to implement. Today, robotic automation means redesigning your entire facility for the robot to work. You need to change the floor plan, adjust conveyor belts, and re-educate your staff. This is inefficient and unnecessary. With Servo7, you don’t have to do any of that. Automating with Servo7 is simple and fast, because our robots: 1) Deploy in existing operations 2) Learn from simple demonstrations 3) Keep improving on the job We have previously worked on autonomous defense systems, LLMs, autonomous driving, and hyperloops. Not just in the lab, but actually deploying them in the field. We’re already working with warehouses to automate their fulfillment. If you work in assembly, manufacturing, or logistics, email founders@servo7.com. We're onboarding our next partners now.

Inviscid AI builds physics-informed AI solutions that transform how buildings and data centers operate. By combining real-time IoT sensor data with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling, we create digital twins that simulate building performance in real time and autonomously optimize operations. Our platform optimizes airflow patterns and ventilation strategies to eliminate dead zones, improve air distribution, and reduce the load on mechanical systems. On the energy side, we minimize HVAC power consumption, reduce cooling costs, and lower overall operational expenses while maintaining optimal thermal comfort and indoor air quality. Beyond immediate operational efficiency, we optimize equipment scheduling and maintenance cycles by predicting system behavior under different conditions, allowing facilities managers to proactively address issues before they become problems. Our physics first approach ensures that we're not just optimizing against historical patterns, but optimizing based on a deep understanding of how air, heat, and energy actually move through your building, enabling us to find solutions that traditional rule-based or purely data-driven systems would miss.

RoboDock builds robots that automate depot operations, like charging and vehicle checks, for electric and autonomous vehicle fleets. We turn fleet depots from manual sites into self-running systems that lower operational costs and increase vehicle uptime.

ARC Prize builds AI benchmarks that measure general intelligence. Our benchmark, ARC-AGI, has been used by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI. Founded by Mike Knoop and Francois Chollet, we inspire open source artificial general intelligence (AGI) research through benchmarks (the ARC-AGI series), global competitions, research grants, community, and content, we exist to guide researchers, industry, and regulators on the path to AGI. We believe that AGI requires more than just scaling up existing AI models. It demands a fundamental shift towards systems capable of genuine fluid intelligence, the ability to adapt to novel challenges and solve problems efficiently, much like humans do.

DAIVIN! builds tankless dive gear that unlocks breath autonomy in extreme environments. Starting from underwater environment our mission is to remove the need for dangerous, heavy and bulky oxygen tanks in space, air and on land and replace them with water!

We make radars that can see small drones. As drones evolve faster than air defenses, detection has fallen behind. Even $50 drones now present a major threat to airports, critical infrastructure, and front-line defense. We solve this by building high-frequency radar systems, designed from the ground up to detect even the most challenging low-signature targets. This allows us to identify and track nano drones like no other solution, letting you know what's truly in your airspace.

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.

GrazeMate builds autonomous drones that herd cattle. On command, our drones fly to a paddock, position themselves around the mob, and move them where they need to go. What used to take a full day of helicopters, motorbikes, and horses now runs on a schedule. We work with some of the largest cattle ranches in the world. While the drones are herding, they're also estimating animal weights, measuring grass biomass, monitoring water levels, and flagging sick animals. We're building physical AI that lets a grazier manage thousands of head across millions of acres from their phone.

We believe the electricity grid is the most important machine on Earth. If we want electrification to move fast, the teams planning and operating networks need software that is as modern as the challenge. Our thesis is simple. Better decisions come from one unified, trusted network model. When everyone works from the same model, planning becomes consistent, assumptions are visible, and progress stops getting lost in spreadsheets and static reports. Squid is AI powered grid planning in your browser. We have spent years inside National Grid, Octopus Energy, and AWS, building and learning what breaks. Now we are building what we wished existed.

We engineer inexpensive, autonomous strike drones designed to operate in the most contested combat environments on Earth! 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.

GRU Space is building permanent lunar infrastructure to make humanity interplanetary within our lifetime, starting with the first hotel on the Moon. In just 6 weeks, we built the world's first Moon factory: patent-pending hardware that turns lunar regolith into bricks and inflates modular pressurized habitats designed to withstand lunar temperature and pressure extremes. Our first mission lands on the Moon in 2027 to demonstrate in-situ brick manufacturing and habitat deployment. A second mission lays the hotel's foundation inside a lunar cave, and a third opens the first lunar hotel, targeted for 2032. We don’t stop at Moon hotels. GRU’s long-term plan: 1. Build the first hotel on the Moon. GRU solves off‑world surface habitation. 2. Become the Moon Base Company of America: build roads, mass drivers, warehouses, and physical infrastructure. 3. Repeat on Mars and build the first cities there. 4. Own property on the Moon and Mars as these economies grow. 5. Reinvest profits into resource utilization systems on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and beyond—reaching our final form: Galactic Resource Utilization. GRU Space is backed by investors in SpaceX and Anduril, is part of Nvidia's Inception program, and our launch generated 1B+ views across 60+ countries, earning invitations to the White House, Senate, and Pentagon.

We’re archiving the physical world for embodied intelligence by collecting and labeling aligned multimodal data. To build dexterous and perceptive robots that generalize robustly, we need massive amounts of real-world data across multiple modalities and environments. We have thought deeply about the fine line between biomimicry and its application to humanoid systems. Based on this research, we design and deploy custom hardware across residential and manufacturing settings. We then post-process the resulting data through internal QA, anonymization, and annotation pipelines to deliver diverse, high-fidelity datasets at scale to frontier labs developing robotics foundation models and general-purpose robotics companies. We believe we are at a historic inflection point, with a unique opportunity to leave a dent on humanity and reshape physical labor markets forever. That's why our team dropped out of Stanford and Berkeley and moved to Asia to collect the world’s largest annotated multimodal dataset.