Manufacturing Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Mass Magnetics turns recycled rare-earth scrap into high-performance permanent magnets, made in America. The materials we supply are the backbone of electric motors, sensors, speakers, hard drives, and electronics. Our process enables DFARS-compliant magnets for defense, aerospace, and industrial manufacturers who demand domestic supply without compromising on quality. Operations in Greater Boston, MA (Greentown Labs) and Columbus, IN.

We deploy robots that learn new tasks from a single human demonstration in the factory. We're starting in contract manufacturing, where lines change every week and both traditional automation and today's VLAs fall over. Our founding team has 20+ years of experience in robotics. Navid was part of the core team that productized Spot at Boston Dynamics and led manipulation projects there. Before that, he was at Rethink Robotics. Mojtaba led whole-body control and manipulation efforts at Amazon Robotics and was a Research Assistant Professor at Northwestern University.

We mass-produce modular data centers that deploy on stalled infrastructure projects losing billions per week. Delayed infrastructure projects hemorrhage $1B a week in the US alone - Pacific mass-produces modular data centers that deploy on those sites in days and turn their unused power into revenue. Data centers are stuck for years waiting for power, while delayed construction sites across the world sit on unused interconnects, losing billions of dollars per week in interest on trillions of dollars of debt. Our pods deploy on those sites and generate revenue for them in days. They use diamond wafers in the cooling system so pods run anywhere on earth, even a desert. We'll use the same mechanisms we're building today to deploy compute across the galaxy.

The technologies that define this century, including data centers, rockets, satellites, and robots, are built from complex metal parts. As these systems advance, the parts get harder to make. Past a certain complexity, casting and machining stop working, and the advanced methods that remain are slow, expensive, and hazardous. Ultrasonium has invented a new manufacturing method to make these critical parts 15x faster and 75% cheaper than the methods they replace, in the U.S. and at scale. Solid metal feedstock goes in and a finished part safely comes out, controlled by a physical AI layer and novel control processes. The systems that matter most, in aerospace, energy, and compute, are demanding metal geometries that can't be machined or cast and are too expensive and slow to make with incumbent methods, at a moment when domestic manufacturing capacity is a national priority. Our founding team has built and innovated some of the most complex engineering systems known to man: quantum computers, superconductors, nuclear reactors, and novel aerospace alloy processing methods.

SpaceFlow is the managed runtime for AI agents that execute supply chain work across ERPs, email, spreadsheets, documents, and supplier portals. It turns fragmented operational data and SOPs into a governed context layer, then gives agents reusable skills and controlled access to enterprise tools. SpaceFlow agents normalize multi-round quotations, chase suppliers and delivery confirmations, repair incomplete requests, classify materials, reconcile phantom inventory, surface market signals, and help sales and operations planning teams continuously align demand, supply, inventory, purchasing deadlines, and freight decisions. SpaceFlow deploys in the customer’s cloud or on-prem environment with permissions, human approvals, observability, and audit trails, allowing industrial and regulated enterprises to automate high-stakes operations without replacing existing systems or moving sensitive data.

We grow high-purity diamond wafers for advanced hardware. Used in data centers, aircraft, spacecraft, RF electronics, power devices, and lasers, our diamond moves heat up to 5× better than copper, helping critical systems run cooler, faster, and more reliably. Diamond has spent centuries as a symbol. We are turning it into infrastructure.

Applied Electrodynamics builds imaging systems that see through solid matter. Our team previously co-invented the iPhone touchscreen and Nest learning thermostat. We’re starting in construction, helping teams map structural elements and utilities inside walls and ceilings. The same platform extends to security screening and cargo inspection. Our mission is to make the hidden physical world machine-readable across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

Neuron is crafting the world’s first purpose-built industrial controller for AI, replacing the antiquated PLCs running every machine and factory. We help customers from chemical processing to nuclear reactors compress controls projects from weeks to hours.

Orvixo uses AI to build reactive end-to-end planning and optimisation models for manufacturers.

Every custom part starts as a 2D drawing, and every drawing has to be reviewed before manufacturing begins. Today that means senior engineers checking dimensions, tolerances, and GD&T callouts by hand against ASME and ISO standards. It takes days, it bottlenecks release, and errors still slip through to the shop floor, where they become scrap and rework. Hera automates design review. Upload a drawing, get back every violation with the standard it breaks and where. Engineer-to-order manufacturers in aerospace, medical devices, and pressure vessels use Hera to release drawings faster and catch mistakes before they cost real money.

Bizmark is the operating system for companies that make, move, or sell physical goods. Legacy ERPs force operators into templates that don’t reflect how the business runs. As a result, decisions that directly affect revenue, margins, and service levels are made from spreadsheets, with less information than the company has, often by whoever is closest, not whoever knows best. Bizmark solves this by connecting to the systems, inboxes, spreadsheets, documents, and the knowledge that lives in people’s heads, then turning that context into optimized decisions and automated workflows. Bizmark adapts to how each company operates, not the other way around. And customers get a working product in weeks, not years. Some of the most innovative American companies use Bizmark to transform their operations.

Donkey is the modern trading company. We buy straight from Chinese factories and sell delivered to US importers: one USD price to their dock, duty paid, our own inspectors on the factory floor before the factory gets paid. Most importers buy through trading companies that mark up every container 15 to 30 percent and never reveal the factory. US customs records are public. Almost nobody reads them, so we arrive already knowing their supply lane. They send one photo of a part they reorder. We name the factory that actually makes it and beat their landed cost in 72 hours, or they keep their supplier. We take title, run the inspection, move the money, and offer credit-insured net-45 terms to qualified buyers. The old trading giants ran this coordination with tens of thousands of people. Our machine runs it with a handful, and every settled order compounds the pricing and reliability data the next one runs on. Team in SF and China, English and Mandarin. Know a US importer buying from China? Send them our way: one photo of a part, and we will name their factory. donkey.trade

Singularity is answering humanity’s call to engineer counter-weapon systems at scale. We build to protect people on the battlefield and at home.

ProvenMetal manufactures the fastest circuit boards in the United States. Domestic circuit board manufacturing is slow and expensive, and while reshoring is happening, the supply chain isn't there yet. We automate the bottlenecks - part procurement, DFM review, and assembly - delivering circuit boards in days instead of weeks.

Greypoint Industries built LEGION, a drone swarm that identifies, geolocates, and tracks every emitter on the battlefield using the enemy’s own radio signals. LEGION enables our warfighters to precisely track previously obscured targets like jammers, command posts, and drone operators so they can proactively respond to threats instead of reacting to them.

Operon is the data intelligence layer for heavy industry. We ingest the messy documents a plant runs on (P&IDs, schematics, datasheets, scans) and turn them into one structured, queryable model of the facility. On top of it, engineers query their plant in natural language and build agentic workflows for safety, compliance, and design.

GUILD is making aerospace parts faster and cheaper than today’s defense supply chain. We win defense contracts, automate manufacturing, and deliver to the government's door. We’ve built an AI-native operating model for defense contracting: a company brain that connects requirements, pricing, supplier capability, compliance, manufacturing, finance, and delivery so each contract makes the next one faster and cheaper.

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.

Sidekick is an AI assistant for frontline manufacturing workers. Sidekick lets workers text problems, photos, or voice memos in any language; it answers from the company's own documents, creates and routes the work order, and syncs with software the company already runs. Sidekick captures the tribal knowledge in veterans' heads - the know-how that usually walks out the door when they retire - into a searchable knowledge base the company owns. No app, no login, works on any phone.

Allus builds next-gen vision foundation models that bring real intelligence to manufacturing. Enabling factories to see, understand, and improve production in real time.

Bravi is building the AI operating system for home-services businesses, using AI-powered customer communication as the wedge. We replace the front office (calls, chats, follow-ups) with AI agents that never miss a lead, then layer an internal AI copilot that understands products, pricing, and technical documentation. We started with fenestration (shutters, windows, garage doors), a large, complex vertical with no modern software, before expanding to adjacent trades. Bravi is already live with leading installers and manufacturers across Europe and the US, turning missed demand into revenue.

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.

China and Russia control the world’s critical minerals. We can produce Titanium, Magnesium, Aluminum, Zirconium & Hafnium in the U.S. more profitably than any existing process, and carbon neutrally via co-production. Carbochlorination is the primary process for producing critical metals like titanium, hafnium, and zirconium, and was once the standard for magnesium. The problem: conventional carbochlorination relies on purchasing carbon feedstocks, wastes valuable byproducts, and is highly CO₂-intensive. Duranium changes this with a novel reactor that recycles CO₂ emissions back into feedstock (CO) while generating a valuable co-product (bleaching agents). This closed loop slashes emissions and delivers Chinese-level metal pricing without subsidies — unlocking the full potential of carbochlorination for U.S. critical mineral production.

Axial develops accelerated software for geometric computation, physical simulation, and manufacturing. Our GPU-native kernels provide programmable building blocks for the computational engineering cycle. They make existing workflows faster and less expensive while enabling engineering teams to explore substantially larger design spaces.

Testing and certifying the hardware of the future

Paloma gives manufacturing companies an embedded team of engineers and ops experts who replace their manual operations with custom AI-native software.

Nox Metals is an AI-powered metals supplier powering modern American manufacturing at scale. We are building automated factories that turn raw metal into production-ready material faster, cheaper, and more reliably than legacy service centers.

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.

We make reagents and software that are purpose built for AI, automated labs, and personalized medicines.

chrt is a logistics platform for time-critical shipping. We enable businesses to deliver their most critical items same-day. Time-Critical Logistics is a $30B market growing at a 20% CAGR driven by growth in American healthcare and manufacturing. Businesses that place time-critical orders are enterprises who have urgent items they need to deliver ASAP. These orders are critical in nature and often require white glove service -- think therapeutic treatments for healthcare providers or specialized equipment for manufacturers. chrt builds the software for forwarders and professional couriers who pick up and deliver these orders. Couriers use chrt to coordinate and track their shipments, including a driver app and fleet management tools. Forwarders use chrt to dispatch couriers, book flights, and track time-critical orders from start to finish. Shippers use chrt to place these orders with their providers and to monitor everything. In addition, we also sell physical tracking devices that can be used to track valuable cargo or assets. This gives us full control of the shipment and allows us to provide shippers with end-to-end tracking. It also allows us to intervene early if we notice something is going wrong. We’re software engineers that became friends years ago at McKinsey. Kyle is an expert in Time-Critical Logistics, having led strategy at a leader in the space. Aaron is an expert at designing and implementing AI systems to handle complex coordination. We were shipping code together on nights and weekends for years before chrt; now we’re also shipping freight.

Lumari is the world's first AI-powered procurement automation platform purpose-built for direct materials and supply chain execution. Backed by Y Combinator, Lumari is a well-funded startup that deploys 100s of always-on AI agents that run sourcing workflows, manage RFQs, expedite purchase orders, and coordinate supplier communication end-to-end -- compressing cycle times and giving teams full visibility into active orders, RFQs, and supplier performance. Founded by engineers from Google, Tesla, Amazon, and Stripe who have built and scaled supply chain systems serving millions of users. Built to operate directly on top of existing tools and ERP systems, Lumari helps procurement teams move faster, eliminate operational bottlenecks, and build more resilient supply chains. No rip-and-replace, no supplier onboarding. Lumari handles the manual chase: quote follow-ups, PO confirmations, delivery status updates, and risk escalation. Lumari helps companies from Fortune 500s to fast-growing startups automate work from sourcing to delivery, streamline supplier communication and order management, and bring full visibility to their procurement operations. To learn more check out https://lumari.ai/

We're building an AI powered platform for engineers that are building new robots and machines. We allow users to invent and modify machine designs in a matter of minutes, not years. Ayna and Andy, the co-founders, met during their time at Harvard and started this in 2024 as their programs were wrapping up. We're commercializing 10+ years research done by our team at Harvard and MIT on this space. Our team wrote the very first papers on applying GenAI and optimization algorithms to compose robots from parts and applying computational design to fine tune machine designs. We're bringing in our deep knowledge of modifying equipment and integrating it into factories keenly understanding what makes hardware hard. We take in parts under consideration, constraints and tasks at hand and our algorithm formulates and fine tunes from 100s of possible design options. All in a few clicks, so engineers can push hardware to market faster and companies can benefit from the inventions being done by their R&D teams. We already have two paying customers in the OEM and system integrator spaces. We are venture backed and supported by a GBP 2.5MM grant by ARIA, the UK Government's invention agency.

For the first time in decades, fast, flexible domestic production can be economically superior. We’re rebuilding America’s productive edge through low-volume, high-mix manufacturing, helping hard-tech teams prototype faster, launch sooner, and build more here. If you want to restore American productive power and ship real hardware, reach out. jakob@foundation-industries.com

We build robots for physical AI. Meet Axol - A dual-arm robot designed for real-world tasks using AI.

GroundControl builds mission-critical software for manufacturers in highly-regulated industries (aerospace, defense, medical) Our core product automates lengthy, complex, and regulated quality documentation in aerospace manufacturing. As an example, the Boeing 777 is made up of over 3 million parts sourced from manufacturers around the world. These manufacturers must complete quality documentation for every part on this aircraft (machined parts, printed circuit boards, wire harnesses, assemblies, and more). GroundControl helps manufacturers complete this required documentation accurately, in minutes instead of days.

We capture and structure real factory workflows at scale by combining first-person industrial video with SOP-level process knowledge. This enables robotics and AI labs to train on real production data, not just controlled lab environments.

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.

Optifye.ai does AI performance monitoring for factory workers We place cameras in factories and use vision AI to tell supervisors who's working and who's not in real time. The shop floor has historically been a black box. With Optifye, manufacturing companies can now accurately measure worker output and boost efficiency!

We are making reusable satellites for zero-g manufacturing & Hypersonic Technology Development. Our first orbital recovery mission is set to launch in Q4 2026.

We help companies get custom PCBs built without having to manage multiple vendors themselves. We review or create PCB designs, find the right manufacturer, coordinate production, inspect and test every board, handle any manufacturing issues, and deliver the finished boards directly to your office. Our goal is to reduce manufacturing errors, shorten iteration cycles, and get your boards to you as quickly as possible without compromising on quality.

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.

Loombotic is automating wire harness manufacturing.

At Tiny, we’re building a new kind of ERP system for factories where AI agents automate repetitive workflows. Made for the four million factories still primarily relying on Excel. LLMs now unlock their troves of siloed unstructured data. We see a massive opportunity to build a compound startup and, beyond that, tap into network effects to unlock just-in-time manufacturing across entire supply chains.

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 it faster and easier to get custom parts manufactured in America. Submit one RFQ and Vendra turns your technical requirements into custom manufactured parts - routing work through qualified US suppliers, gathering competitive quotes, and managing production through delivery. We're ITAR registered and manufacture parts for American aerospace and defense leaders. Customers include Anduril, Mach Industries, Relativity Space, Castelion, and Planet Labs. Submit an RFQ at www.vendra.io to get started today!

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

Distributors & Manufacturers use Soff to grow revenue through Soff's sales agents that process quotes, orders and handles all communication with customers, co-workers & suppliers.

Building out new LNG plants, HVAC systems, or semiconductor processes rely on hundreds of iterations of feasibility testing (through simulation or real-world lab tests) where different designs (combinations of equipment) and parameters are validated. The parameters are often locked in PDFs (datasheets, wiring diagrams, PFDs/P&IDs) which take thousands of hours to convert into CSVs / JSONs, and the simulators don't have an easy API to work with. Outerport bridges the gap by finding documents from PLMs, extracting structured data from drawings, building a knowledge graph over them, and building autonomous AI agents that can fully automate this R&D process by running simulations and performing design checks.