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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Warehousing is a $500B industry in the US, and 90% of its operators already have security cameras installed. Yet fewer than 10% use them for anything beyond security. Meanwhile decision-makers sit in their offices all day frustrated with their inability to know what is actually happening on the ground, benchmarking operations across different sites, identifying bottlenecks, and holding managers on the ground accountable. Remy AI is the intelligence layer that plugs into your existing camera infrastructure to track the metrics that matter. We combine AI models, analytical dashboards, and hardware where required to deliver a turnkey solution that adapts to your infrastructure and specific needs. Recent projects - Trunk fill and dwell times: auto-measuring inbound and outbound trunk fill percentages and tracking how long trailers are sitting empty on a bay before loading or full before departure, helping tighten bay allocation and alerting managers when trailers have been sat for too long - Workforce productivity by zone: measuring hourly scan rates, headcount and hours logged in key areas, and wave completion times, giving managers an objective view of where teams are hitting targets and where performance is slipping - Advanced security detection: flagging segregation zone breaches, out-of-hours activity, unauthorized entries, and backlog build-up in designated areas, turning passive CCTV into an active loss-prevention layer Our privacy-first architecture guarantees anonymization, with end-to-end encryption in transit and at rest.

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.

OctaPulse uses AI vision to automate hatchery QA for fish farms, starting with broodstock phenotyping and juvenile deformity inspection. We cut inspection time from about 5 minutes to under 30 seconds per fish, with more than 90 percent accuracy, so farms advance only high quality fish and waste less feed and labor. Our goal is to bring automation across the entire fish production lifecycle for the $300B aquaculture industry. Aquaculture is the fastest growing food sector, and has already surpassed commercial fishing for production of seafood. Yet two of the most critical QA and QC steps in fish production are still done by hand: phenotyping and deformity inspection. These processes are slow, error prone, and despised by technicians but vital for the success of the farm, so much so that farms spend >$200K a year on trained technicians and geneticists to operate. We’ve built an AI vision platform for vertically integrated finfish farms that drops into existing workflows starting in the hatchery, uses off the shelf cameras, standardizes these QA steps, and creates a proprietary multi species dataset that becomes the brain for future autonomous aquafarms. Phenotyping is the start, but the platform is designed to be a drop in solution that can easily expand into feeding, health monitoring, and processing so we can solve production problems across the lifecycle. We signed a 6-figure paid pilot with the largest trout producer in the United States, are deploying into 2 more farms early 2026, and trained models above 90 percent accuracy while cutting inspection time from 5 minutes to under 30 seconds. Each deployment adds labeled images to our dataset and improves cross species generalization.

Voltair is building the world's first globally distributed network of autonomous drones for Earth observation. Power utilities are the perfect first customer. Aging infrastructure and extreme weather drive the need for millimeter-scale inspection data on the power grid. Utilities spend tens of billions of dollars every year just looking at their own equipment. Autonomous drone fleets will enable utilities to inspect 7 million miles of infrastructure more frequently, quickly, and accurately. Our long-range, weatherized flying robots work with charging pads installed directly on utility poles. Each new pad unlocks 1000 square miles of coverage. With a charging network deployed on the power grid, we can serve existing multi-billion dollar data markets in road, rail and telecom inspection at 10x lower prices while enabling entirely new applications in hyperlocal weather monitoring, forestry, construction, search & rescue, and insurance. We envision a future in which drone "instances" are requested on-demand through our platform, enabling any application builder to serve these critical markets without ever operating their own hardware.

AxionOrbital Space builds foundation models that enable continuous visibility through clouds and darkness. Legacy optical satellites are rendered useless 70% of the time by weather and night cycles, while Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) produces data that is unintelligible to humans and breaks standard vision pipelines. We solve this by translating raw radar backscatter into analysis-ready optical imagery in real-time. Our proprietary architecture uses deterministic one-step diffusion to transform complex radar signals into clear, photorealistic images. This enables persistent, 24/7 situational awareness for defense, commodities trading, and disaster response, guaranteeing visibility even when the sky is blocked.

HLabs is making an industrial supply chain for building robots in the USA including electronics and actuators, with a focus on in-house manufacturing. Robotics is going to be one of the largest industries the world has ever seen. Teams have to buy what they can from overseas and then build everything else in house just to get something to move. HLabs is producing a plug and play set of robotic primitives to accelerate the early development and then working with larger scale production robots for bespoke designs. Early customers span across household robotics, humanoids, robot arms, quadrupeds, and defense. Hlabs is founded by Paul, a second time YC founder who also participated in the W21 batch with Mystic. He ran Mystic as CEO for 6 years.

We provide defense companies with simulation infrastructure to train and validate autonomous systems.

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.

Forge Robotics is changing the way that metal parts are fabricated. We are enabling a future where our intelligent robotic system completes all steps needed to take raw metal stock and transform it into fully welded parts. Beginning with welding, we are building a robot-mounted vision system and AI feature detection that creates a real-time 3D map and tells the arm exactly where to go at every instant.

Zephyr Fusion is building the first in-orbit fusion power source: a megawatt-class reactor enabling large-scale industry in space, at a fraction of the cost of equivalent solar. Founded by former physicists from Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, Zephyr leverages decades of fusion research to deliver a compact magnetic confinement system designed to take advantage of the space environment.

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!

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

Cortex AI builds the world’s most diverse and large-scale real-world workplace robot & egocentric dataset — where the physical world becomes the next training and evaluation set for embodied AI. We power frontier labs developing robotics foundation models and general-purpose robots by providing the data they need: 1️⃣ Egocentric Data — real-workplace human video with hand/body pose, depth, and subtask labels. 2️⃣ Robot Data — trajectories collected from manipulators and humanoids in real industry settings. 3️⃣ Human-in-the-Loop Rollouts & Evals — real-world deployments with remote operators who recover robots when they fail, capturing data that feeds back into training and continuously improves models. Additionally, through the Cortex Marketplace, workplaces get paid to host data-collection and evaluation sessions, while labs access the in-the-wild data that truly matters. This draws on Lucas’s previous experience as co-founder of Carousell, a C2C marketplace that scaled to a $1B+ valuation.

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.

Wardstone is a space defense-tech company developing next-generation capabilities to protect the United States and its allies from missiles and other space-based threats. We design, build, and deploy satellites equipped with space-based interceptors to kinetically counter hypersonic and ballistic missiles.

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.

We build humanoid robots that do your chores at iPhone prices. Just like the millions of cars generating data for self-driving, we need millions of humanoids generating real-world data for general-purpose robotics. Humanoid companies today can only manufacture hundreds a year because motors are expensive and slow to assemble. We use artificial muscles. Each muscle is just a tube wrapped in braided fibre, and the whole robot is powered by a single pump — which means we can mass-produce humanoids by the millions. Our design is built for that scale from day one and is cheap enough to enter billions of homes.