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.

Micora is a next-generation robotic energy developer that compresses the timeline from initial design to power generation from years to weeks. Our vertically integrated platform combines purpose-built robotic hardware with proprietary modular energy systems, enabling critical power infrastructure to be designed, manufactured, and deployed at unprecedented speed. Traditional energy projects are slow, costly, and built around processes that were never designed for today’s rapidly growing power demands. Micora is rebuilding energy development from the ground up; transforming what has historically been a bespoke, multi-year construction process into a repeatable and scalable manufacturing system. As demand from data centers, advanced manufacturing, and electrification strains existing power infrastructure, the ability to deploy new generation quickly is becoming increasingly valuable. Micora is building the infrastructure platform needed to deliver power wherever and whenever it is needed.

Deploy's core belief is that robots should be useful. Getting a generalist robot to do real work is fundamentally the same problem across industries. We build everything between the model and the task to bring generalist robots to the businesses that actually need them.

Shepherd Robotics builds general purpose robots for skilled physical work across AI infrastructure and advanced manufacturing. Our robots are powered by robot foundation models and use modular, flexible hardware designed to adapt to different environments and tasks. We train our systems on a combination of real world and simulation data so they can learn complex manipulation skills and generalize across workflows. We are starting with tasks such as data center construction and operations, cable and wire manufacturing, wire harness assembly, kitting, and factory packaging, where traditional automation struggles with variability, dexterity, and changing environments.

Every instance of intelligence occurring in nature is embodied. Scientific intelligence is no different. We are building general-purpose robotic experimentalists: systems that unite scientific reasoning and physical action to iterate toward discovery by observing, hypothesizing and experimenting.

Dreamscale Labs is building the fastest cloud inference platform for robotics. As complex physical AI models become difficult to fit on expensive on-robot GPUs, we let users offload inference to the cloud and serve them with real-time latency. So far, we've hit 40-50% lower latency than existing neoclouds.

Sinter is creating a faster and radically more affordable American plastics pipeline, helping iteration heavy hardware teams evolve from additive prototypes to production parts on week-scale timelines.

At Orca, we are focused on creating the future of spacecraft operations by moving control onto the vehicle. By allowing LLMs to control the satellite using deterministic tooling, we are able to achieve the same holistic, high-quality decisions on "what" to do to carry out a mission while maintaining the safety of systems that decide "how" to execute it.

Frontier is first to grow biological brains at scale, serving biological neural nets with substrate-level colocation of memory and compute, enabling highly cost effective training of large parameter count models. While academia has traditionally been limited to ~1M neurons in vitro, Frontier has built a pathway to scale to 100M+ neurons by circumventing traditional scaling challenges in biological culture, demonstrating this strategy's functionality by training a biological brain using this scaling primitive to play Frogger. Frontier is now growing exascale compute clusters to produce substrates capable of long-horizon language reasoning while operating at much higher sample efficiencies than traditional architectures, and collocating memory with compute to enable significantly larger parameter counts than would be tractable for training within traditional compute clusters.

At Talos, we are building better, more modern predictive maintenance for the power industry with a focus on large transformers. Our devices continuously monitor critical power equipment and detect problems early on using anomaly-detection models. For each fault, we provide detailed analyses of the problem, exactly where and why it happened, as well as next steps teams should take.

Ethos makes silicon on the Moon to power terawatt scale data centers. The Moon's surface is 21% silicon. We melt and electrolyze the lunar surface to make raw materials for solar panels. With solar panels made from the Moon, the constraint that limits data center scaling and everything else in space is gone.

Edgerun builds powered legs that double a soldier's range. Started this year. $100M+ in Ukrainian LOIs, requested by the most combat-experienced infantry on Earth. Our work is just beginning.

We build physical agent harnesses to enable AI to debug, validate, and ship functional hardware and software.

We are building the future of chip manufacturing. Chips are more advanced than ever, and the features inside them keep getting smaller. But the cleanroom infrastructure supporting their manufacture has not scaled at the same pace. Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and others spend billions building and operating massive cleanrooms, only to isolate their most advanced wafers from the surrounding facility as much as possible. We think that architecture is backwards. Instead of making the entire building cleaner, why not make the machinery itself as clean as possible? Talos is our proprietary tool-integrated purification system. It sits directly inside semiconductor equipment and continuously destroys airborne molecular contaminants before they reach the wafer. Instead of fighting contamination by constantly flooding tools with ultra-high-purity nitrogen, Talos keeps the environment inside the machine 10–100x cleaner, without the massive purge-gas bill. Talos is powerful on its own, but it is also the foundation for a much bigger vision: the Cleanpipe. The Aerogen Systems Cleanpipe is an ultra-clean interconnect infrastructure that protects wafers as they move from machine to machine across the fab. Rather than relying on a billion-dollar cleanroom to protect every cubic foot of factory space, Cleanpipe creates a controlled environment only where cleanliness actually matters: around the wafer. Talos cleans the tools. Cleanpipe connects them. Eventually, we delete the cleanroom and build more advanced chips, at greater scale, with radically less infrastructure. With cleanpipes connecting tools, chip fabs can exist anywhere.

We make mass-deployable radars for unmanned systems. Our first product is Archimedes, a radar seeker that finds and locks onto targets, enabling autonomous intercept on any drone. We have over $580M in LOIs for Archimedes, across some of the largest defense primes in Ukraine, the EU, and the Middle East. Seekers are the most critical and costly component in every autonomous interceptor. Developing a radar seeker takes a 200+ person team at Raytheon and hundreds of millions of dollars. Archimedes is 100x cheaper than existing radar seekers on the market - and is the first product to make it feasible to deploy radars on every drone.

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.

Meteoric is building drones that clear clouds over solar farms and ultimately weaken severe storms and hurricanes.

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.

Every serious robotics lab is bottlenecked on the same thing: demonstration data. The field has converged on egocentric video and hand pose as the substrate, and both are now cheap to collect at scale. What neither of them contains is force. A video of someone picking up an egg and a video of someone picking up a rock are nearly identical in pixel space and nearly identical in joint angles. They differ almost entirely in a quantity nobody is recording. Policies trained without it learn geometry and inherit no sense of touch. Hemlock closes that gap at the source. Our device, the Bracelet, is a wrist-worn surface EMG band that reads the electrical activity of the forearm muscles that actually drive the hand, which means it recovers contraction force directly rather than inferring it from motion. This distinction is the whole thesis: force cannot be reconstructed downstream of kinematics, because a hand squeezing hard isometrically and a hand resting can occupy the identical pose. Muscle signal is the only non-invasive channel that separates them.

Our first model, Atom 1, pre-trained on the internets video, and fine tuned for physics. It has been action conditioned, so you can simulate robot actions within it. This lets Robot Labs train their robots using GPUs instead of relying on human collected manual data that is slow and expensive. In unseen and hard to replicate environments, this is the only path to getting ANY training data.

Enact creates the physical environments to benchmark and hill climb robotics models on high-value tasks. We find where robots fail, and fix them with our in-house training loop.

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.

Marengo is an AI-native engineering firm designing data centers in half the time and half the cost. We have $4M in design partnerships with two of the world's largest developers ($XB). Marengo is backed by YC, Exor, Future Planet Capital, undisclosed $2B AUM family office, and other top-tier investors. Our team includes the former President & CEO of Saipem America ($3B+ P&L), former President of Exyte's Advanced Technology Facilities GBU ($6B+ P&L) and more.

VIM connects to the entire cell: PLCs, robots, CNC machines, sensors. When a cell faults, VIM finds the cause, stages the fix, and the operator approves with one click. When a part drifts, VIM catches it seconds after the cut, inside the machine, and recommends the correction. Recovery drops from 30 minutes to under two, saving more than $15,000 per fault in large factories.

Hebbian Robotics builds APIs for robotics data teams to verify data quality for model training. Our customers use us to build quality control pipelines in just a few lines of code, with custom models 10x faster and 8x cheaper than general foundation models. https://hebbianrobotics.com/ https://github.com/Hebbian-Robotics/hflow

Exosat is building thousands of low-cost communication satellites to provide a neutral, sovereign alternative to Starlink. By designing our satellites with zero ITAR/EAR-controlled content, we can leverage manufacturers anywhere in the world to produce our satellites at under a tenth of the cost and launch them from other nations to bypass capacity bottlenecks and access equatorial orbits. We're starting off by selling connectivity to device OEMs and network operators, but will eventually use the distributed compute across our constellation to run low-latency inference for robots and autonomous vehicles in remote and rural areas anywhere on the planet. We've already signed hundreds of millions in LOIs to work with operators across Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, booked our first satellite launch next year, and hold an 11,000 satellite filing with the ITU to build the largest comms network outside of the U.S. and China.

We are building robots that can work autonomously in existing wet labs. Unlike traditional lab automation, which requires dedicated equipment and fixed workflows, our robot moves between workstations, manipulates existing scientific equipment, transports lab materials, and executes experiments using the same lab infrastructure as a human technician. We make the robots easy to manage through natural interfaces like Slack, email, and phone. Our goal is to make deploying robots in wet labs as easy as onboarding a new employee, and to accelerate scientific research!

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.

IMPACT builds autonomous interceptor drones that ship in sealed containers. The box sits at the site it protects, data centers, power grids, airports, bases, with no crew on the pad. When sensors cue a hostile drone, an interceptor pierces its own frangible lid, launches, and rams the target, guided by onboard vision that keeps working when GPS is jammed. Legacy effectors cost $1M+ per shot against $30k threats; ours cost less than the threat and scale with the swarm, the same class of interceptor already downing Shahed drones over Ukraine. Sites subscribe to protection instead of buying missiles, hardware, reloads and monitoring included: Air Defense as a Service. 180M+ USD in signed letters of intent.

Lambda Robotics builds and deploys robots for the infrastructure powering frontier AI.

Kara is building diamond semiconductors. We begin with growing ultra-high purity diamond wafers for advanced hardware. Used in data centers, spacecrafts, RF systems, and quantum hardware, 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.

Grip is a robotics company building intelligent robotic systems for waste and recycling. We are starting with organic waste, where removing contaminants from messy, constantly changing streams remains difficult and highly manual. Our technology combines learning-based manipulation and custom hardware to identify and pick objects, learning from real-world operating data, including every successful and failed grasp, to become more reliable and adaptable over time. This helps waste operators reduce manual sorting, recover more valuable material, lower contamination, and deploy automation flexibly across facilities. Over time, Grip aims to expand beyond organics and build the intelligent manipulation layer for trash in general, making waste processing and the circular economy more efficient and scalable.

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.

We want to push machines to where humans cant go. Presidential early career award winning Duke Semiconductor ECE Faculty Tania Roy and Sanjeev Chauhan are building a frontier semiconductor research lab. Their focus is on solving physical AI challenges from the semiconductor device level and building products around the moat of impossible to copy innovation. Their first work is on a new vision sensor that can run neural network filters right in the camera pixels and only collect data that machines care about. As physical AI develops, machines needs to understand the world around them if they aim to interact with them.

We are building nuclear power delivery ships to power our floating compute barges at sea. Our systems are fully standalone, have better cooling, and avoid all the resource competition that leads to local community opposition. Our centralized manufacturing allows us to deploy anywhere on Earth, four times faster than on land.

Agency Tool Company ships software to robots in the field 20x faster than a Docker pull with ATC Deploy, sending only the bytes that changed and resuming when the network drops. Deployment tooling is the connection between the lab & the field that continually bottlenecks robotics scaling and lacks a strong robotics-native solution. Deploy is live today with 3 launch partners across ag, construction, and logistics robotics. Our second product, ATC Build, offers embedded-compute as a CI service so devs can run tests and validate their software on the actual target hardware. Build supports the Nvidia Jetson lineup, Raspberry Pi, and a number of other embedded platform targets. Jack Morrison and Davis Foster founded and sold Scythe Robotics after deploying hundreds of autonomous mowers across the country; Agency Tool Company is building the robotics deployment platform across hardware and software they wish they had. Learn more at https://agencytool.com

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.

Maingen builds simulations for industrial operations ($5 trillion slice of the US economy) so frontier labs can train models that actually run power plants, factories, and datacenters.

Proprio Robotics is building state-of-the-art physical intelligence to automate the entire data center lifecycle—from buildout to maintenance to decommissioning. There are currently 400,000 unstaffed data center technicians positions in the United States alone, which means the massive compute needs of AI are being bottlenecked by labor constraints. Proprio is solving this by building robots that do it instead, and is deploying data center maintenance robots starting Q1 2027.

The US Warehouse industry spends $75bn on labor each year. Yet, only 10% of US warehouses have any form of automation, because existing robotics are too expensive and hard to integrate. Manifold deploys autonomous robots that handle picking, loading / unloading, and palletizing — priced by pick. Integration in hours. No upfront costs. No retrofitting. No need to rebuild the operation around the robot. Our mission is to make it easy for any warehouse to adopt robotics.

At Hera, we build tools that help heavy engineering teams bring products to market up to 20× faster. Today, we work with manufacturers of data center ancillary equipment, renewable energy systems, robotics, heat exchangers, power plants and pressure vessels.

Operate any robot, anywhere in the world.

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

We’re building collaborative robotic crews for large-scale infrastructure projects, including solar farms and data centers. 002C: “002A, 5.3 mm left.” 002B: “002A, you’re running low. Next pallet is on the way.” 002C: “Am I clear to come in?” 002A: “Aligned. Panel released. You’re clear.” 002C: “Fastening.” 002B: “Next load arriving now.” This isn’t a human crew talking. It’s three robots building a utility-scale solar farm together. Our AI control system enables specialized robots to collaborate, learn reusable construction skills, like alignment, fastening, and manipulation, and transfer them across workflows, from solar farms to data centers. 🚧 🦺

Skymerse is building one AI system for airline flight operations: from planning and monitoring in the operations center to real-time support in the cockpit. It is developing specialized aeronautical models that understand the data, constraints, and procedures behind each flight, replacing fragmented tools and manual interpretation. Notamify, its first product, already serves airline customers and thousands pilots and aviation professionals.

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.

Earendil Robotics builds cUAS solutions for the modern warfighter, enabling effective air defence at the small-unit level. We deliver spotting, engaging, and destroying capabilities through advanced sensors, autonomous interceptors, and integrated systems. Our product lineup covers every stage of the kill chain, complemented by the Drone Warfare Academy that trains soldiers to eliminate enemy drone threats in contested environments. Backed by worldwide frontline combat experience, we equip units with combat-proven tools to counter evolving aerial threats.