Industrials Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) in Los Angeles 2026

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.

The Moon will become the next Silicon Valley as data centers move to space. Already, rockets cannot keep up with launch demand. We make silicon from raw materials already present on the Moon, so that power in space can be made in space. Silicon on the Moon is how to ascend the Kardashev scale.

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.

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.

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

Hop Aero is building rocket cargo vehicles that deliver to contested environments hundreds of miles away in minutes. Our rockets fly point-to-point into the most austere locations at hypersonic speeds. Hop Aero's goal is to provide the U.S. and allies the asymmetric advantage that deters a future major conflict.

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.

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?

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.

Icarus is building the modern-day U-2 spy plane. Our autonomous solar aircraft fly at 60,000 feet for weeks at a time, eventually months and years, above weather and below satellites. They deliver persistent intelligence and connectivity for the military at a fraction of the cost of existing systems. The stratosphere is the forgotten frontier.

Wardstone builds a low-cost, modular interceptor platform for air and missile defense. Our platform enables the warfighter to right sizes their interceptors against the threat. This allows us to defeat air-breathing and ballistic missile threats at a fraction of the cost of exquisite interceptors, adding affordable magazine depth to existing air defense systems.

Splash is developing the next generation of autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) to provide National Security and defend critical assets such as oil rigs and shipping terminals. Our long-term vision is to make traditional naval vessels obsolete by creating a fleet of low-cost and versatile boats which will be able to dominate the seas. Our expertise in mass manufacturing, engineering and quickly scaling operations will make this vision a reality.

Orbital Operations is developing a high thrust, reusable space vehicle for satellite defense. We protect critical satellites, like GPS and Military communication satellites, from adversarial threats, like China and Russia. Our vehicle will use the exact same propulsion systems that launch vehicles have used for decades by implementing a cryogenic management system. This will give us over 100x the thrust or current in-space propulsion. Ross and I have over 15 years of combined aerospace experience across NASA, Aerojet Rocketdyne, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Relativity Space. We’ve worked side by side for more than 3.5 years developing propulsion systems, turbomachinery, and building our own respective engineering teams. We are currently working on the first demo of our unique cryo management system and intend to launch an operational vehicle by 2027.

Yondu is creating the robotic workforce of the future starting with logistics automation. We're deploying humanoid robots in the first flexible, drop-in picking automation solution designed for 3PLs.

CoAsync by Cognitio Labs is the AI back office for product quality compliance teams. We help mission-critical food manufacturers automate repetitive, document-intensive workflows. We started with Certificates of Analysis (COAs), one of the many workflows quality teams manage before products can ship. Today, this work is still performed manually across PDFs, emails, spreadsheets, and disconnected ERP systems. Other documents we help quality teams respond to 24x7 include supplier audit questionnaires, production schedules, lab reports & changes in product specifications and quality records. CoAsync automates the workflow by: Reading supplier documents Extracting laboratory data Validating product specifications Applying compliance requirements Drafting compliant COAs Organizing audit-ready documentation Results from one of our initial deployments with a mid-market food processor: 85% less QA administrative work 4× more COAs processed per shift 1-2 hours saved per document New product onboarding in under one day COAs are just the beginning. Our vision is to build the AI back office for product quality and compliance across regulated industries by automating the many document-intensive workflows manufacturers manage every day. Backed by Y Combinator and leading investors. Founder Diva Avaya Sharma has presented example AI workflows for product quality and compliance through the World Economic Forum Centre for Advanced Manufacturing and Supply Chains' SmartStart initiative and at the International Telecommunication Union's AI for Good Global Summit, organized in partnership with the United Nations. Know a company shipping food & product urgently? Help them get started with their own document workflows at https://cognitioiq.com

Founded in 2022, Atmeto was started as a place to develop and apply machine learning to solve the world's biggest problem—climate change. Our current priority is getting the grid to run on 100% clean energy, which is currently limited by battery storage (specifically, the algorithms that control them). We're redefining these algorithms to unlock gigawatts of untapped energy storage capacity, enabling the grid to run on more clean energy from wind and solar.

Airhart is making airplanes anyone can fly. Our semi-autonomous tech will enable 10x more people to fly their own planes and make flying to Tahoe as easy as driving to the grocery store

1.2B lbs of fish are caught everyday yet as little as 1 in 3 fish make it to a plate — most of this waste arises because fish are suffocated on boats or electrocuted on farms. Suffocation and inaccurate electrocution create stress and so acidify meat, damage quality and significantly reduce shelf-life. Artisanal techniques in high-end sushi multiply shelf-life and taste but, because of the variation in fish, are difficult to perform in a mechanical fashion. Shinkei automates traditional techniques using robotics to provide long-lasting and delicious fish for farmers and harvesters at scale.

AstroForge is an asteroid mining company. Instead of bringing back the entire asteroid, we break it up, refine, and return only what’s valuable.

Impossible mining is building underwater robotics vehicles which collect battery metals from the seabed without harming the environment. We have $500M+ in off-take LoI’s and have signed a partnership with a global offshore logistics company which holds a seabed mining exploration permit. We have also built the 1st PoC underwater robotic arm. Polymetallic nodules are rocks which are rich in critical battery metals. Specially nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper. These metals are the the most expensive part of EVs.

Odys Aviation (formerly Craft Aero) builds vertical take-off and landing aircraft for major airlines. We cut travel time in half on the world’s busiest routes by using city helipads and local airports. The company founders are electric propulsion and automotive manufacturing experts who have spent their careers electrifying transportation systems at Virgin Hyperloop, GoogleX, Volvo, and Fisker Automotive. We’ve won two USAF Agility Prime contracts, have pre-orders and options for more than 1,000 aircraft.

Turion Space is building spacecraft to move things around in space and image space objects when they’re not, and focused on developing the dual-use technology required to ensure a sustainable future in space. They aim to build a strong foundation selling space domain awareness imagery data while advancing their technology towards an affordable solution for orbital debris removal and eventually asteroid mining. The founding team originates from SpaceX, and after going through the Y-combinator accelerator in summer 2021 went on to raise a $6.2M seed round and is launching their first DROID satellite in early 2023.

With five issued patents covering our core business lines, and more than a dozen additional patents pending this year and more than $5M in revenue, TransAstra is developing the technologies that will drive the rapidly expanding space economy. Our breakthrough Omnivore propulsion system can propel spacecraft, including our Worker Bee commercial OTV with water or virtually any other fluid as a propellant using only concentrated sunlight as a power source. Omnivore is faster, cheaper, and more practical than electric propulsion while being substantially less expensive, safer, and more operationally flexible than legacy chemical propulsion systems. Our Sutter Telescope System can identify and locate resource-rich asteroids and orbital debris that existing technologies can’t find and works synergistically with our Worker Bee OTV for orbital logistics. For government customers, Sutter can identify dark fast-moving objects between Earth and the Moon which currently evade detection, a critical issue for national defense and a key need of the Space Force. We are already using Sutter in ground-based observatories and will begin commercial sales of Sutter SDA data next month having tracked dozens of faint moving objects in space already. Once launched into space, Sutter will be 300,000 times more cost effective than any other known telescope design and will revolutionize sense making in space.

Heart makes electric airplanes.

Our focus is on developing the smallest, fastest heavy lift optionally piloted VTOL aircraft. Our aircraft can be operated in urban environments with no risk of rotor strikes - we don't use rotor systems! Ship anything from downtown LA to downtown San Diego in 20 mins!

At Nuvola, we're commercializing SafeCoat, a spray-on separator that is directly deposited onto electrodes, removing the need for conventional separator films and the massive infrastructure to build them. SafeCoat has been piloted with top-tier battery and automotive manufacturers and is ready for commercial deployment. Industry leaders are drawn to its impact: it reduces fire risk by 99%, cuts manufacturing scrap by 70%, and saves $350M per 40GWh factory. Our capital-light model requires just $8M in CAPEX to reach profitability in 2027.

Prime Lightworks Inc. manufactures electric propulsion systems for space satellites.Their goal is to engineer new possibilities in space while drastically reducing cost and waste.

Relativity is building humanity’s multiplanetary future. We invented a new approach to design, build, and fly our own rockets, starting with Terran 1 – the world’s first entirely 3D printed rocket, and Terran R, our next generation medium-heavy lift reusable launch vehicle. As a vertically integrated technology platform, Relativity is at the forefront of an inevitable shift toward software-defined manufacturing. By fusing 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and autonomous robotics, we are pioneering the factory of the future. Disrupting 60 years of aerospace, Relativity offers a radically simplified supply chain, building a rocket with fewer parts and faster iteration. We believe in a future where interplanetary life fundamentally expands the possibilities for human experience. Our long-term vision is to upgrade humanity’s industrial base on Earth and on Mars.

PickTrace is a fast growing software company that provides workforce and harvest management solutions for large-scale farms. Founded by brothers Austin and Harrison Steed, PickTrace is building the farm management system of the future. PickTrace builds powerful software products that help agriculture companies thrive. Our workforce and harvest management software helps growers gain insight into their operations and improve their operational efficiency. Everything that we do is based on the conviction that we succeed when our customers build a more efficient, compliant, and profitable operation.

At Zeitview, our goal is to accelerate the transition to renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure. We do this by combining advanced inspection software with the ability to capture visual data in more than 60 countries. This allows us to deliver safer, faster, lower-cost inspections of energy and infrastructure assets with a high degree of accuracy and repeatability. We use artificial intelligence and machine learning to ingest and analyze vast amounts of visual data to provide objective insights that our customers can act on immediately.

Glow Energy is a mission-driven company dedicated to making the built environment more sustainable. Our software empowers rental property owners to transform their buildings into Virtual Power Plants that drive sustainability and financial benefits for tenants, property owners, and clean energy infrastructure developers.

Talyn is making long-range electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for cargo. We get fixed-wing performance with VTOL capability by making an electric fixed wing aircraft that is caught mid-air with a custom winged drone, enabling it to take-off and land vertically.