Robotics Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2024

Bear Flag Robotics is developing autonomous driving technology for farm tractors. By equipping tractors and implements with technology, Bear Flag allows growers to automate and optimize many of their most common tasks. This addresses the farm labor shortage while removing workers from hazardous conditions. Additionally, Bear Flag provides growers with analytics that help them garner actionable insights about their crops and operations.

Gecko Robotics is the pioneer of AI + Robotics [AIR technology], transforming how the world builds, operates, and maintains its most critical infrastructure for a more reliable and sustainable future. Using fixed sensors and robots that climb, crawl, swim, and fly, we combine first-order data layers with the predictive power of AI into a single source of truth for the physical world. Cantilever™ is our operating platform, powered by AIR technology, that empowers teams to achieve operational excellence through actionable data for immediate and long-term planning.

Mighty Buildings is an innovative construction technology company based in Oakland, CA creating beautiful, sustainable, and high-quality homes using 3d-printing, robotics, and automation. Their mission is to have a positive impact on the environment, local communities, and the housing crisis through their sustainable approach. Mighty Buildings' technology has the potential to unlock the needed productivity for large scale construction alongside the opportunity for reduced emissions, leading to a more sustainable product and future. Mighty Buildings was founded by a team of physicists and robotics engineers with extensive experience solving hard R&D problems and building successful engineering firms. They started by inventing a new material that is a 3D printing tech that enabled printing of an entire building, not just walls, in a single cycle. Unlike concrete, Mighty Buildings’ material is lighter, can be uniquely treated (trimmed and cut) by robotic arms, and features high thermal insulation properties. This allows them to produce prefab housing with up to 80% of operations automated. Mighty Buildings has a near-zero waste production process, preventing 1,100 - 2,000 kg of CO2 emission per 3D-printed home. They are committed to achieving Net-Zero by 2028 - making the company 22 years ahead of the construction industry. The company is certified under California's Factory Built Housing program to build units using 3D-printing, but they are also the first company to achieve certification under the UL 3401 standard for evaluating building structures and assemblies.

Nextera Robotics is an AI-native Robotics and Industrial Automation company founded at MIT.

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.

Iron Ox is redesigning agriculture to confront its staggering environmental impacts and adapting farming to meet our future needs by making it a precise science that lets plants reach their full potential.

Today, biologists spend too much time pipetting by hand. We think biologists should have robots to do pipetting for them. People doing science should be free of tedious benchwork and repetitive stress injuries. They should be able to spend their time designing experiments and analyzing data. That's why we started Opentrons. We make robots for biologists. Our mission is to provide the scientific community with a common platform to easily share protocols and reproduce each other's results. Our robots automate experiments that would otherwise be done by hand, allowing our community to spend more time pursuing answers to some of the 21st century’s most important questions.

The traditional manufacturing process for individualized drugs is extremely slow and expensive, because it is based on manual labor. At Multiply Labs, we believe that robotics is the only way to truly scale the production of individualized drugs - finally providing these life-saving therapies to the millions of patients who need them. We develop cloud-controlled modular robotic systems that manufacture individualized drugs, and we deploy these systems in the facilities of our pharma customers. This is pharma robotics as a service: we sell the robotic production capacity that our customers need to scale their next-gen individualized drugs.

We're building humanoid robots to do most of what you find boring or tedious. We have an open-source design which we are releasing to the public, which is capable of walking, talking and manipulating objects.

We amplify worker produtivity by10X. Restaurants and food retail businesses require high volume and consistency, yet many business owners struggle to achieve this. Employees also dislike working in repetitive and labor-intensive environments, where even a slight mistake can lead to customer complaints. This results in high turnover rates in the restaurant industry. Our goal is to let robots and machines handle the boring, laborious tasks so that humans can focus on engaging with customers and collecting product feedback.

Orangewood Labs makes the world's most affordable AI-powered industrial robotic arms for small businesses! Our robots can be programmed by just using natural language prompts and cost a fraction of human labor.

Polymath is building a general autonomy stack for cautious vehicles. Our software allows any industrial vehicle - whether it's a tractor in a field or a bulldozer in a mine, drive itself. We bundle together AI, ML, Controls, ROS, Safety and best-in-class deployment practices to enable our customers to tell automated vehicles to do via a REST API. We're on more robots than we have engineers, are seeing our revenue (and robotic fleet) grow rapidly, and are looking for folks who want to help automate the world.

At Lucid, we are a B2B robotics provider for dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs, starting with the cleaning industry, which has a 200% annual turnover rate. Our primary product is a drone that can clean anything from windows to roofs to stadium domes to industrial tanks. Our drones can clean up to 8x faster. Due to customer demand, we also launched a ground-based pressure-washing robot to complement our cleaning drone. We support customers around the country who use our robots every day to clean properties with great safety and efficiency. We engineer, manufacture, and support our technology from a 20,000 sqft headquarters in Charlotte, NC.

Charge Robotics is building robots that automate the most labor-intensive parts of solar construction. Solar has rapidly become the cheapest form of power generation in many regions. Demand has skyrocketed, and now the primary barrier to getting it installed is labor logistics and bandwidth. Our robots remove the labor bottleneck, allowing construction companies to meet the rising demand for solar, and enabling the world to switch to renewables faster.

Volta Labs is a genomics applications company that has developed a cutting-edge digital fluidics platform to maximize performance and scalability of sample preparation in genomics while providing unparalleled consistency. Volta is transforming the way biological research and analyses are performed, allowing scientists to focus on what they do best -- pushing the boundaries of biology. As a collective of scientists and builders working at the intersection of engineering and biology, we imagine a world where extracting vital information from biological samples is as simple as pressing a button. That's our vision, and we're turning it into reality. Our HQ is in Boston’s Seaport, where we develop and manufacture our technology. We believe in cross-functional collaboration and continuous learning – whether your interest is in biology, MechEng, CompEng, or simply joining a fast-growing startup striving to make the world a better place, we'd love to welcome you to our team. Check out some of our blog posts to learn more about work life at Volta.

BotBuilt is creating flexible robotic systems to solve the housing crisis. Our cutting-edge software and cost-efficient hardware allow us to improve the world by providing beautiful construction, safer job sites, and sustainable building techniques. The $600 billion residential construction industry is facing a massive labor shortage. Our robotic systems leverage the latest in rapid prototyping, artificial intelligence, and computer vision. By taking on some of the hardest technical challenges on earth, BotBuilt is ready to help solve one of society’s biggest problems.

Ultra builds AI-powered robots that automate the dull, repetitive labor still done by people in American warehouses. We’re starting with e-commerce order packaging in fulfillment centers — where a worker puts items in a box, seals it, and labels it. Traditional automation isn't working for warehouses because it's costly, rigid, and often underutilized. Ultra’s robots are different: they’re easy to deploy, adaptable, and powered by AI that’s trained through examples.

Stealth-mode, rapidly scaling, venture-backed startup at the vanguard of automated robotic surgery revolution -- just closed our Series A round. We are improving access to dental care in underserved populations by combining novel imaging technology with AI and surgical robotics to automate surgery in the $452B dental industry. We are bringing a new imaging modality to dentistry which can see inside teeth and below the gingiva all without the need for x-rays. AI is used to diagnose decay and plan treatment. Automated robotics reduces the time for surgery down to one minute, reducing patient discomfort and saving time and reducing cost for the dentist. YC 2020, Winner of the Forsyth DenTech 2021 CareCaptial award

Miru provides developers with the infrastructure to easily deploy updates over-the-air to fleets of robots and IoT devices by simply pushing new changes to GitHub.

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

Saphira is the easiest way for hardware products to get safety certified and reach market faster, such as industrial robots and heavy machinery.

CircuitHub is on a mission to fix rapid electronics prototyping. We are the first automated electronics factory built around a modern tech stack. We help hardware companies producing self-driving cars, satellites, 3D printers, robotics, & more to rapidly prototype electronics and get to market faster.

Spaceium builds fully automated space stations to refuel and repair spacecraft. We have secured $86.1 million in binding commercial contracts and have an additional $230 million in the pipeline. Additionally, we have 1 billion dollars in letters of intent. We have successfully tested our hardware, which will launch to space next year. Our fully automated space stations will efficiently store and transfer both cryogenic (extremely cold) and non-cryogenic fuels with zero loss during storage and transfer. And they can transfer fuel seamlessly to any spacecraft design using our proprietary modular robotic arm. Our customers include launch vehicles, orbital transfer vehicles, moon landers, and spacecraft that benefit from increased payload capacity and extended travel capabilities. Our long-term vision is to build service hubs along the space superhighway to connect Earth to Moon and Mars and help humanity to become multi multi-planetary species

Flux Auto is building autonomous mobility technology to fully automate the movement and operation of vehicles in controlled spaces. Using Flux's solutions customers can reduce their dependency on human drivers, while also increasing productivity and reducing operating costs. Flux is currently deploying in warehouses, farms and mines.

Double Robotics is the creator of Double, the world’s leading telepresence robot. We help telecommuters feel more connected to their colleagues by giving them a physical presence wherever they need to be. Having your own Double in the office means you can be free to roam around anywhere without scheduling a call or meeting. Double takes everything you love about video calls on an iPad and places that on a mobile base that puts the remote worker in control. By combining cutting edge technology with an intuitive, elegant design, Double is the ultimate tool for telecommuters. Our mission is to connect the world through remote experiences. http://www.doublerobotics.com info@doublerobotics.com

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.

teaBOT offers an amenity-as-a-services to offices and showrooms. Your staff and clients will love coming to your space and sharing their custom-made tea blend with colleagues and guests! Offices like Google, HubSpot, and McKinsey use teaBOT as a recruiting and retention tool to have their teams love coming into the office! Details at www.teabot.com

May Mobility is a leader in autonomous vehicle technology development and deployment. With more than 300,000 autonomous rides to date, May Mobility is committed to delivering safe, efficient and sustainable shuttle solutions designed to complement today’s public transportation options. The company’s ultimate goal is to realize a world where self-driving systems make transportation more accessible and reliable, the roads safer, and encourage better land use in order to foster more green, vibrant, and livable spaces.

Archform is teeth aligner software startup that lets orthodontists create, design and 3D print aligners within their own offices. The idea is to provide orthodontists with a way to better compete against some direct-to-consumer teeth aligner startups and cut down on the cost of Invisalign.

We have created a robotic system for wind turbine blade maintenance. It can perform tasks such as lightning conductivity testing, high-resolution inspection, drainage hole cleaning, cleaning, painting and leading-edge repair.

Our software allows drones to fly indoors and collect analytics, helping warehouses automate inventory collection.

Ember Robotics is building the hardware observability layer for autonomous robots, starting with camera diagnostic tools. We worked on optimizing camera performance at Tesla Autopilot and now we're building software that takes mitigating camera failures from hours to minutes.

Founded in 2012, Transcriptic has developed the first robotic cloud lab platform for on-demand life science research. It’s powered by the Transcriptic Common Lab Environment (TCLE) a scalable, digital infrastructure that integrates laboratory processes, instruments and IoT technologies into a single user interface. Researchers can carry out scalable, reproducible and rapid experimentation from anywhere in the world. Top ten pharmaceutical companies, as well as emerging biotech companies, are using the platform to gain more reproducibility and flexibility in the design and control of their experiments. By leveraging cloud-based technologies, users can access the power of a fully automated laboratory – whether in their own labs through an on-premise deployment of TCLE or through Transcriptic’s Bioassays services – all through a simple web-based interface. Transcriptic is transforming drug discovery and synthetic biology research by helping scientists focus on accelerating discoveries instead of labor-intensive bench work.

Cerulion is an open source operating system for robots built by 2 MIT robotics PhDs. Companies like Amazon Robotics and Boston Dynamics AI Institute are using us to develop faster and ship more reliable robots than with ROS. With up to 1000x improvements in communications performance over state of the art, Cerulion is enabling the next generation of embodied AI.

Sensei helps robotics companies scale and outsource their training data collection. Our hardware platform enables the collection of human-demonstration data at a tenth of the cost and twice the speed of current teleop approaches. Our software platform acts like Scale AI for robotics data: a large network of paid human operators use our low-cost collection platform to fulfill data-generation requests.

Faction Technology, Inc. is a leader in developing right-sized driverless vehicle fleets. As pioneers in supervised autonomous mobility, Faction is dedicated to creating innovative solutions that redefine the future of transportation. With a commitment to sustainability, safety, and technological excellence, Faction is driving the evolution of autonomous mobility for a smarter, more connected world. Learn more at www.faction.us.

We help truckers cut delivery times, increasing productivity and adding much needed capacity to the freight industry. We do this by building autonomy software that tag-teams with human drivers. Conventional trucks drive ~120K miles/ year. Trucks with our tech can hit more than 190K miles/ year.

250M lbs of plastic is wasted annually in US manufacturing. Bucket Robotics is making defect detection faster and easier to deploy to prevent that. Our products are designed to be easy to integrate into existing automation and technology stacks, flexible enough to bring retooling costs down, and reliable enough to make you forget that it's a robot. Matt and Steph are leveraging their experience from the self-driving industry, where we've integrated high-performance computing and quality sensing into complex, noise-filled environments. We focus on robust hardware and user-friendly software for a new generation of end-users, ensuring ease of use and rapid deployment. Secure and efficient handling of user data can make customers in the manufacturing space nervous to invest in sensing — our team's extensive experience handling self-driving car data in these regulated environments positions us uniquely to tackle these challenges. Companies like Keyence, National Instruments, and FLIR offer either outdated hardware or prohibitively expensive systems, along with software that hasn’t evolved to meet modern user needs. US manufacturing is undergoing a significant transformation, with construction spending hitting a record annualized pace of over $200 billion. The need for a more reliable supply chain has seen over $700 billion in manufacturing megaprojects across North America since 2021, and this growth requires heavy automation. Bucket Robotics is at the forefront of this shift, offering a scalable, cost-effective solution that enhances automation and positions manufacturers closer to their end customers.

Teleo converts heavy equipment, like dozers, trucks, and loaders, into supervised autonomous robots. This enables a single operator to remotely operate multiple machines while sitting at a remote control center, unlocking productivity gains for the General Contractor.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY5zqKRy8A8

Pivot Robotics makes AI software for robotic arms that helps manufacturers automate their most labor intensive tasks. We are starting out with the dangerous task of metal grinding and are currently deploying our software on 10+ robots in a cast-iron foundry.

Innate is developing teachable home robots. Our robots navigate, perform physical tasks, interact and understand the world on their own, and users can teach entirely new behaviors quickly to get the help they need from the robots Our first product, Maurice, is tailored for builders of Silicon Valley to quickly develop on top of and play with the state of the art in Embodied AGI.

Four Growers was founded to provide healthy, affordable, local produce by reducing the production costs of greenhouse growers through robotics technology. We are positioning ourselves to be the automated solutions provider for greenhouse crop management. We are working closely with various greenhouse growers to develop a tomato harvesting robot. Our technology relies on two layers of protection, patents filed protecting the physical design of the robot and a proprietary algorithm that controls the robot's decision making. Our solution is not only capable of harvesting the tomatoes, but also of performing a quality check and packaging.

It takes 5 years for pharma to develop long lasting drug injections for chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes. Persist uses AI-driven automation to reduce formulation development time down to 2 years, a ~50% reduction.

Reshape Biotech builds lab robots that automate the everyday tasks of microbiologists, from filling plates to analyzing images. Other companies try to sell “one lab robot that does everything”. But those robots become so complicated that they sit unused on the shelf. We build one robot for each function, which makes them easy to use.

We're building autonomous sheet metal factories. Sheet metal is a large ($200b+ in the US) industry heavily reliant on human labor. If you're building something in the real world, it's almost a certainty that you will use sheet metal in some capacity. It's used in automotive manufacturing, aerospace, consumer goods, defense, and many more verticals. The industry mostly operates the same way it has for the last 50+ years. We're making a 10x better experience for people to get sheet metal parts manufactured. We are vertically integrated and build everything from our quoting engine to the physical automation inside of our factory. Factories should own automation as a core in-house skill. Today we sell laser cut and bent sheet metal parts. Users can get instant quotes through our website (and eventually through integrations build on top of our API). We build custom internal software to command and control the operations of the factory. Right now we are actively working on fully automating the production of laser cut parts including scheduling, material movement, laser configuration, etc. Orders will be able to come in, and our software will control the factory and output parts ready to ship.

Buoyant Aero builds unmanned blimps that move middle-mile air freight at half the cost of a small plane. We're two MIT hardware engineers who've been friends for almost a decade, and we've built satellites and antennas at Astranis, Wafer, and OneWeb. So far, we’ve built and flown four airships - our most recent is 20 feet long and capable of speeds up to 35 miles per hour. We’ve also closed $5 million in LOIs and have two pilot programs planned. We're starting by improving air cargo in remote regions like Alaska and northern Canada, and will expand to move less-than-truckload shipments in low density parts of the world.

Simplex creates on-demand vision datasets rendered from 3D scenes to train AI models. We can create data for any scenario, saving companies millions of hours they’d otherwise spend collecting and labeling real data.

We bring Tesla autonomous manufacturing to every automaker and other producers. At Tesla, we were the core autonomous factory team and we’re now building the smart cameras and robotic guidance tools that provided the main advantages at Tesla

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.

We design, develop and manufacture sustainable battery solutions.

We make tools for state-of-the-art 3D VR video, which fix motion sickness for a more comfortable and immersive experience. Our team's experience includes building VR cameras at Facebook, and robot perception systems at Lyft and Google X.

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.

Seaflight Technologies has developed a new form of Aerodynamic Flow Control for electrified aircraft that increases range and payload by 30%. That's the same performance improvement you'd get from hopping in a DeLorean to 2035 and coming back with batteries from the future. But it's available today - our tech has been derisked by testing supported by the National Science Foundation, the US Air Force, and the Australian Government. Our first product is a simple fixed-wing large cargo drone that is efficient enough to remove the "green penalty" currently associated with electric aviation. That's a step change from today's conventional platforms. First generation electric aircraft are heavy, expensive, complicated, and limited in terms of range and payload. In the entire history of aviation, that's never been a winning formula. When everyone already has access to the same batteries, materials, and motors, what really makes the difference? The answer is revolutionary aerodynamics, but in a form factor that suits today's operations and manufacturing. Beyond our own drone product line, we have partners across Aerospace helping incorporate our tech into their products. In the future, if you want to have the most efficient and cost-effective flying machine of any description, you'll need Seaflight's Flow Control inside.

Hedgehog builds robotic mushroom farms. Our robots eliminate labor and our AI optimizes grow conditions to increase yield. We’ll soon grow mushrooms and fungi for <1/3rd the cost of leading growers. Fungi may address our food system’s biggest problems: they transform agricultural waste into protein-rich foods with near-zero environmental impact. Hedgehog’s technology is unleashing fungi as our next major food source.

We are building self-driving shuttles for transportation within campuses like universities, resorts, airports, and retirement communities. Website: www.auro.ai

We build automated robots for concrete floor construction. One person with our robots does the work of 6 construction workers.