Robotics Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2024

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 mission of Gecko Robotics is to improve the state of the world by helping the most important institutions ensure the availability, reliability and sustainability of critical infrastructure. Gecko's combination of wall-climbing robots, industry-leading sensors, and an AI-powered data platform give customers a unique window into the health of their physical assets allowing real-time decisions that prevent power outages, ensure military missions succeed, and help reduce energy costs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 achieve this through a unique blend of traditional coffee-making values—sourcing the best beans, understanding the nuances of roasting, and mastering the art of brewing—with cutting-edge technological innovation. Our cafes are not just spaces but experiences, where the artistry of the human barista is enhanced by the precision and efficiency of robotics. This synergy allows us to deliver consistently exceptional coffee, tailored to individual tastes, at a speed and scale previously unimaginable. But it's not just about the coffee. It's about the experience—the moment of pause in a busy day, the space for conversation, the ritual that centers us. Our technology doesn't replace the human touch; it amplifies it, making the luxury of a perfectly crafted cup of coffee accessible to everyone, everywhere. As we look to the future, our goal is to continue innovating, to push the boundaries of what a coffee company can be. We're not just serving drinks; we're creating a community united by a love for life. We're building a world where technology and tradition coexist, enhancing our lives and enriching our connections. One cup at a time, we're making the world a better place—through the universal language of coffee.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Flux Auto is building autonomous vehicle technology to fully automate the movement and operation of forklifts in warehouses. This removes dependency on human commercial drivers, allowing logistics companies to increase productivity while reducing operating costs.

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

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

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.

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.

Faction develops driverless vehicles that have the speed and performance of cars, but at the cost of a motorcycle. We do driverless combined with remote human supervision, so we’re not gated by waiting for 100% autonomous technology. Initially we’re focusing on micro delivery and vehicle-on-demand, where you can summon a vehicle and drive it yourself. Faction prototypes are in operation now and we're rolling out new programs with customers throughout 2023.

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.

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

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

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.

Adagy is a remote intervention service that rescues robots when they fail. For example, when a tractor robot gets lost in a field, instead of calling the farmer for help, it can now call Adagy, whose operators will take control of the robot and remotely drive it back to safety. We’re starting with trained human operators assisted by generative AI, and as we collect more data, our model will learn to handle more of the edge cases. We want to see a world with more robots, so we’re addressing the biggest problem in robot deployment: reliability.

Pivot Robots 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.

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.

Aedilic is building a new 2-part system consisting of a fixed-wing carrier that drops off multiple targeted delivery quadcopters over hubs where they need to deliver. Because it uses a fixed-wing carrier, it is longer-range, cheaper, faster and quieter than other options.

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 develops models that allow robots to understand and intelligently carry out complex commands. The models are trained on data across various robotic platforms on different modalities of tasks. The models serve as a control policy for devices that need to make decisions, whether they be drones for reconnaissance, robot dogs for inspections, or cameras for smart surveillance. Yondu offers our models to robotics service providers through an API and license. Additionally, Yondu sells off-the-shelf hardware with our custom models to provide smart robots for tasks that benefit from improved human-robot interaction. Our first product is a drone you can control with your voice.

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 is creating a network for flown cargo on coastal routes, enabled by electric, remote-piloted wingships – our unique friendly flying robots that operate at ultra-low altitude over water for maximum efficiency. This isn't drones for burritos though, unless you want literally a ton of burritos! We are addressing heavy payloads - the hardest stuff to fly electrically. Whether you’re in Antigua or Australia, Saipan or Sumatra, goods can take days or weeks to come by boat the cheap way. If you need pharmaceuticals, fresh produce, or electronics quickly, expect to pay 10x or 20x in shipping costs to have it flown. Electric aircraft could be a solution for lowering cost, but we’re stuck with small payloads and low range for many years to come. So for the hundreds of millions of people around the world in coastal or inter-island communities that could benefit the most, the electric aviation revolution just isn’t coming. Unless... Without requiring FAA certification or integration into formal airspace, Seaflight’s simple uncrewed "ground effect" craft will enable high value, time-sensitive cargo to be flown overwater, point-to-point between coastal communities at 10x the speed of a ship, with triple the margin of conventional air freight, and almost double the range or payload of a conventional electric aircraft. Express air cargo continues to grow at double digit pace, it's time to deliver it in the most efficient way possible for cost and climate. *You won’t find impossible machines here*

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.