Robotics Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) in the San Francisco Bay Area 2026

Robocurve builds open-source tools and independent benchmarks to measure how well robots can do real-world jobs. Instead of relying on unverified demo videos from frontier labs, we score their models on reproducible benchmarks that anyone can trust. Today there are no well-run, standardized robotics benchmarks. Labs evaluate in-house, and no independent group has stepped in to run continuous benchmarking as a service. The result is that no one actually knows how good anyone else is, or where the real frontier sits. Good benchmarks require operating and maintaining physical hardware and real-world setups. Simulation only goes so far, since models that look strong in sim can show large performance gaps once deployed in the real world. Building real-world benchmarks means coordinating job-domain experts, evals engineering, and hands-on robotics all at once. Frontier labs are targeting general-purpose robotics by 2028, yet the field of robotics evals barely exists. Whoever builds the trusted measure of robot capability becomes the reference everyone relies on. We combine backgrounds in AI evals and robotics to build and grow this field as fast as possible. We already shipped v1 of our open-source framework, Inspect Robots, and ran our first pilot scoring a frontier model on a real robot.

Our mission is to build a city on Mars. Cosmic-1, the first equipment in our fleet, is an autonomous robot capable of heavy-lift manipulation. Its been deployed on some of the largest solar farms in the US, more than doubling labor productivity across tens of thousands of panel installs. We're scaling in solar, expanding in data centers, and building lunar construction robotics under contract with NASA.

Greypoint Industries builds mass-produced autonomous interceptors that defeat drone saturation for a fraction of the cost of the targets. We are developing a soldier-deployable, fire-and-forget interceptor built to give Western and allied forces the ammunition to counter mass drone swarm attacks.

Instance is ground truth for robot learning. Labs generate thousands of robot episodes a week — far more than anyone can watch — and the mislabels nobody catches poison training data, evals, and RL rewards. Give us a task description and video rollouts, and we return a success verdict with evidence. Teams use Instance to clean training data, run evals they can trust, and get reward signals for reinforcement learning without hand-labeling. We benchmark our verifier against human-labeled episodes across 8 benchmarks and 7 robot platforms, where it outperforms frontier VLMs in accuracy and latency. We're MIT computer scientists & friends since middle school, with backgrounds at NASA JPL, SpaceX, and AWS.

We build modular humanoid robots and the software platform that allows anyone to train, deploy, and scale robots for real-world tasks. Today, teaching a robot a new skill requires robotics engineers, machine learning engineers, training infrastructure, and significant compute resources. We reduce that process to: Record → Upload → Train → Deploy. Our robots are modular and configurable, with interchangeable end effectors, configurable sensors, and multiple deployment configurations. We believe current humanoid embodiments are often overfit for specific use cases, so we're building a platform that adapts to different environments and applications. Long term, we want robotics to be as accessible as software development. Our goal is to become the default platform for training and deploying autonomous robots.

Hub is a distributed real-world data infrastructure company that captures the lived richness of human experience, including voice, nuance, and perspective to train the next generation of AI models. Through HubApp, our global network spanning 150+ countries sources high-fidelity, original data that cannot be found on the public web or generated synthetically. We provide a completely automated pipeline coupled with human-in-the-loop validation to deliver production-ready multimodal data to frontier AI labs and Fortune 500 companies.

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.

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!

Building open-source general-purpose robots capable of performing unsafe, repetitive or boring tasks.

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.

Topological is developing physics-based foundation models for CAD optimization. We help hardware teams iterate at the same speed that software teams do. Our technology is accelerating the engineering workflow with AI and scales design and optimization to identify the ideal designs for complex problems given their physical constraints with enhanced speed and performance. Our first model, UToP-v1, is a SOTA topology optimization model that understands physics, geometry, and manufacturability. It can generate the most efficient design given a problem’s physical requirements. It has <5% compliance error and is 1930x faster than current methods. We're reimagining mechanical engineering and computational design with precision spatial AI.

Semi-humanoid robots that do real physical labor. Building hardware and training models, each driving the other. Already deploying in hospitality.

DeepAware (Robotics Center of Silicon Valley, https://roboticscenter.ai/) is the fastest way for enterprises and researchers to get robots and robotics parts in the US — 72-hour delivery or Bay Area pickup. Beyond hardware, we help teams collect teleoperation data, build reinforcement learning environments, and deploy robots into production. Customers include AI labs, industrial operations, research teams, and event producers.

b12 makes high-value molecules that are otherwise hard to make. We help pharma companies plan and make new drugs, accelerating early-stage drug discovery from years to months. Andres built the first AI agent that can autonomously think and make molecules in a robotic lab, published in Nature Machine Intelligence (1000+ citations), and won the best paper award at the NeurIPS AI for Science conference. Zlatko is a 3x National Chemistry Olympiad champion, competed at IChO level, and medicinal chemist who has worked at Roche and leading lab robotics companies. Combined, we have an extensive network of hundreds of chemists, automation scientists, and AI 4 Science researchers. We run paid pilots with big pharma companies, demonstrating that our platform planned a set of experiments that achieved full conversion in a single attempt, eliminating the iteration cycle.

Physical Turing tests humanoids in the real world and returns actionable failure data before deployment. We procure, staff, and operate a wide range of target environments for real-world rollouts, helping robot makers, model companies, and enterprises continuously evaluate where humanoids succeed, where they fail, and what needs to improve before each deployment.

We build robots for physical AI. Meet Axol - A dual-arm robot designed for real-world tasks using AI.

We’re building AI-powered systems that automate manual work in scientific labs using robotics. Scientists simply type their experiment in plain English. Zeon translates it into code and runs it on robotic arms (no coding required). By controlling robots with natural language, we’re enabling automation for every lab, every scientist, and every experiment. Zeon is lab-aware. It detects equipment, adapts to protocols, and moves autonomously between instruments to execute full workflows. We’re already working with labs at Stanford and UCSF to accelerate discovery - from running overnight nanoparticle fluorescence measurements to safely disposing of hundreds of bacterial samples. Zeon reclaims time for what matters most: the science.

We collect high-quality human data, across diverse interactions and environments, to help advance the next generation of multimodal AI and robotics models.

We capture and structure real factory workflows at scale by combining first-person industrial video with SOP-level process knowledge. This enables robotics and AI labs to train on real production data, not just controlled lab environments.

General Trajectory is using AI to solve the world's most important problems, from autonomous defense to scientific R&D.

We make personal AI robots - general-purpose physical machines that anyone can program with code, language and demonstrations. We believe building open platforms like the first PCs this is the only way to bring the robotics future that we all want, where everyone can participate in the robotics revolution.

Theseus builds visual navigation software for GPS-denied drone operations. Using onboard cameras, inertial sensors, and satellite reference imagery, our system computes position fixes entirely passively. The system is entirely self contained, can't be jammed and has no RF signature.

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.

Ember builds hardware and system observability tools for robots and IoT devices. Founded by former Tesla Autopilot engineers, we help hardware teams catch failures early, reduce downtime, and iterate with confidence from prototype to scale.

Miru makes it easy for robotics teams to manage, version, and deploy robot configurations. Developers use our well-documented APIs and UI components to automate configuration updates for both engineers and operators. In the long term, we're building software infrastructure to accelerate the automation of the physical world.

Bucket Robotics builds deployable computer vision systems for manufacturing — without labeling, long pilots, or fragile rules. We turn CAD and sample data into production-ready vision models that run on existing cameras and edge hardware. No manual labeling. No cold-start problem. Models deploy in minutes and adapt as parts, defects, and lines change. Our roots are in self-driving cars (Argo AI, Uber ATG, Stack AV), where we learned how to ship perception systems that operators trust in messy, real-world environments. We’re applying that playbook to factories: robust sensing, fast iteration, and tooling engineers actually enjoy using. Manufacturers struggle with inspection because parts are too variable for rules-based vision and too expensive to inspect by hand. Legacy systems are rigid, hardware-locked, and slow to customize. We take the opposite approach: software-first vision that fits into existing automation and scales across SKUs, facilities, and workflows. American Manufacturing is in the middle of a $700B automation push — but quality is still a trust problem. Bucket Robotics is building the vision infrastructure that lets factories automate inspection with confidence.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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