Semiconductors Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

We build AI scientists that discover new materials for the semiconductor industry - specifically datacenters and fabs. Finding novel materials today takes 10+ years of lab work. We aim to compress that timeline to months, using a swarm of AI agents. Akash completed his PhD at Stanford on material discovery for semiconductors. The materials he discovered for nanoscale interconnects have been adopted into the roadmaps of Intel and TSMC. Advaith was the founding applied scientist at Persona AI (acquired by Luma Labs), where he built long horizon autonomous agents for major telecom and crypto companies. Power consumption and heat release from AI chips is doubling every year. The semiconductor industry needs new materials to keep this exponential going - Matforge will help find them.

PowerMatrix provides the MOST efficient and compact next-generation high-performance power supplies for emerging technologies, such as GPUs, xPUs, AI server, datacenters, drones, EV, aerospace, etc. Based on patented circuit topology, embedded packaging, and novel magnetics, our power supply systems can reduce energy loss by up to 50%. We have developed several prototypes and are collaborating with world-leading customers.

Atum Works is building 3D ASML. Founded by Caltech and NASA engineers, we're starting the next scaling law of semiconductor manufacturing, this time in 3D.

Inversion Semiconductor is developing the next-generation chip fabrication machine, to create the most powerful chips 15x faster. Our vision is to reshore advanced chip fabrication capabilities in the West. We're building a lithography machine. Lithography uses light to pattern circuit features on silicon. We're scaling transistors to their physical limits by shrinking particle accelerators 1000x, to create a high power light source. Using our light source we will double transistor density for a given numerical aperture and 3x throughput.

Mobius is the safe spot market for electronic components like microcontrollers and capacitors. We help electronics manufacturers buy and sell chips quickly, safely & at market prices.

DeepSim is building an AI physics simulator. We are currently developing the only thermal simulator to meet AI chip design needs and are validating our tool with Intel. We are a team of three electrical engineering PhDs from Stanford with backgrounds in semiconductor fabrication and design.

Zetta is building the next NVIDIA, energy-efficient chips ("XPUs") for AI training and inference, offering superior speed and energy efficiency compared to traditional GPUs and TPUs. Our XPUs are reconfigurable, capable of optimizing the dataflow of each model, making them faster and more energy-efficient than the current SOTA chips on the market. This saves data centers *billions* in cooling and energy costs.

Quantum computers will allow humanity to understand the world at its most fundamental level, enabling the acceleration of drug discovery and the development of new materials. Currently, quantum engineers spend days, sometimes weeks, manually getting their silicon quantum chips to operational conditions to realize two qubits. A qubit is the information-carrying unit of a quantum computer, analogous to a bit in a classical computer. We need billions of qubits to make a useful quantum computer. Therefore, automation software will be vital to realizing this goal. Conductor Quantum will develop AI software to remove the human from the loop, enable the scaling of quantum technology.

Silogy is building an AI-powered platform for chip developers to simulate and debug their designs.

We're building AI-native core tools & agent-driven workflows for frontend chip design. Today, Silimate is helping Fortune 500s and chip unicorns create & iterate to correct, optimized designs 40x faster. Our goal is to enable autonomous spec-to-design for silicon.

Bronco is an applied AI lab helping chipmakers keep Moore’s law going. Our mission is to build AI silicon verification engineers that find bugs, drive functional coverage, and help companies ship working chips on time. We're currently deployed alongside verification teams at leading chip companies building next generation hardware (4 nm process node). We are well-funded and backed by tier-1 investors, including YC, 8VC, Elad Gil, SV Angel, and Contrary Capital. We have also established strong relationships with the leading academic and industry researchers in the field of AI for chip design. Our advisors have won multiple Best Paper Awards at leading conferences, been cited tens of thousands of times, and received some of the highest honors in the microelectronics and EDA industries.