Hello, this is Ryuta Hamamoto from TIMEWELL.

Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch is now out. 236 companies.¹

A list like this is not simply a roster of startups. It is the collected answer of founders who cleared one of the most competitive screens in the world, to the question of what counts as a profitable inconvenience right now — several hundred of them, at the same moment, under the same conditions. Data that controlled is rare.

I read through all 236 and classified them against the public data. Two shifts stand out.

First, AI agents are being treated as customers rather than as tools. Debit cards for agents. Phone numbers. Permission management. Expense attribution. The list looks almost exactly like what a company sets up when it hires one human being.

Second, this is not a software-only batch. Robotics, semiconductors, manufacturing, construction, defence — the physical side accounts for about 23%. Approach it expecting a pile of AI SaaS and you will misread it.

And the number that surprised me most: the median team size is two. Those two people are saying they will build robot factories and data centres.

The short version

• Summer 2026 is 236 companies, above Winter 2026 (199) and Spring 2026 (196) — among the largest recent batches
• Composition: B2B 52.1%, Industrials 22.9%, Healthcare 8.5%, Fintech 7.2%
• Median team size is two. 128 companies (58%) have one or two people; only two have eleven or more
• San Francisco accounts for 174 companies (73.7%)
• Trend 1: markets that sell to AI agents — payment, communication, identity, permissions, runtime
• Trend 2: "measure, fix, defend" over "build". Evaluation and red-teaming attract real founders
• Trend 3: Physical AI has split into layers. Specialists per stage rather than vertical integration
• Trend 4: Services-as-Software. Not selling tools but running the business itself
• Trend 5: a return to hardware, with "made in America" as a selling point
• Trend 6: compute and power becoming financial instruments, including a market for future inference capacity
• Trend 7: government and regulation have become a market

Groundwork: what Y Combinator is

Skip this if you know it.

Y Combinator (YC) is an American accelerator founded in 2005. It invests a small amount in very early startups and runs a roughly three-month programme. Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox and Coinbase came through it.

It runs several batches a year, and accepted companies appear in a public directory.¹ That transparency is why outsiders can read the trend at all.

Why read at batch level? Individual companies are honestly not much of a guide. What matters is whether hundreds of judgments point the same way. When independent founders start digging in the same place at the same time, something is usually there.

Summer 2026 by the numbers

Batch sizes

Batch	Companies
Winter 2024	248
Summer 2024	248
Fall 2024	94
Winter 2025	166
Spring 2025	143
Summer 2025	166
Fall 2025	146
Winter 2026	199
Spring 2026	196
Summer 2026	236
Fall 2026	19 (still being announced)

After swelling to 248 in 2024 and tightening to the 140s, the batch is expanding again. Four batches a year, back near the earlier scale.

Industry mix

Industry	Companies	Share
B2B	123	52.1%
Industrials	54	22.9%
Healthcare	20	8.5%
Fintech	17	7.2%
Consumer	13	5.5%
Real Estate and Construction	6	2.5%
Government	2	0.8%
Education	1	0.4%

Industrials at 23% sets the character of this batch. Manufacturing and robotics 23, defence 9, energy 3, aviation and space 3. Not a software-only world.

Tags

Tag	Companies	Share
AI / Artificial Intelligence	77 / 76	~33%
B2B	48	20.3%
Robotics	28	11.9%
Hard Tech	24	10.2%
Developer Tools	23	9.7%
SaaS	23	9.7%
Infrastructure	21	8.9%
Hardware	18	7.6%
Manufacturing	15	6.4%
Reinforcement Learning	13	5.5%

Reinforcement learning appearing as a standalone tag on 13 companies caught my eye. A few years ago that was frontier-research vocabulary. Now it shows up as a business tag, on robot training environments and evaluation platforms.

Team size

This is the number that surprised me most.

Size	Companies
1–2	128
3–5	74
6–10	15
11+	2

Median two, mean 3.1. More than half are two or fewer; only two companies have eleven or more.

And again: those two-person companies are saying "robot factories," "floating nuclear data centres," "satellite constellations." Headcount has stopped being a reason not to start.

Location

San Francisco 174 (73.7%), New York 16, Boston 8, Los Angeles 7, London 4. More than seven in ten are in SF.

Trend 1: AI agents became the customer

This is the big one.

Read through the 27 infrastructure companies and the pattern is hard to miss.

• Agentcard — debit cards for AI agents
• Inkbox — the identity and communication layer for AI agents
• OneCLI — a secured, sandboxed assistant agent for every employee
• machine0 — cloud computers for AI agents
• Amulet — a high-performance file system for agents
• Codag — log compression for agents
• Executor — an open-source integration management layer for AI
• Egoist Machines — secure, user-owned context for every AI app
• Tenor — AI workers that attribute outcomes back to token spend

Payment, communication, identity, permissions, runtime, storage, expense allocation. Line them up. It is nearly the same list a company assembles when it hires one human employee.

These founders are not selling AI agents as a feature. They are betting that a large population of a new kind of worker is arriving, and moving to own the surrounding services first. Not B2B, not B2C — call it B2A, business to agent.

The conceptual point matters. Software has been built for humans, and when humans are the user, the interface is everything. When agents are the user, there is no interface. What matters instead is authentication, billing, auditability and permission separation. What you build changes.

Trend 2: "measure, fix, defend" over "build"

A quieter but healthier signal: real founders are attacking the fact that agents cannot be trusted.

Evaluation and benchmarks

• Instance — automated evals for robot policies
• Robocurve — evaluating robots in the real world
• Moving Atoms — a world model lab for evaluating and training robots
• Olam Labs — multi-agent simulations for model evals and training
• CoArena — a crowdsourced benchmark for computer use
• Litmus — evals for humans

Breaking things on purpose

• Fabraix — frontier hacking for AI agents
• Trident — agents that find genuinely exploitable vulnerabilities
• Palisade — finding and fixing OS-level vulnerabilities across device fleets

Observing and repairing

• Buildbox — understanding how users experience your AI agents
• Agnost AI — product analytics for conversational agents
• HyperProbe — a runtime data layer for agents to monitor and debug apps
• Archal — API sandboxes built for AI agents

This layer always appears when a technology moves from experiment to industry. Testing and CI became an industry in software the same way. Money is starting to move from "we can build it" to "we can say it will not break."

Trend 3: Physical AI split into layers

Lay out the 23 robotics companies and the stages separate almost cleanly.

Collecting data

• Praxis Robotics — turning every company into a data vendor
• DeepReach Inc. — a real-world data network for robots and world models
• Mireye — infrastructure for physical-world AI agents
• Datoric — secure training data shaped by experimentation

Training

• Enact — the post-training layer for robotics
• Maingen — simulating agents running industrial companies

Quality and development

• Hebbian Robotics — an open-source SDK for quality control pipelines in physical AI
• Osseus — a development platform for robotics
• Hilstart — autonomous hardware testing

Deploying and operating

• Agency Tool Company — infrastructure to build, deploy and manage real-world robots
• Aktoria Robotics — human as API for robots
• Waddle Labs — agents for robotics control
• 6thSense — a nervous system for physical AI

The robots themselves

• Nori — a sub-$2,000 humanoid you can teach to do anything
• OS3 — US-built robots and video action models, full stack
• Manifold — deployment-ready robotic labour for supply chains
• Libra Robotics — robotic crews for large-scale infrastructure construction
• Cosmic Robotics — autonomous construction on Earth and beyond
• Grip — robotics for waste management
• Salem Robotics Inc — inspection robots for hazardous spaces such as nuclear
• Shiraz AI — robots that learn on the job
• Neuromorphic — robots to automate wetlabs

Factories that build robots

• Tensr — robotic factories that build robots

Specialists per layer, not one vertically integrated company. That is the classic signal of an industry leaving the experimental phase. The same shape appeared in cloud in the early 2010s and MLOps in the late 2010s.

Note also where the weight sits: closer to the field than to the model. Data collection, evaluation environments, quality control, deployment. Far more companies work around the model than on it.

Trend 4: from "selling AI" to "running on AI"

The most suggestive cluster in the batch. Rather than licensing software, become the operator whose cost structure AI has rewritten.

Accounting

• Billow AI Labs — an AI-native accounting firm to replace the Big Four
• Last Accounting Company — an agent-native accounting firm
• Rational — AI employees for accounting
• Rex — AI-native BPO for enterprise order-to-cash
• Definite — back-office agents on one live model of your books

Insurance

• Florin — an insurance carrier with zero underwriters
• PRINCEPS — an AI-native insurer for the compute economy
• Veltha — an AI claims adjuster for regulated insurance
• Risklytics — insurance for the frontier

Legal

• Erinys — a network of AI-native law firms
• Perceptron ML — making law firms AI-native

Healthcare

• Radley — the first AI-native radiology practice
• Avoca Systems — an operating system for radiology networks
• Care GP — agents to run primary healthcare operations

Property and operations

• Atlia — an AI-native property management company
• Marble — the autonomous back-of-house for restaurants
• Zaplar — an agentic hotel operating system
• Axelrod — boutique hotels that run themselves
• Bernard — AI employees that run home appliance repair companies
• Async — AI agents that run small businesses

This is Services-as-Software. Not renting a tool monthly, but going after the P&L of a labour-intensive service business.

I think this is the model that lands hardest in Japan, where professional services are a large share of the economy and where labour shortage and ageing are arriving together. Selling a tool requires persuading the incumbent; taking over the business does not.

It also breaks the usual gross-margin arithmetic. If SaaS runs at 80% and a service business at 30%, and an AI-rewritten service business lands in between, the yardstick itself changes.

Trend 5: hardware, and where you build it

Reading the 54 industrials, one thing is unmistakable: where something is manufactured is being used as a selling point.

Explicitly American manufacturing

• ProvenMetal — fast-turn, American-made PCBs
• Mass Magnetics — USA-made magnetics for aerospace, robotics and defence
• Ultrasonium — metal parts, faster, cheaper, safer
• OS3 — deploying US-built robots
• GUILD — aerospace parts faster and cheaper for defence

Semiconductors and compute

• Baud — AI chips for ultra-fast training and inference
• Lamb Labs — lightning-fast chips with hardcoded AI models
• Synapse Semiconductor — semiconductors merging compute and vision
• Aerogen Systems — advanced chip manufacturing
• Standard Machines — teaching AI to design chips
• Dipole Labs — AI-controlled optical switching for AI clusters
• hardware intelligence — AI tools for the chips your AI runs on

Defence (nine companies)

• Earendil Robotics — drone swarm defence at small-unit level
• Greypoint Industries — drone swarms that hunt drone operators
• IMPACT Drones — air defence as a service for civilian infrastructure
• Isengard Industries Inc — mass-produced AI strike systems and counter-UAS
• Vernius Systems, Inc. — autonomous radar guidance for interceptors
• Edgerun — military exoskeletons
• Hop Aero — rocket cargo delivery to contested environments

What is worth noticing is how far the economic-security instinct spreads beyond the defence category. Being American-made, and knowing your supply chain, reads as a feature rather than a compliance burden.

The sharpest example is Exosat, which is building "a sovereign Starlink" and explains that by designing satellites with zero ITAR/EAR-controlled content, it can manufacture anywhere in the world at under a tenth of the cost. Export control treated not as a constraint but as a design variable. That inversion is worth borrowing.

Trend 6: compute and power as financial instruments

Small in number, decisive in implication.

Trading compute

• Computable — buy, sell and redeem GPU hours for any week, with instant liquidity
• Stoa — the market behind AI hardware
• Touchmark — a market for future inference capacity

Arbitrage and cost

• Conifer — least-cost routing to cut token spend by 80%+
• Understudy Labs — a self-optimizing neocloud that cuts LLM bills by 80%
• Tracer — combining open-source models for better answers at lower cost
• OneTriangle — the cheapest, fastest lightweight inference
• OpenRelay — distributed, hardware-agnostic inference

Power and data centres

• Pacific — mass-producing and financing micro data centres
• Atomarine — floating nuclear-powered data centres at sea
• Marengo — an AI-native engineering firm designing data centres
• Proprio Robotics — building autonomous data centres
• Edviro — AI that operates energy infrastructure

GPU-hour futures, forward sales of inference, power arbitrage. Power, GPUs and tokens are becoming traded commodities like oil and electricity.

Touchmark's market for future inference capacity is the clearest evidence that this is maturing into a capital-goods industry. And PRINCEPS is writing insurance for the compute economy. A commodity market appears, then insurance appears. The industry's plumbing is arriving.

Trend 7: government and regulation became a market

Few in number, unmistakable in direction.

• Stratum Industries — applied AI for governments
• Verdant — AI-native planning and permitting software for local government
• Locke — changing how companies and governments work together
• Chromie — find, qualify and win government contracts with AI

Permitting, administrative review, public procurement. Products that take on the institution itself, sitting in the list as ordinary YC companies.

Regulatory work has always been treated as an annoying cost. It is now being read as a large market you can attack with AI.

What this suggests if you are building something

Here is what I would take away.

1. Headcount is no longer a reason not to start

Median two. And those one- and two-person companies are proposing robot factories, floating nuclear data centres and satellite constellations.

That is not motivational talk. AI genuinely widened the range one person can execute. Design, code, sales material, first-pass legal review — much of what needed division of labour now runs in one pair of hands.

"We do not have the people" is a weaker constraint than it was. Which also means it is a weaker excuse.

2. "AI for X" is losing to "be the X business"

The Services-as-Software cluster makes this vivid.

Not "AI tools for accounting firms" but "an AI accounting firm." Not "underwriting AI for insurers" but "an insurer with zero underwriters." The subject of the sentence changed.

Selling a tool means fitting the buyer's process and persuading them to adopt it. Running the business means designing the process yourself — and keeping the margin AI creates.

The difficulty rises, obviously. Licences, liability, customers. Heavier than SaaS. The dividing line is whether you can explain why the incumbents are not doing it.

3. If you cannot say it in one line, it does not get in

Reading 236 descriptions, the striking thing is that almost every one is a single clean sentence.

"Debit cards for AI agents." "Robotic factories that build robots." "An insurance carrier with zero underwriters." "A camera that can see through walls."

No modifiers. Nothing about being AI-powered, next-generation and integrated. If it cannot be said in one line, it did not get through.

Can you say yours in one line? If not, you may not have decided what you are building yet.

4. Your buyer might not be human

The B2A point. Do not assume the user of what you build is only ever a person.

If agents are the customer, you do not need a beautiful interface. You need a callable API, a clear billing unit, auditable logs and separated permissions. The priorities invert.

For companies that already have a human-facing product, "can an agent use this?" is the next differentiator. That this batch contains Context.dev (real-time web context for AI agents) and Rindler (a translation layer between agents and the web) is the flip side of a fact: today's web is hard for agents to read.

5. Pick your layer

From the Physical AI split. "Do everything" and "own one stage" are different strategies, and the second is more often the realistic one.

Data collection, training environments, evaluation, quality control, field operations — each is an independent business now. Competing on foundation models is hard; "best in the world at evaluation" is reachable.

Decide which layer your existing assets actually help with, and the path gets clearer.

6. Atoms and regulation are moats that do not move

Software is copied quickly. Factories, parts, permits and licences are not.

Industrials at 23%, and founders moving into regulatory work, is not a coincidence. As AI drove down the cost of producing software, software alone stopped being a differentiator. What differentiates is physical implementation and institutional fluency.

Closing

The line that stayed with me was Nori's: "a sub-$2,000 humanoid robot you can teach to do anything."

A few years ago that sentence would have been a joke. Now it comes out of a two- or three-person team as a matter of course. The baseline of what is attemptable has shifted quietly and completely.

One more thing. Of these 236, there is probably not a single one you can call a certain success today. Plenty of YC companies disappear. So this list is not an answer.

Its value is that it shows where several hundred capable people chose to dig, at the same time. Read it as a map, not an answer.

Where does what you are building sit on that map? Or does it sit nowhere on it? Starting from that question alone is worth something.

Wrapping up

• Summer 2026 is 236 companies, above Winter 2026 (199) and Spring 2026 (196)
• B2B 52.1%, Industrials 22.9%. Not a software-only batch
• Median team size two. 58% have one or two people; only two have eleven or more
• AI agents became the customer. Payment, communication, identity, permissions and runtime are businesses now
• "Measure, fix, defend" is attracting founders — a sign of industrial maturity
• Physical AI has split by stage, weighted toward the field rather than the model
• Services-as-Software. Run the business instead of selling the tool
• "Made in America" reads as a feature, and one company treats export control as a design variable
• Power, GPUs and inference capacity are becoming traded commodities
• Government and regulation are now a market
• Six takeaways: headcount is no excuse; change the subject of the sentence; say it in one line; your buyer may not be human; pick your layer; atoms and institutions are durable moats

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Full list: YC Summer 2026

The list below reflects the YC public directory as of August 25, 2026.¹ Categories follow YC's own subindustry classification. Company names link to their official YC pages.

A small number of companies operating adjacent to our own business are omitted as a matter of policy. The complete list is available in YC's official directory.

B2B | Infrastructure (27 companies)

Company	One-liner
Amulet	High performance file system for agents
Archal	API sandboxes, built for AI agents
Caution	Hosting platform for software you don't want to have hacked
Codag	Log compression for agents.
Context.dev	We give AI agents realtime web context.
Decawork	The Agent Control Plane for IT teams
Dialogus	Infra for enterprise voice agents.
Edviro	AI That Operates Energy Infrastructure
Executor	The open source integration management layer for AI.
Experiential Labs	Open source OpenRouter that turns your traffic into a better model
Familiar	Dubbing is finally good. Audio-Visual Translation.
GitCafe	The Git forge for the next hundred billion commits
hiloop	Infrastructure for recursive self-improvement
Induction Labs	Building intellectually curious AI
Inkbox	The identity and communication layer for AI agents
machine0	Cloud computers for AI agents
Magma	Monetize your agent's traces.
Markov	Data for computer-use AI
Mireye	Infrastructure for Physical World AI Agents
OneTriangle	The cheapest, fastest lightweight inference.
OpenVector	AI that turns any camera to an autonomous worker with real-time vision
Parasma	Training human brain cells for AI compute
Riften	Earned intelligence for every company
Rindler	The translation layer between AI agents and the web
Speko	A router for voice models. One key, every model.
Touchmark	Market for future inference capacity
Understudy Labs	Self-optimizing neocloud that cuts LLM bills by 80%

B2B (41 companies)

Company	One-liner
Akon Labs	Nervous System for AI Agents
Almanac	The AI that knows your company
Assemble	AI Coworkers for IT teams
Async	AI agents that run small businesses
Axelrod	Boutique Hotels that run themselves
Belvedir	The easiest way to make private AI models.
Bizmark	The OS for companies that make, move, or sell physical goods
Callbook AI	AI collections agency for late stage portfolios
CarSignal	The Smart Operating System for Auto Shops.
Chromie	find, qualify, & win contracts with AI
Conifer	Least cost routing system to reduce 80%+ token spend
Daqstra	AI-native test infrastructure to accelerate hardware companies.
Datoric	Secure training data shaped by experimentation
DeepReach Inc.	Real-world data network for robots & world models
Dock	Multiplayer agent workspace to run your company
Dream	Pocket-sized AI cameras that catch asset damage.
EdotEnv	A Quant Neolab building self-improving agents from quant trading
Financial Datasets	Connect your agent to the stock market
Instance	Automated evals for robot policies
Lamb Labs	Lightning fast chips with hardcoded AI models
LATO	Agent-native research and simulation platform for investors
LemonLime	Fully automated GTM for small business
Litmus	Evals for humans
Locke	Locke is changing the way companies and governments work together.
Marble	The autonomous back-of-house for restaurants.
Mentlio	Engineering Intelligence and Token Optimization for the AI-Coding Era
Mosaic	Defining the frontier of multiplayer AI.
Olam Labs	Building multi-agent simulations for model evals and training.
Ooak Data	We turn company data into training data
OpenTag	Model Agnostic Claude Tag
Osmaura	AI growth engine for law firms.
Palette	An AI-Native Media Platform
Perceptron ML	We make law firms AI-native.
Petrarch	Internal industrial company data for frontier labs
Poth Labs	Helping companies understand why users behave the way they do
Rapidfolio	AI for fintechs & banks
Standard Machines	Teaching AI to Design Chips
Tenor	AI workers that attribute the outcome back to the token spend
Tracer	Combining open-source AI models for better answers at lower cost
Trope	The AI-native ERP system integrator
Zomma	Computer Use Agents for back offices in finance

B2B | Engineering, Product and Design (13 companies)

Company	One-liner
Agent FM	One group chat to hear and steer your coding agents.
Alkera AI	Reliable and safe data engineering and data science agents
Amorphic Labs	OpenRouter for Agent Capabilities
CoArena	The biggest crowdsourced benchmark for Computer-Use
Graphify Labs	On-device knowledge graph engine for enterprises
hardware intelligence	AI tools for the chips your AI runs on
Hoplite	Effortlessly deploy cloud software factories.
HyperProbe	The runtime data layer for agents to monitor and debug apps
OpenRelay	Distributed, hardware-agnostic AI inference
Osseus	The intelligent development platform for robotics
Palisade	AI sales agents that run your marketplace
Prized	Lovable for internal tools
Vendo	Let your users build their own features on top of your product

B2B | Security (7 companies)

Company	One-liner
Fabraix	The world's frontier hacker for AI agents.
Nebula Security	Building Mythos for everyone
OneCLI	Give every employee a secured, sandboxed pro assistant agent
Palisade	AI that finds and fixes OS-level vulnerabilities across device fleets
Traceforce	Securing AI native apps directly on devices
Trident	Agents that find real exploitable vulnerabilities in your company
Verdict Machine	AI cybersecurity for financial institutions' digital assets

B2B | Analytics (5 companies)

Company	One-liner
Agnost AI	Product Analytics for Conversational Agents
Buildbox	Understand how users experience your AI agents
Click	Research services for ChatGPT and Claude
Lyon	Foundation models on enterprise transaction data.
Studio	Engineer the future

B2B | Operations (6 companies)

Company	One-liner
Bernard	AI employees that run home appliance repair companies
Cerenovus	AI that finds value creation opportunities across enterprise…
Kebra	Making the field queryable
Rational	AI Employees for Accounting
Sidekick	AI agent that handles frontline operations over text
Zaplar	Agentic Hotel Operating System

B2B | Finance and Accounting (5 companies)

Company	One-liner
Billow AI Labs	AI-native Accounting Firm to Replace the Big-4
Definite	Build everyday back-office agents on one live model of your books
Last Accounting Company	Agent-native accounting firm.
Luca IQ	API First Tax Engine for CPAs
Rex	AI-native BPO for enterprise order-to-cash

B2B | Legal (1 companies)

Company	One-liner
Erinys	Building the first network of AI-native law firms

B2B | Supply Chain and Logistics (6 companies)

Company	One-liner
Derya	Agentic Supply Chain Automations
Donkey	The AI-native trading company: China factory-direct for US importers
Peer	AI-native freight brokerage
SpaceFlow Technologies, Inc.	AI-native procurement services for the physical economy
Waybill	Managed procurement & inventory for hardware teams.
Whitespace	AI Operating System for Wholesale Distributors

B2B | Productivity (4 companies)

Company	One-liner
Glen	Institutional knowledge for every agent in your company.
Marker	Platform and FDEs for rebuilding businesses agent-first
rekursiv.ai	Scale AI scientists whose own breakthroughs accelerate the next.
screenpipe	AI powered by everything you've seen, said or heard

B2B | Sales (2 companies)

Company	One-liner
COACH	The AI Coach for in person sales reps.
Nex	AI GTM Engineer

B2B | Marketing (1 companies)

Company	One-liner
TryNearby	Local creators for local businesses

B2B | Recruiting and Talent (1 companies)

Company	One-liner
Pluto	AI voice agent that helps professionals get discovered

B2B | Retail (1 companies)

Company	One-liner
Pango	Agentic OS for e-commerce operations

Industrials | Manufacturing and Robotics (23 companies)

Company	One-liner
6thSense	Nervous System for Physical AI
Agency Tool Company	Reliable infrastructure to build, deploy and manage real-world robots.
Aktoria Robotics	Human as API for robots
Dawn Industries	Automatic Diagnosis & Fix for Industrial Automation Cells
Enact	The post-training layer for robotics.
Grip	Robotics for waste management
Hebbian Robotics	Open source SDK for building quality control pipelines for Physical AI
Hilstart	Autonomous Hardware Testing
Libra Robotics	Robotic crews for large-scale infrastructure construction
Manifold	Deployment-ready robotic labor for the supply chain industry
Moving Atoms	World Model Lab for Evaluating and Training Robots.
Neuromorphic	Building robots to automate wetlabs
Neuron Industries	Industrial Controllers built for AI
Nori	sub-$2000 humanoid robot you can teach to do anything
OS3	Full Stack Robotics: Deploying US-Built Robots & Video Action Models
Proprio Robotics	Building autonomous data centers
ProvenMetal	Fast-turn, American made PCBs
Robocurve	Evaluating robots in the real world.
Salem Robotics Inc	Deploying robots for inspections in hazardous spaces, like nuclear.
Shiraz AI	Robots that learn on the job
Tensr	Robotic factories that build robots.
Ultrasonium	Manufacturing the metal parts the world runs on faster, cheaper, safer
Waddle Labs	Agents for robotics control.

Industrials (13 companies)

Company	One-liner
83 Sciences	AI-native materials discovery powered by unpublished experimental data
Aerogen Systems	Building the future of advanced chip manufacturing.
Applied Electrodynamics, Inc.	A new kind of camera that can see through walls.
Baud	AI chips for ultra-fast model training and inference
Control Seat	Predictive maintenance on your plant data and sensors.
Cosmic Robotics	Autonomous construction on Earth and beyond
Dipole Labs	AI-controlled optical switching for AI clusters
HERA	Hera is the design verification layer for heavy industry.
Kara	Making Diamond Engineerable
Pacific	Mass-producing and financing micro data center incredibly quickly.
Praxis Robotics	Turns every company into a data vendor
Synapse Semiconductor	New semiconductors that merge compute and vision
Torus	Legora for physical engineering firms

Industrials | Defense (9 companies)

Company	One-liner
Earendil Robotics	Drone swarm defence at a small-unit level
Edgerun	Military exoskeletons
Greypoint Industries	Building drone swarms that hunt drone operators
GUILD	Making aerospace parts faster and cheaper for defense
Hop Aero	Rocket cargo delivery to contested environments
IMPACT Drones	Air Defense as a Service for Civilian Infrastructure.
Isengard Industries Inc	Mass-produced AI strike systems and Counter-UAS
Mass Magnetics	USA-made magnetics for aerospace, robotics, and defense.
Vernius Systems, Inc.	Autonomous radar guidance for interceptors

Industrials | Energy (3 companies)

Company	One-liner
Atomarine	Floating nuclear powered data centers at sea.
Maingen	Simulating Agents Running Industrial Companies
Marengo	AI-Native Engineering Firm designing Data Centers

Industrials | Aviation and Space (3 companies)

Company	One-liner
Ethos Space Resources	We make Silicon on the Moon.
Exosat	Building a sovereign Starlink
Skymerse	Autopilot for Flight Operations

Industrials | Climate (2 companies)

Company	One-liner
Meteoric	Drones that clear clouds over solar farms and weaken hurricanes
Rise Reforming	We turn waste gases into valuable supply-secure chemicals

Industrials | Agriculture (1 companies)

Company	One-liner
Molagri	Resistance free pesticides.

Healthcare (11 companies)

Company	One-liner
Avoca Systems	The AI-powered operating system for radiology networks
Care GP	AI agents to run primary healthcare operations
Cova	Financial infrastructure for family caregiving
Evergrove	Voice agents that accelerate care coordination in workers' comp
Floracene	Vibecode + deploy HIPAA-compliant internal tools, no eng team needed
Gutgutgoose	Personalized probiotics, guaranteed to colonize.
Insurf	The AI-Native Decision Infrastructure for Health Insurance
Omanta	A research lab for one
Prescience, Inc.	Healthcare for the age of abundant intelligence.
Radley	The first AI-native radiology practice
RonanRx Inc.	We use AI to personalize peptides to your biology

Healthcare | Drug Discovery and Delivery (4 companies)

Company	One-liner
Atlas Discovery	Predicting human response to drugs in clinical trials
Gamgee	Scalable Personalised Cancer Treatment
Rasyn	Towards a General Intelligence for Chemistry
TareBio	Vaccines for any cancer or infection in weeks.

Healthcare | Consumer Health and Wellness (2 companies)

Company	One-liner
Illume Labs	24/7 Personal Health & Longevity Companion
Lumeria	Oura Ring for Skin

Healthcare | Healthcare IT (1 companies)

Company	One-liner
Hubble	Retrieve records other APIs can't

Healthcare | Healthcare Services (1 companies)

Company	One-liner
Allia Health	Clinically Integrated Group for Mental Health

Healthcare | Therapeutics (1 companies)

Company	One-liner
WonderTx	Extrapolative AI to unlock First-in-Class drugs

Fintech (6 companies)

Company	One-liner
Agentcard	debit cards for AI agents.
Audun	AI-native debt collection
Computable	Buy, sell, and redeem GPU hours for any week with instant liquidity
Levocred AI	The AI analyst for lenders
Prodigy Research	Training the world's best foundation model for quantitative finance.
Stoa	The market behind AI hardware.

Fintech | Insurance (6 companies)

Company	One-liner
Denta	Dental Insurance
Florin	Florin is the insurance carrier with zero underwriters
PRINCEPS	AI-native insurance company for the compute economy
Qlo	Legora for commercial insurance carriers
Risklytics	Insurance for the Frontier
Veltha	AI claims adjuster for regulated insurance

Fintech | Asset Management (3 companies)

Company	One-liner
Ekpa	Building Autonomous Research Agents for Trading
Pennant	The Corporate Governance OS for Public Markets
Spectre Intelligence	We are a multi-strategy trading firm that trains AI traders.

Fintech | Banking and Exchange (1 companies)

Company	One-liner
TovenAI	AI agents for compliance at institutional trading firms

Fintech | Consumer Finance (1 companies)

Company	One-liner
Arbital	The trading terminal for perps, memes, and stocks.

Consumer (7 companies)

Company	One-liner
Egoist Machines	Secure, user-owned context for every AI app
Jcode	The harness company
OpenTrade	The new interface for investing.
Sunflower	Building the Sobriety Platform for the future of Superintelligence. 🌻
tash	The investment platform for sports & trading cards
Touchy	AI voice assistant that understands the world around you
Wondering	Duolingo for learning anything, but 10x better

Consumer | Content (2 companies)

Company	One-liner
Grocalo	AI brain that runs content for creators
MOCHI.TV	1 Minute Anime

Consumer | Gaming (2 companies)

Company	One-liner
Instaplay	AI-Native Social Platform, Starting with Games
PokerClubHub	Host a Poker Club and Make Money

Consumer | Social (1 companies)

Company	One-liner
Snap Poker	The social network for online poker

Consumer | Job and Career Services (1 companies)

Company	One-liner
Tsenta	AI career agent that finds matching jobs and applies for you

Real Estate and Construction | Construction (3 companies)

Company	One-liner
Alloovium	Construction paperwork that finally works for your team
FlowManual	AI for Construction's Back Office.
SubVysion	Autonomous rovers to make the ‘Google Maps’ of underground utilities

Real Estate and Construction | Housing and Real Estate (3 companies)

Company	One-liner
Atlia	The AI-native property management company
RealPact	AI-native OS for Real Estate Brokerages
Vestris	AI native platform for real estate closings

Government (2 companies)

Company	One-liner
Stratum Industries	Applied AI for Governments.
Verdant	AI-native planning & permitting software for local gov

Education (1 companies)

Company	One-liner
Bloomy	AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

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Footnotes

1. Y Combinator public company directory (Summer 2026 batch). https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202026 — Aggregation used an open-source JSON mirror of the YC public directory (as updated August 25, 2026), with a random sample of companies cross-checked against their official YC pages for existence and naming. ↩ ↩² ↩³