Hard Tech Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Frontier is first to grow biological brains at scale, serving biological neural nets with substrate-level colocation of memory and compute, enabling highly cost effective training of large parameter count models. While academia has traditionally been limited to ~1M neurons in vitro, Frontier has built a pathway to scale to 100M+ neurons by circumventing traditional scaling challenges in biological culture, demonstrating this strategy's functionality by training a biological brain using this scaling primitive to play Frogger. Frontier is now growing exascale compute clusters to produce substrates capable of long-horizon language reasoning while operating at much higher sample efficiencies than traditional architectures, and collocating memory with compute to enable significantly larger parameter counts than would be tractable for training within traditional compute clusters.

We're building a silent speech wearable that lets you talk to your computer at the speed of voice, but silently and completely imperceptibly to everyone around you.

Ethos makes silicon on the Moon to power terawatt scale data centers. The Moon's surface is 21% silicon. We melt and electrolyze the lunar surface to make raw materials for solar panels. With solar panels made from the Moon, the constraint that limits data center scaling and everything else in space is gone.

Edgerun builds military exoskeletons. The first product is a 10-pound hip system that fits over existing kit and doubles a soldier’s range. Since April 2026, Edgerun built over a dozen iterations of their product through continuous field tests with Ukrainian fighters and secured $150M+ in LOIs. Founder David Venegas previously co-founded Durin (autonomous mining robotics) and worked at Stoke Space (at 19) and Hadrian. He is a high-school dropout, state-championship runner, adventure athlete, and pilot. Edgerun is a Y Combinator company backed by General H.R. McMaster, Cyan Banister, Joshua Steinman and Jason Miller. edgerun.com

We are building the future of chip manufacturing. Chips are more advanced than ever, and the features inside them keep getting smaller. But the cleanroom infrastructure supporting their manufacture has not scaled at the same pace. Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and others spend billions building and operating massive cleanrooms, only to isolate their most advanced wafers from the surrounding facility as much as possible. We think that architecture is backwards. Instead of making the entire building cleaner, why not make the machinery itself as clean as possible? Talos is our proprietary tool-integrated purification system. It sits directly inside semiconductor equipment and continuously destroys airborne molecular contaminants before they reach the wafer. Instead of fighting contamination by constantly flooding tools with ultra-high-purity nitrogen, Talos keeps the environment inside the machine 10–100x cleaner, without the massive purge-gas bill. Talos is powerful on its own, but it is also the foundation for a much bigger vision: the Cleanpipe. The Aerogen Systems Cleanpipe is an ultra-clean interconnect infrastructure that protects wafers as they move from machine to machine across the fab. Rather than relying on a billion-dollar cleanroom to protect every cubic foot of factory space, Cleanpipe creates a controlled environment only where cleanliness actually matters: around the wafer. Talos cleans the tools. Cleanpipe connects them. Eventually, we delete the cleanroom and build more advanced chips, at greater scale, with radically less infrastructure. With cleanpipes connecting tools, chip fabs can exist anywhere.

We make mass-deployable radars for unmanned systems. Our first product is Archimedes, a radar seeker that finds and locks onto targets, enabling autonomous intercept on any drone. We have over $580M in LOIs for Archimedes, across some of the largest defense primes in Ukraine, the EU, and the Middle East. Seekers are the most critical and costly component in every autonomous interceptor. Developing a radar seeker takes a 200+ person team at Raytheon and hundreds of millions of dollars. Archimedes is 100x cheaper than existing radar seekers on the market - and is the first product to make it feasible to deploy radars on every drone.

Mass Magnetics turns recycled rare-earth scrap into high-performance permanent magnets, made in America. The materials we supply are the backbone of electric motors, sensors, speakers, hard drives, and electronics. Our process enables DFARS-compliant magnets for defense, aerospace, and industrial manufacturers who demand domestic supply without compromising on quality. Operations in Greater Boston, MA (Greentown Labs) and Columbus, IN.

Meteoric is building drones that clear clouds over solar farms and ultimately weaken severe storms and hurricanes.

Every serious robotics lab is bottlenecked on the same thing: demonstration data. The field has converged on egocentric video and hand pose as the substrate, and both are now cheap to collect at scale. What neither of them contains is force. A video of someone picking up an egg and a video of someone picking up a rock are nearly identical in pixel space and nearly identical in joint angles. They differ almost entirely in a quantity nobody is recording. Policies trained without it learn geometry and inherit no sense of touch. Hemlock closes that gap at the source. Our device, the Bracelet, is a wrist-worn surface EMG band that reads the electrical activity of the forearm muscles that actually drive the hand, which means it recovers contraction force directly rather than inferring it from motion. This distinction is the whole thesis: force cannot be reconstructed downstream of kinematics, because a hand squeezing hard isometrically and a hand resting can occupy the identical pose. Muscle signal is the only non-invasive channel that separates them.

Our first model, Atom 1, pre-trained on the internets video, and fine tuned for physics. It has been action conditioned, so you can simulate robot actions within it. This lets Robot Labs train their robots using GPUs instead of relying on human collected manual data that is slow and expensive. In unseen and hard to replicate environments, this is the only path to getting ANY training data.

Engineering is bottlenecked by slow, costly simulations. We're fixing that by building foundation models that learn physics end-to-end and deliver the same results in seconds, at a fraction of the cost.

We are building robots that can work autonomously in existing wet labs. Unlike traditional lab automation, which requires dedicated equipment and fixed workflows, our robot moves between workstations, manipulates existing scientific equipment, transports lab materials, and executes experiments using the same lab infrastructure as a human technician. We make the robots easy to manage through natural interfaces like Slack, email, and phone. Our goal is to make deploying robots in wet labs as easy as onboarding a new employee, and to accelerate scientific research!

The technologies that define this century, including data centers, rockets, satellites, and robots, are built from complex metal parts. As these systems advance, the parts get harder to make. Past a certain complexity, casting and machining stop working, and the advanced methods that remain are slow, expensive, and hazardous. Ultrasonium has invented a new manufacturing method to make these critical parts 15x faster and 75% cheaper than the methods they replace, in the U.S. and at scale. Solid metal feedstock goes in and a finished part safely comes out, controlled by a physical AI layer and novel control processes. The systems that matter most, in aerospace, energy, and compute, are demanding metal geometries that can't be machined or cast and are too expensive and slow to make with incumbent methods, at a moment when domestic manufacturing capacity is a national priority. Our founding team has built and innovated some of the most complex engineering systems known to man: quantum computers, superconductors, nuclear reactors, and novel aerospace alloy processing methods.

Ekho predicts the wars, strikes and tariffs that break global shipping, and tells freight teams which shipments are exposed and what to do about them. Predicting escalation is what our team did for eight years before this - now we bring the same engine to logistics.

Applied Electrodynamics builds imaging systems that see through solid matter. Our team previously co-invented the iPhone touchscreen and Nest learning thermostat. We’re starting in construction, helping teams map structural elements and utilities inside walls and ceilings. The same platform extends to security screening and cargo inspection. Our mission is to make the hidden physical world machine-readable across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

We want to push machines to where humans cant go. Presidential early career award winning Duke Semiconductor ECE Faculty Tania Roy and Sanjeev Chauhan are building a frontier semiconductor research lab. Their focus is on solving physical AI challenges from the semiconductor device level and building products around the moat of impossible to copy innovation. Their first work is on a new vision sensor that can run neural network filters right in the camera pixels and only collect data that machines care about. As physical AI develops, machines needs to understand the world around them if they aim to interact with them.

We are building nuclear power delivery ships to power our floating compute barges at sea. Our systems are fully standalone, have better cooling, and avoid all the resource competition that leads to local community opposition. Our centralized manufacturing allows us to deploy anywhere on Earth, four times faster than on land.

Daqstra is the AI-native orchestration layer for physical R&D. It saves engineers in Aerospace, Energy and Robotics hundreds of man hours managing test infrastructure by connecting fragmented test hardware, bringing live and historical test data into one place, and by giving engineers an API to orchestrate their entire test setup. We enable teams to spend less time rebuilding test infrastructure and more time improving the hardware they test.

We build centimeter-accurate 3D maps of underground utilities to help construction contractors dig safer and faster. With underground intelligence, contractors can avoid dangerous utility strikes and costly project delays.

We’re building collaborative robotic crews for large-scale infrastructure projects, including solar farms and data centers. 002C: “002A, 5.3 mm left.” 002B: “002A, you’re running low. Next pallet is on the way.” 002C: “Am I clear to come in?” 002A: “Aligned. Panel released. You’re clear.” 002C: “Fastening.” 002B: “Next load arriving now.” This isn’t a human crew talking. It’s three robots building a utility-scale solar farm together. Our AI control system enables specialized robots to collaborate, learn reusable construction skills, like alignment, fastening, and manipulation, and transfer them across workflows, from solar farms to data centers. 🚧 🦺

Geopolitical conflicts and natural disasters frequently expose the vulnerability of the American chemical industry. The reason? Production is centralized and fossil fuel-dependent. The solution? Localized production using an undervalued resource: biogas. The US produces enough biogas to make over $20 bn/y worth of chemicals, but 60% is wasted in low-margin applications or flared altogether. Rise Reforming is commercializing a modular process to transform this underutilized biogas on-site into cheap, supply-secure chemicals. Our beachhead market is dimethyl ether (DME), used as an aerosol propellant and a low-carbon fuel additive in propane. Our target market is methanol: an established billion $ chemical and the future of low-carbon shipping. We're doing our pilot project at a Chicagoland wastewater plant. This will be the first wastewater biogas-to-methanol demo in the Americas. We're hiring for a senior chemical process engineer. Apply here: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/rise-reforming/jobs/wJ9Q9nv-senior-chemical-process-engineer

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.

83 Sciences uses AI to mine discarded experimental data and drive scientific breakthroughs. Working alongside labs, we discover the materials that will power the new Industrial Revolution.

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.

We manufacture Nori: A sub-$2000 bimanual mobile manipulator that can clean rooms, restock shelves, and fold clothes. Nori can handle basic tasks out of the box, and its software lets anyone teach Nori to automate work specific to their home or business. Nori aims to solve the robotics data bottleneck. By deploying affordable robots to customers around the world, we can gather the diverse data required to train the next generation of generalist robotic policies. Every user of Nori makes Nori smarter. Since launching 6 weeks ago we have already deployed our first robot and have over $440k+ in sales. We can bring general-purpose robotics to homes and businesses that could never afford it before. There are 132.7 million households and 8.4 million employer business locations in the U.S. At $1,688 per robot, selling just one Nori to 0.5% of them represents a $1.2B market opportunity in the U.S. alone.

Our software turns any robot we deploy into an everyday independent worker at your facility. They are able to walk sites, handle instruments, overcome obstacles, collect measurements, and generate auditable compliance records, replacing hours of mandatory manual surveys and inspections. Built by Los Alamos robotics veterans and deterministic-manipulation researchers, we started in nuclear and are already expanding to other hazardous industries.

Praxis captures the data physical AI is bottlenecked on: egocentric video, 3D scans, and multimodal capture from inside real industrial and residential environments. Embedded within publicly listed and unicorn-scale conglomerates, we reach 60k workers across 5 continents and 150+ environment types, supplying the real-world training data frontier labs and humanoid companies can't source anywhere else.

Arlo Industries is building a network of sensors that precisely tracks stealthy drones and aerial threats better than radars. This capability does not exist yet because traditional radars are built on past war doctrines designed to protect single, centralised assets. Modern warfare, however, demands wide-area, persistent coverage that is both passive and economically scalable. By utilising a mesh architecture, Arlo Industries unlocks unprecedented asymmetric economics. The network is fundamentally built to scale: the cost of adding sensors grows linearly, but the tracking accuracy increases exponentially, delivering highly resilient, persistent coverage for a fraction of the cost of legacy systems. Deo founded Arlo Industries after spending over 6 years in the Israeli defence ecosystem, where he lived through multiple conflicts and experienced the Iron Dome and other systems in action against ICBMs and the infamous Shahed drones. Learning exactly how these defence systems could be improved after a Shahed exploded close to his apartment, he built Arlo Industries around the core philosophy that conflict should be concise & precise. The people behind Arlo1 includes a PhD in drones and autonomy and military experts. Arlo Industries has actively showcased this technology directly to Ukrainian militaries on the frontlines, as well as to operators across Europe and the USA.

Ornadyne builds flapping-wing drones for reconnaissance that look, fly, and sound like birds. Today’s drones are easy to detect acoustically, visually, and electronically. As counter-UAS systems improve, traditional quadcopters and fixed-wing UAS systems are becoming increasingly ineffective for close-range surveillance. Flapping-wing aircraft have existed for years, but have lacked the performance, endurance, and control required for real-world deployment. We’re changing that by engineering a high-performance, stealth-optimized system built from first principles for efficiency, autonomy, and reliable field use. The final frontier of surveillance won’t look like machines; it will look like wildlife already in the sky. Maybe birds aren't real?

We turn natural Language into Multi-Drone Mission execution. Degla is built around a simple idea: once you’ve expressed your intent, the system owns the problem.You don’t babysit drones. You don’t micromanage failures. You don’t rewrite plans. You state the goal, Degla figures out how.

Nine Fives produces modern radio frequency test equipment and solutions to disrupt the $130B test equipment industry. By combining modern electronics, AI ready test automation, and strategic supply chains, we’re equipping our customers to cut their time to market in half.

Dispatch is building refurbishable reentry vehicles that host and return payloads for companies making ultra-high-value materials (semiconductors, biotech, and pharma) that can only be manufactured in space. Right now, these companies have no practical way to manufacture and get their products back to Earth. We solve this bottleneck. We just returned from the Mojave Desert testing our first full-scale reentry heat shield designed to protect the satellite as it returns from space at Mach 20+, built in an apartment for 100x cheaper than competitors. To test, we held it behind a rocket engine to simulate the forces of atmospheric reentry. IT WORKED! Watch here - https://youtu.be/dhlQmnIoptg To scale, we anchor permanent infrastructure in orbit - building high power Autonomous Space Stations designed from day one for "lights-out" manufacturing serviced by the reentry vehicles.

Ndea is building frontier AI systems that blend intuitive pattern recognition and formal reasoning into a unified architecture. # AI for Scientific Advancement Unlike all life before us, humanity's ascent is a story of ingenuity, not just biological evolution. Our progress has been driven by the curiosity to acquire knowledge, the ability to pass it on, and an intrinsic drive to innovate. We build technology which gives us leverage beyond our biology. We stand at the top of a knowledge and technology colossus that we collectively created over the past ten thousand generations. Scientific progress has helped us overcome burdens that long defined human life — famines, plagues, and widespread illiteracy. Science will continue to redefine the boundaries of the human condition. Today, the acceleration of scientific progress hinges on one factor: AI capable of independent invention and discovery. This capacity is the gateway to advancements beyond our wildest imagination. # A New Research Lab We're starting Ndea — an AI research and science lab. The name - like 'idea' with an 'n' - is inspired by the Greek concepts ennoia (intuitive understanding) and dianoia (logical reasoning), capturing our first goal to merge deep learning with program synthesis. Ndea is entirely focused on developing and operationalizing AGI to realize unprecedented scientific progress in our lifetime for the benefit of all current and future generations. Building AGI alone is a monumental undertaking, but our mission is even bigger. We're creating a factory for rapid scientific advancement — a factory capable of inventing and commercializing N ideas. From our vantage point today, we see many 'known' frontiers like self-driving vehicles, drug discovery, sustainable energy, robotics, and space exploration. While AGI will benefit all of these, the most exciting adventure lies in the 'unknown'. AGI promises discoveries and progress we cannot imagine today.

Up to 80% of the most advance AI compute chips sits idle because of slow networking. Piris Labs builds photonic based networking solutions to enable fast, scalable, and low cost AI workload execution infrastructure.

Visibl Semiconductors makes custom silicon accessible to hardware companies, starting with power electronics. We are an AI-native custom-silicon design partner that cuts ASIC development cost and timeline on mature nodes, helping teams deliver better performance and lower BOM cost. We work with data-center and AI-infrastructure power, motor drives, industrial automation and robotics, industrial power supplies and conversion, battery systems and e-mobility powertrains, EV charging, solar, energy storage, grid power, HVAC, heat pumps, and appliances. V1 boards built from off-the-shelf parts are great for getting to market quickly, but scaling to v2+ volume requires optimizing cost, size, and manufacturability. Visibl folds those parts into custom silicon built around the product: a simpler BOM, reclaimed board space, fewer supply constraints, and automation-ready assembly. We manage the full path from architecture and design through verification, fabrication, packaging, and production-ready silicon, working alongside hardware teams so they do not need an in-house chip team.

Zephyr Fusion is building the first in-orbit fusion power source: a megawatt-class reactor enabling large-scale industry in space, at a fraction of the cost of equivalent solar. Founded by former physicists from Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, Zephyr leverages decades of fusion research to deliver a compact magnetic confinement system designed to take advantage of the space environment.

Darwin is building general-purpose humanoid robots for real-world work. Our first robot, Darwin One, will learn from real-world experience and continuously improve as AI moves from the screen into the physical world. First deployments begin in early 2027.

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!

Wardstone builds a low-cost, modular interceptor platform for air and missile defense. Our platform enables the warfighter to right sizes their interceptors against the threat. This allows us to defeat air-breathing and ballistic missile threats at a fraction of the cost of exquisite interceptors, adding affordable magazine depth to existing air defense systems.

We are scaling foundation models that are curious about the world. We’ve seen general intelligence appear exactly once, and its hallmark has been curiosity: a dissatisfaction with what we already know about the world, an ability to learn from world experience, and a disposition to share knowledge with other individuals. Across generations, these human traits have built modern science, technology, and culture. We think superintelligence will come from models that work the same way: learning from their own observation, updating as they go, growing what they know. These models will start from what humanity knows and discover past us. We believe that scaling curious intelligence is a defining problem of our time. If solved, we will live to see a new era of technological advances, scientific understanding, and human flourishing.

SigmanticAI is building an AI-native hardware development assistant that automates the entire RTL design flow, from natural language to synthesizable HDL and testbenches, inside a seamless VSCode fork. Powered by fine-tuned Verilog LLMs, reinforcement learning, and real compiler feedback, SigmanticAI iteratively refines code until it compiles and passes synthesis, no matter how complex the design. It’s like the Cursor for HDL design. In addition to code generation, SigmanticAI can generate token-level annotations and onboarding documents to accelerate ramp-up for new engineers. With support for both cloud and on-prem deployment, it integrates with existing EDA tools to dramatically reduce debug time, improve collaboration, and accelerate hardware design across teams

On-device AI for phones, wearables, smart home, robots and small robots: - 2bit - 8-29MB - up to 4k tokens/sec decode speed

Boost Robotics is building autonomous mobile manipulation robots to remotely perform manual tasks in data centers. The surge in AI applications is pushing data centers to scale faster than they can manage, leading to suboptimal operations and staffing shortages amid rising power and compute demands. We save data centers millions in insurance premiums and SLA violations by increasing the frequency of inspection and maintenance while reducing the time it takes to triage and address failures.

NODI is building distributed energy infrastructure to rewire the grid. We deploy and aggregate batteries at the edge and orchestrate them as distributed nodes, providing locational flexibility to the rigid grid — relieving congestion and unlocking capacity at constrained locations, so data centers can connect in weeks instead of waiting decades for reinforcement.

Photonium is building software to automate optical system design. We supercharge optics experts with intelligent tooling to reduce costs and deliver faster. We handle the full design stack — from optimization, verification, sourcing, to prototyping — for AR/VR, quantum, biotech, metrology/chip fab, LiDAR, and more.

What if every experiment you wanted to run could be modeled using AI? Godela is an AI-powered physics engine that gives engineers faster, cheaper replacement to simulations and physical prototypes. No set up, no wait. Just ask—and get simulation quality result.

Cascade Space is building the commercial alternative to the Deep Space Network. Our first ground station, Earth Station Zero, will be online and downlinking data from the Moon in 2026, with plans to scale to a full global network by 2028.

Instinct is making the Moon the new LEO. Our small lunar lander is designed to be launched as a regular LEO rideshare, enabling higher mission cadence at a lower cost.