Hardware Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Flock Safety provides the first public safety operating system that empowers private communities and law enforcement to work together to eliminate crime. We are committed to protecting human privacy and mitigating bias in policing with the development of best-in-class technology rooted in ethical design, which unites civilians and public servants in pursuit of a safer, more equitable society. Our Safety-as-a-Service approach includes affordable devices powered by LTE and solar that can be installed anywhere. Our technology detects and captures objective details, decodes evidence in real-time and delivers investigative leads into the hands of those who matter. While safety is a serious business, we are a supportive team that is optimizing the remote experience to create strong and fun relationships even when we are physically apart. Our flock of hard-working employees thrive in a positive and inclusive environment, where a bias towards action is rewarded. Flock Safety is headquartered in Atlanta and operates nationwide. We have raised $150M in our Series E led by Tiger Global at a $3.5B valuation.

The US Warehouse industry spends $75bn on labor each year. Yet, only 10% of US warehouses have any form of automation, because existing robotics are too expensive and hard to integrate. Manifold deploys autonomous robots that handle picking, loading / unloading, and palletizing — priced by pick. Integration in hours. No upfront costs. No retrofitting. No need to rebuild the operation around the robot. Our mission is to make it easy for any warehouse to adopt robotics.

Singularity is answering humanity’s call to engineer counter-weapon systems at scale. We build to protect people on the battlefield and at home.

ProvenMetal manufactures the fastest circuit boards in the United States. Domestic circuit board manufacturing is slow and expensive, and while reshoring is happening, the supply chain isn't there yet. We automate the bottlenecks - part procurement, DFM review, and assembly - delivering circuit boards in days instead of weeks.

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.

We manufacture humanoid robots in San Francisco.

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.

Simantic is modernizing the embedded firmware industry with hardware simulation developed for the adoption of AI in hardware engineering. Simantic gives both humans and AI the visibility into hardware previously limited by the physical world.

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.

America does not just need more welders. It needs welding knowledge that can scale. The American Welding Society projects 320,500 new welding professionals will be needed by 2029, with about 80,000 jobs to be filled annually from 2025 to 2029. More than 157,000 current welding professionals are approaching retirement. Welders are only a small share of the skilled-trades workforce, but welding accounts for an outsized share of projected capability demand. The market calls it a labor shortage. AMR sees a learning bottleneck. We are building American-made robotic welding cells that combine computer vision to provide real-time seam tracking and post-weld inspection to turn welding from a scarce manual process into a closed-loop manufacturing system that learns from every weld as it happens.

A personal AI HUD that lives in a pair of glasses. Think Jarvis. It reads your email, runs your calendar and puts directions in your eye. 25 grams, no cameras, all day.

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.

The best grid connection is no grid connection. Voxel builds vertically integrated energy generation and storage systems for data centers that bypass utility connection delays. By leveraging the vast supply of second-life EV batteries and our novel DC microgrid architecture, Voxel generates datacenter power on site and drastically reduces system cost and time-to-power.

We engineer inexpensive, autonomous strike drones designed to operate in the most contested combat environments on Earth! By combining true hardware modularity with an agentic control system that lowers cognitive load on operators, we enable faster upgrades, broader adoption, and more than 2x reduction in lifecycle cost. Our customers and partners include the UK Royal Marine Commandos, several other units in the UK, and 4 other NATO forces, and we are currently shipping prototypes for iterative feedback. Think of us as Anduril, but with worse weather, and better banter.

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.

Tornyol builds micro-drones that kill mosquitoes. We use smartphone microphones, car park assist sensors and some clever DSP and control to transform 40-gram toy drones into mosquito killers. Because these drones are so cheap and fast, we will lower the cost of mosquito control by 100x which will enable the eradication of mosquitoes from cities, saving more than a million people each year from Malaria, West Nile, Dengue, etc.

Norra helps nursing facilities manage equipment operations. Every year, ~$80 billion are spent on medical equipment like beds, concentrators, and wheelchairs. Nursing facilities continue to operate with zero visibility which leads to $15 billion in equipment waste annually. We use physical trackers and AI agents to eliminate this.

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!

Icarus is building the modern-day U-2 spy plane. Our autonomous solar aircraft fly at 60,000 feet for weeks at a time, eventually months and years, above weather and below satellites. They deliver persistent intelligence and connectivity for the military at a fraction of the cost of existing systems. The stratosphere is the forgotten frontier.

Our agents run hardware engineering tasks that normally take hours or days in just a few minutes, allowing engineers to process 100x more data and information. Our platform allows hardware engineers to orchestrate agents for tasks such as analyzing failures across entire test campaigns, pulling the right data and KPIs from their databases, checking how conditions (like temperature or load) affect performance and reliability, and then document findings in reports and dashboards.

Testing and certifying the hardware of the future

Everyone pays someone to handle the parts of their life that don't need them personally. The cleaner, the bookkeeper, the lawn service. Nobody could handle what lives in your phone. Until Blue. Blue is a small USB-C dongle and iPhone app. Plug it in and say what needs doing. The follow-up you haven't sent, the appointment you haven't booked, the reply you owe. Blue opens the right app, does the work, and tells you when it's done. You don't touch your phone. Works with every app already on your iPhone. The team brings complementary experience at scale: Omar Abdelaziz led Google Assistant’s transition to LLMs and holds one of earliest patents in LLM-based computer control; Peter Krogh spent decades designing voice-first dialog systems and was most recently a design lead at Google DeepMind building actions for Gemini Live; Muhammad Farhan Hossain helped ship Apple Vision Pro, is named on dozens of hardware/systems patents, and has led products from prototype to mass production. We’ve built systems used by billions. Now we’re on to defining the next era of computing.

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

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

GD&T takes years to master. Engineers must encode their design intent into a dense syntax that manufacturers must decode, and not everyone gets it right. Put ten engineers in front of the same drawing and you may get ten different interpretations. Which means errors often surface later in interface stack-ups, manufacturing, or in the field - when they’re far more expensive to fix. That’s why we built F4 - the platform that analyzes GD&T to determine whether your designs are ready for production. Drop in your drawing and 3D file. F4 analyzes every element of your GD&T to assess whether your design is clear, manufacturable, and production ready. To make the drawing easier to understand, engineers can visualize their datums, reference frames, and tolerance zones directly on the 3D model. F4 also calculates tolerance stack-ups instantly - directly from the drawing. What once took hours of manual work now takes seconds. When issues are found, F4 flags them and guides engineers toward resolving the problem. After analyzing your drawing, F4 also automatically generates design and inspection reports - stack-up tables, FAI reports - ready to share with your team. And it does all of this locally on-device with no AI used for analysis. Producing deterministic results engineers can trust.

Embedder is an AI agent for embedded software. It reads your datasheets and schematics, writes the code, flashes the board, runs the tests, and fixes its own mistakes. Testing is hardware-in-the-loop: Embedder drives the equipment your team already owns (debug probes, logic analyzers, power profilers, oscilloscopes) and validates firmware on real silicon, not just against a compiler. Embedder works with some of the top semiconductor ecosystems in the world, supporting 500+ MCUs and 3,000+ peripherals.

Flywheel AI converts any existing excavators for contractors to enable remote ops to increase safety and productivity, and use robotics context dataset to train autonomous policies.

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.

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.

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.

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

Steinmetz is building the next generation of American power electronics. The next generation of great machines — electric vehicles, robotics, aerospace, and industrial systems — depends on power electronics that are lighter, cheaper, more efficient, and built at real scale. We push the Pareto frontier of power electronics through multi-disciplinary design. We're the OEM that customers actually appreciate.

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.

Mentra is building the open source operating system for smart glasses. The smart glasses hardware is finally ready, so we're building the OS and app store to power the next computing platform.

Pickle is a personal, memory-based operating system, the missing layer of AI that continuously learns your real-world context, preferences, and intent, enabling AI to evolve with you and become truly proactive rather than reactive. Our system spans both software (Chat, our web-based creative intelligence app) and hardware (Pickle 1, our AI-powered AR glasses) to capture different layers of personal context. Together, they form the foundation of a real personal intelligence.

Adam is building AI CAD. It transforms text into parametric designs so engineering teams can ship 10x faster. Our mission is to eliminate the gap between engineering and reality so more great ideas come into existence.

We help companies get custom PCBs built without having to manage multiple vendors themselves. We review or create PCB designs, find the right manufacturer, coordinate production, inspect and test every board, handle any manufacturing issues, and deliver the finished boards directly to your office. Our goal is to reduce manufacturing errors, shorten iteration cycles, and get your boards to you as quickly as possible without compromising on quality.

Forge Automation runs software enabled factories that deliver custom metal parts in four days or less. Instead of mechanical engineers having to wait two to three weeks for their low volume CNC parts, they can simply upload a CAD model on our platform and we will ship it out in four days or less. We aim to give mechanical engineers the "Amazon experience" for custom metal parts.

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.

camfer is the AI CAD tool. Now, engineers can create parametric designs with natural language.

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.

Vendra makes it faster and easier to get custom parts manufactured in America. Submit one RFQ and Vendra turns your technical requirements into custom manufactured parts - routing work through qualified US suppliers, gathering competitive quotes, and managing production through delivery. We're ITAR registered and manufacture parts for American aerospace and defense leaders. Customers include Anduril, Mach Industries, Relativity Space, Castelion, and Planet Labs. Submit an RFQ at www.vendra.io to get started today!

We build underwater data centers to cut power usage by up to 30%, operating GPUs cheaper and more sustainably. Our 1 MW capsule is being tested underwater in the SF Bay

Diode automates circuit board design. We work with hardware companies to get them the PCBs they need, fast.

Building out new LNG plants, HVAC systems, or semiconductor processes rely on hundreds of iterations of feasibility testing (through simulation or real-world lab tests) where different designs (combinations of equipment) and parameters are validated. The parameters are often locked in PDFs (datasheets, wiring diagrams, PFDs/P&IDs) which take thousands of hours to convert into CSVs / JSONs, and the simulators don't have an easy API to work with. Outerport bridges the gap by finding documents from PLMs, extracting structured data from drawings, building a knowledge graph over them, and building autonomous AI agents that can fully automate this R&D process by running simulations and performing design checks.

Sorcerer is deploying a global network of persistent airborne sensors to fuel advanced weather forecasting. Our high-altitude balloons collect 1000x more data than existing systems and are already used daily by meteorologists to track extreme weather across the US and Central America.

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