Industrial Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

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.

twentyfour26 builds autonomous CNC machining cells for rapid prototyping, so hardware teams can iterate with software speed.

OpenVector transforms any existing camera into an automated 24/7 workforce without requiring new hardware. We've built the world's fastest vision-language model inference engine that allows users to simply describe a task in plain English and automatically build a custom AI vision model to monitor their feed. When it detects an important physical event—like a stalled production cycle, a safety violation, or a waiting customer—it operates a computer just like a human to take immediate action. It integrates with legacy systems, makes calls, sends emails, updates a POS/CRM, or triggers webhooks in real time. OpenVector enables any camera to do real work.

Neuron is crafting the world’s first purpose-built industrial controller for AI, replacing the antiquated PLCs running every machine and factory. We help customers from chemical processing to nuclear reactors compress controls projects from weeks to hours.

At Hera, we build tools that help heavy engineering teams bring products to market up to 20× faster. Today, we work with manufacturers of data center ancillary equipment, renewable energy systems, robotics, heat exchangers, power plants and pressure vessels.

Torus lets engineering firms and project owners build infrastructure 10x faster to reindustrialize America and the West. We're working with multiple Fortune 500 companies to build critical infrastructure including data centers and critical energy installations.

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.

Control Seat builds the hardware and software that helps industrial teams see, understand, and run their operations. Our platform creates one clear source of truth across the plant. It connects the systems teams already use, brings control, monitoring, history, and machine health together, and adds an intelligence layer that continuously watches for meaningful changes. Teams can understand what happened, catch problems earlier, and act before they become downtime. The result is fewer surprises, faster decisions, and less time spent piecing together information across disconnected tools. We work with manufacturers, utilities, energy companies, and other industrial operators modernizing existing facilities or building new ones.

Sidekick is an AI agent that runs custom manufacturing operations over text. Workers text a problem, photo, video, or voice memo and get an answer from the shop's own documents. It reads live machine data and acts on its own: flagging issues before they become downtime, opening and routing work orders, and placing purchase orders. No app, no login. These shops run on tribal knowledge: a handful of veterans know how every job is set up, and they are retiring. Sidekick learns from every message it handles, so answers outlive the people who gave them, and shops run 15% more jobs with the same crew. Sidekick captures it as a byproduct of the work, in an industry that was never documented.

Tenet Industries is building AI-automated factories for manufacturing of PCBAs. We're using AI and robotics to build a factory in München for instant-quote, fast-turnaround PCBA manufacturing and electronic manufacturing services.

Robotic factories that build robotics in the US. Currently operating a 12,000 sqft factory in the Bay Area and actively manufacturing customer orders for some of the largest robotics companies in the US and the International Space Station. 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.

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.

Axial develops accelerated software for geometric computation, physical simulation, and manufacturing. Our GPU-native kernels provide programmable building blocks for the computational engineering cycle. They make existing workflows faster and less expensive while enabling engineering teams to explore substantially larger design spaces.

Testing and certifying the hardware of the future

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.

Rebulk builds AI-native software for rail, transload, and bulk operations. We help teams manage railcars and trucks, transloading, maintenance, yard switching, railcar tracking, bulk inventory, documents, customer reporting, and billing. Much of this work still runs on spreadsheets, paper tickets, phone calls, and disconnected legacy systems. That means teams spend too much time entering the same information twice, tracking down paperwork, figuring out where railcars and inventory are, and putting together reports by hand. Rebulk brings that work into modern software built around how each business actually operates. We’ve lived this problem, and we know how to build for it. Warren previously led product at a Series A supply chain software startup, where he worked closely with companies moving and managing bulk commodities. Cole was engineer #3 at Tropic, helping scale it from seed to Series B, and later led engineering at an AI startup. Rebulk runs operations at Venezia Transport, Usher Transport, Cicada Logistics, McDonald Farms, and TransloadX across transloading, rail maintenance, switching, railcar tracking, and bulk inventory.

chrt is a logistics platform for time-critical shipping. We enable businesses to deliver their most critical items same-day. Time-Critical Logistics is a $30B market growing at a 20% CAGR driven by growth in American healthcare and manufacturing. Businesses that place time-critical orders are enterprises who have urgent items they need to deliver ASAP. These orders are critical in nature and often require white glove service -- think therapeutic treatments for healthcare providers or specialized equipment for manufacturers. chrt builds the software for forwarders and professional couriers who pick up and deliver these orders. Couriers use chrt to coordinate and track their shipments, including a driver app and fleet management tools. Forwarders use chrt to dispatch couriers, book flights, and track time-critical orders from start to finish. Shippers use chrt to place these orders with their providers and to monitor everything. In addition, we also sell physical tracking devices that can be used to track valuable cargo or assets. This gives us full control of the shipment and allows us to provide shippers with end-to-end tracking. It also allows us to intervene early if we notice something is going wrong. We’re software engineers that became friends years ago at McKinsey. Kyle is an expert in Time-Critical Logistics, having led strategy at a leader in the space. Aaron is an expert at designing and implementing AI systems to handle complex coordination. We were shipping code together on nights and weekends for years before chrt; now we’re also shipping freight.

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.

For the first time in decades, fast, flexible domestic production can be economically superior. We’re rebuilding America’s productive edge through low-volume, high-mix manufacturing, helping hard-tech teams prototype faster, launch sooner, and build more here. If you want to restore American productive power and ship real hardware, reach out. jakob@foundation-industries.com

SalesPatriot is a back-office operating system for distributors and OEMS. We build custom AI workflows for sales and supply chain teams to manage procurement, requests for quote and purchase orders. In large orgs that operate as key nodes of the supply chain data is scattered across twelve systems. Quotes get lost and Executives lack visibility. Supply chain workflows are time consuming because data isn't where it needs to be in the format it needs to be. Employees are stuck between their email, ERP, CRM, marketplaces, and spreadsheets instead of winning business and protecting margin.

Dartboard is the modern remote operations center for hardware fleets. We pair expert operators with AI agents to identify, diagnose, and fix issues faster.

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.

Plume is an AI-powered geospatial platform for site selection in energy infrastructure projects. Selecting the right sites requires analysis of +50 geospatial, grid, and regulatory constraints across fragmented data sources. Plume changes the process by enabling users to interact with geospatial data using natural language.

Ultra builds practical, general-purpose robots that are deploying—and producing ROI—today. Unlike traditional industrial automation that’s rigid and complex, our robots are zero integration (able to be installed in hours, not weeks) and are highly flexible, capable of quickly learning new tasks and delivering immediate value to customers. Founded by a team of three-time entrepreneurs with a decade of collaboration, Ultra moves fast. We already have robots in the field generating revenue and data, with plans to rapidly scale deployments this year.

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.

Poka Labs builds an AI platform to help sales reps at chemical manufacturers respond to requests from customers and win more business. Our agents understand each companies product catalog, customer purchase behaviors, and tribal knowledge in order to price, quote, and win the business. Malay and Andrew met while pursuing at Harvard Business School and now are building for companies ranging from a few million in sales per year to billions.

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.

Garage is modernizing how America buys and sells the vehicles and equipment that keep communities safe. Our AI-powered marketplace automates every part of the transaction—appraisals, payments, paperwork, freight, warranty, and financing—reducing what once took months down to minutes. By replacing broken, manual processes with modern software, Garage helps critical equipment reach communities faster—saving taxpayer dollars and supporting the industries that keep America running. We've raised $18M to date, and are backed by Y Combinator, Initialized Capital, Infinity Ventures, FJ Labs, and other leading investors.

Our mission is to empower every manufacturer, no matter their scale, to invent and build anything using intelligent robots. Today’s industrial robots are fast but "blind". They struggle with any task that isn't perfectly repetitive. We are building the eyes and brain (a proprietary vision system and AI model) that allow industrial robots to see, reason, and perform complex work with sub-millimeter accuracy and the adaptability of a human expert. We are witnessing the start of a new industrial revolution: an era of advanced manufacturing powered by AI and robotics. We aim to lead this shift by putting these tools into the hands of every manufacturer, ensuring the power to invent and build at scale isn’t a privilege of the few.

RMFG builds and operates advanced, software-defined factories, manufacturing precision parts and metal assemblies for fast-moving hardware teams. Our vertically integrated software platform automates quoting, DFM, scheduling, and machine control, and allows us to ship faster and at lower cost than traditional shops.  We build our own computer vision models, AI agents, and custom software to solve problems inside our manufacturing facility. Today we primarily build complex metal assemblies using sheet, tube and CNC milled parts. We plan to continually moving upstream, offering more complex manufacturing services including electro-mechanical assembly. We’ve delivered critical parts for companies building custom robots, autonomous farms, PCB factories, weather modification technology, rockets, and more. 

Solugen is decarbonizing the chemistry of everyday life with enzymes and innovative metal catalysts. Our new to the world Bioforge platform technology can produce high value chemical goods that are biobased and carbon negative, at cost on par with current technologies. We are making sustainable chemistry accessible to all living things, to ensure a prosperous world exists for generations.