Manufacturing Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Inflection is building the industrial capacity to manufacture tens of thousands of spacecraft per year for next generation commercial and government space applications. Imagine a factory that looks like an Amazon fulfillment center instead of a NASA clean room.

Shepherd Robotics builds general purpose robots for skilled physical work across AI infrastructure and advanced manufacturing. Our robots are powered by robot foundation models and use modular, flexible hardware designed to adapt to different environments and tasks. We train our systems on a combination of real world and simulation data so they can learn complex manipulation skills and generalize across workflows. We are starting with tasks such as data center construction and operations, cable and wire manufacturing, wire harness assembly, kitting, and factory packaging, where traditional automation struggles with variability, dexterity, and changing environments.

Sinter is creating a faster and radically more affordable American plastics pipeline, helping iteration heavy hardware teams evolve from additive prototypes to production parts on week-scale timelines.

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.

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.

We deploy robots that learn new tasks from a single human demonstration in the factory. We're starting in contract manufacturing, where lines change every week and both traditional automation and today's VLAs fall over. Our founding team has 20+ years of experience in robotics. Navid was part of the core team that productized Spot at Boston Dynamics and led manipulation projects there. Before that, he was at Rethink Robotics. Mojtaba led whole-body control and manipulation efforts at Amazon Robotics and was a Research Assistant Professor at Northwestern University.

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

We mass-produce modular data centers that deploy on stalled infrastructure projects losing billions per week. Delayed infrastructure projects hemorrhage $1B a week in the US alone - Pacific mass-produces modular data centers that deploy on those sites in days and turn their unused power into revenue. Data centers are stuck for years waiting for power, while delayed construction sites across the world sit on unused interconnects, losing billions of dollars per week in interest on trillions of dollars of debt. Our pods deploy on those sites and generate revenue for them in days. They use diamond wafers in the cooling system so pods run anywhere on earth, even a desert. We'll use the same mechanisms we're building today to deploy compute across the galaxy.

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.

We builds foundational AI models for chemistry. Almost nothing you buy is a single chemical. Products like datacenter coolant, GPU thermal paste, paint, and glue are formulations, which are mixtures of around ten ingredients each, and demand for them has grown quickly because of AI and EVs. Designing a new formulation is essentially a search problem, because there are more possible mixtures than anyone could ever test, and none of them can be predicted in advance. As a result, bringing a single formulation to market today takes three to five years of trial and error in a lab. Our models predict how a mixture will behave far faster than the standard methods used today, which lets us design new formulations in weeks rather than years, at a fraction of the cost. To prove this, we used them to invent three chemicals that never existed before, including a PFAS-free coolant for datacenters, and we have since synthesized and patented all three. We are already working with some of the largest manufacturers to design formulations for them, and we are building our own lab to generate the data that will train our next models.

SpaceFlow is an AI-native procurement services company for businesses that make, move and serve physical goods. We help procurement teams bring more spend under management, execute source-to-contract work and turn identified savings into realized savings without adding headcount or replacing existing systems.

Kara is building diamond semiconductors. We begin with growing ultra-high purity diamond wafers for advanced hardware. Used in data centers, spacecrafts, RF systems, and quantum hardware, our diamond moves heat up to 5× better than copper, helping critical systems run cooler, faster, and more reliably. Diamond has spent centuries as a symbol. We are turning it into infrastructure.

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.

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.

Hey YC! We're Bizmark. I (Rodrigo) grew up in a factory, watching my mum run everything through Excel and email. That’s why we’ve built Otto, the OpenClaw for manufacturers. In a few days, he learns from your systems and spreadsheets to take over repetitive work in procurement, quoting, and production planning. Otto is live at multiple factories, bringing in $108k in annual recurring revenue. Last month, he worked the equivalent of 9 full-time employees. I did CS at UChicago and built a distribution business from 0 to $60M. My cousin and cofounder Oscar did CS at Stanford and deployed AI for the US Air Force, Amazon, and the factories of Johnson & Johnson and Intel. There's a quarter of a million manufacturers in the US, making this a $25B market. In 5 years, they will all run on Otto-pilot.

Donkey is the AI-native trading company. Upload a buying list and we land the whole container at one locked, delivered price, tariffs included. You buy from Donkey: one contract, one company responsible for everything between the factory floor and your door. Our own people check the cartons before the factory gets paid, and the balance is due when the goods are accepted at your dock. Small businesses buy imports through three or four middlemen, each adding 15 to 30 points, because none of them can fill a container on their own. Big enough to buy pallets, never big enough to buy the box. Quotes float with freight, FX and tariffs and live 15 to 30 days. A trading company is rooms of people on the phone with factories, forwarders and brokers. Donkey runs that as one engine. It finds the real factory behind the customs record, stacks duty line by line, packs the container on weight and cube, and returns one number that holds from signature. Next comes the shared container: small buyers fill one box together at container prices, and every container earns better factory terms for the next one. Team in San Francisco and Wuhan, English and Mandarin. If your business buys pallets of anything imported, send us your buying list.

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.

GUILD is an AI-Native Defense contractor making aerospace parts faster and cheaper. We win defense contracts, automate manufacturing, and deliver to the government's door.

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.

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.

Allus builds next-gen vision foundation models that bring real intelligence to manufacturing. Enabling factories to see, understand, and improve production in real time.

Bravi helps manufacturers of windows, doors, and other home improvement products turn fragmented technical and commercial data into tools their teams can use instantly. Our AI platform helps sales, customer service, and field teams answer technical questions, configure complex products, generate quotes, and retrieve order information by connecting to existing documentation, catalogs, ERP, CRM, and pricing systems. Bravi is already live with leading installers and manufacturers across Europe and the US, turning missed demand into revenue.

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.

China and Russia control the world’s critical minerals. We can produce Titanium, Magnesium, Aluminum, Zirconium & Hafnium in the U.S. more profitably than any existing process, and carbon neutrally via co-production. Carbochlorination is the primary process for producing critical metals like titanium, hafnium, and zirconium, and was once the standard for magnesium. The problem: conventional carbochlorination relies on purchasing carbon feedstocks, wastes valuable byproducts, and is highly CO₂-intensive. Duranium changes this with a novel reactor that recycles CO₂ emissions back into feedstock (CO) while generating a valuable co-product (bleaching agents). This closed loop slashes emissions and delivers Chinese-level metal pricing without subsidies — unlocking the full potential of carbochlorination for U.S. critical mineral production.

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

Paloma gives manufacturing companies an embedded team of engineers and ops experts who replace their manual operations with custom AI-native software.

Nox Metals is an AI-powered metals supplier powering modern American manufacturing at scale. We are building automated factories that turn raw metal into production-ready material faster, cheaper, and more reliably than legacy service centers.

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.

We make reagents and software that are purpose built for AI, automated labs, and personalized medicines.

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.

Lumari is the world's first AI-powered procurement automation platform purpose-built for direct materials and supply chain execution. Backed by Y Combinator, Lumari is a well-funded startup that deploys 100s of always-on AI agents that run sourcing workflows, manage RFQs, expedite purchase orders, and coordinate supplier communication end-to-end -- compressing cycle times and giving teams full visibility into active orders, RFQs, and supplier performance. Founded by engineers from Google, Tesla, Amazon, and Stripe who have built and scaled supply chain systems serving millions of users. Built to operate directly on top of existing tools and ERP systems, Lumari helps procurement teams move faster, eliminate operational bottlenecks, and build more resilient supply chains. No rip-and-replace, no supplier onboarding. Lumari handles the manual chase: quote follow-ups, PO confirmations, delivery status updates, and risk escalation. Lumari helps companies from Fortune 500s to fast-growing startups automate work from sourcing to delivery, streamline supplier communication and order management, and bring full visibility to their procurement operations. To learn more check out https://lumari.ai/

We're building an AI powered platform for engineers that are building new robots and machines. We allow users to invent and modify machine designs in a matter of minutes, not years. Ayna and Andy, the co-founders, met during their time at Harvard and started this in 2024 as their programs were wrapping up. We're commercializing 10+ years research done by our team at Harvard and MIT on this space. Our team wrote the very first papers on applying GenAI and optimization algorithms to compose robots from parts and applying computational design to fine tune machine designs. We're bringing in our deep knowledge of modifying equipment and integrating it into factories keenly understanding what makes hardware hard. We take in parts under consideration, constraints and tasks at hand and our algorithm formulates and fine tunes from 100s of possible design options. All in a few clicks, so engineers can push hardware to market faster and companies can benefit from the inventions being done by their R&D teams. We already have two paying customers in the OEM and system integrator spaces. We are venture backed and supported by a GBP 2.5MM grant by ARIA, the UK Government's invention agency.

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

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

GroundControl builds mission-critical software for manufacturers in highly-regulated industries (aerospace, defense, medical) Our core product automates lengthy, complex, and regulated quality documentation in aerospace manufacturing. As an example, the Boeing 777 is made up of over 3 million parts sourced from manufacturers around the world. These manufacturers must complete quality documentation for every part on this aircraft (machined parts, printed circuit boards, wire harnesses, assemblies, and more). GroundControl helps manufacturers complete this required documentation accurately, in minutes instead of days.

We capture and structure real factory workflows at scale by combining first-person industrial video with SOP-level process knowledge. This enables robotics and AI labs to train on real production data, not just controlled lab environments.

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.

Optifye.ai does AI performance monitoring for factory workers We place cameras in factories and use vision AI to tell supervisors who's working and who's not in real time. The shop floor has historically been a black box. With Optifye, manufacturing companies can now accurately measure worker output and boost efficiency!

We are making reusable satellites for zero-g manufacturing & Hypersonic Technology Development. Our first orbital recovery mission is set to launch in Q4 2026.

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.

Loombotic is automating wire harness manufacturing.

At Tiny, we’re building a new kind of ERP system for factories where AI agents automate repetitive workflows. Made for the four million factories still primarily relying on Excel. LLMs now unlock their troves of siloed unstructured data. We see a massive opportunity to build a compound startup and, beyond that, tap into network effects to unlock just-in-time manufacturing across entire supply chains.

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.