Robotics Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Orvixo uses AI to build reactive end-to-end planning and optimisation models for manufacturers.

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.

Operate any robot, anywhere in the world.

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.

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 humanoid robots in San Francisco.

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 manual surveys and inspections. Built by Los Alamos robotics veterans and deterministic-manipulation researchers, we're starting in nuclear and expanding to other hazardous industries.

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.

We’re automating robot evaluation– the loop where you wait for your robot to roll out, judge its success, and then reset the scene. We're starting with step one: a success detector that automatically tells you whether your robot actually completed its task along with detailed subtask breakdown. We're MIT computer scientists & friends since middle school, with backgrounds at NASA JPL, SpaceX, and AWS. Book a demo with founders@instancelabs.ai.

We build modular humanoid robots and the software platform that allows anyone to train, deploy, and scale robots for real-world tasks. Today, teaching a robot a new skill requires robotics engineers, machine learning engineers, training infrastructure, and significant compute resources. We reduce that process to: Record → Upload → Train → Deploy. Our robots are modular and configurable, with interchangeable end effectors, configurable sensors, and multiple deployment configurations. We believe current humanoid embodiments are often overfit for specific use cases, so we're building a platform that adapts to different environments and applications. Long term, we want robotics to be as accessible as software development. Our goal is to become the default platform for training and deploying autonomous robots.

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.

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?

Hub is a distributed real-world data infrastructure company that captures the lived richness of human experience, including voice, nuance, and perspective to train the next generation of AI models. Through HubApp, our global network spanning 150+ countries sources high-fidelity, original data that cannot be found on the public web or generated synthetically. We provide a completely automated pipeline coupled with human-in-the-loop validation to deliver production-ready multimodal data to frontier AI labs and Fortune 500 companies.

We deploy robots in warehouses to automate the most demanding job in logistics: unloading loose-loaded containers. Our customers include 3PLs (CEVA, Stord), distributors (DHL, PostNL) and many more logistics companies.

Fern provides RL environments for robotics companies powered by a foundational world model. Companies can plug and play their robot policies completely in software with varying starting scenes of their production environment, and we'll produce RL heads on top of your existing policies to improve speed and success rate. Our customers get a continual learning flywheel where their production robots improve every week.

We provide defense companies with simulation infrastructure to train and validate autonomous systems.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Building open-source general-purpose robots capable of performing unsafe, repetitive or boring tasks.

Cortex AI builds the world’s most diverse and large-scale real-world workplace robot & egocentric dataset — where the physical world becomes the next training and evaluation set for embodied AI. We power frontier labs developing robotics foundation models and general-purpose robots by providing the data they need: 1️⃣ Egocentric Data — real-workplace human video with hand/body pose, depth, and subtask labels. 2️⃣ Robot Data — trajectories collected from manipulators and humanoids in real industry settings. 3️⃣ Human-in-the-Loop Rollouts & Evals — real-world deployments with remote operators who recover robots when they fail, capturing data that feeds back into training and continuously improves models. Additionally, through the Cortex Marketplace, workplaces get paid to host data-collection and evaluation sessions, while labs access the in-the-wild data that truly matters. This draws on Lucas’s previous experience as co-founder of Carousell, a C2C marketplace that scaled to a $1B+ valuation.

We build humanoid robots that do your chores at iPhone prices. Just like the millions of cars generating data for self-driving, we need millions of humanoids generating real-world data for general-purpose robotics. Humanoid companies today can only manufacture hundreds a year because motors are expensive and slow to assemble. We use artificial muscles. Each muscle is just a tube wrapped in braided fibre, and the whole robot is powered by a single pump — which means we can mass-produce humanoids by the millions. Our design is built for that scale from day one and is cheap enough to enter billions of homes.

Topological is developing physics-based foundation models for CAD optimization. We help hardware teams iterate at the same speed that software teams do. Our technology is accelerating the engineering workflow with AI and scales design and optimization to identify the ideal designs for complex problems given their physical constraints with enhanced speed and performance. Our first model, UToP-v1, is a SOTA topology optimization model that understands physics, geometry, and manufacturability. It can generate the most efficient design given a problem’s physical requirements. It has <5% compliance error and is 1930x faster than current methods. We're reimagining mechanical engineering and computational design with precision spatial AI.

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

DeepAware (Robotics Center of Silicon Valley, https://roboticscenter.ai/) is the fastest way for enterprises and researchers to get robots and robotics parts in the US — 72-hour delivery or Bay Area pickup. Beyond hardware, we help teams collect teleoperation data, build reinforcement learning environments, and deploy robots into production. Customers include AI labs, industrial operations, research teams, and event producers.

b12 makes high-value molecules that are otherwise hard to make. We help pharma companies plan and make new drugs, accelerating early-stage drug discovery from years to months. Andres built the first AI agent that can autonomously think and make molecules in a robotic lab, published in Nature Machine Intelligence (1000+ citations), and won the best paper award at the NeurIPS AI for Science conference. Zlatko is a 3x National Chemistry Olympiad champion, competed at IChO level, and medicinal chemist who has worked at Roche and leading lab robotics companies. Combined, we have an extensive network of hundreds of chemists, automation scientists, and AI 4 Science researchers. We run paid pilots with big pharma companies, demonstrating that our platform planned a set of experiments that achieved full conversion in a single attempt, eliminating the iteration cycle.

Physical Turing rolls out humanoids in the real world and captures failures for benchmarking and post-training. We procure, staff, and operate a wide range of target environments for real-world rollouts, helping robot makers, model companies, and enterprises continuously evaluate where humanoids succeed, where they fail, and what needs to improve before each deployment.

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.

Every month, our robots greet tens of thousands of Americans with a smile. They answer questions, upsell customers, and can be trained just like a human employee.

Teach robots new skills through natural language and run reliably in production in minutes. Mbodi combines generative AI and agent orchestration, turning everyday language and quick demos into precise, reliable robot actions for industrial automation.

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.

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

We’re building AI-powered systems that automate manual work in scientific labs using robotics. Scientists simply type their experiment in plain English. Zeon translates it into code and runs it on robotic arms (no coding required). By controlling robots with natural language, we’re enabling automation for every lab, every scientist, and every experiment. Zeon is lab-aware. It detects equipment, adapts to protocols, and moves autonomously between instruments to execute full workflows. We’re already working with labs at Stanford and UCSF to accelerate discovery - from running overnight nanoparticle fluorescence measurements to safely disposing of hundreds of bacterial samples. Zeon reclaims time for what matters most: the science.

We collect high-quality human data, across diverse interactions and environments, to help advance the next generation of multimodal AI and robotics models.

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.

General Trajectory is using AI to solve the world's most important problems, from autonomous defense to scientific R&D.

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.

We make personal AI robots - general-purpose physical machines that anyone can program with code, language and demonstrations. We believe building open platforms like the first PCs this is the only way to bring the robotics future that we all want, where everyone can participate in the robotics revolution.

Theseus builds visual navigation software for GPS-denied drone operations. Using onboard cameras, inertial sensors, and satellite reference imagery, our system computes position fixes entirely passively. The system is entirely self contained, can't be jammed and has no RF signature.

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.

Sensei helps robotics companies scale and outsource their training data collection. Our hardware platform enables the collection of human-demonstration data at a tenth of the cost and twice the speed of current teleop approaches. Our software platform acts like Scale AI for robotics data: a large network of paid human operators use our low-cost collection platform to fulfill data-generation requests.

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.