Semiconductors Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

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.

We use AI to discover new materials for the semiconductor industry - specifically datacenters and fabs. Finding novel materials today takes 10+ years of lab work. We aim to compress that timeline to months, using a swarm of AI agents. Akash completed his PhD at Stanford on material discovery for semiconductors. The materials he discovered for nanoscale interconnects have been adopted into the roadmaps of Intel and TSMC. Advaith was the founding applied scientist at Persona AI (acquired by Luma Labs), where he built long horizon autonomous agents for major telecom and crypto companies. Power consumption and heat release from AI chips is doubling every year. The semiconductor industry needs new materials to keep this exponential going - Discovered Materials will help find them.

Visibl makes custom chip development dramatically faster and lower cost for hardware companies. Today, most hardware companies that need a custom chip have bad options: sign a massive contract with an incumbent like Broadcom, pay a traditional design house millions of dollars and wait 18+ months, or keep using off-the-shelf chips and FPGAs that are not optimized for their product's cost, power, performance, size, or manufacturability. We handle the full path from architecture and design through verification, foundry management, and production. That makes custom ASICs accessible to robotics, drones, industrial, IoT, and edge hardware companies that were previously priced out of the market. As more hardware products need differentiated silicon, we think custom chip development should be available to far more companies than it is today.

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.

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.

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.

DeepSim is building an AI physics simulator. We are currently developing the only thermal simulator to meet AI chip design needs and are validating our tool with Intel. We are a team of three electrical engineering PhDs from Stanford with backgrounds in semiconductor fabrication and design.

Zetta builds energy-efficient chips ("XPUs") for AI to accelerate discovery. Our XPUs are highly programmable, letting them optimize the dataflow for each model and making them faster and far more efficient than anything on the market today, saving data centers billions in energy and cooling costs.

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.

Conductor Quantum is building quantum superintelligence: AI that operates quantum computers to make scientific discoveries beyond human reach. Quantum computers let us understand the world at its most fundamental level, the path to new drugs, new materials, and discoveries no human can reach alone. A quantum computer is the perfect simulator of nature: it encodes the logic of reality into a programmable machine, atom by atom, electron by electron. Give AI that simulator and you open the door to discovery. The bottleneck is operating the hardware. Today, engineers spend days or weeks by hand to bring a chip to operating conditions for just two qubits. A qubit is the information-carrying unit of a quantum computer, the equivalent of a bit in a classical one, and a useful machine needs billions. Removing the human from that loop is only half the problem. Every command an AI sends to a quantum computer must be optimised for the specific hardware it runs on. We build the AI that operates quantum computers and tunes every machine it runs on. That is the path to quantum superintelligence.

Silogy is building an AI-powered platform for chip developers to simulate and debug their designs.

We're building AI-native core tools & agent-driven workflows for frontend chip design. Today, Silimate is helping Fortune 500s and chip unicorns create & iterate to correct, optimized designs 40x faster. Our goal is to enable autonomous spec-to-design for silicon.

Novel AI hardware and developer platform, built from first principles to let companies train, fine-tune, and deploy frontier models with orders of magnitude better performance than incumbents

Bronco is an applied AI lab helping chipmakers keep Moore’s law going. Our mission is to build AI silicon verification engineers that find bugs, drive functional coverage, and help companies ship working chips on time. We're currently deployed alongside verification teams at leading chip companies building next generation hardware (4 nm process node). We are well-funded and backed by tier-1 investors, including YC, 8VC, Elad Gil, SV Angel, and Contrary Capital. We have also established strong relationships with the leading academic and industry researchers in the field of AI for chip design. Our advisors have won multiple Best Paper Awards at leading conferences, been cited tens of thousands of times, and received some of the highest honors in the microelectronics and EDA industries.