CompanyBatchTeam

Robotics & physical AI 31

Humanoids, robot brains, actuators, robot data and evals, robots for labor.

Manufacturing, energy & industrial 24

Factories, CNC, inspection, industrial automation, energy and grid infrastructure.

Finance & trading 22

AI trading, asset management, credit, banking compliance and consumer finance.

Vertical operating systems 21

AI that runs a specific kind of business: restaurants, hotels, auto shops, real estate, construction, local government.

Defense, aerospace & drones 19

Counter-drone, munitions, radar, satellites, space manufacturing and flight ops.

Agent plumbing 18

Gateways, tool routers, context, memory, identity, payments and guardrails for agents.

Enterprise agents & knowledge work 18

Company brains, AI coworkers and agents that do knowledge work inside companies.

Training data & RL environments 17

Data, benchmarks and RL environments sold to frontier labs and model builders.

Consumer apps & devices 17

Consumer agents, wearables, phones, content, learning and games.

Sales, marketing & hiring 15

GTM automation, sales coaching, marketing content, SEO and recruiting.

Healthcare delivery & health IT 15

AI-native clinics and practices, health ops, records and consumer health.

Insurance 14

AI-native carriers, brokers, TPAs, claims and benefits.

Inference, compute & model training 13

Cheaper or faster inference clouds, token-cost routing, compute markets, custom model training.

Coding agents & developer tools 13

Coding agents, IDEs, git, on-call/debugging and data tooling.

AI-native service firms & back office 13

Law, accounting, BPO and collections firms run by AI, plus legal/HR back office.

Supply chain, logistics & procurement 12

Freight, trucking, distribution, procurement and trade.

Bio, drugs & science 12

Drug discovery, therapeutics, materials and lab automation for science.

Chips & data-center hardware 11

New silicon, optical interconnect, bio-computing and data-center buildout.

Agent sandboxes & cloud runtimes 10

Where agents run: sandboxes, VMs, devboxes, browsers, managed agent clouds.

Security 10

Offensive/defensive AI security, agent security, identity and watermarking.

Agent testing & simulation 8

Simulated APIs and worlds, evals and monitoring to catch agent failures before production.

  • We find where AI agents fail, then train better models to run them.
    S26
    2
    YC ↗
  • Test agents in realistic worlds built from production usage
    F26
    2
    YC ↗
  • Continuously improving evals for agentic commerce
    F26
    2
    YC ↗
  • Continuous optimization for AI agents
    F26
    3
    YC ↗
  • API simulators for testing and training agents locally
    F26
    2
    YC ↗
  • Firmware simulation for AI agents
    F26Hiring
    4
    YC ↗
  • User simulations for production monitoring.
    F26
    2
    YC ↗
  • Simulation Environments for Verifying Mission Critical Software
    F26Hiring
    2
    YC ↗

AI research labs & foundation models 8

Labs training their own models or automating research itself.

No companies match.

Source: yc-oss mirror of the YC directory (see data/). Hand-assigned by Claude from each company's one-liner on 2026-10-03; judgment, not source data.