A lot of construction work is still done by hand simply because the machines to automate it don’t exist. That’s become a bottleneck for building things like solar farms, data centers, and other critical infrastructure. @cosmic_robotics is building those machines. Their robots have already installed 11,000 solar panels, and they just signed a major contract with the largest construction company in the country. They’re building the construction robots we’ll need on Earth today, and eventually on the Moon and Mars. @JamesAEmerick

YC works with thousands of founders every year, which gives us an early look at how startups are changing. Right now, the shift is striking: startups are moving from bits to atoms, nearly one in five YC companies has a solo founder, and companies are reaching meaningful revenue faster than ever. In this episode of the Lightcone, @garrytan, @snowmaker, @sdianahu, and @harjtaggar dig into what’s driving these changes and what they mean for founders. They discuss how AI is making it possible for smaller teams to take on more ambitious problems, why experienced founders are having a resurgence, and why knowing what to build is becoming more important than simply knowing how to build it. 01:06 — Startups Are Moving From Bits to Atoms 03:29 — Why AI Is Making Hard Tech Easier 05:21 — Defense, Manufacturing, and the Return of Hard Tech 09:48 — AI Compute Is Becoming a Physical Infrastructure Problem 12:34 — Robotics Is Approaching Its ChatGPT Moment 15:40 — Software Isn’t Dead. It’s Becoming the Harness 17:59 — Why AI Startups Are Growing Faster 22:52 — The Hidden Boom in Data and RL Environments 27:08 — Why Robotics Will Need Specialized Models 29:38 — The Rise of the Solo Founder 32:54 — Why Experienced Founders Are Back 34:59 — What Founders Should Do Right Now

How much we love building things! Especially with my twin co-founder, @OTrashi 🩵 And now, we’re incredibly excited to have @BioDelivera backed by @ycombinator ! 🚀 We both graduated with our PhDs this March, packed our bags, moved to San Francisco, and kept building @BioDelivera. It’s been a crazy journey, and we’re happy that it’s about to get even crazier ⚡️🌪️🌀 We’re working to solve one of the biggest challenges in translating science to humans: delivery. Getting medicines and gene editors to the right organs and cells is vital. We’re ready to revolutionize the drug delivery space with our GCVs! A huge thank you to our YC partners, @dessaigne and @nemild , for believing in us, and to everyone else who has been there for us and supported us endlessly along the way. 🩵 We’re just getting started! 🚀 follow us for more updates! #biotech# #ycombinator# #womenfounder# #pharma# #biodelivera#

Steve Wozniak will be joining me on the main stage on October 2nd @Supabase Select is a conference for builders, so we invited one of the GOATs get your ticket here:

Conviction: Trading Desk in Your Pocket. Describe a trading idea in natural language. Conviction tests it on historical data and deploys an AI agent that trades on your behalf. Trade like a quant: Here's how it works:

I first came to San Francisco when I was 15, with my dad. He is a programmer. To a teenager from a small island outside of Stockholm, this was the place where the future was being built. We walked into Salesforce East and stood there watching the enormous digital display of moving water. Outside, Salesforce Tower was starting to rise. I remember looking up and thinking it would be pretty sweet to have a tower someday. We are not there yet. What I could not have known is that I would be back years later, having dinner with @Benioff and welcoming @salesforce as a @WeAreLegora customer. Salesforce's Legal and Corporate Affairs organization will now use Legora across North America, EMEA and APAC. Their lawyers keep the judgment calls. We take care of the work around them. We have run on Slack since day one and became Salesforce customers when our sales team outgrew its first CRM, so it is good to have it run in the other direction too. Welcome to Legora, Salesforce. Dad, this one feels special.

@ycombinator built AI versions of its partners to help more people work through their startup ideas. For its Office Hour Simulator, the team needed useful answers delivered quickly enough for a spoken conversation. They had been testing lightweight Gemini and OpenAI models before moving to GLM-5.2 on a dedicated Wafer endpoint. YC then compared that deployment with GPT-4.1 mini on OpenAI and Gemma 4 31B on Cerebras, evaluating answer quality, latency, and conversation duration. The Wafer configuration delivered 31% lower average LLM latency than OpenAI and 44% lower than Cerebras. Users spent 2.5 minutes longer talking to YC’s AI partners when using Wafer. Read how YC built the experience and landed on Wafer 🧵 link in thread

Last week, I got to go up on stage at YC Demo Day and pitch the idea of non-aligned, sovereign orbital infrastructure to thousands of investors @Exosat_ YC was an incredible experience Huge thanks to @bradflora and @ChristinaG325, it was great to work with you both!

People still underestimate how large the data market will become. Better models do not reduce demand for data. They increase the number of useful things models can learn. The frontier keeps moving, so the data has to keep getting harder.

today, we're launching our new Parse Router extend now runs a classifier on every page, and decides whether to run our performance or light engine for parsing (on a page-by-page basis) tldr: - most documents have a mix of complex pages intermingled with simpler ones. The router classifies and routes each page so you get the best blended performance x cost for any given document - you pay per page for whatever was used: 0.5 credits for our Light engine, 2 credits for Performance - our classifier works by scoring each page on layout, text quality, tables, form fields, and checkboxes - on RealDoc-Bench, enabling the parse router scored 89% (close to Performance's 90.9%) while using significantly fewer credits Parse Router is now our recommended default for most customers with mixed document payloads in mortgage, insurance, healthcare, and legal it's live today, set the engine to `parse_auto` and give it a shot on your own docs

Introducing the Knowledge Base MCP. Greptile maintains a detailed knowledge base of how every part of your codebase works, as well as a history of past incidents. Starting today coding agents like Codex, Claude can access the Knowledge Base via Greptile's MCP, so they can use Greptile's learnings to write better code.

Greg Brockman: If We Ban Data Centers, China Writes the Rules⁣ ⁣ "AI will continue without us, and then we'll have zero say, as opposed to we're the leaders, and then we have all the say... we could just say, hey, you have to be a well behaved data center as opposed to we're going to ban them or we're going to stop AI."

Today we're announcing Clarion's $10M seed, led by Accel with participation from Y Combinator. After a decade training as a physician at Stanford and Harvard, I left the bedside to fix how medical practices run. Here's why. The medical practice is one of the most important institutions in American life. There are over 200,000 of them, and they're running on decades-old technology and grocery store margins. Twenty years ago medicine digitized the patient chart, but it never digitized the practice. The rules that actually run a practice live on sticky notes and in the heads of the practice manager and their staff. As a result, the modern medical practice is illegible to AI. Clarion learns how a practice works from every call, message, and document that moves through it everyday. We turn those interactions into a world model of the practice, and our agents operate from it, handling the scheduling, referrals, and patient requests that previously consumed the front desk. Today, Clarion agents handle millions of patient interactions every month, for some of the largest and most respected healthcare groups in the US. This is the greatest shift in how practices operate since paper charts gave way to electronic records. By 2030, the best-run practices in America won't look anything like the practices of today, and they will all run on Clarion. Thank you to our partners for trusting us with their patients, to our team for earning that trust every day, and to our investors for backing us before it was obvious. We're hiring across all roles in New York. Join us. @clarionhealthai @Accel @ycombinator

Today, we are open-sourcing the Innate OS, the intuitive agentic OS for general-purpose robots 🎮 Try it today in our simulator and make the smartest robot ⬇️ Here is a demo with two robots collaborating We are entering the physical agents era, but building for mobile robots is still reserved for PhDs. We designed the Innate OS for intuitiveness, so that everyone can start automating their lives. Innate OS runs on our <$1k open-source robot or on your computer. It takes just a minute to build your first agent in our simulator.

Introducing Grade. Predict how users will respond before you ship. Grade is an eval system calibrated to what real users actually say and do. Get early access here -->