Hardware Supply Chain Nicolas Dessaigne In Shenzhen, a team can go from design to a new physical part in a day. In the US, that same loop often takes weeks, and that gap compounds. The overall stack for rapid hardware iteration still doesn't exist in America, and we want... to fund the startups building it.show more

Electronics in Space @PhilipJohnston Reusable rockets are about to dramatically increase humanity's capacity to put things in space, and that means an enormous new market for compute built to operate there. We want to see inference chips optimized for mass, thermal, and radiation tolerance, built for a world where space is no longer out of reach.

Counter-Swarm Defense @bosmeny A Patriot missile costs $3 million. An FPV drone costs $500. All the cost advantage lies with the attackers, and the next wave isn't one drone, it's swarms. Drone defense is starting to look less like operating a weapon and more like running a real-time distributed system. We want to fund founders building the counter-swarm stack.

Company Brain @t_blom Every company has critical know-how scattered across people's heads, old Slack threads, support tickets, and databases, and AI agents can't operate like that. We think every company in the world is going to need a new primitive: a living map of how the company works that turns its own artifacts into an executable skills file for AI.

AI-Native Service Companies @gustaf The total spend on services is many times larger than the spend on software, and a lot of those services are already outsourced, which makes them easier to replace with an AI-native product. We're excited about companies that don't sell a tool to help you do the work: they just do the work.

AI for Low-Pesticide Agriculture @garrytan Farmers are stuck in a bad loop: use more chemicals, get diminishing results, pay more, take on more risk. And they can't just stop, because if pests win, crops die. AI that can identify individual weeds in real time, robotics that can treat one plant instead of blanketing a field, and new biological solutions mean this problem finally looks solvable.

AI has stopped being a feature and started being the foundation. We're excited about a new wave of startups rebuilding software, services, and silicon— and pushing AI into the physical world.

Industrial Capabilities in Space @AdiOltean The moon has abundant silicon, aluminum, iron, and titanium, and extracting them there may actually be more efficient than on Earth. We want to see startups developing industrial capabilities in space, from electrolysis of raw materials to 3D printing complex structures from molten regolith.

Inference Chips for Agent Workflows @sdianahu Most AI chips are designed for "prompt in, response out." Agents don't work that way. They loop, branch, and hold context across dozens of steps, and current GPUs hit 30–40% utilization as a result. That gap is where purpose-built silicon wins.

SaaS Challengers @snowmaker AI has collapsed the cost of producing software by 10–100x, and the moat that once protected legacy SaaS, millions of lines of code built over decades, is gone. That's bad news for incumbents and great news for startups.

Software for Agents @aaron_epstein The next trillion users on the internet won't be people. They'll be AI agents, and they're already doing real work on top of software that was designed for humans clicking buttons. Every major category of software needs to be rebuilt for agents as first-class citizens, and that won't come from incumbents.

Startups That Sell to the Biggest Companies in the World @bradflora & @aroraharshita33 For the first time, a 2–3 person team can land a pilot with a Fortune 10 company before the ink is dry on their incorporation docs. AI has made the buyers reachable, the product shippable fast, and the ROI obvious to even the largest organizations in the world.

Supply Chain 2.0 for Semiconductors @sdianahu A single advanced AI chip crosses a dozen countries and takes five months to build, managed mostly with spreadsheets and phone calls. Real-time allocation tracking, multi-tier risk monitoring, and export compliance tooling barely exist, which is exactly why this is a startup opportunity and not a feature inside SAP.

The AI Operating System for Companies @sdianahu The best AI-native companies have made their entire company queryable: every meeting, ticket, and customer interaction legible to an intelligence layer that learns from it. Building this today requires brutal integration work, and there's no product that connects all this context into a single layer that can reason across it.

AI-Personalized Medicine @agupta The cost of genome sequencing has fallen faster than Moore's Law, and agents can now analyze personalized health data to generate highly accurate, user-specific suggestions. We think these shifts will bring about a revolution in care delivery, and a wide variety of startups will support every step of that ecosystem.

Dynamic Software Interfaces @agupta Before AI, every user of a piece of software got the same interface. Coding agents are now good enough to let users become their own forward-deployed engineers. We think software companies will soon ship shared primitives with the full expectation that users will radically customize the final product themselves.

@agupta If you’re interested in working on any of these ideas, you should apply to YC. The deadline for applying to the Summer batch is May 4th at 8pm PT:

AI-Native Discovery Engines @xuster For centuries, scientific discovery has run on the same loop: hypothesize, experiment, interpret, repeat. It works, but it's slow. Frontier models have now reached PhD-level performance on scientific reasoning, and the frontier is shifting from copilots to systems that can run closed discovery loops on their own.

@dessaigne This is dumb. It isnt a “startup” problem its a infrastructure and city planning problem. Shenzen has a network effect of cramming everything you need to build anything in 10sq miles. You need to build a “new shenzen” here to compete American capital is too short sighted to do it

@dessaigne It is a problem of high labour prices and stringent QC mandates to come in the way of quick iterations. If you look at how China is able to get all these done in a day and try to replicate that in the US, you would hav e broken multiple laws of the country.

@dessaigne China is fast because even competitors collaborate. This is unthinkable in the US, and why they will not match China's speed.

@dessaigne You really are this dumb Shenzhen America won’t work with slim margins and cost of living here in USA

@dessaigne This is exactly what @makematterco is building :)

@dessaigne This used to exist when the defense industry was less monopolistic, had large ecosystem of job shops. Investor funding won't scratch the surface.

@dessaigne literally what I’m building

@dessaigne Recommend to check out DFM Foundry for the supply chain solutions of your hardware ambitions

@dessaigne Welcome to the game @ycombinator

@dessaigne We mine electronics waste for rare earths and precious metals.

@dessaigne 👋

@dessaigne @dessaigne is the prompt to hardware mass production platform you're looking for! We have users from Tesla, Amazon Leo and Google building with our platform! Applied to YC S26!

@dessaigne

@dessaigne @danedisonsiegel

@dessaigne Getting a CNC part in China takes 24-72h, USA 72h to a week, Europe a week to two weeks. Rest of the world 30+ days.

@dessaigne Much needed funding! As someone who almost took VP mfg job at prominent Chinese auto supplier corp... let me make this clear: China vendors STEAL YOUR SHIT. They often ask for more details, maintenance, CAD from you "in order to better understand needs" And then this happens:

@dessaigne You should checkout @3e8blueprint

@dessaigne Anybody wanna go check out shenzhen?

@dessaigne Hello! We build wiring harnesses with ultrafast turnaround times (when we aren’t overbooked). Have your people call my people!

@dessaigne Let’s fix this

this is false. I use to run a company in the UK and we were launching a new physical/hardware product every week to demonstrate this is possible. We run this for 2 months we launched 9 products going from idea, to prototype to small batch manufacturing, marketing and selling every week. Most of those products sold out immediately. I agree the ecosystem can be simplified but lack of willingness doesn't mean it can't be done. Also, for reference, the UK has worse supply chain for parts than the US.

@dessaigne Major problem that definitely needs a strong team for this solution. I think the winner in this space is going to have at least one founder with a lot of long-term expertise in manufacturing.

@dessaigne Then invest in me.

@dessaigne i love french english.

I grew up in Shenzhen, studied in both Hong Kong and the US, and spent time working in the US before returning to China. I’ve now spent more than 10 years working here — long enough to watch Shenzhen evolve from trade → light processing → deep manufacturing → and ultimately into a high-end manufacturing ecosystem. However, what people often underestimate is this — Shenzhen is not just a supply chain advantage. It’s the outcome of decades of compounding across multiple layers: 1. Industrial clustering, initially anchored by players like Foxconn and Apple’s ecosystem 2. Continuous automation upgrades and domestic substitution from low-end to high-end manufacturing 3. Structural shifts driven by new supply chains (e.g. EVs like Tesla, consumer electronics, etc.) 4. Deep specialization across extremely granular verticals, now AI hardware, robotics and etc. But none of this happened in isolation! It’s the result of an entire region — including surrounding cities — evolving together, supported by long-term policy, infrastructure, talent migration, and capital flows. This is a multi-decade compounding system, not a playbook you can copy. Happy to discuss more — would love to hear how others see this. 😃

@dessaigne It's a fundamental issue

@dessaigne Weeks/month if you're lucky. Mostly you're either ignored or wait weeks just for a quote. But then it's a 6month lead time.

@dessaigne CHIPS act should include PCB manufacturing and assembly.

@dessaigne Jews will not allow that

@dessaigne @ReeplayerHQ

@dessaigne @jimbelosic

@dessaigne @ycombinator - get us moving !!

@dessaigne Isn’t McMaster around anymore ?