Y Combinator's latest batch presented on Thursday, and the consensus among early-stage VCs was clear: this cohort felt "like science fiction." TechCrunch asked investors to name the hottest startups, and nine emerged as the buzziest, flagged by at least two investors each.
Atomarine is building nuclear-powered data centers floating at sea, targeting the compute shortage driven by AI demand. Co-founded by MIT nuclear and naval engineers, it claims over $4 billion in customer interest via letters of intent and plans a gas-powered pilot by 2028 with nuclear transition in 2032.
Dipole Labs tackles GPU cluster inefficiency with optical switches that skip the light-to-electricity conversion, keeping data as light throughout the networking layer — potentially eliminating a major power and latency bottleneck.
Isengard Industries mass-produces jet-powered attack and counter-drones within allied countries at a fraction of prime contractor costs. Already generating $10 million in revenue, co-founded by a former Australian Army officer.
Lamb Labs hardcodes AI model weights directly into silicon via "Model Processing Units" (MPUs), eliminating memory-bandwidth bottlenecks for ultra-efficient inference.
Nori launched six weeks ago with a $1,600 humanoid robot for household tasks — already touting nearly half a million in sales, undercutting competitors like Neo by an order of magnitude.
Cosmic Robotics builds autonomous heavy-lift robots already installing solar panels across the U.S., with $25 million in contracts through 2027 and a long-term Mars colonization vision.
Parasma trains human brain cells as a computing substrate — a biocomputing play targeting AI's energy problem.
Waddle Labs offers an API layer that lets LLM agents write robot control code, positioning itself as "Claude Code for robotics." Founded by Harvard graduates, it claims 20-minute setup for any hardware.
Praxis AI collects real-world video data of humans doing work to train robots, already operating in 150+ environments with publicly traded company partners.
The full story is at TechCrunch.
