Y Combinator(@ycombinator)

This week’s Paper Club is all about inference. For every FLOP spent training a model, roughly six ...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 16:30:36 GMT

This week’s Paper Club is all about inference. 

For every FLOP spent training a model, roughly six go to serving it each year — and getting that part right has produced over $220 billion in market cap in the last decade.

But inference is much more than calling model.forward. Every token has to move through a complicated stack of routing, caching, scheduling, kernels, memory, and hardware, all while balancing speed, cost, and quality.

We brought together researchers and builders from @togethercompute, @ollama, @luminal_ai, and @sgl_project & @radixark to take us through that stack from end to end. We’ll see how a token gets from an API request to a GPU and back, why the same open model can perform differently depending on who serves it, and how new approaches to compilers and caching are making inference faster and more efficient.

00:00 - Why inference matters more than training
08:24 - Three kinds of inference innovation
12:14 - Dan Fu (@realDanFu): the lifecycle of an inference request
42:18 - Jeff Morgan (@jmorgan): not all open model tokens are the same
1:04:31 - Joe Fioti (@joefioti): compiling models with search, not heuristics
1:30:30 - Liangsheng Yin (@lsyincs): SGLang and memory for the agent era

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Congrats to @dakshgup, @soohoonchoi, @vaishaaant and @greptile (W24) on their $50M Series B! Grept...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 17:28:38 GMT

Congrats to @dakshgup, @soohoonchoi, @vaishaaant and @greptile (W24) on their $50M Series B! 

Greptile reviews and tests more than 1% of all pull requests opened on GitHub every day.

With fewer than 50 people, Greptile serves thousands of engineering teams, including those at Nvidia, Coinbase, Decagon, and Vanta. These teams rely on Greptile as an independent validation layer, no matter which coding agent wrote the code.

greptile.com/blog/series-b

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*Over $11.5M in perks and deals btw

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 16:57:55 GMT

*Over $11.5M in perks and deals btw

Jay @ LegalOS@jaykhan

YC W27 applications are now open

What YC gives you:

→ $500K investment
→ YC partners in your corner, for life
→ Faster launches, growth and customer acquisition
→ Demo Day in front of thousands of investors
→ Over $500K in credits and 100+ perks
→ Alumni include Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash & Coinbase

Truly a life-changing opportunity, one application away 🔸

🔗 View Quoted Tweet

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Tune in: https://t.co/bybdL36hD7

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 15:01:32 GMT

Tune in: youtu.be/X7oI4Umt3DU

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Join us for the next Paper Club on October 21st, where we'll talk Inference: https://t.co/VVDTJXc7JG

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 15:01:32 GMT

Join us for the next Paper Club on October 21st, where we'll talk Inference: events.ycombinator.com/yc-paperclub-o…

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This week’s Paper Club is all about AI safety. Not the headlines, but the science. AI safety has b...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 15:01:31 GMT

This week’s Paper Club is all about AI safety. Not the headlines, but the science. 

AI safety has been a research field for decades, with its own conferences, methods, and a track record in systems like aircraft collision avoidance, where the standard is one catastrophic failure per billion flight hours.

We'll hear from @ClarkBarrett7 and Mykel Kochenderfer (@aiprof_mykel), Stanford professors and co-directors of the Stanford Center for AI Safety. 

Together with @FrancoisChauba1, they break down the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, how formal verification can mathematically prove properties of code, how aircraft safety techniques are being adapted to language models, and why AI may need its own NTSB.

00 - Science fiction vs. science fact
32 - Engineering problem, or P(doom)
04 - What actually happened at Hugging Face
53 - Where "10% in 10 years" comes from
21 - The real risk: open weights in the wrong hands
25 - Clark Barrett: when AI met automated reasoning
35 - CSLib: proving code correct in Lean
32 - From English spec to verified code in one click
55 - Mykel Kochenderfer: how do we know a system is safe
11 - Adaptive stress testing, from aircraft to LLMs
57 - Verifying neural networks
30 - Runtime monitoring and BetterBench
53 - Panel: reacting to the past three weeks
55 - An NTSB for AI
18 - Is cybersecurity solvable in five years
00 - If you were CISO of Bank of America
03:06 - The Swiss cheese model
05:43 - Audience Q&A

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Demis Hassabis on choosing what’s worth spending your life building in a world changing this fast: ...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:00:02 GMT

Demis Hassabis on choosing what’s worth spending your life building in a world changing this fast:

“Going after hard problems and deep problems, it’s no more difficult in some ways than going after a shallower, simpler, more superficial problem. They’re just differently difficult.”

“Given life’s very short and you only have so much time and energy, you might as well put your life force into something that will really make a difference.”

“If you start off on a deep tech journey today... you’re talking about a 10-year journey for true deep tech. So now you have to consider AGI appearing in the middle of that journey.”

“Imagine what that world would look like and then build something that would be useful if that comes in halfway through.”

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Full convo with @demishassabis and @garrytan: https://t.co/sCyNwtXOC5

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:00:02 GMT

Full convo with @demishassabis and @garrytan: youtu.be/JNyuX1zoOgU

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Applications for the YC Winter 2027 batch are now open! Apply by November 2: https://t.co/OnqI05W53...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:50:44 GMT

Applications for the YC Winter 2027 batch are now open!

Apply by November 2: ycombinator.com/apply

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Jensen Huang on why founders don’t need to be right from day one, but they do need to be able to lea...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:37:58 GMT

Jensen Huang on why founders don’t need to be right from day one, but they do need to be able to learn quickly:

“The technology that founded the company turns out to be exactly wrong.”

“I went down to Fry’s, and I bought three textbooks... I brought them back to the company. I gave them to the engineers.”

“Everybody would have thought that NVIDIA started out as world leaders in 3D graphics. We learned it from a textbook.”

“The big lesson for me is technology’s changing all the time. So long as you’re able to confront reality, so long as you are able to learn, the technology itself actually doesn’t matter. Since then, NVIDIA has been inventing all kinds of technology." 

"We approach everything with the same attitude. If it’s important to do, we’re going to go learn it. How hard can it be? It always turns out to be much, much harder than we expect. But you go into it with the attitude, how hard can it be?”

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Full convo from Startup School 2026: https://t.co/Bp5xKOGYmG

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:37:58 GMT

Full convo from Startup School 2026: youtu.be/I4B37S1dyQQ

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Congrats to @molagri (S26) on their $5.8M raise! They’re making precision biopesticides that can be...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 17:41:13 GMT

Congrats to @molagri (S26) on their $5.8M raise!

They’re making precision biopesticides that can be updated as fast as pests adapt.

Pests evolve resistance to every pesticide we throw at them, and new chemistry takes about a decade to reach the field. Molagri’s particles are designed to act only on the target species, sparing bees and other beneficial insects, and can be reprogrammed when resistance emerges instead of starting over from scratch.

agfundernews.com/molagri-raises…

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Full convo from July 29th at Startup School 2026: https://t.co/eXkYOElQz7

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:05:33 GMT

Full convo from July 29th at Startup School 2026: youtu.be/sJ4VJWycX9M

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Alexandr Wang on what matters in an age of abundant intelligence: “The scarce resource isn’t going ...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:05:32 GMT

Alexandr Wang on what matters in an age of abundant intelligence:

“The scarce resource isn’t going to be intelligence or agency. I really think it’s going to be vision and ambition.”

“Do you have a clear view of what you want the world to look like in the future? What is the one way in which you wanna put your finger on the scale for how the future of the world will develop?”

“AI will make that easier... But the flip side of that is then all of a sudden you can dream bigger.”

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https://t.co/MPgYccfge1

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 22:47:49 GMT

youtu.be/5bxp78i96S8

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Paul Graham on what surprised him most about AI: “The way we thought it was all going to play out w...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 22:47:48 GMT

Paul Graham on what surprised him most about AI:

“The way we thought it was all going to play out was you start out with a perfect fly.”

“Instead, what we got was basically a full-on human, but full of shit.”

“Instead of starting with perfect and then working your way up to human, you start with human and then work your way towards perfect.”

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Congrats to @hylight_aero (S23) on their $14.5M raise! They’re bringing back the airship, this tim...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:39:49 GMT

Congrats to @hylight_aero (S23) on their $14.5M raise! 

They’re bringing back the airship, this time autonomous, hydrogen-powered, and built to inspect critical infrastructure.

Power lines, pipelines, and railways are still mostly inspected by helicopter, which is expensive, polluting, and risky for crews. HyLight’s 12-meter airships hover low and slow with LiDAR, cameras, and methane detectors, capturing imagery down to 1 millimeter per pixel. Four are flying missions in France today, with 15 planned to operate at once by 2027.

aerotime.aero/articles/frenc…

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https://t.co/HlPWBCap1x

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:46:52 GMT

youtu.be/ofxAtQhV-xA?si…

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Tune in: https://t.co/vHobI7pyzF

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:32:29 GMT

Tune in: youtu.be/ofxAtQhV-xA

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Jeetu Patel is Cisco’s President and Chief Product Officer, helping turn one of the world’s largest ...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:32:28 GMT

Jeetu Patel is Cisco’s President and Chief Product Officer, helping turn one of the world’s largest technology companies into what he calls “the world’s largest startup.” 

Cisco is now positioning itself as the picks-and-shovels company for the AI era, spanning networking, security, silicon, and infrastructure. Its AI infrastructure business went from zero to $9.3B in orders in just two years.

In this episode of Main Function, Jeetu joins YC's Jared Friedman to talk about bringing a founder mindset to the company, and what the massive data center buildout looks like from the inside. He also shares the unlikely path that took him from waiting tables at Sizzler to leading product at Cisco, and the lessons he’s learned about ambition, compounding, and making the most of the opportunities in front of you.

00 — Cisco’s Bet on AI
38 — Running Cisco Like a Startup
45 — The Infrastructure AI Agents Need
00 — Getting 32,000 Engineers to Embrace AI
07 — Bringing AI to Hardware and Silicon
15 — Inside the AI Data Center Buildout
27 — Are We Overbuilding AI Infrastructure?
10 — Building Trust in AI Agents
18 — From India to Waiting Tables at Sizzler
12 — Choosing Learning Over Ego
31 — Ambition, Teamwork, and Compounding
31 — Don’t Squander Your Opportunity

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Congrats to @vitalize_care (YC W23) on their $31M Series A! They're building the AI operating syste...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 17:17:45 GMT

Congrats to @vitalize_care (YC W23) on their $31M Series A!

They're building the AI operating system for hospital staffing, scheduling, and capacity.

Nurse managers often lose two to four hours every day building schedules by hand, time that could be going to patients. Vitalize now manages millions of shifts a week across 15+ health systems, saving clinical leaders more than 2,000 hours a day. St. Luke's Health cut its overtime and agency labor spend by 54% within 12 weeks.

fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/vi…

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Congrats to @multiplylabs (YC S16) on their $75M Series B! They build robots that manufacture the ...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 18:22:31 GMT

Congrats to @multiplylabs (YC S16) on their $75M Series B! 

They build robots that manufacture the world's most complex drugs, including gene therapies and mRNA treatments.

AI is speeding up drug discovery, but someone still has to physically make the medicines, and today that work mostly happens by hand. Manual production is slow, vulnerable to contamination, and can cost more than $1 million per dose for some gene therapies. Multiply's robots run that production inside facilities at AstraZeneca and Legend Biotech.

businessinsider.com/see-the-pitch-…

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Congrats to @sensible_bio (YC S21) on their $47M Series A! They engineer living cells to manufactur...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:00:01 GMT

Congrats to @sensible_bio (YC S21) on their $47M Series A!

They engineer living cells to manufacture mRNA, turning the cell itself into the factory.

Today's mRNA is made in cell-free processes that work fine for vaccines, where doses are small. The next generation of mRNA medicines, like in vivo CAR-T and gene editing, needs far higher doses and far purer mRNA than those methods can deliver.

Sensible is closing that gap with a platform that can already produce around 1,000 mRNA sequences per week. endpoints.news/sensible-bio-s…

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Congrats to @kiwicopple, @AntWilson, and @supabase on their $150 million round at a $10.65 billion v...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:40:00 GMT

Congrats to @kiwicopple, @AntWilson, and @supabase on their $150 million round at a $10.65 billion valuation!

More than 13 million developers use Supabase as the backend for their apps. They're adding more than 1 million users and over 4 million databases every month, and 70% of new databases are now created by agents or AI-driven tools.

nytimes.com/2026/10/02/bus…

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Applied Electrodynamics is building cameras that can see through walls and other opaque materials. ...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:07:06 GMT

Applied Electrodynamics is building cameras that can see through walls and other opaque materials.

Using radio waves, they can locate studs, pipes, cables, and junction boxes behind surfaces like drywall or marble and turn it into a dimensionally accurate 3D model.

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Gumloop (YC W24) is building a platform that lets employees across a company build and share AI agen...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:15:00 GMT

Gumloop (YC W24) is building a platform that lets employees across a company build and share AI agents, while giving IT control over the data, permissions, and infrastructure behind them. 

Today it’s used by companies including Shopify, Gusto, and Instacart to automate work across sales, customer success, operations, and more.

In this fireside, @gumloop co-founders @MaxBrodeurUrbas and @rbehal1729 joined @gustaf to share how they built Gumloop before models were ready for agents, then found product-market fit as the technology caught up. They talk about landing early enterprise customers, making companies AI-native, and why the people closest to the work should be the ones automating it.

00 — The AI Agent Builder for Every Team
38 — From Workflow Automation to Enterprise AI
20 — What It Takes to Win Enterprise Customers
02 — How the Founders Met and Got Into YC
00 — How Gumloop Uses Its Own Agents
02 — Landing Shopify and Rethinking Pricing
23 — Fundraising and the Limits of Staying Lean
35 — Letting Employees Automate Their Own Work
43 — Building Agents Companies Can Control
23 — Getting IT to Say Yes

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https://t.co/U12sl5x64x

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:15:00 GMT

youtu.be/kDLji2s7LV4

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Tune in: https://t.co/AoGdMFZ98a

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:18:23 GMT

Tune in: youtu.be/xc2FTBGRSJo

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Join us for the next Paper Club, where we'll talk AI Safety: https://t.co/SF0SkOM9bl

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:18:23 GMT

Join us for the next Paper Club, where we'll talk AI Safety: events.ycombinator.com/yc-paperclub-o…

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This week’s Paper Club is all about alternative compute. Modern AI has been shaped by a tight coupl...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:18:22 GMT

This week’s Paper Club is all about alternative compute.

Modern AI has been shaped by a tight coupling between transformers, backpropagation, and GPUs. But as compute efficiency starts to plateau, there may be very different ways to build the machines that come next.

We explore what AI compute could look like beyond conventional digital hardware through optical systems that use light to perform computation, neuromorphic architectures inspired by the brain, and experiments teaching living brain cells to play Doom.

07 — @FrancoisChauba1: Why Alternative Compute?
38 — Beyond Backpropagation
08 — Zero-Order Optimization and SOMA
06 — Ilker Oguz: Computing With Light
27 — Why Optical Computing Isn’t Everywhere Yet
23 — Building a Diffusion Model With Light
03 — Optical Computing Q&A
00 — @AlokVasudev: What Is Neuromorphic Computing?
23 — What the Brain Can Teach Us About Chips
35 — Where Neuromorphic Computing Stands Today
24 — Neuromorphic Computing Q&A
04:24 — @vytalow: Teaching Brain Cells to Play Doom
07:48 — Training Biological Neurons With Reinforcement Learning
12:28 — How Brain Cells Learn From Feedback
15:40 — Biological Computing Q&A

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Startup School is coming to Taipei on November 12! 🇹🇼 Hear from founders like @andyfang of DoorDa...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 01:05:24 GMT

Startup School is coming to Taipei on November 12! 🇹🇼

Hear from founders like @andyfang of DoorDash, @jeffchanginvest of Vest, @moseslo of Xendit, @mchiang0610 of Ollama, and more.

And join builders and hackers from across Asia for a day of talks and sessions with YC partners.

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RSVP here: https://t.co/czwYVNAneH

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 01:05:24 GMT

RSVP here: events.ycombinator.com/startup-school…

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We’re excited to welcome @vivianmshen and @raphaelschaad as YC’s newest General Partners! Vivian an...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 17:36:06 GMT

We’re excited to welcome @vivianmshen and @raphaelschaad as YC’s newest General Partners!

Vivian and Raphael first came to YC as founders.

Vivian co-founded Juni Learning (W18), which teaches kids coding and math, and later founded Acely, an AI tutor for college prep. Raphael founded Cron (W20), the calendar app that became Notion Calendar.

They built products used by millions of people, then returned to YC as Visiting Partners to help other founders. Now they're doing it full-time.

ycombinator.com/blog/welcome-v…

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https://t.co/9NBvecbiDC

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:32:49 GMT

youtu.be/0-g2-PRrOdw

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Halluminate is building reinforcement learning environments and benchmarks to help AI models do know...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:32:48 GMT

Halluminate is building reinforcement learning environments and benchmarks to help AI models do knowledge work beyond coding, starting with finance. 

With a team of fewer than 10 people, the company works with four of the top five closed-source US AI labs and recently raised a $30M Series A.

In this fireside, co-founders @Jerr_Wu and @wgm752 sit down with YC's @xuster to share how testing browser agents led them to building the environments models now use to practice tasks like financial modeling. They explain why better verification, not just more training tasks, is critical to making models smarter, and how that work could eventually lead to simulated companies where teams of AI agents learn to work together.

00:00 — Halluminate’s Pivot From Evals to Training Environments
03:48 — Teaching AI to Do Financial Work
07:13 — Why Verification Matters More Than Volume
10:13 — From Finance to Simulated Companies
13:30 — AI Safety and Building the Team

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Live from DC with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman (@NASAAdmin) https://t.co/7A8r3jfSf8

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:34:23 GMT

Live from DC with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman (@NASAAdmin)

x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

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We're hosting an evening in SF with @oakhcft and π for early-stage builders in physical AI: robotics...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:02:25 GMT

We're hosting an evening in SF with @oakhcft and π for early-stage builders in physical AI: robotics, autonomy, and intelligent hardware.

Join us for a fireside chat with @physical_int co-founder @QuanVng on what it takes to build in the physical world.

events.ycombinator.com/yc-oak-happyho…

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Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:35:22 GMT

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The Startup Industrial Base: Building for the Next 250 — Washington, D.C. https://t.co/7A8r3jfSf8

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 12:56:34 GMT

The Startup Industrial Base: Building for the Next 250 — Washington, D.C. x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

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Tensr is building robotic factories that build robots. Their 12,000-square-foot factory is already ...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:51:24 GMT

Tensr is building robotic factories that build robots.

Their 12,000-square-foot factory is already making humanoids, end effectors, and even robots for the International Space Station.

Every order becomes training data for the factory to manufacture the next one better.

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“Tradeoffs that only pay off in 10 years will usually be underpriced.” Play the long game. When you...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 17:06:33 GMT

“Tradeoffs that only pay off in 10 years will usually be underpriced.”

Play the long game. When you think in decades rather than quarters, you’ll see that your potential customers have trajectories, not fixed sizes.

Paul Graham on making startups more powerful:
paulgraham.com/powerful.html

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One of the biggest surprises in AI over the last few years has been how well coding agents generaliz...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 14:35:20 GMT

One of the biggest surprises in AI over the last few years has been how well coding agents generalize beyond software. 

In a recent essay, MIT professor Philip Isola argued that we may be entering the era of robot-use agents: general-purpose models that can control different robots, write policies, and learn new physical tasks with little or no robot-specific training.

In this episode of Decoded, we're joined by the founders of @theWaddleLabs and @Robocurve, two of the startups whose work helped drive this realization. They're working at the frontier of using general-purpose models to control robots, and their recent demos helped inspire the growing conversation around robot-use agents. 

Together, we dig into the research behind that idea, from code-as-policies and vision-language-action models to the harnesses and evals needed to make these systems work in the real world.

00:00 — What Are Robot-Use Agents?
02:11 — From Vision-Language-Action Models to General LLMs
04:07 — The Bitter Lesson for Robotics
07:04 — How Coding Agents Learned to Control Robots
10:41 — How Robots Learn From Experience
14:22 — The Harness as a Form of Robot Intelligence
16:14 — Watching Astra Control a Robot
20:55 — Why General Models May Win in Robotics
26:05 — How Close Are General-Purpose Robots?

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Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 14:35:20 GMT

youtube.com/watch?v=Jv5B5C…

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Hop Aero is building rockets that can deliver cargo anywhere on Earth in minutes. They’re starting ...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 18:05:18 GMT

Hop Aero is building rockets that can deliver cargo anywhere on Earth in minutes.

They’re starting with military logistics and other time-sensitive payloads, including temperature-controlled materials with short shelf lives, where getting something there much faster can materially change the outcome.

They’ve already built and successfully hot-fired a new rocket engine, and signed $1.37B in commercial LOIs.

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Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:23:14 GMT

youtu.be/2otGNwNOEUM

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Vapi (@Vapi_AI) is the platform for building and deploying voice AI agents. It now serves about a bi...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:23:13 GMT

Vapi (@Vapi_AI) is the platform for building and deploying voice AI agents. It now serves about a billion calls a year for companies including Amazon, Uber, and Intuit, helping businesses automate phone calls with AI.

Voice is becoming the default interface between businesses and their customers, but getting agents reliable enough for production is still much harder than it looks.

In this episode of Founder Firesides, co-founders @jordan_dearsley and @nikhilro_ sit down with @gustaf to share the long path to product-market fit, from pivoting more than a dozen times to building an AI therapist that eventually became the foundation for Vapi. They explain why voice was the first idea that felt inevitable, and how sticking with that conviction before the technology was ready eventually paid off.

05 — Powering a billion calls a year
12 — Why voice AI suddenly started working
57 — More than a dozen pivots
08 — From calendar app to AI note taker
23 — Starting over in San Francisco
14 — The AI therapist that became Vapi
56 — Finding PMF
47 — Why the model labs won’t replace Vapi
49 — The future of voice AI

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A lot of construction work is still done by hand simply because the machines to automate it don’t ex...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 20:07:36 GMT

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

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Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 18:20:10 GMT

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

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Congrats to Alex, Ben, and @hubble_network (YC W22) on their $200M Series C at a $1.6B valuation! ...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 18:19:57 GMT

Congrats to Alex, Ben, and @hubble_network (YC W22) on their $200M Series C at a $1.6B valuation! 

Hubble's satellite network lets any Bluetooth device connect directly to orbit with just a software update.

Cellular covers about 15% of Earth's landmass, and tracking anything beyond that has meant satellite hardware costing $25 or more per device. Hubble brings connectivity under 50 cents per device, which changes the math for billions of pallets, shipping containers, water pumps, and farm equipment that were never worth connecting before.

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Congrats to @SpamRoss, @mduvall_, and @numeral (YC W23) on their $100M Series C! Numeral automates ...

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:25:00 GMT

Congrats to @SpamRoss, @mduvall_, and @numeral (YC W23) on their $100M Series C!

Numeral automates sales tax compliance end to end, from registrations and calculations to filings and payments.

They handle US sales tax plus VAT and GST across more than 90 countries, all in one system. More than 3,500 businesses run their compliance on Numeral, including Supabase, Eight Sleep, and Graza, with transaction volume up 327% in the past year.

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