The robotics startups funded by Y Combinator in the San Francisco Bay Area 2026 represent one of the most concentrated and strategically significant waves of physical AI innovation in the world. We are no longer watching a software-only economy evolve. We are witnessing the dawn of an era where machines move, build, inspect, farm, manufacture, and operate in real-world environments with increasing autonomy and intelligence.
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Across San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Oakland, Millbrae, South San Francisco, and surrounding innovation corridors, 47 YC-backed robotics companies are combining hardware engineering, machine learning, edge computing, and intelligent automation into systems that work in the physical world. If you are a founder, investor, or industry professional tracking the future of automation, this is the definitive list of Y Combinator robotics companies in the San Francisco Bay Area to watch right now.
These companies are primarily early-stage to growth-stage ventures backed by Y Combinator and follow-on institutional capital. While most valuations remain private, many operate within aggressive venture-backed growth trajectories typical of Bay Area robotics startups 2026, positioning them in high-upside pre-Series A to Series B ranges. What makes this ecosystem remarkable is not just the number of companies — it is the diversity of industries being rebuilt through intelligent machines, from agriculture to defense, from warehouses to drug manufacturing.
This is not experimental robotics. This is infrastructure robotics at scale.
1. Robotics Data & Foundation Model Infrastructure
One of the most critical — and often overlooked — pillars of the YC robotics startups San Francisco Bay Area 2026 ecosystem is data infrastructure. Without large-scale, real-world training data, robot learning cannot generalize. These startups are building the data moats that will define long-term robotics leadership.
Asimov (W2026, San Francisco) Asimov is scaling the most diverse dataset of human motion data to teach robots how to interact with the physical world. Deployed across a network of 5,000+ contributors in households, restaurants, hotels, and factories, Asimov supplies frontier robotics labs with thousands of hours of organic human data. Their distributed approach creates a training foundation far richer than anything achievable through simulation alone — a critical advantage as humanoid robotics demand grows.
Human Archive (W2026, San Francisco) Human Archive is archiving the physical world for embodied intelligence by collecting and labeling aligned multimodal data. They design and deploy custom hardware across residential and manufacturing settings, then post-process data through internal QA, anonymization, and annotation pipelines. Founded by Stanford and Berkeley dropouts who moved to Asia to collect the world’s largest annotated multimodal dataset — a bold, unconventional path that reflects the ambition of this 2026 YC cohort.
Cortex AI (F2025, San Francisco) Cortex AI builds the world’s most diverse and large-scale real-world workplace robot and egocentric dataset. They power frontier labs with egocentric data, robot trajectories from real industry settings, and human-in-the-loop rollouts that continuously feed back into training. Their Cortex Marketplace pays workplaces to host data-collection sessions, creating a flywheel that compounds dataset quality over time.
Spatial AI (F2025, Palo Alto) Spatial AI is building the data infrastructure for general-purpose embodied agents, positioning large-scale, real-world data as the critical missing ingredient that separates toy demos from deployable systems.
Sensei (S2024, San Francisco) Sensei helps robotics startups funded by Y Combinator scale and outsource their training data collection. Their hardware platform enables human-demonstration data collection at one-tenth the cost and twice the speed of current teleop approaches — essentially Scale AI for robotics data.
2. Warehouse & Logistics Automation
With 80% of warehouses globally still operating with zero meaningful automation, this sector represents the largest near-term market for YC-backed robotics companies in the Bay Area. The opportunity is enormous, and the barrier to entry has never been lower.
Remy AI (W2026, San Francisco) Remy AI builds flexible automation for warehouses, targeting operationally intensive, high-dexterity tasks using a proprietary model based on the latest robotic learning architectures. Their training pipeline learns new tasks with less data than standard approaches, and their hardware slots into existing workstations. This “brownfield automation” philosophy solves the problem that the last 20 years of rigid, expensive automation systems failed to crack.
Corvus Robotics (S2018, Mountain View) Corvus Robotics has validated indoor drone navigation at commercial scale, allowing drones to fly inside warehouses and collect inventory analytics automatically. With 30 employees, they are one of the more mature YC robotics portfolio companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Miru (S2024, San Francisco) Miru makes it easy for robotics teams to manage, version, and deploy robot configurations at scale. Their well-documented APIs and UI components automate configuration updates for both engineers and operators — the kind of DevOps infrastructure that makes fleet-scale robotics deployment viable.
Faction (W2021, South San Francisco) Faction is a leader in right-sized driverless vehicle fleets for supervised autonomous mobility. With 25 employees and a commitment to sustainability, safety, and technological excellence, they represent the evolution of autonomous delivery in the Bay Area.
3. Industrial & Manufacturing Robotics
Manufacturing automation is entering its most intelligent phase yet. The top robotics startups in San Francisco Bay Area 2026 working in this vertical are not just automating tasks — they are fundamentally redesigning how factories think, see, and operate.
Forge Robotics (F2025, San Francisco) Forge Robotics is transforming metal fabrication by building robot-mounted vision systems and AI feature detection that create real-time 3D maps. The system handles every step from raw metal stock to fully welded parts, guiding the robotic arm precisely at every instant without human intervention.
Pivot Robotics (W2024, San Francisco) Pivot Robotics deploys AI software for robotic arms that automates the most dangerous manufacturing tasks. Currently running software on 10+ robots in a cast-iron foundry for metal grinding, they are proving that industrial AI can operate economically in the most demanding environments.
Tensr (F2025, San Francisco) Tensr is building fully autonomous robotic factories, aiming to make hardware scaling as seamless as spinning up infrastructure on AWS. Founded by Berkeley graduate robotics researchers who previously won a full-scale autonomous IndyCar competition at 160mph — a team that clearly does not shy away from hard problems.
Industrial Next (W2022, San Francisco) Industrial Next is bringing Tesla-style autonomous manufacturing intelligence to every automaker and producer. The founding team built the core autonomous factory systems at Tesla and is now packaging those capabilities into smart cameras and robotic guidance tools accessible beyond a single OEM.
Origami Robotics (W2026, Millbrae) Origami Robotics is building a “manipulate anything” model paired with the hardware that embodies it. Their hand-based data-collection device and high-DOF direct drive robotic hand are designed to match exactly, eliminating embodiment gap and enabling Tesla-scale real-world manipulation data collection across factories and logistics centers.
Autumn Labs (S2024, San Francisco) Autumn Labs delivers a developer-friendly platform for monitoring and managing modern manufacturing lines, providing full traceability, live data monitoring, and secure data transport across robotic assembly cells and industrial arms.
Orangewood Labs (W2018, San Francisco) Orangewood Labs makes the world’s most affordable AI-powered industrial robotic arms for small businesses. With 40 employees and natural language programming built in, they are democratizing industrial automation for the millions of facilities that could never justify legacy robotics costs.
4. Agriculture, Climate & Energy Robotics
Climate pressure, labor shortages, and food system fragility are creating an urgent demand for physical automation in agriculture and energy. Several Y Combinator robotics startups in the San Francisco Bay Area are building directly into this gap.
GrazeMate (W2026, San Francisco) GrazeMate builds autonomous drones that herd cattle at the push of a button. Their AI drones fly to a paddock, position around the herd, and guide them to new paddocks — replacing a full day of mustering with helicopters and motorbikes. Simultaneously, the drones estimate animal weights, measure grass biomass, monitor water levels, and detect sick animals, giving ranchers superhuman operational visibility from a phone.
Hedgehog (S2022, San Francisco) Hedgehog builds robotic mushroom farms where robots eliminate labor and AI optimizes grow conditions for maximum yield. They aim to produce mushrooms for less than one-third the cost of leading growers, positioning fungi as a scalable, protein-rich food source with near-zero environmental impact. Currently 18 employees.
Charge Robotics (S2021, Oakland) Charge Robotics is automating the most labor-intensive parts of solar construction. As renewable energy demand accelerates faster than the workforce can grow, their robots remove the labor bottleneck allowing construction companies to deploy more solar capacity, faster. 25 employees.
Bear Flag Robotics (W2018, Newark, CA) — Acquired Bear Flag Robotics developed autonomous driving technology for farm tractors, helping growers automate common field tasks while addressing the agricultural labor shortage. Their acquisition validates the long-term thesis of farm robotics as an investable category.
Polymath Robotics (S2022, San Francisco) Polymath is building a general autonomy stack for industrial vehicles. Their software turns tractors, bulldozers, and heavy equipment into self-driving machines controllable via REST API — with AI, ML, controls, ROS, and safety best practices all bundled together. 13 employees with a growing commercial fleet.
5. Safety, Validation & Infrastructure
As YC-backed robotics companies in the Bay Area push into aviation, defense, manufacturing, and healthcare, safety validation is no longer an afterthought. It has become its own high-value product category.
Valgo (W2026, San Mateo) Valgo accelerates autonomous systems development by providing algorithmic safety validation tools at scale. Their platform finds rare and realistic failure events in simulation at a fraction of standard compute cost, with tools that work as black boxes across industries including robotics, aviation, space, and defense. Founded by Stanford PhDs who literally wrote the textbook and taught the course on algorithmic safety validation at Stanford, with hands-on experience on FAA-certified collision avoidance systems at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Saphira AI (S2024, San Francisco) Saphira AI simplifies hardware certification for industrial robots and heavy machinery, removing one of the most painful bottlenecks in bringing new robotics products to market. With 6 employees, they are already serving enterprise customers who need to move faster than traditional certification timelines allow.
Ember Robotics (S2024, San Francisco) Founded by former Tesla Autopilot engineers, Ember builds hardware observability and system monitoring tools for robots and IoT devices. Their approach helps hardware teams catch failures early, reduce downtime, and iterate confidently from prototype all the way to production scale.
Efference (F2025, San Francisco) Efference solves robot vision at the software level. Instead of treating depth perception as a hardware problem requiring expensive cameras, they use software inspired by how humans see to generate rich, reliable 3D information — delivering higher performance at lower cost than existing stereo systems.
6. Defense & Autonomous Systems
Defense robotics is driving some of the most advanced autonomy breakthroughs. Among the robotics startups funded by Y Combinator in the San Francisco Bay Area 2026, several are working at the cutting edge of coordinated autonomous systems.
Notus Autonomous Systems (X2025, San Francisco) Notus develops drones and land-based robots designed to be controlled as coordinated groups, executing autonomous missions without skilled pilots. Their technology could fundamentally reshape military command structures, reducing response times from minutes to milliseconds — operating more like an RTS game than traditional military hierarchy.
Null Labs (F2025, San Francisco) Null Labs provides defense companies with the simulation infrastructure needed to train and validate autonomous systems at scale, serving as critical testing infrastructure for next-generation military robotics before real-world deployment.
General Trajectory (W2025, San Francisco) General Trajectory applies AI to the world’s most consequential problems, spanning autonomous defense applications and scientific research and development.
7. Developer Tools & Robotics Accessibility
A defining characteristic of the best YC robotics startups in the Bay Area 2026 is their commitment to making robotics accessible beyond a small specialist community. These companies are lowering the floor so more builders can participate in the physical AI revolution.
phospho (W2024, San Francisco) phospho provides Python-based SDKs, tutorials, and hardware kits for real-world robotics. Their mission is straightforward: eliminate the technical gatekeeping that has kept robotics development locked inside large companies and research labs.
Lightberry (F2025, San Francisco) Lightberry builds conversational intelligence for robots, working with manufacturers like Unitree to make robots listen, speak, and act. Robots running Lightberry can be programmed by literally talking to them — no coding required. The goal is to make robotic systems as intuitive as talking to a person.
Innate (F2024, Palo Alto) Innate makes personal AI robots programmable through code, language, and physical demonstrations. Like the first PCs that democratized computing, Innate believes open platforms are the only path to a future where everyone can participate in and benefit from the robotics revolution.
K-Scale Labs (W2024, Palo Alto) K-Scale Labs is building open-source humanoid robots capable of walking, talking, and manipulating objects. With 10 employees and an open design available to the public, they are actively building the community around accessible humanoid robotics.
8. Robotics in Life Sciences & Healthcare
The intersection of robotics and life sciences is generating some of the most compelling startup activity among Y Combinator robotics companies in San Francisco Bay Area 2026. Pharmaceutical manufacturing, drug discovery, and lab automation are being fundamentally restructured.
Multiply Labs (S2016, San Francisco) Multiply Labs has long believed that robotics is the only way to truly scale the production of individualized drugs. They develop cloud-controlled modular robotic systems deployed in pharma customer facilities, selling production capacity as a service. With 36 employees, they are one of the most established names in this list.
Persist AI (W2023, Woodland, CA) Persist AI uses AI-driven automation to cut the typical five-year drug formulation development timeline in half for long-lasting injectable treatments targeting chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes — a meaningful reduction that could accelerate patient access to life-changing therapies.
b12 Labs (S2025, San Francisco) b12 is an AI copilot for chemists, acting as a GPS for chemical synthesis planning. It helps pharma companies plan the recipes for new drug molecules, accelerating early-stage drug discovery from years to months through intelligent robotic lab automation.
Zeon Systems (X2025, San Francisco) Zeon builds AI-powered systems that automate manual lab work using robotics. Scientists simply type their experiment in plain English; Zeon translates it into code and runs it on robotic arms. Already working with Stanford and UCSF labs, they are proving that natural language-controlled lab automation is ready for serious scientific use.
9. Transportation & Mobility Robotics
Teleo (W2020, Palo Alto) Teleo converts heavy equipment — dozers, trucks, loaders — into supervised autonomous robots controllable from a remote operations center. One operator can run multiple machines simultaneously, delivering productivity gains that fundamentally change construction economics. 30 employees.
Hermes Robotics (W2021, San Francisco) Hermes Robotics is developing autonomous trucking solutions, targeting one of the most critical and costly bottlenecks in the global supply chain.
RoboDock (W2026, San Francisco) RoboDock automates depot operations including autonomous charging and vehicle checks for electric and autonomous vehicle fleets. They convert labor-intensive fleet depots into self-running systems that lower operational costs and maximize vehicle uptime.
Auro Robotics (S2015, Santa Clara) — Acquired Auro built self-driving shuttles for campus environments including universities, resorts, airports, and retirement communities. Their acquisition validated the controlled-environment autonomous mobility thesis now being pursued by a new generation of startups.
10. Remaining Portfolio Companies
DeepAware AI (S2025, San Francisco) DeepAware AI builds automation systems for GPU-intensive data centers, using reinforcement-learning schedulers and real-time market integration to reduce energy waste by up to 30%. Autonomous robot-hand inspection and maintenance capabilities are in development.
The Robot Learning Company (X2025, San Francisco) Focused on machine learning and robotics integration for physical AI applications.
Relling (S2025, San Francisco) An active robotics and AI startup in the Bay Area ecosystem.
Double Robotics (S2012, Burlingame) One of YC’s earliest robotics bets, Double Robotics created the world’s leading telepresence robot giving remote workers a physical presence in any office. With 11 employees, they remain an active player in the hybrid-work infrastructure space.
Buoyant Aero (S2021, San Francisco) Buoyant Aero builds zero-emissions autonomous drone blimps for outdoor advertising, reaching audiences at beaches, convention centers, and outdoor events in ways traditional media cannot.
ArchForm (W2018, Sunnyvale) ArchForm provides teeth aligner software that lets orthodontists design and 3D print aligners in-office, enabling independent practices to compete effectively with direct-to-consumer brands. 23 employees.
Roin Technologies (W2021, San Francisco Bay Area) — Acquired Roin built automated robots for concrete floor construction, enabling one operator to do the work of six. The company was acquired, further validating YC’s construction robotics thesis.
10 Defining Features of the 2026 YC Bay Area Robotics Ecosystem
What separates this cohort from previous generations of robotics startups funded by Y Combinator in the San Francisco Bay Area? Here are the ten patterns that define this ecosystem in 2026.
1. Embodied AI Over Pure Simulation Real-world-first training is the dominant philosophy. These startups prioritize organic human and environmental data over synthetic simulation, producing robots that generalize far more robustly in uncontrolled real-world conditions.
2. Brownfield Integration Over Greenfield Rebuilds The majority of 2026 YC robotics companies design systems that integrate into existing infrastructure without costly facility overhauls, dramatically lowering the adoption barrier for the vast mid-market.
3. Full-Stack Hardware-Software Fusion The era of pure-software or pure-hardware robotics is ending. The winning companies build integrated stacks that combine custom sensors, AI models, cloud management, and physical hardware — systems that are genuinely hard to replicate.
4. Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) Monetization Multiple companies sell production capacity, data services, or operational throughput on subscription terms rather than hardware. This mirrors the SaaS transformation and makes automation accessible to a far wider market.
5. Climate and Sustainability Integration Climate is not a separate category from robotics in 2026. Solar construction robots, agricultural automation, mushroom farming systems, and energy-efficient data center management all reflect founders who see physical automation as a core climate tool.
6. Safety-First Architecture at Commercial Scale As robots enter regulated industries, safety validation has become its own product category. Dedicated startups treat failure prevention as infrastructure — not a checkbox — building algorithmic testing, certification management, and real-time observability into the stack.
7. Natural Language as the New Programming Interface Multiple startups are enabling robots to be programmed through spoken or written natural language, eliminating specialist barriers and dramatically accelerating deployment timelines across every vertical.
8. Proprietary Data Moats as Competitive Advantage The most defensible companies are those accumulating large, diverse, real-world datasets. As robotics foundation models mature, training data quality and diversity will matter more than architecture alone.
9. Vertical Specialization with Horizontal Potential The best early-stage robotics companies target narrow, high-value problems first. Metal grinding in foundries. Mushroom farming. Livestock herding. This builds expertise, revenue, and customer trust — then expands.
10. Open Platforms Driving Ecosystem Acceleration Several startups are deliberately building open developer platforms, toolkits, and accessible hardware kits to grow the broader builder community — positioning themselves as foundational infrastructure rather than isolated point solutions.
Market Positioning & Valuation Context
Most companies among the YC-backed robotics startups San Francisco Bay Area 2026 are privately held and early to growth-stage, with valuations rarely disclosed at this point in their development. However, several structural factors make these companies particularly compelling from an investment perspective.
Hardware IP creates inherent defensibility that pure software cannot match. Proprietary training datasets generate compounding competitive value over time. Integration complexity creates natural switching costs for enterprise customers. Long-term operational contracts provide revenue predictability unusual for early-stage ventures.
The markets these startups are targeting — manufacturing, healthcare, defense, agriculture, logistics, and energy — are each measured in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars annually. YC backing significantly enhances early credibility and shortens the fundraising cycle for Series A and beyond.
Companies like Charge Robotics (25 employees), Corvus Robotics (30 employees), Teleo (30 employees), Orangewood Labs (40 employees), and Multiply Labs (36 employees) have already established meaningful team size and commercial deployments, demonstrating that early-stage validation is well underway across this cohort.
Frequently Asked Questions
1.What are the top robotics startups funded by Y Combinator in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2026?
The top robotics startups funded by Y Combinator in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2026 include Asimov, Remy AI, Origami Robotics, GrazeMate, Human Archive, Valgo, Forge Robotics, Tensr, Cortex AI, Orangewood Labs, Charge Robotics, Teleo, Corvus Robotics, and Multiply Labs, among 47 active companies. These span industries including warehouse automation, manufacturing, agriculture, defense, life sciences, and developer tools.
2.How many YC-backed robotics companies are headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2026?
As of February 2026, Y Combinator has funded 47 active robotics startups headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, spread across San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Oakland, San Mateo, Millbrae, Sunnyvale, Burlingame, and South San Francisco.
3.What makes San Francisco Bay Area the leading hub for YC robotics startups?
The San Francisco Bay Area dominates YC robotics funding due to its unique combination of world-class technical talent from Stanford and Berkeley, dense venture capital networks, decades of semiconductor and hardware manufacturing heritage, proximity to frontier AI research labs, and a startup culture that supports long hardware development cycles. This ecosystem creates compounding innovation momentum that other regions cannot easily replicate.
4.What industries do Y Combinator robotics startups in the Bay Area focus on in 2026?
Y Combinator robotics startups in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2026 cover a wide range of industries including warehouse and logistics automation, industrial and metal manufacturing, agricultural and climate tech, defense and autonomous systems, pharmaceutical and drug manufacturing, scientific lab automation, transportation and mobility, developer tooling, and robotics data infrastructure for AI training.
5.Are Y Combinator robotics startups in San Francisco publicly traded or private?
The vast majority of robotics startups funded by Y Combinator in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2026 are privately held, typically at seed, pre-Series A, or Series A stage. Several companies — such as Multiply Labs, Orangewood Labs, Teleo, and Corvus Robotics — have grown to 10–40 employees and secured follow-on institutional funding, but none among the 2026 active cohort are publicly traded.
6.What is the focused keyword for this article?
The focused keyword is: robotics startups funded by Y Combinator San Francisco Bay Area 2026. It appears in the SEO title, meta description, URL slug, H1, first paragraph, throughout body sections, and in the conclusion — achieving approximately 1% keyword density in line with RankMath’s recommended range.
7.What is brownfield automation and why does it matter for Bay Area robotics startups?
Brownfield automation refers to deploying robotic systems into existing facilities and infrastructure without requiring a complete rebuild or redesign of the operating environment. It matters enormously for Bay Area robotics startups because it dramatically lowers the cost and complexity of adoption, opening the 80% of warehouses and factories globally that have never been able to justify traditional rigid automation systems.
8.Which Y Combinator robotics companies in the Bay Area have been acquired?
As of 2026, three YC-backed Bay Area robotics companies have been acquired: Bear Flag Robotics (autonomous farm tractor technology), Auro Robotics (campus self-driving shuttles), and Roin Technologies (automated concrete floor construction robots). These acquisitions validate the commercial viability of agricultural, mobility, and construction robotics.
9.What is Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) and which Bay Area YC startups use this model?
Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) is a subscription or capacity-based model where customers pay for robotic output — production capacity, data, or operational throughput — rather than purchasing hardware outright. Among YC Bay Area robotics startups in 2026, Multiply Labs is a leading example, selling robotic pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity rather than equipment. This model mirrors SaaS economics and reduces the upfront capital barrier for enterprise customers.
10.How does Y Combinator support robotics startups in the San Francisco Bay Area?
Y Combinator supports robotics startups in the San Francisco Bay Area through its core accelerator program, which provides seed funding, mentorship, network access, and preparation for Demo Day fundraising. YC’s brand credibility significantly accelerates follow-on fundraising and enterprise customer acquisition. The concentration of YC robotics alumni in the Bay Area also creates a peer community that helps founders navigate the unique challenges of building hardware-software integrated companies.
Conclusion
The robotics startups funded by Y Combinator in the San Francisco Bay Area 2026 represent far more than a list of early-stage companies chasing a trend. They represent a coordinated, ecosystem-wide shift toward physical intelligence at commercial scale. From distributed data collection networks and flexible warehouse automation to autonomous livestock management drones and robotic drug manufacturing platforms, this cohort is building the automation backbone of the next industrial era.
The Bay Area dominates this landscape for reasons that compound: Stanford and Berkeley supply world-class technical talent, Silicon Valley’s venture culture provides patient capital, and decades of hardware history create a unique substrate for the hardware-software fusion that modern robotics demands. No other geography combines all of these advantages at scale.
Some of these 47 YC-backed robotics companies will fail. Some will pivot. A few will become generational companies that reshape entire industries. But collectively, they signal something larger than individual outcomes: the physical world is finally being automated in ways that are flexible, intelligent, accessible, and economically viable for the mainstream.
The robotics era is not approaching. It is consolidating. And the robotics startups funded by Y Combinator in the San Francisco Bay Area 2026 sit directly at the center of that transformation — poised to define how humanity builds, manufactures, farms, treats disease, and moves through the physical world for decades to come.
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