hardware
(56)
PENSA and the art of removing the awkward bit
A hospital curtain, a razor, an inflatable dog kennel. The Brooklyn design firm finds its opportunities where everyday objects make people work too hard.
Automatic Labs gave old cars a new voice. Then the line went dead.
A plug-in adapter made ordinary cars report their troubles, remember their journeys and call for help. Automatic’s rise and shutdown reveal the bargain hidden inside a connected device.
MOA Ventures takes the long road from lab to market
Electric tractors, diagnostic tools and space startups need more than a pitch deck. MOA Ventures puts industrial partners, investment and hands-on development around the science.
Westcoast sells the kit. The real business is everything around it.
The British distributor turns hardware, software and a thousand small headaches into something a reseller can sell. Its sale to ALSO shows how expensive that useful middle ground has become.
Ground Control and the art of sending less
A water level, a missing buoy, a glacier’s temperature: Ground Control makes a business of getting small, consequential messages out of places ordinary networks cannot reach.
The Startup That Put a Number on Your Steak
For a century, beef and lamb have been graded by a person squinting at a carcass. MEQ Solutions built the hardware and AI to give the industry a number it can trust - and got the USDA to sign off.
The Printer Jammed. So They Ripped Off the Nozzle and Started a Company.
A jammed 3D printer, a $30,000 Kickstarter ask, and $2.3 million later - how three toymakers turned a mistake into the pen that draws in mid-air.
The Liverpool radar shop that turned a $151 billion missile-defense door into an open one
A 58-person shop in upstate New York builds software-defined radar - and just landed on a defense contract worth up to $151 billion.
The Company That Got Rich Selling You Peace of Mind for a $1,000 Phone
How a garage-built waterproof box became a $924 million bet that gravity always wins - and that you'll pay to lose gracefully.
The Family That Wired the World's Stages - And Then Sold the Headphones
Fritz Sennheiser started a lab in a farmhouse in 1945. Eighty years later his grandsons run the microphone company that quietly powers your favorite show - and made a hard call about the headphones on your head.
Aerogen Systems
Aerogen Systems is an Ann Arbor deep-tech startup building point-of-use contamination control for semiconductor fabs. Its modules sit inside wafer storage and process tools, continuously capturing and chemically destroying airborne acids and organic contaminants before they reach the wafer - clawing back yield lost to queue-time contamination that conventional cleanroom AMC systems miss. The company spun out of University of Michigan aerospace research and joined Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch.
Datost
Datost is a Y Combinator (Spring 2026 / P26) startup founded by Maceo Cardinale Kwik and Jason Wang. It launched as 'the proactive AI data analyst' - a Slack-native agent with a semantic layer that scored 75.2% on the BIRD-Interact text-to-SQL benchmark versus 33% for a frontier model alone - and has since become an applied research lab building ED1TH, a 25-gram pair of AI AR smart glasses with no cameras, an in-lens display, and a companion smart ring. Backed by Y Combinator and OpenAI.
Greypoint Industries
Greypoint Industries is a Y Combinator S26 defense hardware startup building mass-produced, soldier-deployable autonomous interceptors that shoot down attacking drones for a fraction of the cost of the drones themselves. Founded by four Canadians with roots in the Canadian Infantry and hardware engineering, the company designs and manufactures counter-drone systems for Western and allied forces, aiming to give frontline soldiers an affordable answer to mass drone-swarm attacks.
Nine Fives
Nine Fives builds modern radio-frequency (RF) test equipment for manufacturers of wireless devices in cellphones, drones, and satellites. Founded by two former SpaceX engineers, the company replaces slow, driver-heavy legacy instruments with driverless, touchscreen, network-connected modules that share a single machine-readable API (REST and SCPI) and ship AI-readable documentation. The pitch: get RF test off the critical path and cut a hardware team's production-readiness timeline from months to minutes.
Perseus Defense
Perseus Defense is a YC S25 aerospace and defense startup building low-cost, man-portable guided micro-missiles to shoot down small drones. Its Harpe interceptor targets Group 1 and Group 2 drones at a claimed cost of under $10,000 per shot - roughly a 20x reduction versus existing systems - closing the cost gap where a $500 drone can threaten multi-million-dollar assets. Founded by ex-NASA aerospace engineer Jason Cornelius and ex-Boeing autonomy lead Steve Messinger, the company is building an affordable, mass-producible 'Iron Dome for drones' for U.S. defense and homeland security customers.
Pocket is a San Francisco hardware-and-software startup (YC W26) building a screen-free AI voice recorder that captures real-world conversations. A credit-card-shaped puck with three microphones snaps to the back of a phone, records in-person talks and phone calls offline, and its app returns transcripts, summaries, mind maps and extracted to-dos across 120+ languages. The company reports over 130,000 units sold and raised $11M led by Accel in June 2026.
Prototyping.io
Prototyping.io is a San Francisco startup (YC Spring 2026) building an AI-native manufacturing platform that turns CAD designs into finished mechanical parts in as little as one day. It automates the traditionally manual path from design to production - DFM analysis, sourcing, process planning, machine programming and setups - so hardware teams can iterate in days instead of weeks. The company serves customers from early-stage startups to multi-billion-dollar enterprises across robotics, AI infrastructure, energy, automotive and defense.
Visibl Semiconductors
Visibl Semiconductors (YC W26) is a San Francisco startup building an AI-native coordination layer for chip design. Its software watches specifications, RTL code, CI pipelines and EDA tool outputs for 'drift' - the slow divergence between what a chip was supposed to do and what the design actually does - then opens evidence-backed cases and proposes review-ready fixes that a human must approve before anything ships. Founded by Bryce Neil (CEO) and Jordon Kashanchi (CTO), the company targets verification and methodology owners on teams heading toward integration, design freeze and tapeout, where a single missed misalignment can trigger a $5M-$20M respin.
GOLDEX GLOBAL
GOLDEX GLOBAL builds the world's first mass-produced robotic terminal for automatically assaying, buying, selling, pawning and storing gold and silver. Its self-service kiosks - branded Goldomat and ATM-Pawnshop - combine X-ray spectrometry, hydrostatic weighing and AI to appraise jewellery, coins and scrap in roughly 3-5 minutes and pay customers instantly to a bank card. The company pairs the hardware with management software, a vending line for investment bars and coins, and a blockchain layer for gold tokenization, positioning itself at the intersection of physical precious metals and digital finance.
Gembah
Gembah is an Austin-based product development platform and marketplace that helps entrepreneurs, e-commerce sellers, and small-to-midsize businesses take physical products from idea to shelf. It connects creators with a global network of vetted designers, engineers, and supply chain specialists, and manages design, prototyping, factory sourcing, and production across regions including China, Vietnam, India, Mexico, and Eastern Europe - aiming to demystify and democratize the process of bringing new consumer products to market.
Dell Technologies
Dell Technologies is a multinational technology company headquartered in Round Rock, Texas, that designs, sells, and supports personal computers, servers, data storage, networking, and IT services. Founded by Michael Dell in 1984, it pioneered the direct-to-customer, build-to-order sales model and grew into one of the world's largest infrastructure and PC vendors. Following its 2016 merger with EMC, Dell now spans consumer laptops, workstations, and a fast-growing AI-optimized server business serving customers in more than 180 countries.
Gridware
Gridware builds pole-mounted sensors and an analytics platform that give electric utilities real-time awareness of what is physically happening on their power lines. Its Gridscope device measures mechanical, electrical, and environmental signals directly at the pole, and its Active Grid Response platform turns those signals into immediate hazard detection, precise fault localization, and faster outage response. Founded in 2020 by three UC Berkeley graduate students - including a former lineman - Gridware aims to close the 'hazard awareness delay' that leaves utilities blind to fallen limbs and damaged lines until after they spark outages or wildfires.
Halo Industries, Inc.
Halo Industries is a Santa Clara deep-tech company that uses lasers instead of diamond wire saws to slice silicon carbide crystal boules into wafers, the foundational substrate for high-voltage power electronics. Spun out of Stanford in 2014, its proprietary light-based process aims to eliminate kerf loss, cut defects, and slash water and energy use, giving more usable wafers from every expensive crystal. Backed by an $80M Series B, Halo is scaling SiC production for electric vehicles, grid infrastructure, renewables, and aerospace, and extending the same approach to silicon, sapphire, and diamond.
nEye.ai
nEye.ai (nEye Systems) is a Santa Clara semiconductor company building optical circuit switches (OCS) on a single chip. By fusing MEMS with silicon photonics and CMOS at wafer scale, its flagship SuperSwitch aims to move data between thousands of GPUs, CPUs and memory units with far less power and space than conventional electrical switching. Founded in 2020 by UC Berkeley photonics researchers and led by telecom-optics veteran Ashish Vengsarkar, the company raised an $80M Series C in April 2026, bringing total funding to about $152.5M as it scales foundry-based manufacturing for AI data centers.
Factorem
Factorem is an AI-driven on-demand manufacturing platform based in Singapore. Founded in 2020 by Alexandra Zhang and Hardik Dobariya, it lets engineering and hardware teams upload a CAD file, get an instant quote, and order custom parts - CNC machining, 3D printing, sheet metal fabrication, injection molding and surface treatment - from a vetted network of Southeast Asian factories, with no minimum order quantity. The platform uses AI to scan designs, match them to the best-suited manufacturer, and manage end-to-end fulfilment, compressing prototyping timelines from months to days.
Foundry Robotics
Foundry Robotics is a San Francisco startup building 'The Everything Factory' - an AI-first, assembly-focused contract manufacturer that uses Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models to run flexible robotic assembly cells. Instead of retooling a line for every new product, Foundry aims to let general-purpose robots switch between building drones, robot dogs, battery packs and satellite components on demand. Founded in 2025 by ex-Ghost Robotics and Scale AI robotics lead Adarsh Kulkarni, the company positions itself as a dual-use manufacturer serving both commercial customers and the U.S. Department of Defense, backed by a seed round led by Khosla Ventures and Garuda Ventures.
Friend
Friend is a consumer AI startup making a $129 always-listening pendant that texts the wearer with commentary, jokes and emotional support. Founded by Harvard dropout Avi Schiffmann - the teenager behind the viral nCoV2019 COVID tracker - Friend bet $1.8 million on its one-word domain and then $1 million on a deliberately graffiti-bait subway campaign that turned New York City into an unfiltered focus group.
Irrigreen
Irrigreen makes a digital, robotic sprinkler system that uses inkjet-printer-inspired technology to paint water onto a lawn with near-pixel precision. Custom zone shapes, weather-aware AI scheduling, and a single rotating head that replaces a half-dozen old-school sprays let homeowners cut outdoor water use by roughly 50% while keeping the grass green.
LuxCreo
LuxCreo is a digital manufacturing company turning dental clinics and labs into same-day production floors. Its patented LEAP (Light Enabled Additive Production) printers, ActiveMemory polymers, and LuxFlow software combine to deliver FDA-cleared, directly 3D-printed clear aligners, night guards, dentures and crowns - cutting weeks of traditional workflow down to hours.
CANDY HOUSE
CANDY HOUSE, Inc. is the consumer-hardware company behind Sesame, the retrofit smart lock that mounts over an existing deadbolt with adhesive tape and turns a smartphone, fingerprint, card, PIN or face into a key. Founded in 2014 by Stanford engineer Jerming Gu and famous for a 2015 Kickstarter that raised about $1.4M, the company built an open ecosystem around SesameOS - locks, touch and face readers, a coin-sized Matter hub, sensors and finger robots - aimed at making smart-home access affordable, rental-friendly and developer-open.