Y Combinator

's requests for startups are always a good place to peek into the zeitgeist (at least the Silicon Valley zeitgeist). A few comments (on things I know a little bit about): #3: the n-of-1 is great on paper but/and requires new types of trials and statistics #4: yes! Prukalpa ⚡ #5: blast from the past (2008-2012) Ben Riley, Aaron Frank #10: the biggest opportunity if you have the right skills, be Naveen Rao #11: SaaS giants are vulnerable, maybe not for long, now is the time #12: and still maintain some level of control #15: like #12, but more of it YC Request for Startups (Summer 2026) 1  Al for Low-Pesticide Agriculture - use Al, robotics, and biology to cut pesticide use by 90% and help farmers grow more food 2 Al-Native Service Companies - don't sell software, sell the service: insurance brokerage, accounting, compliance, healthcare admin 3 Al Personalized Medicine - intelligent agents leveraging plummeting diagnostic and n-of-1 genetic costs to deliver personalized care 4 Company Brain - extract scattered company knowledge into a living map of how a company works 5 Counter-Swarm Defense - the counter-drone stack for incoming swarms: high-capacity interceptors, software that fuses every sensor together, non-kinetic defenses 6 Dynamic Software Interfaces - let users become their own forward-deployed engineers and customize software with coding agents 7 Electronics in Space - inference chips optimized for mass, thermal, and radiation 8 Hardware Supply Chain - close the iteration speed gap through faster parts production, tighter design-to-production loops 9 Industrial Capabilities in Space - extract raw materials through electrolysis and 3D printing of complex structures from molten regolith on the moon 10  Inference Chips for Agent Workflows - silicon built for the agent loop: fast context switching between models, native speculative decoding, KV caches that persist 11  SaaS Challengers - Al collapsed the cost of building software 10-100x; go after the legacy giants like ERPs, chip design software, and supply chain management 12  Software for Agents - rebuild every category of software for Al agents as first-class citizens with APIs, MCPs, and CLis 13  Startups Selling to Huge Companies - small teams can now ship deep, nuanced products in months to F100 buyers 14  Supply Chain 2.0 for Semiconductors - real-time allocation tracking, multi-tier risk monitoring, and export compliance for chips 15  The Al Operating System for Companies - the connective layer that makes a company legible to Al by default and turns the company's own artifacts into a self-improving loop