The Top 5 Robotics Startups from YC F25
Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch featured a strong cohort of robotics companies tackling problems from household humanoids to malaria eradication. Here are five that stood out.
Lightberry
The social brain for robots
Lightberry partners with robot manufacturers including Unitree and Booster to add voice interaction and autonomous behavior to their hardware. Users can program robots through natural conversation rather than code. The company sees its approach as distinct from simply bolting a chatbot onto existing robots, which it says results in systems that lack personality and require constant human control.
The software currently runs on platforms including the Unitree G1, Fourier GR-2/N1, and Booster T1/K1, with deployments in homes, offices, retail locations, and conferences.
Piggy Robotics
Humanoid robots at iPhone prices
Oxford dropouts Richard Gong and Chenny Deng want to bring humanoid robots to the mass market. Their insight: traditional motor-driven humanoids are expensive and difficult to manufacture at scale. Piggy instead uses pneumatic artificial muscles—tubes wrapped in braided fiber, all powered by a single pump—which dramatically simplifies assembly and cuts costs.
The team says it built a full-size humanoid prototype in two months for under $1,000 in parts. Gong left medical school to pursue the company, while Deng brings experience from Tencent's AI research division.
Cortex AI
Real-world data for robotics foundation models
Cortex AI is assembling large-scale datasets of robots and humans operating in actual workplaces—a contrast to the lab environments and simulations that dominate existing robotics training data. The company is also building a marketplace that pays businesses to host data collection sessions.
Founder Lucas Ngoo previously co-founded Carousell, the Southeast Asian marketplace that reached a $1B+ valuation, where he served as CTO.
Spatial AI
Large datasets for robot foundation models
Spatial AI is tackling what founder Alex Petkos sees as the core bottleneck in robotics: not hardware, but the models that control it. The company is building data infrastructure to train more capable robot foundation models.
Its first release, SEA (Spatial Everyday Activities), is a large egocentric dataset capturing people performing common tasks. An open-source version is available on Hugging Face.
Tornyol
Micro-drones that kill mosquitoes
Tornyol is building autonomous micro-drones designed to hunt and kill mosquitoes. Founders Clovis Piedallu and Alex Toussaint have repurposed commodity components—smartphone microphones, parking sensors, and signal processing chips—to turn 40-gram toy drones into precision pest control.
The team claims to have achieved the first successful detection and tracking of a mosquito using an ultrasonic phased array. Before YC, they received a $28k grant from Scott Alexander and Vitalik Buterin.
Their planned consumer product: a drone and base station that continuously patrols outdoor spaces, with the potential to reduce mosquito control costs by orders of magnitude.