The Top 8 Robotics and Drone Startups in YC W26
YC's Winter 2026 batch has a notable concentration of robotics and drone startups, spanning defense, infrastructure, aquaculture, and the robotics supply chain itself. Here are eight worth watching.
HLabs — US-Made Robot Parts
HLabs is building a plug-and-play ecosystem of US-manufactured electronics and actuators for robotics companies. The idea: most teams building robots today are stitching together components from overseas, debugging communication interfaces, and wasting time on problems that aren't core to their product. HLabs sells a suite of hardware including a Jetson-powered main board, FOC control boards, motors, and actuators designed to work together out of the box. Early customers include companies building humanoids, quadrupeds, robot arms, and defense systems. Founder Paul Hetherington is a second-time YC founder who previously went through the W21 batch with Mystic, where he served as CEO for six years.
Milliray — Counter-Drone Radar
Formerly known as DroneTector, Milliray builds high-frequency radar systems designed to detect and track small hostile drones that conventional systems miss. Even $50 consumer drones now present real security threats to airports, critical infrastructure, and military operations, and most existing detection tech wasn't built for targets that small. The founding team is composed of three PhDs from Oxford and St Andrews, and the company has been supported by the UK MoD's Defence and Security Accelerator, NATO DIANA, and the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Voltair — Distributed Autonomous Drone Network
Voltair is building a globally distributed network of autonomous drones for Earth observation, starting with power utility inspection. Their drones use charging pads installed directly on utility poles, with each pad unlocking roughly 1,000 square miles of coverage. Utilities spend tens of billions annually inspecting their own infrastructure, and Voltair argues that persistent autonomous fleets can do it faster and more frequently. The four-person founding team includes CEO Ronan Nopp, who turned down a role working on Starship at SpaceX, and CTO Hayden Gosch, who previously worked in system protection engineering and R&D at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories.
GrazeMate — Robot Cowboys that Herd Cattle with AI Drones
GrazeMate builds autonomous drones that herd cattle. At the push of a button, AI-powered drones fly to a paddock, position themselves around the herd, and guide them to where they need to go. The company was founded by Sam Rogers, a 19-year-old who grew up on a cattle farm in Queensland, Australia, and was publishing machine learning and robotics research by age 15. GrazeMate is already mustering thousands of cattle weekly and has pilot farms covering 700,000 hectares queued for deployment. Beyond herding, the drones collect operational data like pasture availability, animal weight estimates, and water trough conditions. Rogers raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding led by YC with participation from Antler, NextGen Ventures, and Meat & Livestock Australia.
OctaPulse — Robotics for Fish Farming
OctaPulse applies computer vision and robotics to automate quality assurance in aquaculture, starting with broodstock phenotyping. The company says it cuts inspection time from about five minutes to under 30 seconds per fish at over 90% accuracy. They've signed a six-figure paid pilot with the largest trout producer in the United States and are deploying into two additional farms. Co-founder Rohan Singh brings robotics and AI experience from CMU, Tesla, and NVIDIA, while Paul Grech leads commercial efforts as a Future Leader in the National Fisheries Institute.
Overshoot — Real-Time Vision AI Infrastructure
Overshoot isn't building robots or drones itself, but it's building the vision infrastructure that powers them. The company provides an API that lets developers connect live video feeds to vision language models and get responses in under 200 milliseconds. The platform currently serves over 300 developers building applications across robotics, physical security, and gaming. Co-founders Zakaria and Younes El hjouji are cousins who previously built low-latency systems at Uber, Meta, and Intel. Zakaria spent seven years on pricing algorithms at Uber and wrote GPU kernels at Meta AI; Younes was a founding engineer at Cosmonio, which was later acquired by Intel.
Seeing Systems — Unmanned Modular Drones
Founded by brothers Alexander and Matthew Le Maitre, Seeing Systems is building low-cost, modular autonomous drones for NATO militaries. Their pitch centers on two things: swappable hardware that can be upgraded as threats evolve rather than scrapped and replaced, and an agentic control system that reduces the cognitive load on operators. The company says its customers and partners include the UK Royal Marine Commandos along with four other NATO forces, and they are currently shipping prototypes for iterative feedback. Matthew is a former Jane Street software engineer and top-ranked Cambridge CS graduate; Alexander is self-taught in embedded electronics and previously designed Explosive Ordnance Disposal training hardware for military users.
Origami Robotics — Manipulate Anything Robot
Origami Robotics is building a high-DOF, direct-drive robotic hand along with a co-designed data-collection glove that matches it exactly. The idea is to eliminate the embodiment gap that typically plagues robot learning: because the glove and hand share the same kinematics, real-world data collected by a human operator can be deployed directly to the robot without lossy translation. Founded by brothers Ryan and Daniel Xie, the company plans to scale data collection by deploying its devices in manufacturing factories and logistics centers. They've already sold hands to physical AI labs including Amazon.