CROSS-CATEGORY: YC's Latest Demo Day Produced Nine Buzziest Startups and Not One Sells Software
TechCrunch·high signal
TechCrunch polled VCs on the standout companies from Y Combinator's newest Demo Day and every single one of the nine builds atoms: Automarine (nuclear-powered data centers floating at sea, $4B+ in customer LOIs), Dipole Labs (optical networking for AI data centers), Isengard Industries (jet-powered counter-drones, $10M revenue), Lamb Labs (inference chips with model weights hardcoded into silicon), Nori (a $1,600 humanoid against Neo's $20,000, ~$500K sold in six weeks), Cosmic Robotics ($25M in contracts through 2027), Praxis AI, Parasma (human brain cells as compute) and Waddle Labs. For a batch selected in the most AI-saturated funding environment on record, the absence of a single application-layer SaaS company in the top tier is the signal.