It's YC S26 Demo Day tomorrow. Some of the wildest ideas in this batch:
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@Atomarine_co .... floating data centers on barges at sea, cooled by seawater, aiming to run on nuclear ships. Their logic: grids can't expand fast enough, the ocean can.
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@KaraLabsAI .... diamond semiconductors. Today diamond sits next to the chip to cool it. Their bet: tomorrow diamond is the chip.
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@ParasmaAI .... training living human brain cells to compute. The founder got here via a project teaching neurons to play Doom.
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@LambLabs .... hard-coding an entire AI model directly into silicon. Claiming 20,000+ tokens/sec in some configs.
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@Locke .... AI for navigating government. Zero to ~$800K ARR in eight weeks, reportedly on track for $1M by Demo Day.
→ Axelrod .... AI-run hotels whose agents click through the ancient front-desk software the way a human would. Lack of APIs in hotels is the moat.
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@Omantahealth .... a personal scientific R&D team for one patient. Started in oncology, chasing individualized treatment.
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@Exosat_ .... a politically neutral, sovereign satellite network. The founder joined YC on the logic that if it lifted his odds of building a Starlink-scale company by even 7%, the equity was worth it.
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@lumeriaskin .... at-home skin imaging. $100K+ in revenue in under 48 hours
Two-person teams, most of them, pointing AI at tangible stuff - chips, oceans, satellites, biology.
Say what you want about YC. This is not a batch of chatbot wrappers.