Deep-tech startups dominate investor picks from Y Combinator’s latest Demo Day

Deep-tech ventures drew much of the attention at Y Combinator’s latest Demo Day, according to TechCrunch, with early-stage venture capitalists highlighting nine startups mentioned by at least two investors.

The summer batch included Atomarine, which is proposing floating data centres at sea. The startup plans to launch a gas-powered pilot by 2028 and transition to floating nuclear power ships in 2032. Atomarine claims more than $4 billion in customer interest through letters of intent, though the supplied material does not independently verify that figure.

AI infrastructure was another major theme. Dipole Labs is developing optical networking hardware designed to avoid light-to-electricity conversion in AI data centres. Lamb Labs is working on custom inference chips with AI model weights hardcoded into silicon, aiming to reduce memory-related energy use.

Isengard is developing locally producible, jet-powered strike and counter-drones and is reportedly generating $10 million in revenue. TechCrunch said two investors described the company as having one of the highest valuations in the batch.

Robotics featured prominently, including Nori, which is developing lower-cost household humanoid robots and touts almost $500,000 in sales. Waddle Labs is building an API through which AI agents generate robot-control code from natural-language instructions. Two other highlighted companies, whose names were not provided in the supplied article, are focused on collecting robot-training data and autonomous heavy-lifting robots.

Parasma is investigating whether human brain cells could provide a more energy-efficient form of computing. TechCrunch described the cohort as more heavily focused on deep technology than previous batches, while noting that valuations appeared more grounded than in some recent cohorts. The commercial and technical claims cited in the report were not independently verified in the supplied material.