🚨 Just Dropped: YC Spring 2026 Request for Startups
What Y Combinator Wants Built Next (and Why It Matters) 🔥
The Companies Y Combinator Wants to Fund Next
Y Combinator just published its Request for Startups for Spring 2026, and it’s one of the clearest signals yet of what YC actively wants to fund right now.
This isn’t a trends piece but a roadmap for the next category-defining businesses.
These are the types of companies YC believes can become multiple billion-dollar businesses — based on what they’re seeing across thousands of founders, applications, and frontier experiments every batch.
What’s different this time is the level of ambition.
YC isn’t asking for “AI features” or productivity boosts. They’re explicitly looking to fund AI-native companies that replace entire workflows, industries, and interfaces. In essence: Companies built with the assumption that agents, not humans, do most of the work.
If you’re building in any of the areas below, YC is telling you very directly:
this is what we want to back 🔥
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YC’s Request for Startups Spring 2026:
1. Cursor for Product Management
Software teams are shipping faster than ever, yet deciding what to build remains slow, fragmented, and human-centric.
Product discovery still lives in interviews, docs, Figma files, and Jira tickets. These are artifacts designed to communicate intent to people, not AI agents.
YC sees an opportunity for an AI-native product system that ingests customer interviews, usage data, and feedback, then proposes what to build next. This includes features, UI changes, data models, and task breakdowns that can be handed directly to coding agents.
As AI increasingly handles implementation, defining intent becomes the new bottleneck.
2. AI-Native Hedge Funds
The biggest hedge funds in the world have been slow to adopt AI, largely due to compliance and legacy infrastructure.
YC’s view is that the next generation of great funds won’t bolt AI onto old strategies. They’ll be designed from day one around AI agents that research, synthesize information, generate strategies, and execute trades continuously.
This mirrors the early days of quantitative trading, what once seemed experimental is now table stakes. The next inflection point is fully AI-native funds.
3. AI-Native Agencies
Agencies have always been difficult to scale. Margins are low, work is manual, and growth requires hiring more people.
AI changes that equation.
Instead of selling software to help clients do the work, agencies can now use AI internally and sell finished outcomes (design, ads, legal documents) at far higher prices, while operating with software-like margins.
YC believes the next generation of agencies will look more like software companies than service firms.
4. Stablecoin Financial Services
Stablecoins are becoming core financial infrastructure, but much of the financial services layer around them doesn’t exist yet.
With new regulation placing stablecoins between DeFi and traditional finance, there’s room to build compliant, crypto-native financial products. From yield-bearing accounts to tokenized real-world asset access and faster cross-border payments.
YC sees that now that regulation is finally catching up, infrastructure window is open.
5. AI for Government
AI has dramatically increased the volume of forms and applications being submitted. On the other side, governments are still processing much of this information manually.
YC sees a large opportunity for AI systems that process, review, and route government work end-to-end, making governments more efficient, responsive, and cost-effective.
Selling to government is slow and difficult, but once deployed, these systems tend to be deeply embedded and expand into large, long-term contracts.
6. Modern Metal Mills
American metal mills suffer from long lead times, thin margins, and decades-old systems. Planning, scheduling, quoting, execution, and energy usage are fragmented and inefficient.
YC believes software, automation, and modern energy technology are finally good enough to rethink the entire system. Compressing lead times while improving margins.
The opportunity isn’t just faster production. It’s rebuilding industrial infrastructure to be more flexible, efficient, and profitable.
7. AI Guidance for Physical Work
AI may not yet act in the physical world, but it can see, reason, and guide humans who do.
Using cameras, audio, and wearables, AI can provide real-time guidance to workers in manufacturing, healthcare, and field services. This dramatically shortens training time and helps address skilled labor shortages.
YC sees this as the physical-world equivalent of tools like Claude Code, AI that turns novices into effective workers immediately.
The biggest opportunities come from replacing entire workflows, not just optimizing around them.
If you’re building in any of these areas, this is the bar YC is setting for Spring 2026.
Thanks for reading. More breakdowns like this coming soon.
- Guillermo