Garry Tan, Jared Friedman, Diana Hu and Harj Taggar went through the batch-level data on every company accepted in the last eighteen months: which sectors grew, by how much, which ones are producing revenue in weeks and what kind of founder is winning inside each one.
A fifth of the batch has moved into atoms
A quarter is building agents that do an entire job on their own
A layer of suppliers almost nobody talks about is selling training data to the frontier labs at eight and nine figures
And the founders outperforming everyone are solo operators in their forties and fifties
Below is the full build list: the categories, the number YC disclosed for each one, and what each one asks of you if you decide to go after it.
In this guide you’ll find:
Start With Atoms
Hard Tech Went From 8% to 20% of the Batch
Why You Can Afford to Build Hardware Now
Codegen Removed the Thousand-Engineer Requirement
Sell to the Buyers Nobody Is Serving
Defense Contracts and Detroit Manufacturing
Build the Picks and Shovels of Compute
Sites, Power, Silicon and the Switch Bottleneck
Get Into Robotics Before the ChatGPT Moment
The Benchmark Jumped From 10% to 70%
Own the Footage Your Robot Learns From
Why Every YC Robotics Company Fine-Tunes
Build the Place Where the Work Happens
Why Salesforce Grew While Everyone Called SaaS Dead
Build Agents That Do the Whole Job
The Path From Zero to Seven Figures in Three Months
Sell to the Labs
Data and RL Environments Are a Nine-Figure Category
Go Solo If You Have Been Around the Block
Solo Founders Tripled to 19%
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