Sixteen YC Summer 2026 Requests for Startups.
One working demo at a time.
Solo developer. Shipping in public. No pitch decks, no waitlists — just the working thing you can actually click on the live ones. Ten RFS demos are live so far.
AI for Low-Pesticide Agriculture
AI vision for plant health — fewer blanket pesticide sprays.
AI-Native Discovery Engines
Closed-loop AI verification: every claim grounded against the live web.
AI-Native Service Companies
AI accountants, lawyers, and analysts that beat the human version on cost and speed.
AI Personalized Medicine
Off-limits for me — day-job non-compete. Listed verbatim from YC's RFS for completeness.
Company Brain
Ask one question. Cross Slack, Linear, GitHub, Notion, meetings.
Counter-Swarm Defense
Cheap, software-first sensors against drone swarms — Cloudflare, not Raytheon.
Dynamic Software Interfaces
Vague feature request in. Claude-Code-ready brief out — the new craft is engineering the brief.
Electronics in Space
Inference chips that survive mass, thermal, and radiation budgets.
Hardware Supply Chain
Paste a Bill of Materials. AI estimates the US-vs-China cost delta + your CAPE tariff refund.
Industrial Capabilities in Space
Type a space idea, get a real mission brief — instrument, orbit, spacecraft, cost, timeline.
Inference Chips for Agent Workflows
Silicon designed for agent loops, not single-prompt inference.
SaaS Challengers
Score how much of your closed-API AI bill could move to OSS — pricing transparency for the AI substrate.
Software for Agents
Give an AI agent a USDC wallet and a hard spend cap. Watch x402 do the rest.
Startups That Want to Sell to Huge Companies
Two-person teams shipping things F100s actually buy.
Supply Chain 2.0 for Semiconductors
Visibility for the 1,400-step, 12-country chip pipeline.
The AI Operating System for Companies
Make every meeting and ticket queryable. Closed-loop optimization for the org.
Each demo is a real working product, not a mockup. The code, the API calls, the AI — all live. Built by Patrick Hughes in Tennessee.