Investors name nine standout start-ups from Y Combinator's latest Demo Day

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Early-stage investors were asked to pick the hottest companies in Y Combinator's newest batch, and nine were named by at least two of them. One investor said the technology felt "like science fiction". The wider view was that valuations were more grounded than in recent cohorts, which is reassuring news for a batch that includes floating nuclear data centres.

Those belong to Atomarine, which plans to put data centres on barges at sea. It aims for a gas-powered pilot by 2028 and nuclear ships in 2032, and says letters of intent show over $4 billion in customer interest. Isengard Industries makes jet-powered strike and counter-drones to be built inside allied countries and already has $10 million in revenue. Both are among the batch's highest valuations. Cosmic Robotics has a city on Mars as its eventual goal and $25 million in contracts through 2027; for now its robots install solar panels across the US. Nori launched six weeks ago and reports almost half a million in sales of a humanoid that folds clothes, priced around $1,600.

The rest are Dipole Labs, an optical switch that keeps data as light; Lamb Labs, inference chips with model weights built into the silicon; Praxis Robotics, which films people at work in more than 150 settings to train robots; Parasma, human brain cells as computing hardware; and Waddle Labs, whose AI agents write robot control code and set up a robot in about 20 minutes.