Startup accelerator institution, Y Combinator has released a list of 20 new sectors it seeks to fund for startups that will be joining its program, including ideas in robotics, and stablecoin finance.
Y Combinator updates the list periodically, depending on what kinds of startups it sees gaining traction and where it thinks there’s opportunity. This update, released in a blog post on Wednesday, represents the biggest overhaul to its “requests for startups” since 2018.
In the post, YC Managing Director Dalton Caldwell, said the YC Group Partners meet and discuss the current batch every week and one common area of discussion is ideas — what kind of ideas are these founders having the best luck with? Which ones are they pivoting away from?
- “These discussions also do a good job of helping us notice the gaps. Ideas that should be made real — and that we’d want to fund! — but that we aren’t seeing many people work on or apply with. In a recent discussion like this, we realized it was time to put together an entirely new Request for Startups,” he said.
The list
While noting that the world is full of founders with expertise that could be tapped into something new and great, Caldwell said the new areas YC is looking at startups from include:
- Applying machine learning to robotics
- Using machine learning to simulate the physical world
- New defense technology
- Bring manufacturing back to America
- New space companies
- Climate tech
- Commercial open source companies
- Spatial computing
- New enterprise resource planning software (ERPs)
- Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools
- Explainable AI
- LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises
- AI to build enterprise software
- Stablecoin finance
- A way to end cancer
- Foundation models for biological systems
- The managed service organization model for healthcare
- Eliminating middlemen in healthcare
- Better enterprise glue
- Small fine-tuned models as an alternative to giant generic ones
Caldwell noted that the listed ideas are by no means the only ideas it would accept, adding that many of the best ideas are the ones it would never expect.
- “If you aren’t sure what you want to work on, these RFSs should provide a useful jumping-off point to begin your ideation process,” he said.
What you should know
Y Combinator, YC for short, YC hosts two 3-month programs — one from January through March, and one from July through September. The overall goal of the accelerator program is to help startups take off. Startups join YC at all different stages; some with fully developed products, and some still in the ideation stage.
YC invests $500,000 in every company on standard terms. The investment is made on 2 separate safes.
