YC SUMMER 2026 RFS
Y Combinator publishes Requests for Startups (RFS) each batch — the ideas they're most excited to fund. We analyzed every category from the Summer 2026 batch and broke each one down into actionable founder intelligence: the problem, why now, market context, and who should build it.
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Real YC comparisons, two blind spots, and one thing to test with customers.
01 · AGRITECH
AI vision and precision robotics to identify and treat individual weeds and pests in real time.
02 · SCIENCE
Intelligent systems that run closed discovery loops in drug discovery, materials science, and protein engineering.
03 · SERVICES
Don't sell software — sell the outcome. Insurance, accounting, tax, audit, compliance, healthcare admin.
04 · HEALTHCARE
Analyzing genome scans, EHRs, wearables for user-specific treatment. Sequencing costs falling faster than Moore's Law.
05 · ENTERPRISE AI
The missing layer between raw company data and reliable AI automation across Slack, tickets, and email.
06 · DEFENSE
High-capacity interceptors, sensor fusion, non-kinetic defenses. Drone defense as a distributed systems problem.
07 · SOFTWARE
Users become their own forward-deployed engineers. Radically customizable interfaces for exact workflows.
08 · SPACE
Inference chips optimized for mass, thermal efficiency, and radiation tolerance for space compute.
09 · HARDWARE
Design to physical part in a day. Tightly integrated design, manufacturing, and logistics.
10 · SPACE
Extracting silicon, aluminum, iron via electrolysis on the moon. 3D printing from molten regolith.
11 · CHIPS
Purpose-built silicon for the agent execution loop — and the compiler that makes the chip work.
12 · SAAS
AI collapsed software production cost by 10–100x. Clone, reprice, or rebuild AI-native from scratch.
13 · INFRASTRUCTURE
The next trillion internet users are AI agents. Every major software category needs an agent-first rebuild.
14 · ENTERPRISE
F100 buyers actively seeking AI solutions. A 2–3 person team can ship something a Fortune 10 finds useful.
15 · CHIPS
1,400 process steps, a dozen countries, 5 months — managed with spreadsheets. Time for real-time tracking.
Each idea comes with a complete founder playbook — 8-week MVP plan, pricing model, competitor analysis, customer acquisition strategy, and a 90-day action plan.
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Free resources
RFS playbooks, solo-founder data, rejection history and launch playbooks — free to read, sources on every claim.
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Playbook
YC RFS Playbook 2026 →
All 15 YC Request for Startups ideas, turned into founder playbooks.
Ideas
YC Request for Startups →
All 15 RFS ideas YC actively wants funded in 2026.
Stories
Founder Stories →
70+ deeply-reported founder journeys from YC alumni.
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