The Top 5 Robotics Startups from YC F25
Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch featured a strong cohort of robotics companies tackling problems from household humanoids to malaria eradication. Here are five that stood out.
Lightberry
The social brain for robots
Lightberry works with manufacturers like Unitree and Booster to make robots listen, speak, and act. You can program your robot out of the box by literally talking to it, no coding involved. The company positions its software as an alternative to simply adding ChatGPT to robots, noting that approach "responds to every little noise, lacks personality, and needs to be teleoperated."
Robots running Lightberry are being deployed in homes, offices, shops, and conferences, and the software works across multiple robot platforms including Unitree G1, Fourier GR-2/N1, and Booster T1/K1.
Piggy Robotics
Humanoid robots at iPhone prices
Richard Gong and Chenny Deng are building mass-producible humanoid robots that do chores at iPhone prices. Richard dropped out of medicine at Oxford to build humanoid robots for the home, while Chenny is a PhD candidate in computer science at Oxford and former Tencent AI researcher. The pair argue that existing humanoid companies can only produce a few hundred units per year because motors are expensive and slow to assemble. Piggy uses artificial muscles instead: each muscle is just a tube wrapped in braided fiber, and the whole robot is powered by a single pump, enabling mass production at scale.
They built a full-size, mass-producible humanoid robot in 2 months, complete with custom muscles, valves, and pumps for less than $1,000.
Cortex AI
Real-world data for robotics foundation models
Cortex AI is building the world's most diverse real-world, real-workplace, and industry-scale egocentric and robot dataset. Prior to Cortex AI, founder Lucas Ngoo was the co-founder and CTO of Carousell, which scaled to a $1B+ valuation.
The company's thesis: most robotics datasets today are captured in lab environments or simulated settings, far removed from the real physical world where robots actually need to operate.
Cortex is also launching a marketplace where real workplaces get paid to host egocentric-capture and robot-teleop sessions.
Spatial AI
Large datasets for robot foundation models
Spatial AI is building the data infrastructure for robots, positioning large-scale, real-world data as the missing ingredient for general-purpose embodied agents. Founded by Alex Petkos, the company argues that the biggest obstacle to bringing robots into everyday life is the software, and that we need far more capable models to control general-purpose robots effectively.
Their first dataset, SEA (Spatial Everyday Activities), is the largest well-curated egocentric dataset of people performing tasks. The company has also released an open-source version on Hugging Face.
Tornyol
Micro-drones that kill mosquitoes
Clovis Piedallu and Alex Toussaint are building Tornyol, a micro-drone that kills mosquitoes. They use smartphone microphones, car park assist sensors, and DSP to transform 40-gram toy drones into mosquito killers.
Because these drones are so cheap and fast, they could lower the cost of mosquito control by 100x to enable the eradication of malaria.
The team received a $28k grant from Scott Alexander and Vitalik Buterin before YC. They've achieved the first detection and tracking of a mosquito with an ultrasonic phased array.
Their upcoming consumer product is a micro-drone plus base station that patrols your garden 24/7 and eliminates any mosquito in the zone.