Two YC Startups are already in for W26

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The robots are coming, and they’re drunk on torque and cheap compute.

Somewhere in the fog-shrouded San Francisco, November 18, 2025, the Y Combinator Winter ’26 batch has already begun to bleed into the streets, and the first blood belongs to a single outfit: .

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Paul Hetherington (second-time sinner, W21 survivor, six hard years as CEO of a company called Mystic) has returned to the mountain with a new sacrament. This time he’s selling the body parts of God.

Robotics, he says, is about to become the biggest racket the species has ever run. Bigger than oil, bigger than opium, bigger than the atom bomb.

Trillions will pour in like cheap mescal over the border. But right now every poor bastard trying to birth a robot has to forge his own actuators in some garage inferno, wire his own brains, pray the cameras don’t go blind. Months of blood and solder just to make a limb twitch.

Madness. Pure gonzo waste.

Hlabs is the antidote: plug-and-play organs for machines. Snap them together like Lego carved from lightning. Open-source sorcery so clean a drunk in a motel room could birth a biped by sunrise.

Their first offering (an actuator controller that whispers sweet current to hungry motors) hit the streets in October. Forty robotics crews, real crews, not dreamers, threw money at it before the paint was dry. Forty. In hardware time that’s a riot, a revolution, a stampede.

Come Q1 ’26 the next wave drops: a Jetson-powered mother-brain, a camera array cheap enough to shame a casino, and a wireless module that cuts the cord forever. Out of the box, every robot will walk free, no umbilical, no leash, just raw electric liberty.

Paul himself is lean now, burned clean by the last war. Eyes like a man who has stared into the heart of latency and lived. He talks in short, hard sentences the way Hemingway talked about death (plain, brutal, true).

“Robotics today is the web in ’95,” he said, voice low over the howl of a San Francisco night. “Everyone building their own Apache server with a rock. We are npm for arms and legs.”

The YC batch is barely started and already one company has drawn first blood. The rest (thousands of them) are still sharpening their knives in the dark.

But Hlabs is moving. Orders in hand. Metal shipping. The future twitching awake on workbenches from Austin to Shenzhen.

Somewhere out there a humanoid is about to stand up on its own two feet, look around, and realize nobody is holding the strings.

That moment (that beautiful, terrible, inevitable moment) just got a lot closer.

The robots are coming.

And this time they brought their own damn plugs.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/hlabs

NEXT UP? We profile Sarah AI (W26)