Startups — Page 10
Companies to watch, momentum, milestones.
- Tailwind Labs says it is joining Shopify, but leaves the structure unclear
The announcement follows a difficult year for Adam Wathan's bootstrapped maker of Tailwind CSS, which already counted Shopify as a sponsor.
- Michael Kaufman's Covenant opens Dallas missile factory, targets 1,000 Anthems in year one
The former Thiel Capital investor is betting commercial parts, three-country production and $250M can turn flight tests into missile volume.
- New York's Moonshot AI becomes Shuttlebase after colliding with Beijing's namesake
Aviv Frenkel and Evyatar Segal are keeping their e-commerce optimization product while retiring a name shared with Beijing's Moonshot AI, the lab behind Kimi.
- Quantinuum secures up to $100M to manufacture trapped-ion hardware in the US
The federal award brings GlobalFoundries and Monarch Quantum into CEO Raj Hazra's push to industrialize Quantinuum's QCCD architecture.
- Hertha Metals built cleaner steel around the industry's least romantic constraint: price
Laureen Meroueh's Texas pilot uses natural gas and electricity to turn ore into liquid steel in one furnace, cutting emissions by at least half, Hertha says.
- Vaire's Hannah Earley built a chip resonator that recycles energy
The 2025 test proved a circuit could recover net energy. Turning it into a useful processor is the harder bet.
- Opalite Health is hiring its first GTM employee to sell AI interpretation to hospitals
Cathleen Kuo and Alex Mehregan want one early hire to own discovery, demos, pricing, security review and contracting from scratch.
- Atoms reportedly builds robotaxi tech while denying it has robotaxi plans
Travis Kalanick has the capital, former Uber engineers and a $100M Uber investment. A vehicle, city and launch date remain unidentified.
- micro1 wants 10,000 people labeling robot videos within seven days
Ali Ansari's AI data company is recruiting English-speaking reviewers as robotics labs consume more annotated real-world footage.
- Zoox adds Las Vegas airport rides, where robotaxis meet actual luggage
Jesse Levinson's purpose-built vehicles now serve both LAS terminals, less than a month after Zoox began charging fares.
- Nopixel sets September 8th beta as Twitch schedules 23 days of Drops
Nopixel's Koil-led roleplay project opens its closed beta September 8th for 448 invited players through the Rockstar Games Launcher, while Twitch runs a GTA RP campaign through September 30th.
- Modal opens London office to sell its AI cloud across Europe
Erik Bernhardsson is pairing a new commercial base with the Stockholm engineers who built core parts of Modal's infrastructure.
- Lloyd Armbrust launches RonanRX to personalize GLP-1 dosing with AI
The two-time YC founder is pairing physician-set doses with compounded tirzepatide as regulators tighten scrutiny and telehealth rivals crowd the category.
- Ettifos selected to supply retrofit V2X hardware for Arizona deployment
Hojun Kim's V2X-AIR will connect existing fleet vehicles to a federally funded, multi-vendor network across Maricopa County.
- Salem Robotics brings autonomous nuclear inspection software to YC's S26 batch
The founders built on Los Alamos deployments and UT Austin research to automate radiation surveys, instrument handling and compliance records.
- Nvidia reportedly agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B, but deal is unsigned
Hugging Face co-founders Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf previously rejected a $500M Nvidia investment over concerns about investor influence. The reported acquisition would value Hugging Face at $12.9B, against roughly $150M in annualized revenue.
- In-Q-Tel helped Quantum Systems win CIA and FBI drone work
Co-CEO Sven Kruck said the investor opened Washington doors; Quantum Systems is now valued at about $8B.
- Tensr launches a 12,000-square-foot robot factory and aims to automate the rest
The YC startup says it is filling humanoid and space-robot orders while building toward 24-hour autonomous production.
- Applied Electrodynamics unveiled wall-seeing radio imaging; the handheld comes next
Four Apple and Humane veterans say WaveSight maps hidden pipes and wiring to 1 mm accuracy; the product is still collecting preorder registrations.
- RonanRx entered YC promising personalized GLP-1s; service currently stops at Texas
Lloyd Armbrust and Emily Colman are pairing physician-set dosing with a separate compounding pharmacy while marketing a broader national buildout.
- Cosmic Robotics joins YC with a 10,000-pound robot already installing solar panels
James Emerick and Lewis Jones are taking Cosmic-1 from utility-scale solar sites into data centers while NASA funds a separate lunar robot.
- Machina Labs' RoboCraftsman panel flew on a repaired Air Force C-17
The July 30th flight put RoboCraftsman hardware on a crewed military aircraft after the Air Force compressed a repair measured in years into months.
- Flock gives 2,000 organizations access to one suburb's plate data
Several dozen Alpharetta cameras feed a national sharing network whose permissions, searches and safeguards now pose a governance test for Flock's founders.
- FDA authorizes Vitestro's Aletta robot for autonomous blood draws
Aletta handles the needle stick, tube changes and bandaging, while one trained phlebotomist can supervise three machines.