GoKawiilAI was once again the buzzword for this latest batch of YC Demo Day companies. Nearly 190 companies participated in Y Combinator’s Winter ‘26 cohort and presented their startups in a Demo Day on Tuesday.
These companies are working on products across industries such as law, transportation, and healthcare.
I did not, admittedly, listen to every single product pitch given the sheer size of the cohort and this year’s Demo Day format available to media: YC posted the pitch videos, one by one, around 20 minutes after their presentations (rather than a livestream, or an in-person session invite).
Instead, I read about all 190 of the startups presenting and spent the day watching pitches from those we found intriguing, then narrowed it down to the 16 that stood out as the most interesting startups of this overflowing YC class.
ARC Prize Foundation
What it does: Creates benchmarks to help measure progress toward AGI.
Why it’s interesting: A nonprofit in YC! But then again, when OpenAI, Anthropic, and GoogleMind are already using some form of the organization’s benchmarks, it makes sense why it would be included. This foundation aims to inspire more open-source AGI research by hosting competitions and awarding research grants. One reason for this AI revolution is to reach AGI (which Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says has already arrived), and it will be a matter of historical record for tracking how close or we are from AI machines that have a general intelligence.
Asimov
What it does: Collects human movement data to train humanoids
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