America’s industrial infrastructure is overdue for reinvention. From manufacturing to biotech, advances in technology are creating opportunities to rethink how we design, build, and scale the systems that power our physical world.

Startups are the sharpest tool we have to modernize physical systems.

That’s why we’re excited about the recent Y Combinator Techno-Industrialist Request for Startups and and are eager to meet the founders ready to answer it.

Cloud-native tools reshaped entire industries. Now, the most meaningful breakthroughs are emerging in factories, labs, materials plants, and shop floors. YC’s rallying cry—“restore your nation’s industrial soul”—gives this movement a name.

Here’s how our portfolio is already building it.

Energy: Infrastructure for Abundance

We believe energy is one of the most important frontiers for industrial reinvention, from the grid to storage to entirely new generation systems.

When we talk about creating abundant energy, most people picture building more solar farms, wind turbines, or battery storage. But generating power is only part of the challenge.

Before any of that equipment can be installed, developers often need to navigate a maze of hurdles: finding suitable land, identifying and contacting property owners, securing permits, and lining up agreements with utilities. These steps can take months (or even years) and they often delay or derail projects entirely.

In our portfolio we have one company addressing these bottlenecks head-on.

• Leafpress and their AI platform helps brokers, investors, and energy developers uncover verified property owner contact information in minutes, replacing the slow, costly process of working through title companies or consultants. By clearing this chokepoint, Leafpress makes it faster and easier to get renewable and distributed energy projects from concept to construction.

Abundant energy isn’t just about producing more, it’s about rethinking the entire path from idea to infrastructure

The next wave of energy founders will treat generation, storage, and the grid as one connected system—and remove the barriers that slow it down.

Materials: The Inputs of Innovation

Materials innovation rarely makes headlines. It’s not consumer-facing, and most people won’t notice when a metal gets stronger, lighter, or cheaper to produce.

But even small improvements in cost, durability, or recyclability can unlock billions in downstream value (rippling across all industries).

We’re proud that our portfolio includes a startup that is tackling one of the biggest challenges in materials innovation: the speed, cost, and complexity of producing the world’s most advanced chips.

• Inversion Semiconductor (YC W25) is developing the next generation of lithography machines to make advanced chips faster and more affordably. Their tabletop particle accelerators condense processes that once required kilometers of infrastructure into just centimeters. They are reshaping what’s possible in chip production.

Breakthroughs like Inversion Semiconductor’s next-generation lithography go beyond better chips, they rebuild the core infrastructure every other frontier technology depends on.

Blueprints: CAD, Modeling, and Simulation

Every physical product begins as an idea—but too often, the tools to turn that idea into reality are slow, complex, and constrained by legacy software. Designing a building, machine, or industrial process can take weeks or months before the first prototype is even considered.

Faster, smarter design tools can collapse these timelines, reduce costly mistakes, and enable engineers, architects, and operators to explore more ambitious ideas. In short, design speed is an industrial superpower.

We’re backing companies building exactly that.

• ArchiLabs is creating AI-powered design tools for architects and engineers, generating building concepts, floor plans, and 3D models in minutes instead of weeks.
• Mineflow (YC S24) is developing simulation software for mining and industrial operations, allowing teams to model extraction, logistics, and environmental impact before breaking ground.

Manufacturing: Rebuilding the Shop Floor

The U.S. doesn’t manufacture at the scale it once did, and the answer isn’t a return to long shifts on the factory floor. We need a new approach: one where technology powers every part of production.

As YC notes in the RFS, productivity in American manufacturing has stalled. This is a call for founders to change that, by building tools that make production smarter, faster, and more resilient.

One of our portfolio companies gives us a glimpse of what’s possible.

• Jeevy Fabrication's AI-powered EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) platform automates the sourcing and delivery of welded assemblies, cutting bid times by over 80% and bringing real-time transparency to a traditionally slow, opaque process.

Biotechnology: Automating Discovery

Breakthroughs in biotech have always relied on flashes of insight with accidental discoveries followed by patterns noticed after years of trial and error.

But that’s changing. With AI and automation, we’re entering a world where hypotheses can be generated by machines and experiments run autonomously.

This isn’t about replacing scientists. It’s about scaling them. We need startups that will turn the slowest parts of discovery into software-driven systems that can build the infrastructure biology needs to move faster.

That’s the mission of several Singularity-backed companies.

• Kopra Bio is engineering microbes to produce high-value chemicals at industrial scale.
• Uncommon Therapeutics is combining disease expertise with cutting-edge tools to target conditions like Rett Syndrome.
• Yoneda Labs is automating chemistry R&D to unlock new compounds.
• Zeon Systems is making lab automation accessible with robotics that understand natural language.
• Piramidal (YC W24) is building technology that bridges the gap between research and real-world EEG applications.

Individually, they’re tackling very different problems. Collectively, they’re building the tools and platforms that could redefine how fast biotech moves from idea to impact.

Why We Bet on Founders

Re-industrialization won’t come from theory. It will come from builders—founders willing to tackle bottlenecks, question orthodoxy, and move faster than incumbents.

The Future We Want to Back

The next era of innovation isn’t digital-only. It’s physical, industrial, and long overdue.

There’s no instruction manual for re-industrialization. That’s why we back the people willing to write it.

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