Deeptech Decoded: Frontier Builders | AI | Product Taste

What if AI's binding constraint isn't smarter models or faster chips - but the megawatts sitting unused inside regulated utilities in every major city? Graeme Harrison, General Partner at Augur VC and Founder & CEO of Simply Silicon, has spent years betting that energy, not compute, is the real bottleneck for AI. Augur was incubating against an "energy AI" thesis before the term "NeoCloud" exi...

What if the biggest structures humans ever build aren't on Earth - but folded into a backpack and unfolded 50x larger in orbit? Pele Collins, co-founder & CTO of Beyond Reach Labs (YC W26), is on a mission to become the "big builder" of space. Their flat-pack origami mechanism delivers solar arrays up to 100 meters long, 88% cheaper than today's ISS-grade solutions — and it g...

What happens when you give $10,000 and 1 month to two brothers from the Caribbean? They outperform the combined research teams of Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Baidu. Sergio and Luigi Charles, founders of Thesis (YC F25), topped OpenAI's Machine Learning Engineering benchmark (MLE-Bench) which is the definitive test of how well AI systems can train ML models autonomously. No brute-force compute. No...

The grid queue for a 10MW data center is 5 years. At this pace, AI can't wait 5 years for power. Casey Spencer and his co-founders Max Pfeiffer and Evan Schmidt decided the best grid connection is no grid connection. Voxel Energy (YC W26) is building off-grid AI data centers in 200 days — powered entirely by second-life Tesla batteries nobody else thought to use. In this episode: Casey's p...

The space industry is currently addicted to the "tourism" narrative, but if we’re being honest, tourism is just the flywheel. The real game isn’t about who puts the first billionaire in a lunar suite - it’s about who owns the infrastructure that makes Earth’s gravity well irrelevant. Skyler Chan thinks the moon isn't a destination, it's the ultimate physical moat. In this episode...

The entire AI industry runs on hardware that the people using it don't actually like. Why? Elias Almqvist believes the answer is Inertia and the window to displace it is opening faster than most realize. In this Deeptech Decoded Live AMA, we sit down with Elias Almqvist, founder and CEO of ZettaScale AI (YC S24), to discuss the hardware layer the AI boom is quietly outgrowing. Elias makes the prov...

Ashi Dissanayake is building Spaceium — in-space refueling stations that will enable satellites to travel further, carry more payload, and extend their missions. From building hardware in a laundry room with 80 cents left to getting into YC on their fourth attempt, Ashi shares the raw journey of tackling critical space infrastructure. We cover: - Why perfectly good spacecraft become space junk - T...

Even if Y Combinator never existed, Matthew Sutton would still be backing the top builders. Most investors wait for traction. Matthew Sutton backs builders before there’s proof, sometimes before there’s even a category. He is the first check writer you want to have on your side. Operating at the intersection of Harvard Ventures and the YC ecosystems, Matthew has backed AI, quantum, and defense tec...

65% of data-center outages are caused by human error, sometimes as simple as flipping the wrong switch. Shapol M., founder & CEO of Entangl (YC S24), went from building reusable rockets in the UK to preventing catastrophic failures in the infrastructure powering AGI.In this Deeptech Decoded conversation, we dive into:- Why data-center downtime causes mass chaos (remember when even Eight Sleep...

Quantum computing is about to leave the lab and land on your laptop. In this episode of Deeptech Decoded, Nihal Kurth sits down with Brandon Severin, CEO & Co-Founder of Conductor Quantum (Y Combinator) — the startup using AI to automate quantum chip design 1,000× faster, cutting setup time from 27 years to just 2 minutes. Together, they unpack how AI and automation are scaling qubits like sem...

Join us for an in-depth AMA and podcast conversation with Philip Johnston, Co-founder & CEO of Starcloud, the world’s first orbital data center company. 🚀 We cover: 1. Why orbital infrastructure is the next leap in AI compute 2. Starcloud’s plan to launch megawatt-scale compute into orbit by 2027 3. The challenges of energy, cooling, and scalability in space 4. Lessons from building at the fr...