YC changes Requests for Startups to bet on AI in the physical world
Y Combinator's wish list for the Fall 2026 batch trades software that merely wraps a language model for bets on defense, elder care, ocean compute, and agents that run inside entire workflows.
What changed in YC's wish list
Requests for Startups (RFS) is the document Y Combinator updates every batch to say, in practice, what it wants to fund. It isn't a press release: these are texts signed by the accelerator's partners and by portfolio founders, each one making a specific case for where capital should go. The Fall 2026 edition, published on YC's official site, brings together thirteen of these bets.
The structural novelty in this edition is who's writing. For the first time, one of the requests comes from a sitting government office: Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the Army of the United States, signs the text on defense, asking for low-cost interceptors, sensors, and drones that run on open architecture.
There has never been a better time to build for the Army. The door is wide open, so let's get to work.
Daniel P. Driscoll, Secretary of the Army of the United States
From the wrapper era to the physical-world era
In short: most of the requests in this edition aren't about a pretty interface on top of a language model; they're about infrastructure that touches the physical world or processes that today depend on people. It's an explicit shift from the previous crop of AI startups, which competed mostly on prompt and UX.
This shows up in at least five requests on the list:
- Adaptive education (
Translated from the Brazilian Portuguese original · Read the original
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