What they do:
The Cursor for Chip Design - Delivering Silicon-Ready Chip Designs…
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Top Hard Tech Startups
This list has 143 startups and was last updated on Oct 15, 2026. 42 of them are hiring right now. Biggest hubs: San Francisco (70), Los Angeles (9), and Boston (8). Largest teams: Helion Energy, SRTX, and SiPhox Health. Latest round: CircuitHub raised $25.5M (May 13, 2026).
143 startupsPage 4 of 4
What they do:
Powering tomorrow's industrial revolution in space
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HQ: San Diego, CA, United States
What they do:
The robot workforce for infrastructure
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Drones that clear clouds over solar farms and weaken hurricanes
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
The fully autonomous intelligence layer in the sky.
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HQ: Boston, MA, United States
What they do:
Robots for vehicle maintenance.
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Virtual Reality for Training Robots
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
We make silicon on the Moon, to power everything in space.
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HQ: Los Angeles, CA, United States
What they do:
Autonomous rovers to make the ‘Google Maps’ of underground utilities
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Deploying robots to replace workers in hazardous spaces
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Floating nuclear powered data centers at sea.
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
World's Earliest Test for Alzheimer's Biomarkers
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Quick-turn, purpose-built motors & actuators for all
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HQ: Los Angeles, CA, United States
What they do:
A foundation model for engineering physics
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Like Crosby, but for real estate development
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HQ: Phoenix, AZ, United States
What they do:
Universal, Pure-GPU HTML Renderer
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
Faster processors for solving NP-complete problems
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HQ: San Diego, CA, United States
What they do:
Force-sensing wristband for training robotic AI
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
What they do:
AI-controlled optical switching for AI clusters
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HQ: Boston, MA, United States
YC S26Early stage
What they do:
World Model for Freight
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HQ: New York, NY, United States
YC S26Early stage
What they do:
Next generation gas turbines for data centers & aviation
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YC F26Early stage
Proxy
Acquired
What they do:
Smart ring digital wallet
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Teleo
Acquired
What they do:
Supervised Autonomous Heavy Equipment
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Atomic Alchemy
Acquired
What they do:
We produce cancer-curing materials used in nuclear medicine.
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HQ: Idaho Falls, ID, United States
Roin Technologies
Acquired
What they do:
Building robots to automate commercial concrete construction.
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Clip Health
Shut down
What they do:
Testing & treatment at home, in minutes, for chronic & acute disease
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Warpdrive by Synthetic Minds
Shut down
What they do:
From screen recordings to desktop automations using program synthesis
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Light Table/Eve
Shut down
What they do:
Eve is our way of bringing the power of computation to everyone, not…
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Ardis AI
Shut down
What they do:
Transform your text data into a searchable knowledge graph
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Airo Health
Shut down
What they do:
Airo is an AI wearable to track mental health.
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
GTRACK Technologies
Shut down
What they do:
Nanoparticle tracers for reservoir characterization during hydraulic…
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
deepsilicon
Shut down
What they do:
Software and hardware to run neural networks faster and cheaper
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Trident Bioscience
Shut down
What they do:
Accelerating protein engineering.
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
Silver
Shut down
What they do:
Low cost consumer device for toxin detection.
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HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States
YC W16Early stage
Micro Meat
Shut down
What they do:
Technologies for scaling up cultured/clean meat production
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YC S21Early stage