YC Request for Startups: Winter 2027
YC RFSThe latest Y Combinator Request for Startups, from Winter 2027: 11 ideas YC’s partners want founders to build. Each links to a problem page with more detail, related problems and people working on it.
Own Your Intelligence
With open-weight models now competitive, more companies will want to own and improve their own models instead of renting a frontier lab's. YC wants the tools and services that make that practical.
AI for the Air-Gapped Economy
Defense contractors, banks, hospitals and nuclear plants can't send their data to a cloud AI API. YC wants companies that bring frontier AI inside their walls, fully offline.
Data Center Supply Chain
The AI data center buildout is creating shortages far beyond GPUs, from power transformers to switchgear and electrical steel. YC wants companies that unblock every part of that supply chain.
The $15-an-Hour Expert
Instead of AI replacing workers, use AI to let capable people without credentials do specialist work in fields like benefits, taxes, insurance claims and medical billing.
Startups in a World of Abundant Space Access
Launch costs are set to fall by orders of magnitude as SpaceX's Starship scales. YC wants companies started now for business models that only work once reaching orbit is 100x cheaper.
AI for City Hall
Permits, inspections and licensing still run on manual review in almost all of America's 19,000 cities. YC wants AI that clears the backlog, starting with building permits.
Vertical Foundation Models
Specialized foundation models for fields like manufacturing, energy and biology that work from few or no examples, matching general models at a fraction of the inference cost.
Wall Street for the Physical Buildout
Robots, GPU clusters and data centers need large up-front financing that mostly doesn't exist yet. YC wants lenders, lessors and hedging products built for the physical AI economy.
Plaid for Government Benefits
Applying for benefits means proving income, household and address again for every program. YC wants a consent-based data layer that verifies once and works everywhere.
LLMs That Write Well
As models got better at code and math, their writing got more robotic. YC sees room for a startup that builds a model people actually enjoy reading and talking to.
Robots Made in America
As robot foundation models improve, the bottleneck is moving to hardware, and most robots and key parts like rare-earth magnets still come from abroad. YC wants a US robot supply chain.