Let's just roll. We are surrounded by general. Hold your position. Come on. Get up. Trust the experts here. Five. We are experts. Founder Mel. 5. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. UAV online. Blaze. Double blaze. Triple blades. Double kill. Fire. Wrong. Cup is team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blade. That's just wrong. Right. Clearing order inbound. Get up. They're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Track one. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode. Marky clearing order inbound. Five good. I see more and more journalists on the horizon. Founder.
You're watching TVN. Today's Tuesday, June 16th, 2026. We are live from the TV ultra template technology fortress finance capital. Let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Uh, sorry about the delay. We had a little bit of a technical issue. Glad everyone's here. Thank you for tuning in. It's YC demo day.
Thank you for never doubting. Never doubt us ever.
No, it's okay. Every once in a while, you can doubt us a little bit.
Pop off in the comments. Pop off in the chat. But we have YC Demo Day. We have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven YC founders joining, then three YC partners. And then we're going around the horn talking to some other folks. Threads just hit 500 million monthly active users. We're having Connor Hayes back on the show for that. Luke Burgis is here with his new book, The One and the 99. And so we'll go through that. Not a lot of time for the news, but we'll take you through it anyway.
And in the middle of guests, we'll jump in for a little news. Exactly.
We love Exactly. We love the news. The big news, uh, big news is that SpaceX ran like absolute crazy after hours last night. I kept getting push notifications and thinking that that can't be right. And then I would double click and check a little bit and I would say, yeah, the headlines are crazy. So yeah. So the big one is there's so many of just like it's passing this company, passing this company, passing that company and you're like, whoa, this is a crazy, crazy time. So SpaceX sitting comfortably in the top five company.
You got Nvidia at 5 trillion, Alphabet and Apple right around four, four and a half.
Then Microsoft and SpaceX neck and neck, just shy of $3 trillion. And it basically makes their Cursor acquisition free. They paid 60 billion in new stock for the company and their market cap, SpaceX's market cap, more than quadrupled and added more than 4x the price of a Cursor acquisition.
I believe they had until Q4 to actually pull trigger on the Cursor deal, like they built in a window. Now, I bet you there was some terms that weren't public that Cursor would have wanted to make sure that they got in as quickly as possible.
Sure. Done really well. Who knows where SpaceX will net out. I mean, I thought we'd be at 2.4 trillion by the middle, by basically the last hour of trading on Friday. Yeah, I was incorrect at the time, but it's obviously, you know, continued to run. And there was another scenario where SpaceX could have effectively acquired Cursor at an even higher valuation, but I think it's a great, fantastic outcome for the Cursor team. Obviously, you know, OpenAI, its big Cursor investor, Thrive, A16Z, Codeu, and others that I'm unfortunately forgetting. But what was saying about this? He said it's the biggest, the biggest VC-backed in the past five days we've seen the biggest VC-backed IPO ever and the biggest VC-backed strategic sale ever. We've never had an M&A of a VC-backed company, young startup, north of 50 billion. Like 60 billion is so, so big. We sort of lose sight of it because we're talking about a trillion dollars for this company, three trillion for that company, but 60 billion is beyond a home run. Yeah.
And it happened in an M&A, which is crazy.
And yeah, there's I would assume a large number of the retail investors investing in SpaceX were not necessarily even that familiar with Cursor up until today. I did see that. If you're waking up today, you're like, 'Wait, SpaceX just acquired one of the hottest AI companies in the world with billions of dollars in revenue. Like, this is so bullish.' Obviously, a lot of the more institutional investors or people that had been following the company privately were well aware that they had the option to do this, that they would almost certainly take it.
Yeah. But the takes are all over the timeline. Quinn Thompson says, 'This is brilliant corporate finance. Use your newly printed low-flat retail inflated currency to acquire real businesses ahead of the lockup expiring. Probably the most creative way to sell as much equity as possible into IPO pump. I wonder what acquisition is next.' That's very interesting. Nick Carter fires back and says, 'You'd think the people buying the equity would also be aware of this.' And that's a good point. But the question is, like, are there more acquisitions in the pipeline because Tesla has not done a lot of acquisitions? Elon's always been a build not buy operator or founder.
Yeah, that's a very different scenario. What I'm talking about is there are companies, Meta is very inquisitive, Google, Apple, Apple's like on the smaller side, but they still do deals more frequently. It would be very interesting if we're seeing, you know, one deal a month and he's sort of putting together the pieces of buying up Neolabs and compute capacity and Neo clouds and rolling everything up, that would just be a completely different operating philosophy. But given where the stock is, given how smooth this deal went and where the market cap of SpaceX is, it's not the craziest thing. It would be a big pivot in his strategy, though.
Business Insider has a deep dive on Cursor's wild ride. Michael Truel didn't pay himself for years. Interestingly, Cursor once made up 40 to 50% of Anthropic's revenue. That is a crazy, you know, gyration in the market. Just shows you how quickly things are changing. Went from, you know, it's all Cursor, that business is just funneling to Cursor. Cursor is the front door to this business. Then it's like, oh, it's all these hyperscalers that are spending a billion dollars, half a billion dollars a month. And so the whole landscape is changing. Nothing tells that more than Anthropic telling Cursor that Claude Code was just a research effort. This goes back to the Dylan Field, like, were they consistently candid or maybe they really just did think, hey, yeah, this is just a research effort. Like, you do you, and then realized later like, whoa, whoa, we need to be a player in this. We cannot be in the middle of this situation. So we got to do our own thing, owning the end customer relationship.
Yeah. And so wild, wild ride.
Yeah. Similar to, I think the messaging to Figma, Canva around design tool.
Yeah. It's tricky. Every AI company is a general use technology. They're using it for everything. There's, you know, questions about like, will you maintain value if you're in the token path? Do you need to be like, do not build a company that depends on the models getting better? But if the models get really, really good, like, what can't they do? And so constantly we see every company competing with every other company as, you know, every hyperscaler has an LLM at this point and every SaaS product has other products because they can launch features faster. And so the competition is heating up across all these different companies.
Next time we have Michael on the show, we got to ask how he paid the bills for all those years.
Crashing on couches or something?
I don't know, taking out massive loans against the company maybe. Who knows?
Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.
Snap also has some big news today. We're going to get to it.
We'll get to that after our first interview with Andrew Lee from Tasklit. He's the founder and CEO. Andrew, welcome to the show. Thank you for the patience and joining us on such a busy day. How is Demo Day going? How are you?
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I want to be upfront. I can neither confirm nor deny the SpaceX acquisition rumors.
Okay. They're flying around. They're flying around Demo Day. Elon's probably there, Demo Day, shaking hands, trying to scoop up, roll up the entire batch maybe. Who knows? He's got the stuff to do it.
No comment. Demo Day is great. We're having a good time. There's a thousand people here. There's 200 companies. Wow. It's a good time.
Amazing. Did you pitch already, or is that ahead of you still?
Not yet. We're in group four, which is going to be this afternoon. And it's actually my co-founder who's going to be up on stage giving the talk.
I'll just be the pretty face over on the side.
Okay. Well, give us some backstory on yourself and tell us about the business.
Yeah. So, as background, the thing I'm probably best known for is I was one of the founders of Firebase. So, this is my second time through YC. I did the summer 2011 batch. We sold that company to Google in 2014. I was there for about 3 years. This company has been a very interesting story. We actually started in 2020 as a better Gmail. Like, we tried to build a new email experience, raised a bunch of money, hired a team.
So you quit Google to try to eat Gmail alive.
Yeah. I had already left Google a couple years before, but I saw them shut down Inbox and I was like, man, what are these guys doing? This is a huge, huge product. Like, what are these guys doing? We should do a better job. This is a terrible idea. Don't do it. Don't invest in it. But just as we were getting ready to shut that thing down, LLMs got good and we were like, 'Holy crap, we can take all of this data that you have and we can feed into a language model and we can draft emails for you and we can do interesting types of search and we can do categorization.' So, we started kind of pulling that string and around about this time last year, we had this really good agent inside our email client and we had a bunch of users being like, 'Hey, I love your product, but could you just get rid of all this inbox crap, right? Like the UI is getting in the way.' And so, we spun it out and it's a totally new product, totally new codebase and this is Tasklit. And we launched that in October and that's gone super, super well. And that's, you know, that's why we're in YC. At the beginning of the year we were at about a third of a million run rate. We're at a $7 million run rate now. So, it's like a nice, nice fast ramp.
And is that the bar now? Like, is there, you know, are you meeting other companies in the batch that have been able to ramp that quickly?
I think we have the highest revenue of the batch.
There we go. Let's go. There we go. Well, why don't we go hit the gong and then we can boom. That's for you.
This feels like... So, we were looking at our little summary here. AI agents that connect across work tools, run 24/7, and take ownership of recurring workflows. Does big tech hate you? Like, because I feel like the whole point is walled gardens. That's what creates value accrual. That's what keeps the value accruing to the work tools that big company CEOs love and extract a lot of value from. And you're coming in here and digging a hole under the wall of the garden and throwing a ladder over the top and digging a hole right through the walled garden.
How do you maintain those integrations if the actual platform is maybe hostile? We've seen reporting about this where different companies have tried to sort of integrate across and then they've wound up with sharp elbows. I think a lot of them have figured it out. But how do you think about working co-pathetically with the work tools that you integrate with?
Totally. So AI has totally changed the game. You know, two years ago if you wanted to integrate with a bunch of stuff you had to hand-code a bunch of integrations and there were companies like N8n and Zapier that just did that and that was their moat. And our secret sauce is that we can dynamically generate the integrations with AI when you need them. So we have a bunch of canned integrations. Some of them we've hand-coded and made them really, really nice, but even if you ask for an integration we don't have, the AI can generate one for you. And this is super powerful, not just because it lets you go outside the walled garden, but because it lets you connect to things that might not be public at all. So, if you're a company, a lot of times you have internal APIs and you're like, 'Hey, I want to have some integration that hooks up to Notion and HubSpot and Gmail, but then also my random bespoke internal API,' and you can't do that with any of the products from big tech. You can't do that with Claude or OpenAI, but our product, yeah, sure, you can integrate via API with this thing, with MCP with this thing, with a pre-built connector with this other thing, and they can all work together.
Mhm. What's the state of search these days? I feel like we've seen incredible progress in AI and agents. And then when I have the same frustration that you had when you were thinking about working on email, I'll type in some keyword, you know, like YC, and I will get some cookie, some string that's stuffed in a receipt from some coffee shop and it has nothing to do with Y Combinator. The context isn't there. Apple Intelligence is rolling out, it takes like five days just to index everything into some sort of RAG database. Like, why are we falling behind there? Is that key to your strategy or is it a problem for someone else to work on?
So I think agents again have totally changed the game here. So in Shortwave, our email client, the way we did search was the vector database approach, right? We embedded all your emails, we stuck them in a vector database, we had this interesting search stack, and the goal there was to have the search results be good. And it turns out if you have a really smart model and you have an agent, you don't actually care that much if the search results are good as long as you can run lots of searches. So what we found in Tasklit is we don't need to ingest all your email and index it. We can hook up to the regular APIs and just run a whole bunch of queries in parallel, look at the results, adapt, iterate, just keep refining. And so the results are almost as good without any infrastructure. So it's a lot cheaper. You can connect to more stuff. So I think if you use Tasklit, you can kind of hook it up to anything and you'll get surprisingly good search results without any special back-end.
But I imagine that's sort of slow right now. And for a company like Google to roll that out to a billion users, you know, for free immediately, that's going to be really expensive. So that's still a ways out. They need to actually chop through that. But we could expect that search will get faster and better over the next couple years.
Yeah, I think that is the big drawback. Like as an example, for prep for Demo Day, I wanted to make sure that I chatted with the folks that were here that had reached out to me. And I've had people reaching out over a period of months. And so I took Fable 5 back when that was still a thing. And I pointed that at my Gmail and I said, 'Go find everyone who has cold emailed me in the last months who might be at Demo Day and give me a spreadsheet with those folks.' And stack rank them, right? Like I want to know who should I talk to first and so on. And it spent like half an hour. It spent like $60 running this thing, right? But at the end of it I had this spreadsheet of like a hundred plus folks that was carefully researched and ordered, and it found everyone. There was no one I could think of that it didn't find in that process. So if you're willing to spend 60 bucks, if it's worth it to you, like, great.
I love it. Last question. Are you capital constrained? Like I'm assuming you have a bunch of offers, maybe you already finished your fundraise, but why even raise? It feels like you guys seem to be making — I would imagine with that kind of revenue ramp, it'd be hard to not be making money right now.
We are not capital constrained. We actually already closed a $20 million round in April with USV and Lightspeed and some other folks. But we're competing directly with Anthropic and OpenAI. They've obviously raised a lot more money and I think we can put it to use. We are raising more money now.
I like just saying the actual reality because there's a lot of founders that would come on and be like, 'Well, actually, we do something that...' and it's like, no, everyone is competing all the time and it's better to just accept it and play the game.
100%. And I think Corgi set a new bar with, you know, three weeks from what was it, Series B to C or whatever they did there. So, you know, why wait?
Three days. Do it in three days.
Three days. I love it. Awesome. Thank you for coming on. Yeah, great to meet you, Andrew. Talk to you soon. Talk soon. Have a good one.
Let me tell you all about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest will be sitting in that same seat, slotting in in just a second. We have... We'll be working on... Eden Robotics... the microphone. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes.
Good. Alexander says, 'I pay for Starlink. It's a great product.' Cursor is also a great product. Codex is a great product and Claude with Fable is a ridiculous product. That's the main difference between now and 1999. All of this stuff is awesome.
So, total white pill, then read the follow-up.
I don't think you can really compare this to 1999. I think it's actually unprecedented. If AI doesn't work, the global debt bomb explodes and there's a Great Depression. The 1999 bubble popped and things were generally fine.
Yeah. So it is higher stakes but it's more impactful. So it's a good point to not try and draw too much comparison to 1999 just because it's a technology-driven boom. It is very, very different in terms of the financial structure and also the impact, the revenues, the rollout, the opportunity. All of these things were just in higher stakes territory, I suppose. Anyway, we have our next guest from Eden Robotics in the YC Demo Day stage. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Hey guys, all good. How about yourselves?
We're doing great. Great. Thank you so much. Introduce yourself and the company.
Yeah, so I'm Stam, CEO and co-founder of Eden Robotics. We're making general-purpose robots for manufacturing, warehousing initially, and everything else right after that.
How general are we going? Humanoid? Are we going wheels? Are we going semi-humanoids? Semi-humanoid. What does that mean? Centaur.
Yeah, centaur. So the body, the legs are — there's four legs like a horse and a human.
But yeah, semi-humanoid. What does that actually mean?
So that means it's a wheeled-base robot. So it has wheels. But it has two arms which are placed like a human in our shoulders, same way we have. And it also doesn't have dexterous hands. It has grippers, which, fun fact, can do more than 80% of work in industry.
Interesting. What about the wheels are important to decide? Like a lot of manufacturing facilities have very flat floors, so I imagine you don't need really any stair-climbing ability, which some wheeled robots can do. But do you need to be omnidirectional? Do you need to change path? Is it just about optimizing battery life? Like what are the trade-offs that you decide when you're building the base?
Yeah. So when you're building a base, really, when you're going with wheeled, it's not going to be as general-purpose as legs. Like legs could go anywhere. But it doesn't have to be, and you have a massive gain in both cost and energy. Legs are extremely expensive in terms of energy and also in terms of simply cost.
And also I imagine you can put way more battery pack on top of the wheeled base, right?
Half our base is just the battery. So half the base is just the battery and then the other half is the compute and that's it.
So how long — is there some sort of sweet spot for once you have a robot that can roll around and do work in a manufacturing plant for six hours without needing to recharge? That's the sweet spot. You know how like 300 miles of range was like the sweet spot for electric vehicles and under that you start getting range anxiety.
Yeah. So I think six hours is too low. Right now our robot is using a car battery. It can run for 12 hours. But with our own...
Not an electric car battery, just like one of those bricks.
That's a car battery. Exactly. One really big car battery. And with our own battery design, it can go for 20 hours and optimize charging for like these four hours and not have to stop for four and work for 20, but optimize throughout the time to charge enough.
There's a car battery in there. You thinking about putting a V8 in there?
So, one of the, you know, we've had a bunch of robotics founders on. I've been trying to understand what some of the kind of like economic challenges there's going to be to rolling out, you know, humanoid-esque robots. When I see some of these humanoid form factors, I'm thinking like, look how many different motors it has. How much wear is each of the motors going to be taking at any given point? And then like trying to run the numbers on like what is the cost of the unit? What is the depreciation going to look like over the year? How often are you going to have to be repairing different components to actually make it competitive with a human, which you can hire for, let's say, 30 to $40,000 a year depending on minimum wage in a, you know, a certain area or type of role? Because like, you know, aside from humans being like cool and funny, they also go home after work and they feed themselves and they repair, you know, they sort of are repairing themselves while they're sleeping, right? So that's like sort of off-balance sheet sort of like activity that's happening that ultimately benefits the business because somebody goes home, eats, sleeps, and then they come back to work refreshed, ready to go.
That's a crazy way to describe human workers. But I get it.
But yeah, I'm just like comparing these two things. A robot, it doesn't go home at the end of the day. It might need to be repaired. It might need to be updated, and it doesn't happen unless the company actually pays for it.
So the biggest kind of like hardware risk factor is just the actuators. Really nothing else would require maintenance. Everything else would be able to last a pretty long time. Right now we're at this point where you have actuators that are actually good enough to last like 3 years and last this over usage. It used to be that these actuators would overheat very quickly and you would be able to run for a very short amount of time. And there are some humanoids today, like for example Unitree robots, they're very famous for overheating very, very quickly.
But there are actuators in the market, and we are using such actuators that actually can sustain long hours of operation. We ran it, for example, for 10 hours during Alumni Demo Day. There was no hardware issue when it came to the actuators, and it went pretty reliably. We expect that these kind of actuators would have a useful life of about 3 years. And in the case of the maintenance, so our whole thing by the way is we're not selling these robots. So we're selling the labor, and in fact we're not even leasing them on a monthly basis. We're charging per hour. So we're charging $10 per hour, which we actually found that customers love that idea much more than they love the lease idea because they have no mental framework, right? They have the mental framework of a human worker. And so how the maintenance would go is if a customer has a robot somehow breaks, there's a problem with it.
And sorry, is it per hour that the robot is actually running?
So you're not just saying, I'm going to charge you 24 hours a day for this period. It's like they're only paying if they're getting actual.
It's like a Waymo. You're used to paying 20 bucks to get across town. You pay 20 bucks to get across town.
Exactly. We do send minimums obviously because we need to keep the hardware at the facility, but it's just whatever is enough for us to keep the hardware there. Everything else is adapting based on usage.
Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming.
Did you, you already get the round done?
Not yet, but we're very close.
Good luck. Love it. Good luck.
Great to meet you. Come back on soon.
Thank you. Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon.
While we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.
Breaking from Semaphore.
Netflix lost out to Fox in pursuit of Roku.
How is that possible? I mean, yeah, it is interesting the lore there. Netflix sort of created Roku. But the real question is like, why would Netflix want to buy Roku? Like the boxes, that just seems like it makes so much less sense. So in terms of lost out, I can imagine it's a platform. They sit as an application.
On a platform that represents like 40% of connected streaming hours.
Yeah. I don't know. I'm not surprised they lost out because I would be surprised if Netflix, like when Netflix was bidding for Warner Brothers, that made a lot more sense to me. More library, more studio production for Netflix to distribute, but finding a second distributor when they're already competing in the ads-based model. They're moving towards a cheaper distribution thing. They're already installed by default on most connected TVs.
I just think it's a way to expand like overall engagement, watch hours. They're already getting into ads. Why would they not want to have like more basically like more watch hours to monitor?
Maybe, maybe, maybe. It seems like Roku is in way better hands with Fox than Netflix. So it makes sense why the deal broke that way. Anyway, let's bring in our next guest. Hugo Frisk from Tenet Industries is the co-founder and CEO. Hugo, how you doing?
I'm doing great over here. Yeah, thank you so much for the time. Introduce yourself and the company. How you doing?
Yeah, so I'm Hugo. I'm co-founder of Tenet Industries and we're focusing on mass producibility and low cost for the defense system, basically commoditizing it.
So I'm from the electronics manufacturing industry, and my co-founder, we're three co-founders, but one of them is from the automotive industry. So basically taking this like mass producibility, those concepts and bringing them to the defense industry.
How low cost do you want to go? I mean, we're all familiar with like the couple hundred price point for a DJI product. Where do you want to sit?
Yeah, that's about it. It depends on the customer really, but yeah, we want to match. Cheaper than China is our slogan.
Okay. And then how are you thinking about the actual product? We've been hearing a lot about the fiber optic controlled drones that don't need to deal with wireless jamming or anything like that. Where is the demand for the next generation product, or is it just what we know from a DJI quadrotor? What we saw there, are there any specific demands for the defense context that make it a little bit different than what's already out there?
Yeah, the main factor is the range basically. It's range and the lift power. Can you lift, what's the payload weight? So it's all about increasing the range, and the main limiting factor for the range is oftentimes the radio, right? So that's why they're using like these fiber radios or these fiber optic cables because then you get longer range without getting jammed. But unfortunately I think the fiber market, it's kind of only relevant for this bubble in time because to increase the range, which is the main like what customers want, you can do either a better radio, basically you can develop better radios and that's maybe the first step, and the next step is doing autonomy, right? If you have autonomy, then why do you need any contact at all?
Sure, yeah. How are you capable of, or do you think it's going to be possible to do on-device autonomy on a drone that size, 2 kg? That's not enough to run some serious GPU, but what is possible these days?
No, exactly. You can put an Nvidia Jetson on it, but the Nvidia Jetson is like five times as expensive as the drone itself.
So then it's not really a one-time use kind of deal.
So but there are these embedded chips for AI. It's just you can't run an LLM model on it. You can do some visual recognition and maybe you can do some like prioritization of different targets.
But the main factor here about the autonomy is not really the vision model. That's like a solved problem. This is possible. The main problem there is navigation. And how do you get to the near vicinity to your target? How do you arrive in like navigating for 20 km without a GPS? Because you can't use a GPS on the front line. It's not possible. It's jammed out. It's super easy to jam out GPS and to spoof it. They will say that you're in China or something while you're in Ukraine or you're in Sweden or wherever. So that's the main problem. How do you navigate without the GPS? Because the last mile, which is basically the targeting, that's a solved problem that was solved in the 60s with missiles. I don't get the companies that are pitching that.
Yeah.
What is your business model going to look like, or what does it look like today? You're trying to commoditize the category, push pricing down as much as possible, but you know what are your margins going to look like and how do you expect to structure deals with different buyers?
So right now it's kind of this pipeline. How do you scale a defense company? Because it's not really possible to get these deals as a new startup, as deals straight to the state, at least not where we're looking in Europe. But so what you want to do is you start with the private companies, you sell to them. So we're selling to these US companies. This month we went from five orders to 350 orders. And then you start selling to this subprime, it's called, like basically you're selling to a company that's selling directly to the government, and those are really interesting because they already have the channels to sell to these governments. And then once you have established like your manufacturing line and your capability and people trust you, then you can sell directly to the governments.
Chat asks, how does their drone survive high power microwave machines like Leonidas? Is the answer that it doesn't, but you can produce at such scale that you can kind of...
High-power microwave machines rolled out everywhere, but what's your take on microwave as a counter-UAS force right now?
I think microwave is... like, we've tested with these people having shotguns and shooting down our drones with shotguns, like...
Radar-controlled shotguns, basically.
And it's a short-range system. It only reaches... that system only reaches 100 meters. I don't know about this microwave, how long the reach is there, but I would guess it's pretty small.
So then you need a lot of these systems, and people don't have that. They don't have these systems every 100 meters.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not every military installation or unit is going to have every possible counter-UAS. So it's sort of a game of rock, paper, scissors on the battlefield these days.
And then the other thing is, like you said, just send more.
Yeah, that's what I was saying. It's like you have, you know, your five exquisite systems. Well, we're going to, you know, outproduce.
Is everything hand-built right now? Are you already working on automation? I imagine that low-cost manufacturability means more on supply chain and design, but what does the actual rollout look like over time?
Yeah. So when we started this, we wanted to produce with robots, still do, but basically our background is this manufacturing background. So we're really good at designing for manufacturing, designing it so it's really easy to assemble. So we designed it... how would it be easy for a robot to build this?
Well, then it needs a few parts and it needs a few screws and no soldering, and it needs to be assembled all from one side.
So that was the starting, and then it turns out once you do that, it's very, very easy to assemble. So it takes two minutes for a human to assemble it.
So then why do you need a robot?
Well, your batch mate will have to make a pitch for you.
How's investor interest so far? Have you been busy the last couple weeks, or are you starting a process now?
Yeah, super busy. It's actually my co-founder Emil who's doing that.
So he's always on call, and I'm doing customer demos and stuff. Yeah.
Very cool. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.
Congrats on all the progress.
Yeah, no problem. Cheers.
Goodbye.
Ryan Peterson says, 'With yesterday's 20% SpaceX pop, Elon made more money than Warren Buffett made in his entire career.'
These headlines are going to get crazy because I see some of them getting community-noted, but it's like a single day will move more than all of Bill Gates's current net worth, that type of thing. Those headlines are going to pop off consistently. The crazy ones is like, there's going to be down days. Like there's going to be just random 'lost more money today than any person in history.'
He lost more money than Brazil makes in a trillion years, you know, and because like whenever the big numbers get contextualized, it's always very entertaining.
It was up another 14% after hours, though. But the numbers are staggering when you're in the one trillion dollar club.
JB says, 'Is this everyone's first IPO? It's silly now as it approaches Amazon valuation.' Well, we passed that. But the float is low until the lockup of nearly every retail investor on Earth wants to be involved. You're going to get stupid moves. Then the float opens up and all the retail people are stuck for years.
What does that mean?
Just say you haven't seen the mass driver demo, buddy.
Or the next data center. I mean, that's the really interesting thing with Cursor. There's all this debate over like they have a deal with Anthropic, they have a deal with Google. Cursor obviously wants compute, but talking to Gavin Baker, it sounds like there might be a lot more terrestrial compute coming online in the very short term, and that is valuable. They're monetizing this very effectively. And so you could see a short-term revenue ramp just driven from sort of the boring NeoCloud stuff that monetizes really well. And then that provides, you know, it's like the Model 3. It's going to be the economic engine that provides the capital for data centers in space, mass driver on the moon, all that stuff needs fuel for the fire. Anyway,
ad lllo has some data. SpaceX the current approximate price to sales is 150x. Amazon is 3.6, Microsoft 9.2.
See, people read this as a bear SpaceX take, but imagine if Amazon started trading at SpaceX's price to sales.
Be probably be like a hundred trillion dollar company. Anyway, our next guest might be building the next hundred trillion dollar company. We have Payton Case from Dispatch here building re-entry vehicles. We're returning space-manufactured payloads in semiconductors, biotech, and pharma. Welcome to the show, Payton. How you doing? Oh, wait. Sorry. Do I have the wrong person?
Wrong. I think there makes up for the...
Oh, we switched around. Efrain Torres, sorry. Thank you. Please introduce yourself for us so we get it correct.
Yeah. So, hi everyone. My name is Dr. Efrain Torres and we're from Adilante building whole-body mobile MRIs for cancer screening.
Amazing.
There we go.
Are there any downsides to constantly getting MRIs?
No. So, MRI is non-cancer-causing radiation. CT and X-ray, there's limitations.
But MRI, I mean, I've scanned myself thousands of times on this.
Okay. So, uh,
are you the most scanned person in history?
No, my professor takes that one. He likes to tell he's the most scanned and published brain in the history, five times a day or something.
Yeah, that's how you get it. Yeah.
How mobile are we talking? Are we talking mobile like it can be in a truck that comes to the town and you go like getting your body fat measured in a water tank, or are we talking like Fitbit, I clip it to my waistband and I'm constantly getting MRI?
Yeah. No, we're talking trailer. So I would buy like a 4350 shows up outside of a clinic.
There you go. Right. We did, we actually calculated it just for that.
This whole body screen $250 and there you go.
$250. Okay. Okay.
So, what... I'm getting a little feedback right now. Can we deal with that? Thank you. Um,
What does a normal MRI cost?
Yeah. I mean, Prenuvo, if you look at their pricing, they're $2,500 and it can go up to $3,500. So we're on 10 times cheaper than everything on the market.
And what is driving that?
Yeah. So there's two things. The first thing is our technology. Like our system is 80% lighter, consumes 60% less power. It's actually eight times quieter too.
And all of this lets us have the operational gains.
So we don't sell the systems, we sell scans. So it makes our internal operation cost really low.
And the shelf life of these systems is 10 to 12 years. So we can charge $250 a scan and actually our gross margin actually ends up being 55% because of how long these systems last.
Do you have to go through medical device approval with the FDA?
Yeah. No, we're going through medical device approval next year as a Class 2 510(k). It's a fairly straightforward path because of the fact that there's a lot of regulatory precedent.
Where there's regulatory risk arises when you're like the first MRI, first therapeutic and things like that.
Okay, so what's the backstory on the company and the IP? Did you cook this up with your professor? Is he involved with the business? What's the history?
Yeah. No, not the professor. He's not involved. So me and my co-founder, we've known each other 10 years, went to grad school together specifically to spin out a startup to disrupt the MRI industry if you think about it. And so we developed an IP in grad school, got that patent issued. Adilante has exclusive rights to it. And yeah, so it's been cooking for a good bit here, but MRI is a hard problem to solve and that's why it's taking us... Yeah, doing well.
So, very cool.
So you're going through FDA approval. Can you actually sell the product in some advanced form yet, or is it just like demonstration for medical, for like research purposes at this point?
Yeah. So, I love this question because it goes to one of the creativity of our company. We are deploying this year, but it's of traditional MRIs.
The traditional MRIs, we're going to put them in semi-trucks and it's all FDA cleared.
We can go to our customers. We have 11 LOIs already, $19.75 million, and start building that distribution channel now.
And over the next year, right, we're going to get five to 10 of these trailers out there, all breaking even. But then come Q1 2028 when our product is cleared, you just switch it and it's like a lever to profitability.
That's amazing. Wow. Cool.
Congratulations.
How's the fundraising been going?
It's been going well. We only have a small amount of allocation left of our non-leads and having a lot of exciting conversations with potential leads.
Are you seeing more interest from investors who have invested in health tech, medical tech, FDA-approved devices, that crowd? Or are there tech investors who are sort of exhausted with the AI stuff and want to broaden their horizons?
Yeah, honestly we're getting a lot of interest from deep tech generalists and just tech because MRI is very well known in the space. Everyone has a story of someone that didn't get an MRI in time, whether it be from like a sports injury to something more severe like the cancer wasn't caught in time, and so we've had interest from deep tech investors, generalists, health tech as well.
Well, congrats.
Where's the name from? I got to know.
Yeah. So all credit goes to my wife. So, Adilante stands for a couple things.
Our scientific approaches are known as radio frequency adiabatic pulses. And my parents' saying is palante, which in Spanish is keep going forward. Also tattooed on my forearm here.
And so palante is very close to adelante, which means go forward in Spanish. And it kind of goes that no matter what happens to us, we're just going to keep on making progress every single day.
Very cool. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Logo chest piece. There you go. Have a great rest of your demo day. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.
Um, up next we have a good buddy of mine, Russell Smith from Nine Mothers. He's back in YC. I went through YC with him in summer of 2012, 14 years ago.
There we go. Uh, but I'm excited to catch up with Russell Smith, introduce him to everyone.
Tyler was what, one or two?
He was probably seven years old or something. Yeah. Um, but he was working on AI mission systems for...
Can we get Tyler in here?
Focused on counter drone protection. Yeah, yeah. In between the next guest, let's slot in some Tyler for sure. Anyway, we have Russ Smith from Nine Mothers in the TBPN Ultra Dome in at YC Demo Day. How you doing, Russ?
Been way too long. Thank you so much for taking the time. I'm glad we could make this happen. Uh for those who don't know you, introduce yourself. Give us a little bit of the YC history, the entrepreneurial backstory, how long you've been an entrepreneur, and then take us through the current company.
Yeah. I mean, I was an entrepreneur before I did YC, so like in the UK, but got into YC in the same batch as you. That's how we met in summer '12. The batch that basically broke YC at the time and made them rechange it.
70 companies looks... so YC had been like 30. Yeah. Yeah. You can tell it.
Yeah. It scaled and then they decided to change how it worked and it's the genesis of how they do groups now, right? It was basically a free-for-all at the time where the loudest companies or the most intense ones would get the most — well, not deliberately the most attention, but would...
Yeah. It's sort of natural. Yeah. Get the most love, right? It was funny because it was the YC batch that broke YC. Everyone said, 'Oh, YC's over. It's gotten too big.' And then it was like Coinbase, Airbnb or Coinbase, Instacart, Zapier, a couple other companies that became huge.
Clever. Clever. Yeah. Benchling, like a bunch of great companies that came...
A bunch of decacorns and unicorns in that batch.
Soylent as well, right? As in...
I remember going to your Tenderloin office and carrying bags of your early product out in little bags. I remember that you guys didn't you move in there when you had like 18 grand or something.
1,500 bucks a month for three people to live in San Francisco. Yeah. I think we had like 20 grand left in the bank.
And you were like, 'Good, this will last us like 18 months.'
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We paid our rent a year in advance, owned our laptops. We just had to pay internet and food and that was it. It was pretty... where Soylent came from, right?
Eat that. It's cheaper. Anyway, we're not here to reminisce about the old times. Tell us about Nine Mothers.
Yeah. So we make AI mission systems for the DoD and our first product is counter drone and we make a very small robot. So it's 35 pounds. We sell it for about 150k and it's capable of defeating multiple fast-moving drones day or night, kinetically defeat.
So yeah, it's basically a gun on a robot and then we build all of the models for day, night, build acoustic sensors, build models for that and then basically capable of shooting down small fast targets.
Interesting. Can we pull up the video? Because I have no idea what this robot looks like.
Yeah, let's pull up the video.
We'll have the team pull up the video. I'm curious about the decision around acoustic models versus video models. There's so much energy around.
We do all of it. And so the key here is that no sensor is perfect, right? And so multiple sensors gives you more chance at finding something. And then for instance, acoustics is bad on some of the projects we're doing that are around turbines, right? On Chinooks or other vehicles because it gets drowned out. But then radar is bad in some environments and vision is bad in some. And so the fusion, the ability to fuse all that together into a coherent picture and also adapt to new sensors means that we can stop more things, right? And the key here is that this is kind of like the same problem that you saw in Iraq or Afghanistan with IEDs. These are just now flying IEDs.
And all the demos you've seen existingly are almost all of slow-moving targets. So like sub 10 meters a second, sub 10 meters an hour in some cases drones people are struggling to shoot down. And that's just not reality, right? As in we shoot faster internally, but demoing 65 mph small drones repeatedly and that's way closer to reality if that makes sense.
Where does the name come from, dude?
It's Norse mythology. So we're nerds and then our product names are all around the same mythology. That's where it came from. That's the story.
I like naming's hard but yeah. That's good. What does it actually shoot? Is it shooting like 5.56 like some commodity round?
We can adapt to anything as in we can do 5.56. But the thing that works the best is 12 gauge. And so we make our own, we use a gun off the shelf at the moment. We're also developing our own belt-fed shotgun system, like as in the world's first belt-fed, and that will be first firing in the next 3 weeks. We also make ammo, right?
Yeah. It's basically closer to match grade which is like tighter tolerances and then slightly higher pressure. But owning everything like the full stack means it means we have better results. It's the short version.
So razors and blades for defense, right? I mean, you're obviously a very experienced founder. Um, where's the company right now? Do you already have a facility set up, a staff hired? Like I imagine that you're pretty far along for YC.
We're a little later on. So we are, we've sold like 1.6 million dollars of stuff to the DoD as in direct sales of units, not research and dev stuff, like actual sales, delivered units to DoD. And then we're expecting to sell over 100 units this year and a thousand next year. Have multiple believable paths to both. But yeah, aim is to do over 100 mil of rev next year and it's looking completely believable. Should hit 50 this year.
Super impressive. Uh, question for you. Let's say there's a front line and you set up a, I imagine, let's say US military sets up a bunch of these, drones are flying over. How do you manage friendly fire? Like let's say a drone passes the line, there's actual troops back here and you want to take out the drone, but you're effectively shooting rounds into the air. How?
It's a great question and it's a complicated answer and it depends on the mode the system's in. We can ignore stuff that's flying away from us and only prioritize stuff that's coming towards us. We can also take signals off networks they have if they know which drones are theirs. Really the common thing is that they don't actually have that kind of data and so the operator can choose to not run it full automatic and then choose which targets. But mostly they will shoot them because of blue-on-blue risk if it's not drones they are physically flying in the same group.
Right. It's that's the problem is is it a friendly drone that's misidentified you or not? If it's on a network and we know it's not, has it still misidentified you? Uh, that's where you get into the problem of this at this kind of range, right?
Well, congratulations on the progress. Really exciting growth. Great to catch up to you. Come back and we'll talk more soon. Have a great one.
Great to catch up. See you soon. Goodbye.
Uh, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Uh, our next guest is Payton Case from Dispatch. I accidentally introduced him a little bit too soon, but we got him sitting down in the YC demo day. What's going on? How you doing?
Yeah, it's good to be here. Good to see you guys.
Good to see you, too. Introduce yourself. Introduce the company. Tell us what you're building.
Yeah, so I'm Payton. I'm the founder of Dispatch Space. We build satellites for manufacturing products in space. And these are for the most advanced materials in the world that can only be made in microgravity and we bring them back down to Earth.
What specifically are you building? Because the space economy has gotten so fractured at this point. There's multiple launch providers. There's satellite bus providers. There's Impulse Space. Tom Mueller has an extra propulsion system that you can bolt on. Like what is the key product that you're focused on for this early stage of the company?
Yeah, we build the re-entry vehicles. So, this is the satellite is in space, you've made your product, and now you need to get back down to Earth. You're flying at Mach 25, you're surrounded by a plasma that's 3,000 degrees and we build the heat shields and satellites that can survive that environment.
Mhm. Who is doing stuff in space like I live in the world of Varda very closely? The elephant in the room is that we are very familiar with because Delian's our friend and it seems like obviously they're going vertically integrated building the re-entry vehicle and also doing the contracts with biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies but it does seem like the industry is expanding so who are the other buyers that aren't working with Varda that you have an opportunity to work with?
