New YC Fall ‘26 Request for Startups just dropped - what do you guys think (I will not promote)

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The Primer

In Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, a young girl is given an interactive book called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. It looks like a tool for learning to read, but it's far more. It adapts to her completely, and through stories tuned to her life, it teaches her not just to read but to think, to reason, and eventually to grapple with the hardest questions of ethics, meaning, and character. She returns to it day after day for years, and as she grows, it grows too. Continually reshaping itself around who she is becoming and the life she is living.

For the first time in history, something like the Primer is starting to feel possible.

The best education has always come from one-on-one tutoring. Aristotle taught Alexander. But that privilege has been reserved for the few. AI can bring it to every child. And great tutors do more than drill facts. Over years, they learn a child's mind, and with it how to teach what can't be drilled at all: thinking, reasoning, even wisdom.

In Stephenson's story, the Primer is an AI tutor that never runs out of patience or time. We're a long way from building one, but we can start today. What we'd love to see now is a product that adaptively teaches young children to read, write, and do arithmetic, at the quality of a devoted private tutor and at consumer scale. Not a replacement for teachers, but a supplement that makes them more effective.

While we think this begins as something a parent buys to help their child learn basic skills, it is also the entry point to far greater ambitions. A company that gets it right could build toward something like the Primer, and even a fraction of that vision would have a profound effect on society.

The Future of American Defense

Warfare is at an inflection point, and the old ways of Army acquisition simply don't keep pace with modern threats. Modern combat demands commercially developed, modular open-system solutions, and that's why we ripped up the old acquisition playbook.

We need hungry, innovative founders to build for the crucible of ground combat. The threats we face change daily, and the Army must dominate everywhere, from the Arctic to the archipelago and from space to subterranean environments. So here is our request for startups. We are actively funding low-cost interceptors or any component that helps us lower the cost per kill.

We need next-gen sensors, software, payloads, and other hardware that plugs directly into our open system architecture. We need cutting-edge drones, resilient logistics, and advanced manufacturing, and we need it all to survive the most extreme climates on Earth. Bring us your ideas, and we will give you the capital and the proving ground to scale.

There has never been a better time to build for the Army. The door is wide open, so let's get to work.

A Cloud for Small Software

Using agents to build personal software to solve your own problems is a lot of fun.

This is "Small Software". Purpose-built tools that will only ever have one or a small handful of users.

Small software is useful for teams too: Every team does things differently, and there's unlimited demand for bespoke tools for running workflows, tracking important numbers, managing sprints, sharing prototypes, and so on.

Software like this is now very easy to build, but still hard to deploy and share.

Incumbent clouds like Azure and AWS were designed for shipping Big Software that scales with many users… at the cost of complexity.

A cloud designed for small software could delete most of this complexity and unlock a big set of new use cases that agents have only recently made possible.

At the same time, there are other hard problems to solve: every company will want to customize the environment this software runs in, auth & permissions are hard, and allowing nontechnical users to share arbitrary code is tricky to do securely.

Small software should be as easy to share with your colleagues as a Google Doc.

Multiplayer AI

The best work tools of the last two decades won by going multiplayer. Google Docs replaced Microsoft Word. Figma beat Photoshop. And they turned solo tools into places where teams do their best work together.

But AI hasn't had its multiplayer moment yet.

AI agents are the most powerful new tool a team has, but it's the one thing people still use by themselves. That's because right now, working with AI is largely single-player. You open a chat, type a prompt, and get an answer, in a box only you can see. When you want to collaborate with your teammates and agents, the best you can do is send a link to a read-only transcript they can't touch.

That's about to change.

Agents are starting to run tasks that take hours, days, even weeks. Work at that scale was never meant to be done alone, and pulls in many people across a company. Anyone on a team should be able to drop into the same live agent session to watch it work, redirect it, and hand it off, the way they'd work with any other human team member. This turns the work a team does with agents into a shared, living thing instead of a thousand private threads.

We think there's a version of this for every kind of work. Shared agents for engineers coding together in real time. For sales teams working a deal together. For support teams resolving a ticket. For lawyers drafting a contract, analysts building a model, and marketers shipping a campaign. Anywhere a team already crowds around one problem, there should be multiplayer agents they all share.

Compute at Sea

Artificial intelligence is running out of compute. And data centers are running out of electricity and land.

The demand for data centers is insatiable. But new data centers can take years for approval and enough megawatts, and still could get killed by local government intervention.

While communities increasingly oppose the land, the water is open.

It sounds crazy, but we think part of the answer may be to move compute offshore.

The ocean is 70% of the Earth's surface area, has abundant sunlight, no permitting process, and is an enormous natural heat sink that is already getting hit by the sun all day anyway. Think of them as compute flotillas: many standardized, modular vessels operating together as one global cloud.

AI-Powered Consumer Products for 1 Billion People

Every platform shift mints consumer giants. The web gave us Google + Airbnb. Mobile gave us Instagram + DoorDash. AI is the biggest shift YET. But three years in, the only new icon on your home screen is ChatGPT.

So why do we think NOW is a great time to build AI-powered consumer products? Intelligence just got good enough: you can treat an agent like a person. And it's about to get cheap enough, too: today, the magic can run $1,000 a month in tokens for each user, but that is falling 10x a year. Follow the curve, and you can predict the consumer moment: it lands very soon. Whoever builds now, owns it.

What do you build? How we get things done, get around, learn, stay healthy, manage our money, play, connect with friends. It all opens up again.

AI for the Aging Population

By 2030, one in five Americans will be over 65, and there's nowhere near enough people to take care of everyone. The US is projected to have millions of unfilled caregiving jobs within the decade, and 53 million family members are already doing this work unpaid.

Meanwhile, almost no technology is actually built for older people. Even Alexa and Google Home are frustrating for most seniors to use.

AI finally makes a new class of products possible: voice interfaces that can hold real conversations, monitoring that helps older adults stay safe and independent, robotics that can assist with physical tasks around the home, and software that helps family caregivers coordinate care, appointments, and emergencies.

This is one of the largest, most underserved markets in the world, and it's growing every single day.

New Operating Systems for the Physical World

80% of the global workforce doesn'…