Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Y Combinator (YC) has announced an entirely new list of 20 areas of interest in its latest Request for Start-ups. As described in this Valentine’s Day blog post from Dalton Caldwell, Managing Director, it is part of the YC’s DNA to periodically issue such documents.

“You can find examples going back as far as 2009,” he writes. “Each one offers up ideas we’d want to see made real, in spaces that we believe will be important in the coming decades. The world is full of founders with expertise that could be tapped into something new and great; our hope is that this list inspires some of those people to do so — or if they’re already building, to apply to YC.”

The areas of interest are:

• Applying machine learning to robotics;
• Using machine learning to simulate the physical world;
• New defense technology;
• Bring manufacturing back to America;
• New space companies;
• Climate tech;
• Commercial open source companies;
• Spatial computing;
• New enterprise resource planning software (ERPs);
• Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools;
• Explainable AI (artificial intelligence);
• LLMs for manual back office processes in legacy enterprises;
• AI to build enterprise software;
• Stablecoin finance;
• A way to end cancer;
• Foundation models for biological systems;
• The managed service organization model for healthcare;
• Eliminating middlemen in healthcare;
• Better enterprise glue; and
• Small fine-tuned models as an alternative to giant generic ones.

Applications are due April 22 for the Summer 2024 funding cycle.

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