Hemlock YC Application
San Francisco
Hemlock went through Y Combinator in the Fall 2026 batch as a Industrials company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.
- YC batch
- Fall 2026
- Industry
- IndustrialsManufacturing and Robotics
- Location
- San Francisco
- Team size
- 1
- Status
- Active
- Launched
- 2026
Founders
Julian OlschwangFounder/CEO
What Hemlock does
Every serious robotics lab is bottlenecked on the same thing: demonstration data. The field has converged on egocentric video and hand pose as the substrate, and both are now cheap to collect at scale. What neither of them contains is force. A video of someone picking up an egg and a video of someone picking up a rock are nearly identical in pixel space and nearly identical in joint angles. They differ almost entirely in a quantity nobody is recording. Policies trained without it learn geometry and inherit no sense of touch. Hemlock closes that gap at the source. Our device, the Bracelet, is a wrist-worn surface EMG band that reads the electrical activity of the forearm muscles that actually drive the hand, which means it recovers contraction force directly rather than inferring it from motion. This distinction is the whole thesis: force cannot be reconstructed downstream of kinematics, because a hand squeezing hard isometrically and a hand resting can occupy the identical pose. Muscle signal is the only non-invasive channel that separates them.
Hemlock's YC application, reconstructed
Y Combinator application
Hemlock, Fall 2026 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.
- Founders2
- Company7
- Progress7
- Idea4
- Equity3
- Curious2
- Batch Preference1
Company
Hemlock
Force-sensing wristband for training robotic AI
We make the Bracelet, a wrist-worn EMG device for robotics research. It measures electrical activity in the forearm muscles to recover real hand force during demonstrations, something pose and video can't do. This data is the missing piece for labs training manipulation policies in robots. We close the gap between what robots can see and what human operators actually feel.
San Francisco, CA, USA. The company will stay based here after YC.
San Francisco is where robotics research and early adopter labs are concentrated. It's also a strong base for hiring and prototyping hardware.
21 more answers in the full application
Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this the real Hemlock YC application?
No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Hemlock's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Hemlock would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.
What YC batch was Hemlock in?
Hemlock was part of the Y Combinator Fall 2026 batch.
Who founded Hemlock?
Hemlock was founded by Julian Olschwang.
What does Hemlock do?
Force-sensing wristband for training robotic AI
How do I read the full reconstructed application?
Create a free Round Funded account. The full 26-answer version of Hemlock's application, and every other YC batch, is in YC Insights.
