Human Archive YC Application

Winter 2026Active

Human Archive went through Y Combinator in the Winter 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: Winter 2026
Industry: IndustrialsManufacturing and Robotics
Team size: 4
Status: Active
Launched: 2026

Founders

Raj PatelFounder
Rushil AgarwalFounder
Samay MainiFounder
Shloke PatelFounder

What Human Archive does

We’re archiving the physical world for embodied intelligence by collecting and labeling aligned multimodal data. To build dexterous and perceptive robots that generalize robustly, we need massive amounts of real-world data across multiple modalities and environments. We have thought deeply about the fine line between biomimicry and its application to humanoid systems. Based on this research, we design and deploy custom hardware across residential and manufacturing settings. We then post-process the resulting data through internal QA, anonymization, and annotation pipelines to deliver diverse, high-fidelity datasets at scale to frontier labs developing robotics foundation models and general-purpose robotics companies. We believe we are at a historic inflection point, with a unique opportunity to leave a dent on humanity and reshape physical labor markets forever. That's why our team dropped out of Stanford and Berkeley and moved to Asia to collect the world’s largest annotated multimodal dataset.

Human Archive's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Human Archive, Winter 2026 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Human Archive

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Multimodal data provider for robotics

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We build and deploy custom hardware setups to capture aligned multimodal datasets across residential and manufacturing environments. We then process that data through quality assurance, anonymization, and annotation pipelines to create large-scale, diverse datasets for robotics foundation model developers and robotics companies.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We currently live in San Francisco, CA, and plan to keep the company based there after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

SF offers access to robotics and AI talent, investors, and partners, and it's where we can best grow the company while continuing field data collection.

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.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real Human Archive YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Human Archive's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Human Archive would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.