One Robot YC Application

Winter 2026Active

One Robot 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: 2
Status: Active
Launched: 2026

Founders

Hemanth SarabuFounder
Elton ShonFounder

What One Robot does

One Robot builds simulation environments that are realistic to see and realistic to interact with, so robotics teams can train and evaluate robot policies without being bottlenecked by robot time. Today, improving a VLA often means more real-world hours: setting up the scene, running trials, resetting, and repeating. This loop is slow, expensive, and hard to scale. For example, material handling and manufacturing assembly tasks, models need far more training and evaluation data than teams can collect in the real world. We use task-specific data to build world model-based simulation environments for hard manipulation tasks (for example, textiles and box folding). These environments help teams run more training and evals, find failure modes faster, and accelerate iteration on action policies with less dependence on real-world data collection and robot availability.

One Robot's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

One Robot, Winter 2026 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

One Robot

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

World models for robot evals and training

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

We build simulation environments that look real and behave realistically so robotics teams can train and test robot policies without needing the physical robot all the time. Our focus is on hard manipulation tasks like textiles and box folding where collecting real-world data is slow and expensive. Our simulations speed up training and help teams find failures faster with less dependence on real robot time.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA and plan to base the company here after YC as well.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We live and work in San Francisco because that's where robotics startups and customers are concentrated and where we have access to the engineering community we rely on.

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 One Robot YC application?

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