YC’s Winter Demo Day

Y Combinator’s Winter Demo Day took place on March 24, 2026 and featured nearly 190 startups pitching to investors. (techcrunch.com)) YC ran the session without a single livestream—pitch videos were posted roughly 20 minutes after each presentation—and the Demo Day was invite‑only to an audience of about 700 investors and media. (techcrunch.com)) TechCrunch filtered the cohort down to 16 standouts spanning AGI benchmarking, humanoid training datasets, counter‑drone radar, architecture automation and AI wearables. (techcrunch.com)) TechCrunch’s investor survey of “nearly a dozen” VCs required a company be flagged by at least two investors to qualify as a top pick, and sources said a couple of companies are already raising at roughly $100 million valuations with $1M+ run rates while a de facto seed “default” sits near $30 million this quarter. (techcrunch.com)) Beyond Reach Labs, one investor favorite, described deployable satellite solar arrays that launch at table size and unfold to football‑field scale, claims a tenfold power increase and 88% cost reduction, and says it has a flight planned for 2027 plus $325 million in letters of intent. (techcrunch.com)) Byteport’s founder Jayram Palamadai pitched DART, a file‑transfer protocol the company says moves large files on average 10× faster than TCP and up to 1,500× faster on reliable connections. (techcrunch.com)) ARC Prize Foundation — the nonprofit in YC’s W26 batch — unveiled ARC‑AGI‑3, an interactive reasoning benchmark tied to multi‑million‑dollar prize competitions intended to drive open‑source AGI research. (techcrunch.com)) Asimov solicited global user‑submitted videos to build human movement datasets for training humanoid robots, and Milliray presented millimeter‑wave radar systems aimed at detecting and tracking small drones for airspace security. (techcrunch.com))