With each new season comes another YC Demo Day. On Tuesday, the Spring 2026 cohort was unveiled, filled with defense tech, robotics, AI infrastructure and developer tools, and of course, AI agents themselves.
TechCrunch spoke to eight investors to determine which ones were the hottest companies in this batch — both the ones they were watching and the startups they heard other VCs couldn’t get enough of. This list consists primarily of companies that had been flagged by at least two investors as the buzziest in the batch.
