Top Hard Tech Startups 2023

Helion is creating the world’s first fusion power plant, enabling a future with unlimited zero-carbon electricity.

SRTX builds new materials and software to enable better textiles. SRTX is best known for its first technology, Sheertex, a knit made from one of the world's strongest polymers which has disrupted hosiery through impossibly strong pantyhose.

We're building a mobile and wearable digital wallet that makes interacting with payments, identity, and authentication seamless, fun, and empowering. Acquired by OURA in 2023

Integrated Reasoning builds efficient computer processors that are tailored to the memory access patterns of Karp's 21 NP-complete problems. We’re making it 100x - 10,000x faster to perform computations like scheduling airline pilots or optimizing packing layouts for shipping containers.

AirMyne is building machines to capture & remove carbon dioxide from ambient atmospheric air so it can be utilized or sequestered downstream. Our team is based in Berkeley, CA.

Yatima is a verifiable computing platform which uses formal proofs and zkSNARKs to make software safer.

Andson Biotech helps pharmaceutical companies measure difficult to detect chemicals that they need to measure while developing and manufacturing drugs like cell-therapies or biologics. Drug companies want to use our technologies to get fast and accurate chemical measurements they do thousands of times per day for drug development and quality control.

Enlightra develops mass-manufacturable fingertip-size multicolor lasers enabling ultrafast data communication and optical computing while providing up to 10x improvement in energy efficiency and cost reduction.

Palitronica builds and deploys cutting-edge solutions to defend critical physical infrastructure and its supply chain. By using side-channel information from endpoints, Palitronica provides a safe attack detection capability retrofittable to critical systems.

We bring Tesla autonomous manufacturing to every automaker and other producers. At Tesla, we were the core autonomous factory team and we’re now building the smart cameras and robotic guidance tools that provided the main advantages at Tesla

Hubble is building a global satellite network that any Bluetooth-enabled device can connect to, even without cellular reception. Our mission in life is to get a billion devices connected to the network and unlock a new era of human-machine collaboration.

AstroForge is an asteroid mining company. Instead of bringing back the entire asteroid, we break it up, refine, and return only what’s valuable.

Wyvern is a space data company that will capture the highest resolution hyperspectral images from satellites that cost 100X less than satellites using traditional telescopes.

FirstIgnite makes it easy for scientific organizations to grow by providing quick access to customers, capital, talent and suppliers.

There are over 70 million low accuracy tests done in US every year for conditions like the flu. Labsimply is using novel CRISPR enzymes to replace these with Point-of-care tests that offer PCR accuracy in 5 minutes or less.

We make devices that help cancer patients prevent the side effects of cancer treatment, including hair loss, neuropathy and infertility. Our first product, Lily, is a wearable cap that enables chemotherapy patients to prevent hair loss in a comfortable, portable way, while our second product, Lilac, is the world's first device to prevent the peripheral nerve damage caused by cancer treatment.

Humane Genomics is a platform to make artificial viruses. We design and make oncolytic therapeutics with unprecedented selectivity and efficiency. Our first indications are bone cancer, liver cancer and small cell lung cancer.

Meticulous is a tool to automatically catch UI bugs in your web application with zero-effort. Install our JavaScript snippet onto production or staging and dev environments, which records user sessions by collecting clickstream and network data. When you post a pull request, Meticulous selects a subset of sessions which are relevant and simulates these against the frontend of your application. Meticulous takes screenshots at key points and detects any visual differences. It posts those diffs in a comment for you to inspect in a few seconds. This eliminates the setup and maintenance burden of UI testing.

Odys Aviation (formerly Craft Aero) builds vertical take-off and landing aircraft for major airlines. We cut travel time in half on the world’s busiest routes by using city helipads and local airports. The company founders are electric propulsion and automotive manufacturing experts who have spent their careers electrifying transportation systems at Virgin Hyperloop, GoogleX, Volvo, and Fisker Automotive. We’ve won two USAF Agility Prime contracts, have pre-orders and options for more than 1,000 aircraft.

Polymath is building a general autonomy stack for cautious vehicles. Our software allows any industrial vehicle - whether it's a tractor in a field or a bulldozer in a mine, drive itself. We bundle together AI, ML, Controls, ROS, Safety and best-in-class deployment practices to enable our customers to tell automated vehicles to do via a REST API. We're on more robots than we have engineers, are seeing our revenue (and robotic fleet) grow rapidly, and are looking for folks who want to help automate the world.

We combined microfluidic chip technology and a reagent cartridge to create the first personal DNA synthesizer. Until now most life scientists had to rely on out-sourced DNA synthesis, causing stagnating research. Kilobaser empowers every life scientist to synthesize DNA on their benchtop.

Auricle is a medical device company building a breakthrough neurostimulation implant to restore hearing in millions of patients who no longer benefit from hearing aids, get less than 60% on a word recognition test, but aren't prepared to make the jump to a cochlear implant. Our approach preserves remaining natural hearing through a reversible and less invasive surgery, addressing the key concerns that hold most patients back from getting a cochlear implant (currently the only treatment option for these patients). The company spun out of Stanford Biodesign having completed two acute human clinical studies demonstrating the approach will work. The team is now focused on developing their full implant system for their first clinical trial. Auricle addresses a currently unserved profile of hearing loss that affects a growing population of 3.5 million patients in the US and represents an immediately accessible $1.2B market opportunity with existing reimbursement.

Our planes fly 10 times further than battery electric alternatives, with a lower operating cost than fossil fuel powered aircraft. Our first product is a 15 seat aircraft with a range of 800 km that enters service in 2026 with launch customer Skytrans. Our team has over 85 years of aerospace experience and have developed, flight tested and certified aircraft at Google X, magniX, Heart Aerospace, Ampaire, Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier and Gulfstream. We have $145M in aircraft LOIs from 7 airlines in the US, Europe and Australia.

Seabound builds carbon capture equipment for ships. We're the only way for existing ships to reduce up to 95% of CO2 emissions and meet new global regulations.

Greywing is a platform for ship operators to automate their business, through actionable intelligence, better data and communication. Greywing today serves three product lines to customers: *Flotilla* is a monitoring tool for vessels, enabling vessel managers to identify fleet-level patterns and optimizations and to identify risk and liability vectors in advance. *CRY4* is an operational tool for individual vessels that allows crew managers, security officers and masters to gather intelligence about a vessels current or proposed route, making decisions about the safest and the cheapest ports of call that a vessel can be directed to. *Landfall* is a crew management and analysis system to provide risk reporting and detailed editing capabilities about the crew on-board a vessel. *Semaphore* is a port-agent communications tool meant to simplify the process of interfacing with large numbers of port agents while planning a port call.

Trident Bioscience builds tools to expedite the discovery and optimization of useful proteins. Our technology first applies predictive models of protein structure and function to generate sets of potentially active protein sequences. We then apply our state-of-the-art sequence optimization algorithm to design gene libraries capable of testing these candidates extremely quickly and affordably. By combining these technologies, we're closing the design-build-test loop of protein optimization and cutting the total cycle time to help bring synthetic proteins to market faster than ever before.

Ardis AI extracts information from your unstructured text data and automatically generates a knowledge graph that can be browsed and queried, by web app or by API. Users can ask complex questions about the content of your text data, and Ardis responds with the answers and the evidence -- even when the information needed to answer the questions comes from multiple documents. Ardis also provides summary views of the topics discussed in your data. Coming soon: an Ardis plug-in for Elasticsearch, and support for natural languages questions.

Teleo converts construction heavy equipment, like dozers and loaders, into semi-autonomous robots. This enables a single operator to remotely operate multiple machines while sitting at a remote control center, unlocking productivity gains for the General Contractor.

Sticky problems are ubiquitous. Surface fouling due to ice, sludge, snow, bacteria -- even human waste! -- leads to problems across industries. Car sensors don't work when contaminated with mud or snow. Barnacles on ship hulls reduce fuel efficiency. Ice on airplane wings is hazardous. While each industry has its own unique problems, they all require regular cleaning, repair, or replacement of their surfaces to address surface fouling. They therefore share a common pain: surface fouling is expensive! Our coating prevents surface contamination and the associated consequences. Currently our coatings work best on glass, metal, and ceramic surfaces.

Observant is an iPhone-based driver monitoring system for commercial fleets. It uses machine learning + iPhone's depth sensors to detect unsafe driver behavior, prevent accidents, and save lives.

We help truckers cut delivery times, increasing productivity and adding much needed capacity to the freight industry. We do this by building autonomy software that tag-teams with human drivers. Conventional trucks drive ~120K miles/ year. Trucks with our tech can hit more than 190K miles/ year.

Atomic Alchemy is building a bank of reactors to produce the nuclear material that goes into nuclear medicine. Radiopharmaceuticals are vitally important in biological tracers, diagnostic imaging, and cancer treatments. Currently, the world's supply of Molybdenum-99, the cornerstone of 80% of all nuclear medicine procedures, is sourced from just six government-run, scientific research reactors abroad. Five of these reactors are 45-65 years old and are quickly coming to the end of their operational life. This has cultivated a fragile and lengthy supply chain, at odds with the nature of radioactive material. This issue and its implications do not just effect molybdenum, but any other reactor-based isotope. Many promising cancer therapies are stuck in clinical trials, unable to secure enough material in a timely manner. Research doesn’t even happen because of the difficulty of sourcing any new isotopes. It doesn't have to be this way. Atomic Alchemy is working to solve this by building the world's first scalable radioisotope production facility. This facility will contain the world’s first privately-owned nuclear reactors dedicated to radioisotope production.

We build engines that have the potential to slash 33% or worldwide CO2 emissions - cost-effectively. First, we help food and mining companies cut both their heat costs *and* CO2 emissions by replacing gas-fired steam boilers with our proprietary high temperature heat pumps. Our heat pumps make up to 3x more heat with the same amount of electricity, even at up to 1000°F. Once the heat pump market is mature, we will address the seasonal energy storage market. Our storage units are based on the exact same proprietary engine we use for our heat pumps. They work with solar and wind, and replace lithium-ion batteries, fossil-fired power plants, CO2 capture and storage, and fuel procurement, with a cheaper, sustainable and more reliable alternative, which can be sited anywhere. The first opportunity is a high-margin market worth 3% of worldwide CO2. The second is a much bigger market worth 30% of worldwide CO2. By the time all cars become electric, it will be even more. Our key is we are building the first Stirling engine to reach 86% of the Carnot efficiency, compared to 64% for the state of the art. We do all that while significantly decreasing costs, and increasing reliability. Please see Airthium's website for more information.

Our technology enables li-ion batteries to charge extremely fast while retaining long cycle life using smart control algorithms.

Flux Auto is building autonomous vehicle technology to fully automate the movement and operation of forklifts in warehouses. This removes dependency on human commercial drivers, allowing logistics companies to increase productivity while reducing operating costs.

Ultralight is an ultra-fast, ultra-light, standards-compliant HTML renderer for applications and games. It supports most modern HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript features while still remaining light in binary size and memory usage. We have more than a decade of experience in C++, JavaScript, OpenGL, Direct3D, layout engines (WebKit/Chromium/Gecko), library development, and middleware licensing.

CircuitHub is on a mission to fix rapid electronics prototyping. We are the first automated electronics factory built around a modern tech stack. We help hardware companies producing self-driving cars, satellites, 3D printers, robotics, & more to rapidly prototype electronics and get to market faster.

Combining nanotechnology with fundamental chemical engineering principles to accelerate the renewable energy revolution.

Volta Labs is a group of antidisciplinary scientists and builders working at the intersection of engineering and biology. We are building a sequencing technology agnostic platform that spans from the raw biological sample to sequenceable molecules. We are doing this by reinventing the full stack — hardware, software, chemistry, and biology — to create simple, flexible, and powerful solutions for sample preparation and beyond.

We're building autonomous robots to make surgery more consistent, error free, and efficient. Nick is a 3x founder from medtech who co-founded a $1 billion company. Kartik is a 3x founder from autonomous vehicles who built and launched the world's first driverless truck. Surgical robotics companies are worth ~$200 billion total. AI will dominate the next generation of surgical robotics and we will be the first to build it. We're starting with a common urologic procedure that has by far the best outcomes but is not widely adopted due to technical difficulty.

Holy Grail removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to contribute to the long-term sustainability of humans and other species on Earth

Albedo is building a constellation of satellites that will capture both visible and thermal imagery simultaneously, at a resolution 9x higher than the best available today. This novel dataset will enable commercial applications that, until now, have been limited due to the lack of affordability, timeliness, and spatial resolution required for the majority of imagery applications. Our low cost approach will commoditize ultra high resolution imagery, enabling this data source to become as core to society as GPS.

Vena Vitals makes a small sticker that monitors blood pressure continuously. We've shown that it works in the operating room and is as accurate as the best tools doctors have today, at a fraction of the cost. We're a team of health tech scientists with multiple past startups and exits, and we've built products that have scaled to over 2M users.

Blyss is a leakproof data warehouse that lets companies store and analyze sensitive data without ever decrypting it. This has long been considered the ‘holy grail’ of security, and after decades of research, it’s finally here - and we helped invent it. Data sent into Blyss is permanently sealed; once it enters, it's never decrypted. All analysis happens directly on the encrypted data. Regulated enterprises can use Blyss to unlock value from sensitive data without risking leaks. The company is founded by two Stanford engineers, Samir and Neil, who have extensive background in cryptography and high-performance computing, and previously worked at Apple, Yubico, and NVIDIA.

Alba Orbital is building the world's largest earth observation constellation, imaging everywhere on earth, every 15 minutes. We can see events within minutes such as wildfires in real time and have signed >$104m of LOIs, with both government and commercial customers paying pre-orders for imagery. To date we have launched 23 satellites into orbit (more than any other seed stage company in history), with another 2 launching in Q4 2022. We have launched a number of technology demonstration imaging satellites called Unicorns, which are the world's most advanced satellite under 1kg ever flown in orbit.

Atomic's mission is to replicate high-skill trade knowledge of tool and die makers into AI that powers new manufacturing systems which are orders of magnitude more productive.

We are developing a new paradigm for consumer health tech wearables by replacing a 100lb optical instrument with an area of silicon smaller than a postage stamp.

We use the printing methods used for newspapers, packaging, posters, and other graphic media to make beautiful, emissive electronic displays with high-end OLED technology aimed at low-cost applications. Our displays are paper-thin, flexible, and can be easily custom printed in a variety of shapes and sizes, allowing hardware designers to use displays and indicators on curved surfaces and in new ways.

We build automated robots for concrete floor construction. One person with our robots does the work of 6 construction workers.