AI at the Wheel, Drones on the Hunt: Inside YC’s Fall 2025 Batch

Picture this: You walk into Y Combinator’s Demo Day in fall 2025, and virtually every pitch starts with “We’re using AI to...” One founder claims their system will run your entire marketing operation. Another is building 40-gram drones that hunt mosquitoes. A third just fired up a fusion reactor in orbit (well, not yet…).

If you squint, the whole batch looks like a sci-fi anthology written by an optimistic AI and a mad scientist who got into the same coffee supply.

Here’s what’s actually happening. Over half the companies are building AI agents to do specific jobs: filing freight claims, reconciling accounts, troubleshooting server crashes, generating ad campaigns. The rest split between generative media tools (turn your kid’s crayon sketch into a cartoon), AI infrastructure (the picks and shovels for this gold rush), and a handful of genuinely wild bets on drones, space reactors, and robotic factories.

This is a guided tour through that landscape. We’ll map the consensus plays everyone’s making, spot the outliers that make you do a double-take, and figure out what it all means for the near future. By the end, you’ll see how this batch sketches a world where AI is the default coworker and even dusty old industries get a futuristic makeover.