YC Summer 2025: AI Gold Rush, Teenage CEOs, and Our Bets on the Future

Picture this: A 17-year-old founder from Asia casually turns down a seven-figure buyout offer. Two rows over, another team pitches AI-guided counter-drone missiles to a room of investors sitting slack-jawed. Around them, 158 other companies deliver 60-second pitches that almost all start the same way: “Our AI does ___.”

Welcome to Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch. It felt less like a demo day and more like a time machine, showing us what tech will look like in three years.

The raw numbers tell part of the story. About 1,500 investors packed the room to watch roughly 150 founders (many barely past their teens) pitch their startups. But here’s the stat that hits you: 92% of these companies called themselves AI companies. That’s the highest concentration in YC’s 20-year history. If 2023 was the year some startups used AI, Summer 2025 was the batch where almost every startup was an AI startup.

But something more interesting was happening beneath the surface.