Hello, and welcome back to Inc.'s 1 Smart Business Story. Y Combinator just released its spring 2026 "Requests for Startups," and while AI dominates the list (product management tools like Cursor and hedge funds run by AI agent swarms) there are some some unexpected entries 

YC wants startups modernizing America's struggling metal mills to compete with overseas production, building stablecoin-based financial services in a new regulatory sweet spot, and helping government fraud hunters with new whistleblower software. Find out which specific gaps YC sees in the market and why now is the moment to build in these spaces.

In this piece you’ll find: 

BY BEN SHERRY, STAFF REPORTER

The accelerator’s new ‘Requests for Startups’ covers everything from AI hedge funds to advanced metal mills.

Y Combinator just published its spring 2026 “Requests for Startups,” the Silicon Valley-based accelerator’s seasonal list of ideas that they’re eager to fund startups for. It should come as no surprise that most of the startup ideas revolve around artificial intelligence, although a few are bucking that trend to focus on cryptocurrency and infrastructure. 

​​“We’re excited about a range of startup ideas that span AI-native workflows, new financial primitives, modernized industrial systems, and more,” the company wrote. 

Here’s a breakdown of each idea on the list, who’s pitching it, and what they want founders to build.

YC partner Andrew Miklas said that while AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code have transformed how engineers write software, code is only part of the equation. “The most important part is figuring out what to build in the first place!” Miklas wrote.

“Every successful product requires product management,” Miklas said. Today, that process involves talking to users, synthesizing feedback, and deciding what problems are worth solving. This work produces documents like “requirements docs, Figma mocks, and Jira tickets,” which “communicate intent to human engineers.” 

Miklas wrote that there’s an opportunity to build a system that handles the full product discovery loop. With such a tool, he imagined, a founder or product manager could upload customer interviews and product data to a platform, and ask the AI “what should we build next?” The platform would generate proposals for changes to the product’s UI, data model, and workflows. 

In practice, the YC partner wrote, this tool would act like a product-management-focused version of Cursor, the popular AI-powered coding tool. Just as Cursor enables experienced coders to increase their work output through AI agents, Miklas’s ideal tool would use agents to let product managers ideate and make crucial decisions faster. 

Charlie Holtz, founder of YC-backed AI coding startup Conductor, said that the world’s largest hedge funds have been slow to adopt AI, leading to a potentially lucrative market opening. Holtz claims to know this from experience; from 2020 to 2024 he worked as a quantitative researcher at Point72, an alternative investment firm. “When I asked compliance to let us use ChatGPT,” he said, “I didn’t even get a response.” 

This made it clear to Holtz that “the hedge funds of the future won’t just bolt AI onto their existing strategies. They’ll use it to come up with entirely new ones.” 

Today’s founders already have “swarms of Claude agents” writing their code bases, Holtz said, so why not “swarms of agents doing what hedge fund traders do now — combing through 10-Ks, earnings calls, and SEC filings, synthesizing analyst ideas and making trades.” 

In his request, YC group partner Aaron Epstein said that agencies of all kinds have an opportunity to rapidly scale their businesses by heavily using AI.  

“Think of a design firm that uses AI to produce custom design work for clients up front, to win the business before the contract is even signed,” Epstein wrote, “or an ad agency that uses AI to create stunning video ads without the time and expense of setting up a physical shoot.” 

Epstein wrote that unlike SaaS companies, which sell software to customers designed to help improve work output, agencies “can charge way more by using the software yourself and selling them the finished product at 100x the price.”

This tech-enabled change will result in agencies that “look more like software companies, with software margins,” Epstein wrote. “And they’ll scale far bigger than any agencies that exist in these fragmented markets today.” AI-first agencies with big scaling ambitions are encouraged to reach out to YC. 

In a reprieve from AI-heavy requests, Daivik Goel, founder of YC-backed payroll startup Shor, said in a video that recent legislation has positioned stablecoins (cryptocurrency designed to maintain a constant value) in what Goel described as a regulatory sweet spot: compliant, but crypto-native. 

Currently, he said, “businesses and individuals must choose between regulated financial products with limited upside and unregulated crypto with real risk.” But stablecoins in this regulatory middle ground “can bridge this gap, whether that’s yield-bearing accounts, new investment access, or infrastructure that makes money move faster and cheaper across borders.” 

That creates room for a financial services firm that offers DeFi (decentralized finance) benefits “like better yield or access to tokenized real-world assets, while operating under traditional compliance frameworks.” 

YC group partner Tom Blomfield said that government entities “desperately need AI tools” to deal with a massive increase in the amount of forms and online applications they’re required to process. AI platforms have helped businesses and individuals fill out these forms with “unprecedented speed and accuracy,” he said, but much of this information is currently printed out and processed by hand. 

Blomfield added that we’ve “seen hints of this digital government in places like Estonia, but we need to spread it to the rest of the world.” The Estonian government prides itself on its blockchain-based digitization of government services; those services include everything from renewing licenses to filing for a divorce, and even voting online. 

A startup offering revolutionary AI transformation services for government entities could be a massive winner and result in a more cost-effective and responsive public system, Blomfield said, but cautioned that “this kind of startup is not for the faint of heart.” Selling to the government is “extremely hard,” he said, “but once you’ve figured out how to land your first customer, they tend to be very sticky and can expand to huge contracts.”

Want five more ideas from Y Combinator’s startup wishlist? Read more at Inc.com