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Lightcone · 2 min instead of 36 min · Sep 17, 2026
RL environment and data startups quietly build huge revenue
Jared FriedmanHost
Managing partner, Y Combinator
Co-founded Scribd, which YC funded in 2006; has advised 20+ YC unicorns.
Garry TanHost · President & CEO, Y Combinator
Co-founded Posterous and Initialized Capital, an early Coinbase backer.
Diana HuHost · Managing partner, Y Combinator
CTO of Escher Reality; after Niantic bought it, ran AR for Pokémon GO.
Harj TaggarHost · Managing partner, Y Combinator
Co-founded Auctomatic with the Collison brothers and later Triplebyte.
About this segment
YC has funded over a dozen companies each making over $10 million a year selling data or RL environments to AI labs. Many are stealthy and only a couple of years old, so the category's size is easy to miss.
From “The State of Startups in 2026”, Sep 17, 2026. Watch the full episode
“We pulled the data recently, and just in the last two years, YC has funded more than a dozen companies that are each making more than $10 million a year”
Jared Friedmanat 23:26 · Lightcone23:26Takeaways
- More than a dozen YC companies each earn over $10M a year selling data to labs
- Founders in this category have a disincentive to publicize their growth
- Some of these companies reach hundreds of millions in revenue within years
In this episode
Full episode- 29:25Solo founders hit 19% of YC as knowing what to build matters most3:34
22:47RL environment and data startups quietly build huge revenue1:34
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 22:51
And there's another category of companies that's also been growing super fast recently, which is companies that sell data or RL environments to the labs. This one might be interesting to talk about because a lot of these companies are pretty stealthy. they tend to have a disincentive to talk about how well they're doing compared to most companies that like to talk about how well they're doing. And so I think people out there might not realize how big a category this has become. When YC funded scale back in 2016, this was like a tiny little niche thing. It wasn't even a category. Initially, it was basically just scale who was doing, and then Mercore began to do it, and then a couple other companies. But in the last couple of years, it's become a big category. We pulled the data recently, and just in the last two years,
- 23:33
YC has funded more than a dozen companies that are each making more than $10 million a year selling data or RL environments to the labs. And in many cases, hundreds of millions of dollars. And it may make hundreds of millions of dollars. And these are companies that were just a couple of years old. That's pretty fast a revenue, honestly. Yeah, it's like pretty bananas. Do you want to talk about any of them, Gary?
- 23:53
I mean, the big ones, I mean, I think Afterquery and DataCurve, both really, really great. I mean, there are probably too many to name. that are honestly like maybe don't even want to be mentioned because once you have something that's working, you almost don't want people to know. I think that it's kind of natural to understand this though. I mean, data is one of the legs of the scaling law and much has been made of compute, but without the data,