Asim

YC company profile

Enable robots to operate safely in the real world.

Asim is building standardized benchmarks for physical intelligence, helping robotics companies understand their robots’ capabilities and safety limits before deployment.
We test real robots under changing physical conditions, varying shape, weight, friction and material, to identify where performance breaks down and give engineers actionable feedback.

Our four founders include three PhD researchers, two specializing in robotics, with backgrounds at Sony and NASA JPL and two RoboCup@Home championship wins.

Our ambition is to become the standard robotics teams use to measure progress and assess readiness for deployment.

• YC batch: Fall 2026
• Team size: 4
• Location: San Francisco
• Country: US
• Status: Active
• Industry: Industrials
• Stage: Early
• Tags: Deep Learning, Robotic Process Automation, Robotics
• YC partner: Nicolas Dessaigne

Founders

Douglas Tilley — Founder/CEO

Founder at Asim. PhD candidate in AI with Robotics at the University of Bath. Previously ML researcher at National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo) and Tianjin University. 3x Doctoral Recognition Award Winner. Researcher on Safe Human Robot interaction with multiple papers in Hierarchical Machine Learning, Robot Learning and Out-of-Distribution detection.

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Raphaël Lafargue — Founder/CTO

Co-founder at Asim. ex-Senior Research Scientist @ Sony / PhD in AI @ IMT Atlantique/University of Adelaide / M.Sc. Physics @ ENS Paris-Saclay.

LinkedIn · X

Tristan Lecourtois — Founder/COO

Founder at Asim (YC F26). Ex NASA JPL, MS from ENS Paris-Saclay.

LinkedIn · X

Maëlic Neau — Founder

Founder at Asim (YC F26). PhD in Computer Science from Flinders University. Two times world champion of the RoboCup@Home international competition. Published at ICCV, oral presentation at BMVC 2025. Previously Visiting Scholar at National Institute of Informatics.

LinkedIn · X

Source: Y Combinator · Retrieved 2026-11-02. Company information is self-reported on YC.