Hilstart
<!-- hacklab:yc-profile -- YC company profile Autonomous Hardware Testing We build physical agent harnesses to enable AI to debug, validate, and ship functional hardware and sof…
About Hilstart
YC company profile
Autonomous Hardware Testing
We build physical agent harnesses to enable AI to debug, validate, and ship functional hardware and software.
- YC batch: Summer 2026
- Team size: 0
- Location: San Francisco
- Country: US
- Status: Active
- Industry: Industrials
- Stage: Early
- Tags: Developer Tools, Hardware
- YC partner: Jared Friedman
Founders
William A'court — Founder/CEO
Founder and CEO at Hilstart.
Previously Lead Mechatronics Engineer at Aquila, shooting lasers at drones to charge them.
Also made FSAE race cars and electric jetboats along the way.
Simon Alexander — Founder/CTO
Founder & CTO at Hilstart.
Previously Firmware Engineer at Aquila.
Rahul Bhati — Founder
Trained gymnast. Building hardware since 15. 2x National robotics champion at 18.
Before HILStart: power and thermal systems at Vessev (Flying boats) and test rigs at Halter (NZ's latest unicorn). Founding team at Aquila and built the core tech behind kilometre-scale wireless laser energy transmission across many engineering disciplines. Aquila is now a world-leading powerbeaming company, and the tech delivered the world's first 500W transfer to a drone mid-flight.
Josh Schoeman — Founder
Making hardware easier.
Past adventures all over mechanical and electrical development.
Battle scars from electric motor design, accelerated lifecycle testing, mechanical structures, cooling systems, hardware test rigs, DFM, wiring harnesses, race cars and electronics debugging.
Also, destructive testing (often inadvertent).
Source: Y Combinator · Retrieved 2026-11-02. Company information is self-reported on YC.