Kyten

Introducing Fort, a wearable that automatically tracks strength training. Strength training is one of the best things you can do for your health and longevity. It deserves better tools.

The default track for any student vehicle org is to produce two gens of: > A-players who went 0 to 1 > Hirable ICs and PMs who iterate Then, the org hits a learning plateau. It either dies or hobbles until it gets saved by a new gen of founder types (continuing the cycle).

America is in good hands

Signal boosting. Very important.

A few months ago I became curious about "instant quote" manufacturing startups, like SendCutSend. A little curiosity became a deep dive because this business model solves most weaknesses with US manufacturing. America does a lot of manufacturing, but its mostly high volume, boring stuff. Small volume parts that are important for capital equipment and startups developing new technology have been a struggle, hurting US competitiveness. Another component is that top tier workers in the US earn WAY more than the rest of the world. Any company developing low volume products or doing testing spends massive amounts of money for workers to sit around waiting for parts or other slow processes (hence the popularity of vertical integration). Low volume manufacturers themselves struggle to provide reasonable costs because they pay a lot for workers to do things like provide quotes, send bills, program machines, or correct defects. And at low volume there aren't many parts to spread these costs over. Instant quote startups with short lead times kill two birds with one stone. Customers get instant ordering and feedback. Their parts come within a few days, saving massive amounts of money by decreasing dead time. And the only way for producers to deliver this speed is end-to-end digitization that eliminates all the soft costs. Effective part cost declines by an order of magnitude, making US manufacturing competitive with overseas. It isn't just cute little parts because these services make technology and product cycles go faster through quicker iteration. It becomes way easier to build custom manufacturing equipment or prototype new things. These companies also make great businesses, too, because they have lower marginal costs than existing producers and see incredible benefits from scaling that allows them to get big. I wrote a deep dive on the sector on my blog. open.substack.com/pub/austinvern…

Overshoot is the fastest API for real-time vision. Literally faster than human reaction time (<200ms). Developers are using it to ship video agents in gaming, robotics, sports and security. Check out the playground: overshoot.ai Congrats @zakariaornot and Younes on the launch! ycombinator.com/launches/PQO-o…

Most wearables focus on sleep and heart rate. Fort (@fortwearable) is a wearable that automatically tracks strength training, for people focused on longevity. Congrats on the launch @mirandanover, @paulschneider_, and @zacvalles! ycombinator.com/launches/PKj-f…

This is spot-freakin-on. A “neo-prime” is only as fast and cheap as its suppliers.

@ycombinator @CooperKMcBride Thank you for believing in us! We believe that America needs more component suppliers that operate with the intensity and rigor that their customers do.

.@KytenTech is building a factory to manufacture aerospace-grade battery packs. At Starlink, the co-founders put 5,000+ battery packs into space. Now they're powering the 100K+ autonomous vehicles coming to the air, sea, and space. Congrats on the launch @CooperKMcBride & @maddox_lucas! ycombinator.com/launches/PIU-k…

More factories, more battery packs, more 🦅 noises. It's time to redefine the US component supply chain.

Kyten is the modern aerospace-grade battery pack supplier. 1. America needs more factories to build 100K+ submarines, drones, robots, & satellites. 2. The supply chain is the bottleneck, especially batteries. 3. >6 years @ Starlink, our team put 5,000+ battery packs into space.

I quit my job at SpaceX, the only company to crack volume aerospace manufacturing, to build an aerospace component supplier (@kytentech) on @zachglabman's thesis below. I want to highlight a couple of his best insights & add my perspective to them: "The response I hear to [the absence of a domestic drone/robotics supply chain] is “we do have [domestic] suppliers but they are too expensive” The money and talent supporting new defense/manufacturing has overwhelmingly gone to OEMs. Everybody wants to be the SpaceX of their sector, but they're stuck with a supply chain built for Boeing; expensive, slow, and specialized. It's unusable. "the valley of death for robotics and drone startups is entirely a scale problem in the US. We have great prototyping, but no direct path to scaling with partners here in the US in an economically feasible way." Given the current state of the US supply chain, I cannot put into words how difficult scaling hardware manufacturing is. Starlink did it because they stood on the shoulders of Tesla's process knowledge, had the most talent-dense team in the world, unlimited cash, and pushed as hard as humanly possible. This is not a repeatable formula. There’s no law that says these actuators must come from Shenzhen, in fact there probably will be one that says they can’t. The DoD is prohibited from procuring battery cells or packs from China starting on Oct. 1st, 2027. @KytenTech is the Shenzhen-esque alternative. China, Japan, Korea and Germany all did one thing very well, and that was understanding the relative importance of component supply chains (Tiers 2, 3, 4) to building great end products. If you look at Tesla/SpaceX and your takeaway is that vertical integration is the way to start a manufacturing company...you are wrong. It's a survival response to a supply chain that can't meet your needs. There is no reindustrialization without strong, allied component supply chains. @2112Power is right when he says we need 20 more Hadrians.

Why write a whitepaper when @zachglabman does it for you? Kyten (YC W26) is building custom aerospace-grade battery packs for sea, air, and space vehicles because modern OEMs need suppliers who think like them: fast, iterative, and high volume.

🚀 @KytenTech launched! The Modern Aerospace Battery Pack Supplier "Custom Aerospace-Grade Battery Packs" 🌐 fondo.ai/4qNkVX9 Congrats @maddox_lucas & Cooper McBride