Four Irish founders have travelled to San Francisco, having been accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2026 batch.

Two Irish start-ups, Blueprints and ProvenMetal, will join the US accelerator famed for backing the likes of Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox and Reddit, as they build companies in advanced manufacturing and AI-powered fintech.

Advanced manufacturing start-up ProvenMetal builds benchtop X-ray systems that use AI to analyse circuit boards, helping identify faults before electronics are deployed in critical applications such as aerospace, medical devices and defence systems.

Co-founders Johnny Doyle and Will Carkner say the technology could help strengthen domestic electronics manufacturing by making quality assurance faster and more reliable.

The two had previously built Syncra, a building-management IoT company, but knew its scale was limited, and this was confirmed when they applied to Y Combinator (YC), where they were told they had a strong team, but an idea that was not ambitious enough.

Having already been weighing a pivot, Doyle and Carkner decided to commit fully to a new thesis in electronics manufacturing, flying to San Francisco to demonstrate their conviction at the first interview at YC. They were indeed given a second chance.

YC invited them back two weeks later for an in-person round, asking for customer validation and an early prototype. They landed a week early, held more than 30 conversations with manufacturers and industry experts, secured five letters of intent, and built a software prototype.

“We were aware that our original idea had a ceiling and had been considering making a pivot,” said Doyle, co-founder & CEO, ProvenMetal. “When YC said the same, we decided to make that jump with 100pc conviction in the thesis. We booked our flights an hour before the first interview, and as soon as we landed we jammed our calendar full with prospective customers and industry experts. We both want to solve globally critical problems. ProvenMetal is how we are going to do it.”

Founded by Ryan Morrissey and Bence Redmond, fintech Blueprints lets users “express a plain-English conviction about the world and turn it into an automated strategy for trading on prediction markets using AI”.

The company has secured places in both Y Combinator and NDRC and says it has processed more than $500,000 in trading volume from over 250 users since entering public beta.

Blueprints can trace its origins to Ryan’s internship at Stripe in San Francisco, where exposure to global financial infrastructure and emerging technologies sparked an interest in building products for financial markets.

On returning to Ireland, he brought Bence on board and the two built the first version of Blueprints while enrolled in the highly-regarded Immersive Software Engineering programme at the University of Limerick. They registered the company in January 2025 before leaving the programme to pursue it full-time.

“Prediction markets reward genuine knowledge,” says Ryan Morrissey, Co-founder of Blueprints. “If you have a deep understanding of something, whether that’s geopolitics, sport, or a particular industry, you can put that insight to work in a way that simply isn’t possible anywhere else. We built Blueprints so that people can actually act on what they know.”

Blueprints and ProvenMetal are both alumni of Patch, the OpenAI- and Stripe-backed community for exceptional young technologists, scientists and entrepreneurs based at Dogpatch Labs.

Now the four Irish founders will spend the next three months in San Francisco as part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2026 programme before presenting to investors at Demo Day in September.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.