Four Irish founders have traveled to San Francisco, having been accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2026 cohort.
Two Irish startups, Blueprints and ProvenMetal, will join a US accelerator known for backing the likes of Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox and Reddit, as it builds companies in advanced manufacturing and AI-powered fintech.
Advanced manufacturing startup ProvenMetal builds benchtop X-ray systems that use AI to analyze circuit boards, helping to identify defects before electronics are used in critical applications such as aerospace, medical devices and defense systems.
Co-founders Johnny Doyle and Will Carkner say the technology can help streamline home electronics manufacturing by making quality assurance faster and more reliable.
The two had previously built Syncra, an IoT company that manages buildings, but they knew that its scale was limited, and this was confirmed when they applied to Y Combinator (YC), where they were told that they had a strong team, but the idea was not ambitious enough.
After weighing the pivot, Doyle and Carkner decided to fully commit to the new electronics manufacturing thesis, flying to San Francisco to show their confidence in the first interview at YC. They were indeed given a second chance.
YC invited them back two weeks later for an in-person meeting, asking for customer confirmation and an early prototype. They arrived a week early, held more than 30 interviews with manufacturers and industry experts, received five letters of intent, and built a software prototype.
“We realized that our original vision had a ceiling and we were thinking about pivoting,” said Doyle, founder and CEO, ProvenMetal. “When YC said the same, we decided to make that jump with 100pc certainty in this thesis. We booked our flights an hour before the first interview, and as soon as we arrived we packed our calendar full of potential clients and industry experts. We both want to solve critical problems around the world. ProvenMetal is how we’re going to do it.”
Founded by Ryan Morrissey and Bence Redmond, fintech Blueprints allows users to “express a clear English belief about the world and turn it into an automated trading strategy in the prediction markets using AI”.
The company has received spots on both Y Combinator and NDRC and says it has processed more than $500,000 in trading volume for more than 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 capital markets products.
When he returned to Ireland, he brought Bence in and the two built the first version of Blueprints while enrolled in the highly regarded Immersive Software Engineering program at the University of Limerick. They registered the company in January 2025 before leaving the program to pursue it fully.
“Prediction markets reward real information,” said Ryan Morrissey, Co-founder of Blueprints. “If you have a deep understanding of something, whether it’s geopolitics, sports, or a certain industry, you can put that understanding to work in a way that’s impossible elsewhere. We built Blueprints so people can really do what they know.”
Blueprints and ProvenMetal are both alumni of Patch, an OpenAI- and Stripe-backed community for the unique young technology, 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 program before pitching to investors at Demo Day in September.
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