Two Irish start

Four Irish founders have travelled to San Francisco to join Y Combinator’s summer 2026 cohort.

Two Irish-founded 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 said 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) and were told they had a strong team, but an idea that was not ambitious enough.

Doyle and Carkner decided to commit fully to a new thesis in electronics manufacturing instead, flying to San Francisco to demonstrate their new proposal at the first YC interview.

YC invited them back two weeks later for an in-person round, asking for customer validation and an early prototype. The duo 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 and CEO of 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 start-up 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 said it has processed more than $500,000 in trading volume from more than 250 users since entering public beta.

Blueprints can trace its origins to Morrissey’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 Redmond 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 academic programme to pursue the business full-time.

“Prediction markets reward genuine knowledge,” said Morrissey. “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.

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