YC Summer 2026 (S26) founder

Chris Hailey

Founder of OS3, Affordable, intelligent humanoid robots built to deploy at scale

Company

Chris Hailey is listed as a founder of OS3. OS3 is building the platform that makes intelligent robots accessible to every business. Today, robotics is constrained by two fundamental bottlenecks: hardware is too expensive to deploy at scale, and robots are difficult to train because high-quality robotics data is scarce and costly to collect. We built OS3 to solve both. Our two-person team designed and a US-made mobile humanoid robot for a fraction of the cost of commercial alternatives. On the intelligence side, instead of relying on expensive robot-generated training data, we trained our own video-action model on 150,000 hours of real-world video spanning more than 2,000 tasks. Every deployed robot feeds new experience into our reinforcement learning pipeline, self improving robot fleet over time. This creates a robot that can be deployed across industries to automate repetitive, physical work without requiring a new robot or training pipeline for every task. Our robots are already deployed in hotels, with customers now expanding the platform into biotech, hospitals, and data centers, including a wet lab at Stanford. Our mission is to do for robotics what Apple did for personal computing: take technology that was once expensive, specialized, and inaccessible and make it powerful and usable at massive scale. We’re building toward a world with billions of intelligent robots, and OS3 is the platform that makes that possible.

Founder traction evidence

Public posts and activity attributed directly to this founder.

  1. X

    YC startup cofounder introduction

    I am Chris, based in the San Francisco Bay Area and a cofounder at a YC startup; I am always open to meeting more people in tech.

  2. X

    Productivity hack

    One of the greatest productivity hacks out there.

  3. X

    Choosing Hard Problems in Life I keep choosing hard things.

    Choosing Hard Problems in Life I keep choosing hard things. I am a serial marathon runner. I got into running during COVID, when the gyms were closed, and what started small grew into bigger and bigger challenges. Three miles became five. Five became 10. Before I knew it, I

  4. X

    YC alumni helping applicants

    Before we got into YC, alumni we knew eagerly gave mock interviews, feedback, and advice; the cycle of help begins before acceptance.

  5. X

    Excited to announce I made the Forbes 30 under 30!!!

    Excited to announce I made the Forbes 30 under 30!!!

  6. X

    There should be a quiet car on the Caltrain.

    There should be a quiet car on the Caltrain. No phone calls, no conversations, headphones only.

  7. X

    imagine open claw but with real claws too!

    imagine open claw but with real claws too!

  8. X

    real question is how many robotaxi virginites have you taken

    real question is how many robotaxi virginites have you taken