[ { "id": 11925, "name": "Intelline", "slug": "intelline", "former_names": [], "small_logo_thumb_url": "https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/00d76c09d68459b13ffc2910fece040246c89806.png", "website": "https://www.intelline.ca/", "all_locations": "Waterloo, ON, Canada", "long_description": "Intelline makes fuel agnostic engines for practical, clean, and low-cost industrial power. Our first customers are in data center energy infrastructure and oil & gas production. Our engine generate electricity with even the most difficult fuels like flare gas, while reducing fuel OPEX by 40%.\r\n\r\nThere are 1,000,000 new heavy duty engines produced per year, and at an average $50k per heavy duty engine this is a $50B market opportunity.\r\n\r\nOur generator can efficiently run emerging fuel types that traditional diesel engines can't use (flare gas, syngas, ammonia, hydrogen), and can switch between fossil fuels and any other liquid/gaseous fuel while running. Full size running prototype successfully tested April 2025.", "one_liner": "Intelline makes the world's most efficient fuel agnostic engines for…", "team_size": 3, "industry": "Industrials", "subindustry": "Industrials -> Manufacturing and Robotics", "launched_at": 1598392888, "tags": [ "Alternative Battery Tech", "Hardware", "Alternative Fuels", "Climate" ], "tags_highlighted": [], "top_company": false, "isHiring": true, "nonprofit": false, "batch": "Winter 2019", "status": "Active", "industries": [ "Industrials", "Manufacturing and Robotics" ], "regions": [ "Canada", "America / Canada" ], "stage": "Early", "app_video_public": false, "demo_day_video_public": false, "app_answers": null, "question_answers": [ { "question": "How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)", "answer": "Chris and I (Kyle) have known each-other since elementary school. In high school we built an electric car together with a small team of students, and we both went on to study at the University of Waterloo. Chris went into math & accounting, I went into mechanical engineering. \r\n\r\nThe first spark of an idea came in 2017, with EV adoption on the rise. I’ve always been fascinated by all things complicated, difficult, and physical, and naturally was drawn to the energy and automotive space. There is beauty in the things that power our world in the background, unnoticed, unglamorous, but essential. I was drawn to the problem not so much in the spotlight, aging and ever strained grid infrastructure. The constant need for more efficient hardware with practical implementation. Through a rabbit hole of research I was fascinated with the potential of superconducting technologies, saw the barrier in the high cost of cryocooling, and had an idea for more cost effective cryocoolers. I went to my trusted friend Chris with the idea, and Intelline was born. People ask about the name, its a word we made up from latin, ‘intelligent in nature’.\r\n\r\nFast forward to 2019, we had a lovely multi-layered pulse tube cryocooler prototype designed and fabricated from scratch, along with our own linear helium compressor to power it. Unfortunately there wasn’t a huge market for it and we would have to move mountains as a tiny startup to bring together all the stakeholders for any meaningfully sized superconductor project. Over the holidays at the end of that year, we came across an article on diesel generators, highlighting their terrible inefficiency, yet they remain the only effective option for heavy duty industrial power. We were sitting beside our compressor prototype and that was the lightbulb - “Hey, this compressor design would make a really great engine”. I was always a huge car nerd, and have been sketching designs for engines and car parts since high-school, so the prospect of contributing a game-changing engine to the world was very exciting. We modified the compressor design with piston-mounted valves and added on the necessary combustion hardware, filed the patents, quickly machined a small cross-sectioned prototype, and carted it off to a mining equipment conference in Toronto where it was an instant hit. Customers were so excited even at that stage, and it was clear to us we were building something that customers have been begging for with no one answering the call. Today, we have a real running prototype of our groundbreaking engine design, and are preparing for first customer deliveries at a time when this technology is critical for growing power demand. We’ve come a long way, it’s difficult and painful, but since day 1 I’ve had the same fascination with unnoticed, unglamorous, essential hardware, and I’m eternally grateful to have the chance to contribute to that world of important energy hardware.\r\n\r\nI don’t think I ever decided to be a founder. My path is more driven by a need to do something, and a company is just the vehicle to bring vision into reality. " }, { "question": "What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?", "answer": "1. Energy equality. Growth and prosperity in the human race is driven by access to energy. In developing countries and remote areas, this resource is severely lacking. Stable, reliable, and affordable access to electricity improves quality of live, period. We have the unique opportunity to create this change in underserved regions, with affordable microgrids based on our generator tech, given that many of these regions already use old inefficient diesel generators that keep costs high and curtail growth. Furthermore, the power concentrations centered on access to oil can be better distributed, as our generator can run on any fuel. Biofuel and other renewable sources allow remote areas to be far more self reliant on their own energy sources. In short, we can improve the worldwide quality of life by ensuring no-one is left behind in access to practical and affordable energy.\r\n2. Practical transition to zero emissions. We believe in climate change. We don’t care if you don’t. People can argue about this until they are blue in the face, all the while massive diesel engines continue to tick on powering our world economy because no one has provided an actual effective replacement. Our opinion is that real change is not hype, not a fad, and it doesn’t happen overnight. We made an engine that runs on anything, and uses less so it makes financial sense. Stuck with your diesel supply chain? No problem, use less, save money. Soon enough we’ll have thousands of customers using our engines, enough that it makes sense to develop robust supply chains for alternative fuels at scale. With real scale in alternative fuels and customers to use them, costs come down. All the while even the most steadfast climate denier has been using our engine, loving the rugged reliability we’ve come to know from the last 100 years of diesel engines, and then sees that the cost of say, ammonia fuel, is now lower than diesel, and no changes are needed to run it. That’s pretty cool. Our vision is that within 20 years we can do our part in the energy sector to get heavy duty industrial power to zero emissions, and we have a realistic way to do it." } ], "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/intelline", "api": "https://devasheeshg.github.io/yc-api/batches/winter-2019/intelline.json", "year_founded": 2017, "city": "Waterloo", "country": "CA", "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/34746898/admin/", "x_url": "", "fb_url": "https://www.facebook.com/intelline/", "cb_url": "https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/intelline", "github_url": null, "logo_url": "https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/00d76c09d68459b13ffc2910fece040246c89806.png", "app_video_url": null, "dday_video_url": null, "company_photos": [ "https://bookface-images.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/attachments/efc3c8cc212142311fbb626d07729cd8f72c0001.png" ], "primary_partner": null, "founders": [ { "user_id": 280616, "full_name": "Kyle Faller", "title": "Founder/CEO & CTO", "founder_bio": "Previous Powertrain Engineering at Alta Motors and Mechanical Drive Systems Engineering at Tesla. Long time automotive enthusiast and lover of all things energy and engine-related. For fun I build performance engines and custom motorcycles.", "is_active": true, "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-faller-272b42109/", "x_url": "", "avatar_thumb_url": "https://bookface-images.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/avatars/d44228a3d3694f32aa46d3df76da1b423d2aa6f8.jpg" }, { "user_id": 285674, "full_name": "Chris Mathew", "title": "Founder", "founder_bio": "Waterloo BMath, MAcc, CPA. Previous Corporate Tax at KPMG and Quantitative Developer at Scotiabank.", "is_active": true, "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-mathew-0bbb26128/", "x_url": "", "avatar_thumb_url": "https://bookface-images.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/avatars/f8b9aa997476b6eff3236361ee338abd8de8043f.jpg" } ], "jobs": [ { "id": 70869, "title": "Lead ECU Development Engineer", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/intelline/jobs/Br5Dg8r-lead-ecu-development-engineer", "location": "Waterloo, ON, CA", "type": "Full-time", "role": "Engineering", "role_type": "Embedded systems", "salary_range": "$80K - $100K CAD", "equity_range": "0.50% - 2.00%", "experience": "3+ years", "visa": "US citizenship/visa not required", "skills": [ "C", "MATLAB", "Machine Learning" ] } ], "news": [], "launches": [] }, { "id": 31512, "name": "Aernata", "slug": "aernata", "former_names": [ "Pentagon" ], "small_logo_thumb_url": "https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/ab4158325222f50847060cb687cc1b6c81e65dbc.png", "website": "https://aernata.com", "all_locations": "San Francisco, CA, USA", "long_description": "Aernata is an American chemicals company producing clean fuel from industrial emissions.\r\n\r\nWe're starting by converting CO2 to methanol for synthetic fuel production.", "one_liner": "Making clean methanol out of CO2.", "team_size": 2, "industry": "Industrials", "subindustry": "Industrials -> Energy", "launched_at": 1775312221, "tags": [ "Carbon Capture and Removal", "Alternative Fuels", "Climate", "Energy" ], "tags_highlighted": [], "top_company": false, "isHiring": false, "nonprofit": false, "batch": "Spring 2026", "status": "Active", "industries": [ "Industrials", "Energy" ], "regions": [ "United States of America", "America / Canada" ], "stage": "Early", "app_video_public": false, "demo_day_video_public": false, "app_answers": null, "question_answers": null, "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/aernata", "api": "https://devasheeshg.github.io/yc-api/batches/spring-2026/aernata.json", "year_founded": 2026, "city": "San Francisco", "country": "US", "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/aernata", "x_url": "https://x.com/aernata", "fb_url": null, "cb_url": null, "github_url": "https://github.com/aernata", "logo_url": "https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/ab4158325222f50847060cb687cc1b6c81e65dbc.png", "app_video_url": null, "dday_video_url": null, "company_photos": [], "primary_partner": { "name": "Tom Blomfield", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/people/tom-blomfield" }, "founders": [ { "user_id": 402484, "full_name": "Edgar Pavlovsky", "title": "Founder", "founder_bio": "Founder @ Aernata (P26) - an American chemicals company producing clean fuel from industrial emissions.\n\nPreviously founded: marginfi (DeFi lending on Solana), mtndao (Solana's largest builder community), a trading firm & a logistics SaaS.\n\nBefore that: Uber, Goldman Sachs.", "is_active": true, "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/edgarpavlovsky/", "x_url": "https://x.com/edgarpavlovsky", "avatar_thumb_url": "https://bookface-images.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/avatars/6b30edf88abaa421a8619ecae8211bf532982bbb.jpg" } ], "jobs": [], "news": [], "launches": [ { "id": 101681, "title": "Pentagon - A coordination layer for humans and agents.", "tagline": "A new kind of team: humans and agents, working together.", "body": "Hey YC! I'm [Edgar](https://www.linkedin.com/in/edgarpavlovsky/), building [Pentagon](https://pentagon.run).\n\n**TL;DR** Agents are everywhere but they don't have good ways to work together, so humans become the coordination bottleneck. Pentagon is a coordination layer where your agents communicate autonomously, coordinate on tasks, and get work done as a team.\n\n**Book a demo and see it in action:** \\\n**Our launch video:** \n\n**Problem**\n\nAgents are increasingly becoming AI teammates at work - coding, researching, ops, even talking to customers. But they work alone. Coordination is the bottleneck, and it shows up differently depending on where you sit:\n\n* **Small teams** are spinning up agents from scratch and immediately hitting the ceiling: each one is powerful on its own, but getting them to actually work together means you're back in the loop, copy/pasting between terminals.\n* **Enterprises** already have agents running everywhere across the org. The hard part is figuring out what they're doing, how they fit together, and how to keep track of it all.\n\nUnderneath both: humans are the middleware. Hours of human time burnt doing work meant for a mechanical turk. Today's tools weren't built for this - AI products are conversational and non-deterministic, and reproducing workflows is harder than ever.\n\n**Org code**\n\nThere's a deeper layer to this. Great teams are built for the moment - the right team depends on the problem at hand, the resources you have, and even who's leading. This applies to agents the same as it does to humans: every problem has its own org structure.\n\nAndrej Karpathy calls it \"org code\" - and points out that compared to classical orgs, agentic codes have powerful new properties: they’re reproducible and more transparent. We think that agents also allow organizations to be much more dynamic: they can adapt to problems in realtime, and open a new dimension of what it means to build a productive organization.\n\nFrom [a popular Karpathy tweet](https://x.com/karpathy/status/2031767720933634100):\n\n![Image](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIts8HMaIAAKjok?format=jpg&name=medium)\n\n**Our first solution: Pentagon Studio**\n\nPentagon's mission is to build the coordination layer for humans and agents. We're starting with Pentagon Studio - a workspace designed to feel familiar to existing alternatives and shepherd companies into a new kind of collaborative work.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post&id=101681&key=user_uploads/402484/286ecb28-a420-4390-81cf-f1c1b181ec5c)\n\nIn Pentagon Studio, you define your org structure and your agents run it. Agents live on a spatial canvas and pop up sticky notes with status updates - you see who's active, idle, or blocked at a glance. They message each other, delegate tasks, share context, and build self-evolving memory over time. As the human, your job is to design and manage the team; they do the coordination.\n\n* **Spatial canvas.** Agents live on infinite canvases you can think of like an office. Zoom in on one agent's conversation, zoom out to see the whole operation. The \"org IDE.\"\n* **Autonomous coordination.** Realtime, event-driven communication between agents - no expensive polling loops. Agents take feedback from you, ping another agent to get work done, then ping you when they need you.\n* **Agent persistence.** Agents maintain sessions indefinitely and compound institutional knowledge over time. Tribal knowledge for your agent team.\n* **Shared skills & tools.** Manage capabilities at individual, team, workspace, or org level. Each agent inherits based on hierarchy.\n* **Human multiplayer + human-in-the-loop.** In contrast to \"zero-human company\" angles, we see humans and agents collaborating across shared orgs. Your agents should be able to work with your coworkers' agents.\n\n**Why now**\n\nAgents are already inside companies. The infrastructure to coordinate them isn't. Every day this gap stays open, humans burn hours doing work meant for a mechanical turk and leaders lose transparency into how work actually gets done.\n\nWe believe the best version of the future is one where superintelligent agents are viewed as teammates and we work with them as partners. Every company already knows how to work with coworkers - agents fit into existing organizational frameworks better than we've been giving them credit for. They just need the infrastructure to coordinate.\n\n**Ask**\n\nIf you're running agentic workflows in production and struggling to manage them, we’d love to chat. See Pentagon Studio in action and book a demo with us at or reach out to me personally, and let’s evolve your team: [edgar@pentagon.run](mailto:edgar@pentagon.run).\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post&id=101681&key=user_uploads/402484/eb375bb3-1851-449f-9953-0daea8bee1b2)\n\n", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/QS1-pentagon-a-coordination-layer-for-humans-and-agents", "votes": 12, "created_at": "2026-05-20T23:57:21.091Z" } ] }, { "id": 32192, "name": "Rise Reforming", "slug": "rise-reforming", "former_names": [], "small_logo_thumb_url": "https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/5b908857ac82ef0d2a3b793f89fa198298587f8a.png", "website": "https://rise-reforming.com/home", "all_locations": "Chicago, IL, USA", "long_description": "Geopolitical conflicts and natural disasters frequently expose the vulnerability of the American chemical industry. The reason? Production is centralized and fossil fuel-dependent. The solution? Localized production using an undervalued resource: biogas. The US produces enough biogas to make over $20 bn/y worth of chemicals, but 60% is wasted in low-margin applications or flared altogether.\r\n\r\nRise Reforming is commercializing a modular process to transform this underutilized biogas on-site into cheap, supply-secure chemicals. Our beachhead market is dimethyl ether (DME), used as an aerosol propellant and a low-carbon fuel additive in propane. Our target market is methanol: an established billion $ chemical and the future of low-carbon shipping.\r\n\r\nWe're doing our pilot project at a Chicagoland wastewater plant. This will be the first wastewater biogas-to-methanol demo in the Americas.\r\n\r\nWe're hiring for a senior chemical process engineer. Apply here: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/rise-reforming/jobs/wJ9Q9nv-senior-chemical-process-engineer", "one_liner": "We turn waste gases into supply-secure chemicals ", "team_size": 4, "industry": "Industrials", "subindustry": "Industrials -> Climate", "launched_at": 1783464355, "tags": [ "Hard Tech", "Smart Waste Management", "Alternative Fuels", "Renewable Energy", "ClimateTech" ], "tags_highlighted": [], "top_company": false, "isHiring": false, "nonprofit": false, "batch": "Summer 2026", "status": "Active", "industries": [ "Industrials", "Climate" ], "regions": [ "United States of America", "America / Canada" ], "stage": "Early", "app_video_public": false, "demo_day_video_public": false, "app_answers": null, "question_answers": null, "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/rise-reforming", "api": "https://devasheeshg.github.io/yc-api/batches/summer-2026/rise-reforming.json", "year_founded": 2024, "city": "Chicago", "country": "US", "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/risereforming", "x_url": "", "fb_url": null, "cb_url": null, "github_url": null, "logo_url": "https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/5b908857ac82ef0d2a3b793f89fa198298587f8a.png", "app_video_url": null, "dday_video_url": null, "company_photos": [], "primary_partner": { "name": "Jared Friedman", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/people/jared-friedman" }, "founders": [ { "user_id": 3646927, "full_name": "George Rose", "title": "Founder/CEO", "founder_bio": "Co-founder and CEO at Rise Reforming (S26). Previously @ Nexamp, Highland Electric Fleets, Mantel Capture, GenH. Background in Molecular Engineering @ UChicago.", "is_active": true, "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-rose25/", "x_url": "", "avatar_thumb_url": "https://bookface-images.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/avatars/ee413aabedd5216b24ad28029e4413061ab156fa.jpg" }, { "user_id": 3620299, "full_name": "Lucas Zubillaga", "title": "Founder/CTO", "founder_bio": "Co-Founder & CTO at Rise Reforming (S26). Double B.Sc. in Molecular Engineering and Physics from the University of Chicago. Prev: nuclear waste management at Argonne National Laboratory, offshore wind at Avangrid/Iberdrola.\n\nLed the design, procurement, construction, and operation of a bench-scale reforming unit with controls. \n\nAlso have a Spotify playlist with 200k+ saves. Check it out at: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3rV2gyEKHxixpKa3IDQLvF?si=3458c33e03e84738&nd=1&dlsi=d0006826be884d", "is_active": true, "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucaszubillagamaharg/", "x_url": "", "avatar_thumb_url": "https://bookface-images.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/avatars/209b2a1f6985cd73931fc7cb16aa2a3bb8462a42.jpg" }, { "user_id": 3610381, "full_name": "Jona van Oord", "title": "Founder/COO", "founder_bio": "Environmentalist turned engineer. Plan on spending the rest of my life building hardware to address the climate disaster :)\n\nCo-Founder and COO @ Rise Reforming (S26), Molecular Engineering @ UChicago", "is_active": true, "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonavanoord/", "x_url": "", "avatar_thumb_url": "https://bookface-images.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/avatars/e79cd2c8431a00a358ef4d9b12c2ee2e95e79849.jpg" } ], "jobs": [], "news": [], "launches": [ { "id": 105232, "title": "Rise Reforming: distributed chemical production", "tagline": "We turn waste gases into valuable supply-secure chemicals.", "body": "Geopolitical conflicts and natural disasters frequently expose the vulnerability of the American chemical industry. The reason? Production is centralized and fossil fuel-dependent. The solution? Localized production using an undervalued resource: biogas. The US produces enough biogas to make over $20 bn/y worth of chemicals, but 60% is wasted in low-margin applications or flared altogether.\n\nRise Reforming is commercializing a modular process to transform this underutilized biogas into valuable supply-secure chemicals like dimethyl ether (DME) and methanol. Our technology can be deployed on-site, helping biogas producers properly valorize their gas.\n\nWe've just broken ground on our pilot project at a Chicagoland wastewater plant. This will be the first wastewater biogas-to-methanol demo in the Americas.\n\nRise Reforming is hiring for a senior chemical process engineer. Apply here: \n\nVideo: \n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post&id=105232&key=user_uploads/3620299/89d6b5de-3729-4019-a87f-0fe27a549152)\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post&id=105232&key=user_uploads/3620299/b4ac7aec-afea-4a96-9174-ae6202812c2f)\n\n", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/RNI-rise-reforming-distributed-chemical-production", "votes": 5, "created_at": "2026-07-13T14:13:24.467Z" } ] } ]