Another Y Combinator Demo Day took place on Thursday, but this batch looked a little different. While every cohort brings a fresh wave of founders, the startups presenting this week skewed far more toward deep tech than in past years. As we do every quarter, TechCrunch asked early-stage VCs to name the hottest startups in this batch ' both their top picks and the deals everyone was talking about. And as usual, we put together a list of startups flagged by at least two investors as the buzziest in the batch. Why it's a fav: Power is in short supply and local communities are increasingly opposing the buildout of new data centers. Atomarine ' co-founded by an MIT computer science and naval engineer and an MIT PhD in nuclear engineering ' wants to solve the compute shortage by putting data centers on barges at sea, where seawater could provide near-free cooling. The startup plans to launch a gas-powered pilot by 2028 and plans to transition to floating nuclear power ships in 2032....
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