The Pioneer Fund Podcast

What’s emerging from Y Combinator’s Summer 2026 (S26) batch? Pioneer Fund’s Jason Gray (Founder & Managing Partner) and Tim Suzman (Managing Partner) explore the startups, investment themes and technology shifts shaping Pioneer’s S26 portfolio.

Go inside the next wave of AI agents, robotics infrastructure, defense technology and deep tech — and hear how early-stage investors evaluate the teams building it.

In this episode:

• Why more founders are tackling hardware and frontier technology
• The tools powering AI agents and robot fleets
• How proprietary datasets can create lasting competitive advantages
• AI-native business models, usage-based revenue and falling AI costs
• Defense tech and sovereign supply chains
• Pioneer’s investment process, including when to reconsider passing on a startup

Featured companies include Agency Tool Company, Aktoria Robotics, Inkbox, Earendil Robotics, GUILD and Lumeria.

Follow Pioneer Fund for conversations about venture capital, startup investing and the founders building at the frontier of technology.

Ryan McLinko is the co-founder and CTO of Astranis (YC W16), which builds the world's only dedicated satellite networks: flexible, resilient, high-speed connectivity from GEO for global customers. The company started in a San Francisco apartment in 2015. Today it has five satellites in orbit, more than $1 billion in commercial contracts, and a team of 400+.In the first episode of Pioneer Fund's Venture Partner podcast, Ryan joins Jason Gray (Founder & Managing Partner, Pioneer Fund) to talk through what it actually takes to build spacecraft at startup speed: the YC lesson that forced a two-item to-do list, the interview project where candidates design a circuit board he hand-loads himself, the communication cliff that hits every company around 35 people, and why measuring anything in quarters is a habit worth breaking.They also get into the engineering margin mistake Ryan would redo, why process (not IP) is the real moat, what he thinks opens up space after telecom, and the one invention he wants to see in his lifetime.

Topics:

• The YC focus exercise: two goals, three months, one prototype satellite
• How hard tech founders should show traction without a revenue hockey stick
• What founders take for granted at their first startup
• Why Astranis went full-stack: build, finance, operate, and lease
• Teaching yourself electrical engineering mid-career
• Current best estimate vs. margin stacking: a systems engineering lesson
• The ~35-person communication cliff (and why you blow past it before you notice)
• A new job every year: how the founder role keeps changing
• The hiring bar: buck converter interview projects and no talented jerks
• The unit of time that matters (and the one that matters least)
• Process as a double-edged sword, and the delete button
• What comes after comms: space resource utilization
• Fusion power and what 100x cheaper energy unlocks
• The podcasts Ryan actually listens to

About Pioneer Fund: Pioneer Fund invests in top Y Combinator companies, backed by a network of 500+ YC alumni venture partners. This series features those venture partners: experienced founders, operators, and domain experts sharing what they've learned building companies.

Learn more: https://www.pioneerfund.vc/

Astranis: https://www.astranis.com/

Three years ago, Assort Health was two founders with no product. Today it's valued at $1.2 billion.

Connor Hailey (W21) knows what it's like to build a healthcare startup from zero, having founded Axle Health through YC. That perspective is exactly what helped Pioneer spot Assort Health early. In this episode, Connor, Senior Venture Partner at Pioneer Fund, and Dave Messina (GP, Pioneer Future of Health⁠) retrace the diligence that led to investment, the bet on execution over technology, and what Assort's path to a $1.2B Series C says about winning in healthcare AI.

Millions of patients still wait on hold just to reach their doctor's office. Jon Wang, Founder & Co-CEO of Assort Health, decided that was unacceptable — and built the AI to fix it. In conversation with Dave Messina (GP, Pioneer Future of Health), Jon shares how Assort reached 130M+ patient interactions, why specialty-specific AI matters, and where voice AI in healthcare goes from here.

Inflection is a new Pioneer Future of Health series where we bring together people at the edge of Health and AI — founders, operators, and bio-enthusiasts who are building the next decade of healthcare. Raw conversations, real insights, no hype.

In this episode, Jason Gray (Founder and General Partner, Pioneer Fund) and Dave Messina (General Partner, Pioneer Future of Health Fund) dive deep on the W26 Y Combinator batch and discuss key insights related to the Future of Health Fund coming out of one of the strongest biotech and health tech cohorts in recent history.

The conversation covers how AI is reshaping drug discovery, replacing animal models with human biology representations, and acting as a co-pilot for scientists. From AI-powered primary care and revenue cycle automation to chronic disease management and elder care, they break down where they're seeing the most exciting founder activity — and what separates the companies worth backing from the AI wrappers that won't last.

Plus: a look at one of Pioneer's standout portfolio exits — a psychedelics platform that sold its lead asset for over $1 billion after pioneering treatment-resistant depression therapy.