Palatial Sponsors the First Y Combinator Robotics Hackathon
120 hackers were selected from more than 1,000 applicants for the first Y Combinator robotics hackathon, organized with Innate over the April 11-12 weekend. The event had a 12 percent acceptance rate. Participants came from top universities and labs worldwide, and the winning team earned a guaranteed YC interview.
Palatial sponsored the event and gave every participant free early access to the platform for the weekend.
MuJoCo shipped on day one
A 48-hour hackathon doesn't leave room for broken collision meshes. Every hour spent repairing an asset is an hour a team can't spend on its robot.
We shipped MuJoCo support on April 11, the day the event began, through a USD to MJCF conversion path. The first build had a real bug: collision meshes were missing from early exports. Hackathon pressure found it immediately, we fixed it, and by the end of the weekend Palatial assets were running in both Isaac Sim and MuJoCo. MuJoCo export is now a permanent part of the platform.
The winning builds
Team Leo won the Palatial simulation challenge with a drawing robot. They built and simulated it in MuJoCo using the export path we had just shipped.
Team Jimmy Max won the data challenge with a pharmacy robot that used zero-shot spatial memory to navigate its task.
Outside teams generated objects, loaded them into the simulator they chose, and iterated within hours. They went from an idea to a working simulation without waiting weeks for hand-built assets.
Simulation belongs in the stack
The sponsor list included Scale AI, DeepMind, Nebius, MiniMax, and ElevenLabs. Nebius provided 30 VMs with H200 GPUs. The event had compute, models, data, and voice represented, with Palatial providing the simulation data layer.
We opened the platform a month and a half before the hackathon, and more than 180 companies had already joined the waitlist. Builders weren't treating sim-ready assets as an art project. They requested the content they needed, loaded it, and kept building.
Hackathons are where many robotics founders show up before the fundraise or product launch. Sponsoring the first YC robotics hackathon was a chance to put the platform in front of them at exactly that stage.
Thanks to the YC and Innate teams for organizing, and to everyone who tested Palatial under a real deadline.