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Daqstra
Daqstra orchestrates physical test infrastructure for hardware engineering teams.
Founded
2025Daqstra orchestrates physical test infrastructure for hardware engineering teams.
Daqstra is an active San Francisco company with three employees, in Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch, building AI-native test infrastructure for hardware companies. Its mission is to make physical infrastructure programmable and intelligent through observability and orchestration for the physical world.
The company works with advanced hardware teams across aerospace, energy, and drones, and active aerospace programs use Daqstra day to day. An energy pilot with a palm oil processor targets more than one hundred thousand dollars in annual savings, and in March 2026 a SEDS UCSD firing of a liquid rocket engine with a Dispatch nose cone in the exhaust plume delivered a professional-grade timestamped and contextualized data package.
Daqstra is the AI-native API and operating layer for complex test infrastructure, built to connect hardware, unify test data, and orchestrate every run. The platform comprises Daqstra Edge as the interface to physical systems at the test stand, Daqstra Hub for cloud data-to-insight, and Daqstra API for orchestration as code with sequences, redlines, and aborts.
Edge connects to NI, Siemens, Modbus, OPC-UA, and custom TCP sources, while Hub ingests every run for search, comparison, and automated reporting. The API exposes the loop in Python and REST, and Y Combinator describes Daqstra as the AI-native orchestration layer for physical R&D that saves engineers in aerospace, energy, and robotics hundreds of man hours.
Daqstra is built for aerospace programs running static fires, qualification campaigns, and ground systems; for energy operations spanning nuclear facilities, oil and gas plants, and turbine and grid test benches; and for robotics work including autonomous platforms, drone flight test, and hardware-in-the-loop benches. Its initial focus is aerospace, energy, drone, and robotics teams that run frequent instrumented tests across vendor equipment and reconfigure setups between tests.
Target buyers are leads for test, propulsion, integration, validation, or hardware engineering, and the platform is most useful when knowledge is concentrated in a few engineers who understand the whole test environment. An external partner deployment with Dispatch, a YC-backed aerospace startup building thermal protection systems, covered a Mojave heat-shield static fire.
Daqstra works with the equipment teams already have, including NI and LabVIEW rigs, PLCs, custom DAQ hardware, sensors, and controllers, without forcing replacement of the existing test stack. The platform presents a unified vendor-agnostic system layer with versioned infrastructure-as-code and context-rich traceable data streams, in contrast to fragmented test silos and manual tracking.
When alcohol-fire hardware damage occurred during a live campaign, the preserved complete data record enabled root-cause analysis within hours, and modular configuration memory allowed hardware to be swapped and testing to resume without losing campaign continuity. Any laptop can run a full operation without a specific machine, operating system, or expensive licensed software, and a faulted channel is isolated and flagged while acquisition continues.