Atomic industries

Y Combinator is putting hard tech in the spotlight. On Wednesday, the accelerator released an updated list of ideas it would like to see in applications — with categories like space, manufacturing and defense featured prominently. YC has backed plenty of hard tech startups before. Launch companies Stoke Space and Relativity Space and satellite broadband provider Astranis are among its alumnus. The accelerator’s biggest exit is still General Motors’ $1 billion purchase of autonomous vehicle company Cruise Automation…

In 2014, investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel infamously posed the distinction between companies that deal in “atoms” versus those that deal in “bits.” In its crudest terms, the former category includes businesses focused on things like hardware and manufacturing; the latter, software and financial services. Just shy of 10 years on, the distinction now strikes as quaint, if not downright irrelevant. Over the past five or so years, a new cohort of startups have emerged. In some ways, they resemble Silicon Valley of…