Darell

Co-founder of @Daqstra (YC S26)

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

@yousefhll @jladuval Love it!

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

Daqstra works with the equipment teams already have, including NI/LabVIEW, PLCs, custom DAQ systems, sensors, controllers, and vendor hardware.

We’re already working with advanced hardware teams across aerospace, energy, and drones, including active aerospace deployments and an energy pilot targeting $100K+ in annual savings.

If you lead test, propulsion, integration, validation, or hardware engineering, we’d love to talk.

Feel free to DM me or schedule a demo on https://t.co/lbwXlxgMZi

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

Test infrastructure shouldn’t bottleneck great engineering.

Today, we’re launching @daqstra with @ycombinator.

Daqstra turns complex test infrastructure into an AI-native operating layer.

We’re Anchit and Darell, the founders of Daqstra.

We first met while testing liquid rocket engines in the Mojave Desert, where we realized much of the friction wasn’t the engines—it was the infrastructure around them.

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

Before each test, we connected sensors, custom electronics, NI hardware, PLCs, and controllers that were never designed to work together.

After each run, data was scattered across machines, file formats, scripts, and people’s heads. Before we could learn from one test, we often had to reconstruct what happened.

As we talked with teams building rockets, energy systems, robots, and drones, we kept hearing the same story:

Their hardware was advancing faster than the infrastructure used to test it.

So we built Daqstra.

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

Daqstra works with the equipment teams already have, including NI/LabVIEW, PLCs, custom DAQ systems, sensors, controllers, and vendor hardware.

We’re already working with advanced hardware teams across aerospace, energy, and drones, including active aerospace deployments and an energy pilot targeting $100K+ in annual savings.

If you lead test, propulsion, integration, validation, or hardware engineering, DM me or schedule a demo on our https://t.co/lbwXlxgMZi

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

Before each test, we connected sensors, custom electronics, NI hardware, PLCs, and controllers that were never designed to work together.

After each run, data was scattered across machines, file formats, scripts, and people’s heads. Before we could learn from one test, we often had to reconstruct what happened.

As we talked with teams building rockets, energy systems, robots, and drones, we kept hearing the same story:

Their hardware was advancing faster than the infrastructure used to test it.

So we built Daqstra.

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

Daqstra makes your infrastructure a programmable software platform. It works with the equipment teams already have—including NI/LabVIEW, PLCs, custom DAQ systems, sensors, controllers, and vendor hardware.

We’re already working with advanced hardware teams across aerospace, energy, and drones, including active aerospace deployments and an oil/energy pilot targeting $100K+ in annual savings.

If you lead test, propulsion, integration, validation, or hardware engineering, we’d love to talk.

Go to https://t.co/lbwXlxgf9K to schedule a demo or send me a DM.

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

Before each test, we connected sensors, custom electronics, NI hardware, PLCs, and controllers that were never designed to work together.

After each run, data was scattered across machines, file formats, scripts, and people’s heads. Before we could learn from one test, we often had to reconstruct what had happened.

As we talked with teams building rockets, energy systems, robots, and drones, we kept hearing the same story:

Their hardware was advancing faster than the infrastructure used to test it.

So we built Daqstra.

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

Just another day of two founders visiting engineers and understanding their pains.

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

@FabraixHQ Next level security

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

Hard(ware) at work.

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

@tomzheng Hyped to see beautifully efficient agentic infra!!

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

We thought building a cryogenic rocket engine would be the hard part.

It wasn’t.

The real bottleneck was everything around the test: fragmented hardware, brittle scripts, manual procedures, redlines, and hours spent digging through logs.

So we built Daqstra: an AI-native test orchestration platform that brings hardware, live data, procedures, automation, and analysis into one place.

Today, we’re excited to share that Daqstra is part of Y Combinator S26.

If your team runs complex physical tests, we’d love to talk.

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

Can’t wait to show what we’ve been building. Reach out if you’re interested!

[Daqstra @daqstra]

We’re joining @ycombinator for the summer 2026 batch!

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

@PatrickFinley_ Great news Patrick. Incredible for collegiate rocketry!

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

@daqstra It’s becoming real!

[Daqstra @daqstra]

A glimpse of what’s next.

We’re already building this for real test engineers.
This is where test infrastructure is going.

Visualized with AI. Edited by humans.
#deeptech

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

mlflow is pretty cool @databricks

[Darell @heyitsdarell]

@kstonekuan @mintlify @vercel @augmentcode @better_auth @neondatabase @AnthropicAI git commit vibes

[kingston kuan @kstonekuan]

skills launch party at shack15

agent skills are taking over the tech world right now

my favorite from the event is from @mintlify where you can just add any doc page as a skill directly

npx skills add https-your-docs-domain-dot-com