Applied Electrodynamics: a camera that reads what's hidden behind a wall
A five-person YC startup built WaveSight, a radio-wave camera that turns hidden pipes, wiring and studs into a millimeter-accurate 3D map, without touching the wall.
I came across this while scrolling past a video of someone pointing what looked like a tablet at a bare wall, watching pipes and wiring appear on screen like an X-ray. Except it wasn't an X-ray. It was radio.
The company is Applied Electrodynamics, a team of five out of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch, remarkably unknown given their résumés: an antenna lead across four iPhone generations, an early iPhone prototyper who co-invented Nest's Learning Thermostat, a former Humane product design lead, an MIT physicist who built x-ray imagers and retinal implants. Together they hold more than 250 patents. Their product, WaveSight, images what's hidden behind sheetrock, tile, marble, brick and insulation, then turns it into a 3D point cloud accurate to one millimeter.
That's the clever part. Light stops at a wall, but radio waves don't: they pass through drywall and bounce off whatever sits inside, copper pipe, steel stud, cable run, and an antenna array catches the echo. Software turns that echo's timing into a scaled, camera-like image instead of the vague beep of a stud finder. Unlike existing radar scanners like Walabot or Bosch's D-TECT120, which sit flush against the wall, WaveSight claims to scan from across the room, in under a minute.
The market is unglamorous but real: undocumented pipes and cables drive more than $20 billion a year in avoidable US construction rework, because contractors find out what's behind a wall by opening it. Turning "guess and demolish" into "point and check" is the kind of boring efficiency gain that actually ships.
WaveSight is still pre-order, and the company admits its across-the-room claim hasn't been tested on the messy, metal-laced walls of a real job site yet. Still, making the physical world legible across more of the spectrum than our eyes can see is a genuinely useful idea, and I'll be curious to see if it holds up once it leaves the demo reel.