Trinity students win Y Combinator place for US circuit-board manufacturing startup
Posted on: 23 June 2026
Two students from Trinity have won a place in Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch, the San Francisco programme whose alumni include Stripe, Airbnb and Reddit.
Johnny Doyle, who studies Engineering with Management, and Will Carkner, an Engineering student, have moved to San Francisco for the summer to build ProvenMetal, which assembles printed circuit boards for American hardware and robotics companies.
Crucially, ProvenMetal aims to do it faster, and closer to home, than the overseas suppliers most of them currently rely on.
The gap they are working in is wide: two decades ago America made about 30% of the world’s circuit boards. Today it makes roughly 4%. That leaves American companies building critical hardware, medical devices and industrial equipment dependent on factories on the other side of the world, often waiting weeks for boards and with little control over the quality that comes back.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are now being spent to rebuild the industry in America, and ProvenMetal is trying to supply part of what that effort needs: quick, dependable assembly on American soil, with every board x-ray scanned in-house before it ships.
Johnny Doyle (left), Will Carkner and Alex McConnell (right) in San Francisco.
Doyle and Carkner did not begin with this idea. They first applied to Y Combinator with another company, Syncra, and were told the team was strong but the idea was not ambitious enough. Instead of giving up, they spent a few days looking at bigger problem, settled on electronics manufacturing, and flew to San Francisco to make their case in person.
Y Combinator asked them back for a second interview two weeks later and wanted to see customer demand and early progress. The pair arrived a week ahead, held more than 30 conversations with manufacturers and hardware companies, came away with five letters of intent, and were accepted with a company only a few weeks old.
Johnny Doyle, co-founder and CEO of ProvenMetal, said:
“We knew our original idea had a ceiling, and when Y Combinator said the same, we decided to make the jump with full conviction. We booked our flights an hour before the first interview, and as soon as we landed we filled the calendar with customers and people who knew the industry. We both want to work on problems that matter, and ProvenMetal is how we are going to do it.”
Carkner has been building circuit boards since he was a child and ran board testing at a San Francisco battery company, where he saw how broken the circuit board manufacturing industry is. The two have since been joined by Alex McConnell, another Engineering with Management student at Trinity, who has come on board to help build the company.
Doyle, Carkner and McConnell are part of a small group of Irish founders who built at Dogpatch Labs in Dublin and have ended up in the same Y Combinator batch this summer, alongside the team behind a second startup, Blueprints. The programme runs for three months and ends with Demo Day in September, when the companies present to investors.