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Nine Fives

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Simple, Networked, Driverless, RF Test Equipment

Spring 2026Founded 20252 peopleSan Francisco, CA, USA
AI insightcan contain mistakes
RF Test EquipmentHardwareSemiconductor and telecommunications test labsMedium competition
Moat
Proprietary test methodology and driverless automation create defensible niche advantage.
Key risk
Entrenched test equipment vendors (Keysight, Anritsu); high engineering barriers to entry; niche customer base.
Why now
5G/6G rollout and semiconductor complexity drive demand for simplified, networked RF test solutions.
Competitors
Keysight, Anritsu, NI

Founders Β· 2

Andrew Kurtz
Andrew KurtzFounder

I spent the last 9 years as a mechanical engineer working on a wide variety of aerospace products. Now building better test equipment with Nine Fives

Noah Levy
Noah LevyFounder
SpaceX

Calibrated largest phased array in SpaceX history, designed Starship primary RF hardware, worked on radar altimeter for Falcon 9 and S-Band Transceiver for Dragon 2 capsule. I am not a fan of modern RF test equipment from legacy vendors.

Launch

Launched on Y Combinator Β· May 2026
View launch post β†—

Test hardware for companies that can’t wait for their test equipment to catch up.

Nine Fives builds driverless, touchscreen test equipment for manufacturers of radio devices (cellphones, drones, satellites). They announce rack-mountable hardware with a single machine-readable API (REST and SCPI), a web-app for rack configuration, and skill.md to help AI agents generate test software, aiming to reduce production readiness timelines from months to minutes.

IndustrialsManufacturing and RoboticsRadarTelecommunicationsElectronics

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