I formed Atomic Alchemy in 2018 because I thought that one had to have the credibility of a formed company in order to ever receive investment.

With YC, you only need the idea, and you can form the company after you are accepted. And in my case, you can certainly bring an already-formed company to YC. In fact, a small number of companies accepted into YC are already profitable.

That is awesome and fascinating at the same time. I genuinely hope you make a dent in the universe and succeed. I hope you post an update with your success dealing something out the door and dealing with the NRC.

Thank you; that means a lot to me. I will definitely have to follow up sometime in the future.

This is off-topic for the Atomic Alchemy post, and I don't want to distract from that, but I'll just briefly answer your question about YC.

Roughly half of the companies that join YC are new companies that are just getting started (< 6 months old), and roughly half are more established companies. There are even a significant number of companies each batch that are pretty large (say, > 20 people).