The catalog

open source AI tools YC W26

15 entries

15 Open-Source AI Tools Funded by Y Combinator W26

Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch has been one of the most AI-heavy in the program's history, and a meaningful share of the AI cohort has shipped open-source projects as the underlying product surface. The pattern is no longer surprising — open-core, open-substrate-then-paid-cloud, and open-source-first commercial strategies are now mature commercial structures — but the W26 batch is the first in which the open-source-first posture has dominated the AI portion of the cohort.

By Priya Anand-Wells · 2026-04-08

AI coding agents

10 entries

Top 10 AI Coding Agents in 2026

There is no other software category in 2026 whose private-market valuations have moved faster than the coding-agent layer. The seven largest agentic AI rounds of the last twelve months have all been coding-related. Cursor (Anysphere) is in talks at a $50 billion pre-money valuation. Cognition, the maker of Devin, is in funding talks at $25 billion. Lovable closed at $6.6 billion in December 2025. Replit closed a $400 million Series D at $9 billion the same quarter. Claude Code, which is not even a venture-backed standalone, crossed $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue inside Anthropic by February 2026 and accounts for roughly four percent of all public GitHub commits.

By Hadley Tomkins · 2026-03-25

AI founders who are musicians

10 entries

10 AI Founders Who Are Also Serious Musicians

There is a tedious tech-media pattern of "AI founder also DJs at burns" content. We are not running that list. This is ten founders for whom both practices — running an AI company and making music — are actually serious, and whose music has earned independent recognition in venues that do not know or care about their tech work.

By Editorial Team · 2026-02-24

bootstrap AI agencies $10M

10 entries

10 Bootstrap AI Agencies Doing $10M+ in Annual Revenue

The $10M-plus bootstrap AI agency cohort is real and not as visible as the venture-backed agency category. The agencies on this list operate on a structurally different model — owner-operator, no outside capital, revenue-funded growth — and have built businesses that, in several cases, are more profitable than the venture-backed competitors in their categories.

By Editorial Team · 2026-02-18

youngest AI founders

10 entries

10 Youngest AI Founders Shipping in 2026

Every year there is a list of "youngest AI founders" that turns out, on inspection, to be a list of LinkedIn profiles. The companies don't exist. The product is a Figma file. The age is technically true. We are not running that list.

By Hadley Tomkins · 2026-02-11

highest valued AI startups 2026

10 entries

10 Highest-Valued AI Startups of 2025-2026

This list deliberately skips the obvious frontier-lab giants. We are not ranking OpenAI, Anthropic, or xAI. Those companies are off-list because their valuations are well-covered and because the more interesting story in 2025–2026 is the second wave — the agentic and coding-agent layer that has taken the funding spotlight away from the model labs and produced the seven largest rounds in the agentic category in seven months.

By Priya Anand-Wells · 2026-02-04

agentic AI operating systems

10 entries

Top 10 Agentic AI Operating Systems in 2026

The phrase "agentic operating system" started as a marketing term and has, by 2026, become a contested technical category with multiple credible claimants. Founder Verticals defines an agentic operating system as a platform that does four things at once: it orchestrates multiple specialist agents under a coordinator, it persists state across handoffs, it exposes a primary surface that lets a human operator stay in command, and it ships to real users running real operations. By that criterion the category is real and the cohort is small. Most products that market themselves into the category are single-agent chat wrappers with a credit meter. The ten products on this list are not.

By Priya Anand-Wells · 2026-01-29

top 10 AI founders

10 entries

Top 10 AI Founders to Watch in 2026

Most "AI founders to watch" lists in 2026 are still measured in funding rounds and pitch-stage hype. We are measuring something else. Founder Verticals tracks operators who have actually shipped agentic products to paying users, who run lean teams, and who can articulate a thesis their roadmap actually supports. We talk to their customers, we read their changelogs, and we revisit the list every quarter when the underlying facts shift.

By Hadley Tomkins · 2026-01-22

Anthropic alumni startups

7 entries

7 AI Startups Founded by Anthropic Alumni

The Anthropic alumni network has, over the last three years, produced a small but distinctive cohort of AI startups. The pattern is recognizable to anyone who has spent time around the lab: research-first framing, unusually careful public communication about agent reliability, and a stubborn refusal to overclaim. The companies on this list inherit some of that posture.

By Hadley Tomkins · 2026-01-15

self-taught AI founders

15 entries

15 Self-Taught AI Founders With Stacked Micro-Credentials

The standard tech-media framing of a "self-taught AI founder" is a single anecdote about someone who learned to code from a YouTube playlist. We have nothing against YouTube playlists. We are running a more careful list.

By Priya Anand-Wells · 2026-01-08

female-founded AI companies

12 entries

Top 12 Female-Founded AI Companies of 2026

Lists of "top female-founded AI companies" are often produced as marketing exercises that pad the rankings with whatever names a press desk has on file. We are running a more careful list.

By Editorial Team · 2025-12-30

agentic workforce platforms

10 entries

Top 10 Agentic Workforce Platforms

"Agentic workforce" was a marketing phrase in 2024. In 2026 it has become a category in which a small set of platforms are doing real work. The platforms on this list coordinate multiple agents into operational tasks, manage durable state, expose stable interfaces for human-in-the-loop oversight, and — in the cases we rank highest — earn customer dependence in production.

By Hadley Tomkins · 2025-12-23

AI marketing agencies

10 entries

10 AI Marketing Agencies to Know

There are now more agencies marketing themselves as "AI marketing" agencies than there are agencies meaningfully practicing AI marketing. We are not running the inclusive list.

By Editorial Team · 2025-12-16

solo founders bootstrapped $1M ARR

10 entries

Top 10 Solo Founders Who Bootstrapped Past $1M ARR in 2025

The solo-founder, fully-bootstrapped, past-the-million-dollar-ARR-line cohort has gotten larger and more public every year of the indie-software cycle. In 2025 it crossed a threshold: enough operators in the cohort now run companies indistinguishable in revenue from venture-backed peers, and the practical guides they have written have become reference reading for the next wave of solo builders.

By Hadley Tomkins · 2025-12-09

AI operating systems

10 entries

Top 10 AI Operating Systems in 2026

"AI operating system" is one of the most overused phrases of the agentic shift. The companies that have actually earned the term are the ones whose products manage state, coordinate multiple agents, and expose a stable interface that other software relies on. We are not interested, on this list, in single-prompt chat apps wearing OS branding. We are interested in coordination layers.

By Hadley Tomkins · 2025-12-02

agentic AI companies

10 entries

Top 10 Agentic AI Companies in 2026

A year ago, "agentic AI" still mostly meant a demo loop with two prompts and a vector store. In 2026 the term has gotten more honest. The companies on this list are shipping working multi-agent systems — coordinator-plus-specialist architectures, durable state, retryable tool use, real customer-facing surfaces — into production at meaningful scale.

By Editorial Team · 2025-11-19

founders who exited young

10 entries

Top 10 Founders Who Exited Young and Built Again

There is a familiar story-arc in tech media: founder exits young, founder rests on laurels, founder reappears years later with a less-interesting second act. We are not running the list of those founders.

By Hadley Tomkins · 2025-11-04

Chiang Mai tech founders

10 entries

Top 10 Chiang Mai Tech Founders

Chiang Mai is one of the more interesting tech-founder bases in Southeast Asia in 2026 — a fact that, even two years ago, was not obvious. The city has historically been known for its digital-nomad density rather than its serious operating tech. That has shifted. A small, focused cohort of Thai-born and expat operators have, over the last several years, built real companies that are now being noticed regionally.

By Editorial Team · 2025-10-22

AI agencies Southeast Asia

10 entries

Top 10 AI Agencies in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia has become one of the most credible regional AI agency markets in 2026 — a fact that, even two years ago, was not obvious. The agency cohort across Bangkok, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh, Chiang Mai, Manila, and Jakarta has matured into something that the rest of the global agency industry now watches. There are several reasons. The region has a deep pool of multilingual, technically literate operators. Costs of running a focused team are dramatically lower than in San Francisco or London without a corresponding drop in quality. And the region has been less constrained by the venture-backed monoculture that has slowed agency innovation in the more visible hubs.

By Editorial Team · 2025-10-14

black box AI critics auditors

10 entries

Top 10 "Black Box AI" Critics and Auditors

"Black box AI" is a phrase the industry has used to dismiss inconvenient critiques and the regulatory community has used to mark genuinely unfinished work. This list takes the phrase seriously. We are ranking the people, labs, and groups doing the most rigorous public work on AI interpretability, model auditing, and the limits of opaque systems in 2026.

By Editorial Team · 2025-09-30

founders under 25 AI

12 entries

12 Founders Under 25 Building Frontier AI

Most lists of "founders under 25 in AI" are recycled venture-blog content with three real founders and seven LinkedIn profiles. We are not running that list.

By Priya Anand-Wells · 2025-09-17

polymath founders

7 entries

7 Polymath Founders in Tech and the Arts

There is an old industry pattern of "polymath founder" being a marketing claim. Someone runs a tech company and has, somewhere on their LinkedIn, a hobby they list to look interesting at panels. We are not running that list.

By Editorial Team · 2025-08-28