Y Combinator just published its Fall 2025 Request for Startups — calling for founders to build in areas like retraining workers for the AI Economy, video generation, multi-agent system infrastructure, AI native enterprise software, and even the first 10-person, $100bn company. So we rolled up our sleeves and mapped 200+ standout startups tackling these categories.
To be entirely honest 🤐, we used our AI Agent to dive into those 6 distinct categories and do the heavy lifting. It was built precisely to streamline this type of research.
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AI Native Enterprise Software
Rhythms (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 11,795)
Orchestrates the “rhythms” — recurring meetings, reviews and rituals — that drive execution, using an AI operating-system to learn a company’s best-team habits and roll them out org-wide. Founded by Vetri Vellore and Madhan Subhas. In Pre-seed / Seed stage, backed by Greenoaks, Madrona, Accel, Cercano and Founders’ Co-op, with $26m total funding, last raised 7 Dec 2023 – Seed. Early Fortune-500 pilots and top-tier investor backing signal strong market pull. Based in Bellevue, WA.
Cassidy (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 23,858)
Turns a firm’s internal docs and chats into AI copilots and multi-step automations for sales, support and ops. Founded by Justin Fineberg and Ian Woodfill. In pre-seed / seed stage; raised $3.7m seed on 20 Aug 2024 led by The General Partnership with Neo, Comma Capital, Spacecadet, Ride Ventures and notable angels. Headcount-surge and web-traffic momentum point to accelerating SaaS uptake. HQ: New York City.
Filuta AI (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 26,134)
Combines symbolic planning with subsymbolic models to spin up composite-AI agents that slash game-testing cycles from weeks to days. Founded by Filip Dvořák and Slavomir Svancar. In pre-seed / seed stage; total funding $2.57m. Recently raised $197k on June 2025 – seed led by Rockaway Ventures with Tarpan Capital and Lion Beat Capital. Recent funding and media spotlight fuel Prague R&D expansion. HQ: Prague, Czech Republic.
Vespa.ai (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 43,641)
Open-source search-and-vector platform that lets enterprises query, rank and run ML inference over billions of documents in <100 ms, unifying keyword, vector and tensor retrieval in one stack. Founded by Jon Bratseth, Kim O. Johansen and Frode Lundgren, the company sits in Early Stage and is backed by Blossom Capital, raised $31m series a on November 2023. Vespa processes for Yahoo, Spotify, Wix and OkCupid. Norway-based. Spun out of Yahoo as an independent company in October 2023 to broaden access to its technology, Vespa is now a go-to engine for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workloads in large enterprises. Fresh capital is earmarked for expanding Vespa Cloud and adding GPU-accelerated inference, while the team scales globally to meet growing demand from Fortune 500 customers.
Infrastructure for Multi-Agent Systems
Emergence (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 6,627)
Emergence’s “Agents Creating Agents” framework chains and deploys swarms of autonomous agents that can spin up new agents on-the-fly to orchestrate complex enterprise workflows. Founded by Satya Nitta, Ravi Kokku, and Sharad C. Sundararajan. HQ in NYC, exited stealth in June 2024 with a $97.2m series a led by Learn Capital and additional credit facilities exceeding $100m — the company’s most recent primary fund-raise. Its June 2025 launch of the CRAFT self-serve platform gives business users no-code control over data-pipeline agents that interoperate with frameworks like LangChain and Autogen, replacing brittle ETL scripts with real-time agentic workflows.
Katara (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 42,398)
Agentic workflow-automation platform that turns company docs into RAG-powered AI agents. Founded by Matthew Rossi and David Feldman. In Pre-seed / Seed stage, backed by Diagram Ventures, Sparkle Ventures & StreamingFast with $2.6m total funding; last raise August 2024 – pre-seed. Highlights: Headcount Surge, No Recent Funding. Based in Dover, DE, USA. Katara’s August-2024 round lets it expand its “human-in-the-loop” agent fleet beyond Web3, aiming to become the DevX team’s default RAG stack.
Agno (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 21,817)
Open-source framework for lightning-fast multi-modal AI agents with memory, knowledge and tool-use. Founded by Ashpreet Bedi. Pre-seed / Seed; $5.4m total—latest seed on August 2024 from GreatPoint Ventures, Surface Ventures, Zero Prime and angels. Highlights: Headcount Surge & Momentum, OSS Traction. HQ: New York City. Agno’s repo has jumped to 6.9 k ★; the team runs weekly live-coding sessions to showcase agent orchestration at scale.
Agentuity (🌟 Specter – Global Rank 6,790)
Purpose-built “cloud for a trillion AI agents” that handles orchestration, memory and monitoring for production LLM apps. Founded by Jeff Haynie (ex-Appcelerator), the Austin startup is in Seed stage with US $4m total funding—a Seed round on January 2025 led by Boldstart Ventures, joined by Bloomberg Beta, Southern Equity and OneSixOne Ventures . Agentuity Cloud launched in June 2025 with GPU-accelerated “Mission Control” dashboards and has signed design partners in fintech and e-commerce. HQ: Austin, TX.
Retraining Workers for the AI Economy
Deeplearning.AI (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 411,002)
Andrew Ng’s education venture has become a cornerstone for reskilling engineers on the fast-moving frontiers of machine learning. Its short, Coursera-hosted “Specializations” have enrolled millions, while 2024 additions such as the “Generative AI with LangChain” course keep content current. The company remains privately held and bootstrapped by Ng’s AI Fund, but boasts strong organic growth metrics—10 M+ learners, 900k LinkedIn followers, and a newly launched “Short Courses” track aimed at enterprise L&D teams.
RIIICO (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 1,191)
Based in Aachen, RIIICO turns laser-scanned factory floors into interactive 3-D “digital twins,” letting industrial engineers simulate layout changes without downtime. Raised $5m seed round in June 2025 by Hesperian Ventures, Earlybird Digital, Pi Labs, seed + speed Ventures, WaVe-X, and Sixth Sense to commercialise the product across automotive and logistics plants. Recent pilots with Bosch and Thyssenkrupp have cut change-over planning time by up to 60%. The 22-person team is now expanding sales across DACH and hiring simulation engineers.
Dropslab (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 148,754)
Dropslab’s AR platform projects step-by-step guidance and remote expert support into frontline workers’ field of view, boosting factory efficiency and cutting error rates . Founded by Dr Meysam Minoufekr in Aachen, the startup is pre-seed / seed-stage; investors include Right Side Capital Management and gener8tor. It has raised $269K in total, last closing a seed round on August 2022. Highlights in the Specter file note early industrial pilots and head-count expansion plans.
Skills.tech (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 131,744)
Mexico-born Skills.tech builds AI agents that design and personalise corporate training paths, then track skills progress with L&D analytics . Co-founded by brothers Ricardo Cevada (CEO) and Zuriel Cevada (CTO) , the company is pre-seed / seed with $575k raised (last raise, September 2024). Backers include Berkeley SkyDeck and Google’s AI First accelerator. Recent wins: SXSW Casa Tech Mex pitch, NVIDIA Inception acceptance, and pilots with Fortune-500 L&D teams.
Kepler + Co (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 138,875)
Kepler + Co gives HR leaders a workforce-analytics cockpit that maps competencies, detects skill gaps, and recommends targeted upskilling programmes. Founded by Darren Lang in London , it remains pre-seed / seed with $300k total funding; the most recent seed tranche of $100k closed on November 2022. Early customers report clearer internal-mobility planning, and the team is beta-testing an AI “SkillGraph” that forecasts future talent needs.
The First 10-person, $100bn Company
Icon (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 471,511)
Icon bills itself as “the AI Admaker”—a one-man, high-leverage SaaS whose platform plans, generates and A/B-tests thousands of ads end-to-end for DTC brands. Founder/CEO Kennan Davison previously bootstrapped Skio to $20m ARR before launching Icon in 2025. Raised strategic angel backing from Founders Fund, an OpenAI exec and NFL star Saquon Barkley on April 2025. Icon targets $100m ARR within 16 months of incorporation and claims more than 2,200 paying brands six months post-launch. HQ in NYC, US.
The General Intelligence Company of New York (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 10,696)
Building swarms of AI agents to let a single person run a billion-dollar business. Co-founded by Abhishyant Khare and Andrew Pignanelli. Pre-seed / Seed; $2m total, last raise April 2025 – pre-seed from Acrew Capital & Compound. HQ in New York City. GIC’s mission—“one-person, one-billion-dollar company”—resonates with solo founders; early prototypes demo autonomous finance, HR and GTM agents working in concert.
Inbox Zero (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 764,450)
AI assistant that cleans, labels and drafts replies so founders hit “inbox zero” in minutes. Founded 2023 by Eliezer Steinbock. Last raised in January 2025—no external investors and no recorded funding rounds. Chrome/Outlook extension, newsletter-cleaner, and analytics; 8,000+ users and Web-traffic surge in 2025H1. HQ in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Kairos Computer (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 3,521,030)
“Show it once, automate it forever.” Kairos records a user’s on-screen actions, lets its agent learn the workflow, then reruns the task with no code. Founded 2025 by Manas Bam and Samarth Kumar. Bootstrapped—no institutional funding reported; public profiles list <10 teammates. Early adopters automate customer-support QA and spreadsheet manipulations in <15 min. HQ Remote (US-first).
SEO Bot (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 3,595,879)
Fully autonomous “SEO robot” that spins up keyword trees, writes long-form content and publishes site-maps without human input. Solo-built in 2023 by John Rush and still Bootstrapped—no outside capital disclosed. Hit 1m ARR across 1 500 SMB subscribers, launching a referral programme and GPT-agent marketplace in July 2025. HQ Warsaw, Poland.
Using LLMs Instead of Government Consulting
Code Four (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 264,847)
AI Copilot that turns police body-cam video into structured incident reports in minutes, cutting paperwork time by up to 70%. Founded by George Cheng and Dylan Nguyen in 2025 and bootstrapped through Y Combinator’s X25 batch, the San Francisco team has raised undisclosed amount (June 2025) from YC, Greg Brockman and others. Recent pilots with midsize U.S. police departments show a 35% increase in on-street time per officer. Partnering with Axon for camera-SDK integration and securing a DHS S&T SBIR Phase I grant. Based in SF.
Govini (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 380,873)
Delivers the AI-enabled Ark analytics platform that helps the U.S. Department of Defense spot supply-chain gaps and optimize acquisition spend. Founded by Eric Gillespie in Washington DC and now HQ in SF, the company has attracted backers including Accel, Salesforce Ventures and Symphony Technology Group. Govini last raised $20m (series c, 7 May 2015), bringing total funding to about $20m, and has since scaled revenue through multi-year DoD contracts rather than fresh venture capital. Released National Security Scorecard and rapid head-count growth in its classified-cleared engineering team. Based in SF, CA.
Vannevar Labs (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 273,210)
Builds battlefield-grade AI tools—such as Decrypt—that turn foreign-language chatter into mission-ready intelligence for U.S. national-security operators. Co-founded by Brett Granberg and Nini Hamrick, the Palo Alto-based startup has raised $87m, most recently a $75m series b (18 Jan 2023) led by Felicis with DFJ Growth, General Catalyst, Point72 Ventures and others. The team has doubled to 150+ employees and is targeting $1bn in annual national-security revenue by 2030. Multiple seven-figure production contracts across 15+ defense agencies; rapid clearance onboarding program for engineers. Based in Palo Alto, CA.
Govy (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 111,456)
São Paulo GovTech platform that uses generative-AI to match private-sector suppliers with public-sector tenders, automating compliance with Brazil’s new e-procurement law. Founded in 2024 by Alex Castrounis and Justin Johnson, the company secured a R $0.75m (~$150k) pre-seed round (Jan 2024) from Antler and angel investors. Govy is now piloting with three Brazilian states and claims its tender-scoring model lifts win-rates by 28%. Selected for South Summit Brazil 2024 early-stage showcase and on track for 500 paid seats by December 2025.
Video Generation as a Primitive
VideoGen (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 35,936)
Generates professional, copyright-free videos from a text prompt in seconds, stitching script-writing, voice-over, stock footage, and captions into a single click workflow. Founded 2023 by Anton Koenig (CEO) and David Grossman (CTO), the SF-based startup is in pre-seed / seed stage, backed by Y Combinator (S24) and a handful of angel investors. US $3.5m total funding—a $0.5m convertible note (January 2024) followed by a $3m seed round (Nov 4 2024) led by undisclosed angels. Bootstrapped to 1 million users and >US $1.7m ARR before YC —achieved with the founders’ own $30k savings —VideoGen now serves teams at Google, ByteDance and 3,000+ SMBs, processing thousands of videos per day.
Rosebud AI (🌟 Specter - Global Rank 562)
Rosebud AI turns text prompts into polished 2-D & 3-D game assets through its PixelVibe engine, letting solo devs ship art in minutes. Founded by Lisha Li (YC S19), the company is in Pre-seed / Seed and has now raised ≈ $14.8m—the $8.8m logged in the CSV plus a fresh $6m seed led by Bessemer (June 2025). Last round: Seed, 2025-06-04. Investors span Khosla Ventures, Lux, Adam D’Angelo, and Andrej Karpathy. Reported $2.7m in 2024 ARR and 18-person team. HQ: San Francisco, CA.
Gan.ai (🌟 Specter - Global Rank: 381,982)
Enables brands like Amazon and Salesforce to record once and auto-personalise thousands of videos with cloned voice & lip-sync. Founded 2021 by Suvrat Bhooshan (CEO), it is Seed stage with $5.25m raised May 2023 – seed led by Surge (Peak XV) and Emergent Ventures. The 25-person Bengaluru/SF team reports campaigns that lift email CTRs 3-5× and is hiring GPU infra engineers for a forthcoming “Real-Time Personalisation API.” HQ: Bengaluru, India & San Francisco, CA.
BHuman.ai (🌟 Specter - Global Rank: 157,251)
Lets sales and CX teams clone a face/voice once and send hyper-personalised “deep-fake-free” videos at scale. Founded 2020 by Alan Levesque and Kyle Milligan, the New-York-based startup is Seed / Bootstrapped with $885k Seed (2022-07-01) from Mistral Venture Partners. 14-person team hit $2.1m 2024 revenue and counts e-commerce sellers and SaaS SDR teams among 1,700 paying customers. HQ: New York City, NY.
Strategic Outlook
Across every cluster in the report—from AI-native operating systems for enterprise execution (Rhythms, Vespa.ai) and multi-agent orchestration clouds (Emergence, Agentuity) to workforce-retraining engines (Deeplearning.AI, RIIICO) and generative-video tool-chains (VideoGen, Rosebud AI)—one pattern is clear: AI is no longer a bolt-on feature but the substrate of next-generation software. Founders strip away model complexity and ship intelligence as a service that drops straight into existing workflows—Rhythms automates meeting cadences; Filuta AI compresses game-testing from weeks to days; VideoGen delivers one-click creative pipelines.
Three vectors will define competitive edge over the next 18 months
- Domain-specific depth
Start-ups that encode hard industry know-how command higher switching costs and defensible margins: &AI’s patent counsel workspace, RIIICO’s factory “digital twins,” Vannevar Labs’ defense-grade intelligence, or Code Four’s police-report copilot. - Agentic autonomy
Enterprises now want self-directed agents that plan, execute and improve without micro-management. Frameworks such as Emergence (“Agents Creating Agents”), CrewAI’s open-source crews and Agno’s multimodal agent builder show that measurable task-completion rates will outpace passive copilots. - Interoperability at scale
Open, API-first stacks that plug into incumbent SaaS, data lakes and security models reduce adoption friction and become default infrastructure. Vespa.ai’s vector-plus-keyword engine, Katara’s RAG layer and Skills.tech’s L&D analytics all win deals by meeting customers where their data already lives.
Capital is concentrating behind teams that marry these vectors to clear ROI stories: cost take-out (Transfr, Dropslab), revenue lift (VideoGen, Rosebud AI), or risk reduction (Govini). As macro tailwinds push enterprises toward efficiency, start-ups that embed intelligence where work already happens, prove value quickly and expand through partner ecosystems are positioned to capture the lion’s share of the emerging AI platform layer.
Key Takeaways
- Agent-orchestration is live, not lab-ware. Rhythms’ “OS for execution” and frameworks such as Emergence, Agentuity, Katara & Agno show autonomous agents chaining multi-step tasks in production, replacing brittle ETL scripts and static SOPs across support, data and DevOps.
- Domain-first stacks beat generic wrappers. Vertical tools—from Cassidy’s sales-ops copilots and Filuta’s game-testing agents to RIIICO’s factory twins and Dropslab’s AR work-instruction layer—embed deep field knowledge and are already posting 60-90 % efficiency gains.
- Retrieval infra is a venture magnet. Vespa.ai’s $31 M Series A underlines investor appetite for vector-search engines and GPU-ready hosting layers that power RAG pipelines for Yahoo, Spotify and Fortune 500 newcomers.
- Upskilling itself is big business. Deeplearning.AI, Skills.tech, Kepler + Co and VR-training players like Dropslab are racing to retool millions of frontline and knowledge workers for AI-augmented roles.
- Tiny teams, outsized traction. Solo or ≤10-person outfits—Icon, Inbox Zero, Kairos Computer, SEO Bot—are leveraging AI leverage and product-led growth to chase eight-figure ARR without raising large rounds.
- Foundational agent clouds draw the heaviest fire-power. Agentuity’s “cloud for a trillion agents” and Agno’s OSS framework are pulling top seed investors, signaling that control-plane and observability layers will underpin the next AI wave.
- Text-to-video is the new design primitive. VideoGen, Rosebud AI, Gan.ai and BHuman.ai collapse script-writing, voice-over and post-production into a single prompt, suggesting video will follow images in becoming on-demand, commoditised content.
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