{"id": "locke-yc-s26", "added": "2026-08-12", "name": "Locke (formerly Justinian)", "kind": "company", "status": "raised", "batch": "YC S26", "what": "An AI-native government affairs firm. Agents plus in-house policy staff track regulation, lobby, and chase federal contracts for early-stage companies.", "founders": ["Parth Badhwar (White House, Deloitte policy team, Clipbook, Harris campaign)"], "deal": "YC standard: $500K, as $125K post-money for 7% plus $375K uncapped MFN.", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/locke", "url_status": "verified", "note": "Two people billing for lobbying work itself, so the price moves with output instead of headcount. YC lists a $500K annual run-rate six weeks after a quiet launch, across defense, healthcare and govtech clients. The obvious objection is that government affairs runs on relationships an agent does not have. The firm's answer so far is to keep human lobbyists and put the agents underneath them, on the monitoring. It has since renamed to Locke.", "sources": ["https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/justinian", "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/locke", "https://locke.inc"], "site": "https://locke.inc", "accelerator": "yc"}
{"id": "emphere-ai-house", "added": "2026-08-12", "name": "Emphere", "kind": "company", "status": "raised", "batch": "AI House 2026", "accelerator": "ai-house", "what": "Patches known vulnerabilities inside the container images a company already ships, so nobody has to adopt somebody else's hardened base image.", "founders": ["Ankit Kumar, CEO (six years in security at Uber)", "Pallav Gupta, CTO (engineering at CarGurus and Twitter)"], "deal": "$2.1M pre-seed from AI House and Outsiders Fund, June 4th 2026.", "site": "https://www.emphere.com", "url": "https://www.geekwire.com/2026/find-it-fix-it-seattle-startup-emphere-raises-2-1m-to-automate-software-vulnerability-patching/", "url_status": "verified", "venue": "Seattle", "note": "Scanners have been commodity for years, and every one of them ends by handing an engineer a list. A company selling into banks then spends weeks rebuilding images to clear it. Emphere patches the distribution the customer already runs. That is the harder engineering problem, and it is why the incumbents sell hardened base images instead. Five people, two of them security researchers who attack the patched images to check the work.", "sources": ["https://www.geekwire.com/2026/find-it-fix-it-seattle-startup-emphere-raises-2-1m-to-automate-software-vulnerability-patching/", "https://www.securityweek.com/emphere-raises-2-1-million-for-ai-powered-vulnerability-remediation/", "https://www.emphere.com"]}
{"id": "decawork-yc-s26", "added": "2026-08-12", "name": "Decawork", "kind": "company", "status": "raised", "batch": "YC S26", "what": "An agent control plane for IT. Deploy agents with real identities and scoped credentials, put them through approval, and keep an audit trail.", "founders": ["Sarthak Aggarwal (NVIDIA AI systems, deployed at OpenAI and Meta; Ema)", "Aman Raj (AI compliance tooling at Barclays, used by 240+ teams)"], "deal": "YC standard: $500K, as $125K post-money for 7% plus $375K uncapped MFN.", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/decawork", "url_status": "verified", "note": "The product assumes enterprises already have agents running on shared human credentials, with no approval step and no log. That is the same mess service accounts made, and it took a decade to clean up. If Decawork has the timing right, the budget sits with IT, which is a different sale from the one most AI startups are making, and the thing that wins is an identity layer nobody currently owns.", "sources": ["https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/decawork", "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/Artificial%20Intelligence", "https://decawork.ai/"], "site": "https://decawork.ai/", "accelerator": "yc"}
{"id": "agent-fm-yc-s26", "added": "2026-08-12", "name": "Agent FM", "kind": "company", "status": "raised", "batch": "YC S26", "what": "A desktop app that puts every coding agent you are running into one group chat, with live text and audio updates you can answer.", "founders": ["Aniket Deshpande, CEO (Meta Superintelligence Labs, agent orchestration)", "Mugdhaa Patankar, CTO (Snowflake, developer productivity AI; Twitch)"], "deal": "YC standard: $500K, as $125K post-money for 7% plus $375K uncapped MFN.", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/agent-fm", "url_status": "verified", "note": "Running four Claude Code and Codex sessions costs almost nothing. Catching the one that made a bad assumption forty minutes ago costs a lot, and it gets paid in tokens and rework. Agent FM's answer is ambient: the agents talk in a group chat you overhear, with audio, so you steer instead of poll. The risk is obvious. Cursor and Claude Code could ship the same thing in a release.", "sources": ["https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/agent-fm", "https://www.agentfm.ai/"], "site": "https://www.agentfm.ai/", "accelerator": "yc"}
{"id": "yc-s26", "added": "2026-08-11", "name": "Y Combinator Summer 2026", "kind": "incubator", "status": "cohort", "batch": "YC S26", "what": "197 companies, about 40 launched so far; the AI cluster is agents that do work, infrastructure to govern them, and connectors to the physical world.", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer+2026", "url_status": "verified", "note": "The AI cluster in this batch runs to agents that do work, infrastructure to govern them, and hardware connectors. Demo Day is September 10th, so the list is still filling. Individual companies are written up on their own pages.", "sources": ["https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer+2026", "https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs", "https://www.tldl.io/blog/yc-ai-startups-2026"], "accelerator": "yc"}
{"id": "unitree-ipo", "added": "2026-08-11", "name": "Unitree", "kind": "ipo", "status": "priced", "what": "Priced its Shanghai STAR Market IPO at 150.80 yuan per share on August 6th 2026, raising about 6.1B yuan for roughly 10% of enlarged capital; subscription opened August 10th.", "venue": "Shanghai", "url": "", "url_status": "unconfirmed", "note": "China's first mainland humanoid listing, at about a $9B valuation on 2025 revenue of about 1.7B yuan. DeepSeek appears as a strategic placement investor, its first disclosed robotics position. Priced into an awkward tape: AgiBot overtook Unitree on H1 shipments in the same week the book opened.", "sources": ["https://techstartups.com/2026/08/10/top-tech-news-today-august-10-2026-apple-google-meta-openai-unitree-more/", "https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/06/chinese-humanoid-robot-maker-unitree-prices-ipo-at-9-billion-valuation.html", "https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202608/1367695.shtml", "https://technode.com/2026/08/10/unitree-opens-a-share-ipo-subscription/"]}
{"id": "theseus-infrastructure", "added": "2026-08-11", "name": "Theseus Infrastructure", "kind": "company", "status": "raised", "what": "Data-center platform announced August 10th 2026, owned and majority-funded by Macquarie Asset Management and GIC funds, with Anthropic as anchor tenant under long-term leases.", "venue": "United States", "url": "https://www.macquarie.com/au/en/about/news/2026/anthropic-mam-gic-data-centre-infrastructure-partnership.html", "url_status": "verified", "note": "The structure is the product: Anthropic gets purpose-built US capacity without the assets touching its pre-IPO balance sheet, and commits to 100% of grid-upgrade costs plus any consumer electricity increases its demand causes. No dollar figure disclosed, which for a platform of this ambition is itself information.", "sources": ["https://www.macquarie.com/au/en/about/news/2026/anthropic-mam-gic-data-centre-infrastructure-partnership.html", "https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-10/anthropic-macquarie-and-gic-form-venture-for-ai-data-centers"]}
{"id": "psibot", "added": "2026-08-11", "name": "Psibot", "kind": "company", "status": "raised", "what": "Chinese robotics startup at a $1.48B valuation.", "venue": "China", "url": "https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-23/china-s-psibot-becomes-latest-ai-startup-to-hit-1-billion-value", "url_status": "verified", "note": "One of the nearly forty AI unicorns minted in 2026. Track the concentration of robotics money in China; the individual round says less.", "sources": ["https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-23/china-s-psibot-becomes-latest-ai-startup-to-hit-1-billion-value"]}
{"id": "openai-ipo", "added": "2026-08-11", "name": "OpenAI", "kind": "ipo", "status": "filed", "what": "Confidential S-1 around May 22nd 2026, targeting September at up to $850B.", "venue": "United States", "url": "https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/openai-signals-potential-stock-market-debut-while-weighing-private-company-advantages", "url_status": "verified", "note": "The secondary market has already voted on this one: roughly $600M of OpenAI shares sat unsold while $2B of bids queued for Anthropic. Informed holders express views in secondaries that they will not state publicly.", "sources": ["https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/openai-signals-potential-stock-market-debut-while-weighing-private-company-advantages", "https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317955/20260607/openai-targets-ipo-soon-september-850-billion.htm"]}
{"id": "discovery-loop", "added": "2026-08-11", "name": "Discovery Loop", "kind": "company", "status": "raised", "what": "Public-benefit corporation aimed at automating the scientific method, founded by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat.", "venue": "Private", "url": "https://qz.com/jeff-dean-google-chief-scientist-discovery-loop-startup-080526", "url_status": "verified", "note": "Dean and Ghemawat left Google after 27 years, taking Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. Google is a founding investor, cloud partner and first-year compute supplier, which reads more like a settlement than a blessing.", "sources": ["https://qz.com/jeff-dean-google-chief-scientist-discovery-loop-startup-080526", "https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/05/jeff-dean-and-other-top-ai-researchers-are-leaving-google-to-launch-their-own-startup/"]}
{"id": "databricks-round", "added": "2026-08-11", "name": "Databricks", "kind": "company", "status": "raised", "what": "Strategic round at a $188B valuation.", "venue": "Private", "url": "https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/databricks-raising-strategic-round-funding-188-billion-valuation", "url_status": "verified", "note": "Announced by the company, so the number is theirs and no reporter reconstructed it. Read it as a gauge of whether late-stage private marks are still being set by conviction or by momentum.", "sources": ["https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/databricks-raising-strategic-round-funding-188-billion-valuation"]}
{"id": "anthropic-ipo", "added": "2026-08-11", "name": "Anthropic", "kind": "ipo", "status": "filed", "what": "Confidential S-1 filed June 1st 2026 at a $965B valuation on a $47B run-rate.", "venue": "United States", "url": "https://futurumgroup.com/insights/anthropic-files-for-ipo-looking-to-beat-openai-to-the-punch/", "url_status": "verified", "note": "Enterprise-weighted revenue growing from $1B in 20 months. The $1.75T figure circulating in some coverage appears to be contamination from SpaceX's valuation; $965B paired with $47B is the internally consistent pair.", "sources": ["https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/anthropic-files-confidential-1-joins-161008569.html", "https://futurumgroup.com/insights/anthropic-files-for-ipo-looking-to-beat-openai-to-the-punch/", "https://www.useluminix.com/reports/company-overviews/what-do-we-know-about-the-anthropic-ipo"]}
{"id": "agibot-ipo", "added": "2026-08-11", "name": "AgiBot", "kind": "ipo", "status": "rumored", "what": "Shanghai humanoid maker that began a Hong Kong listing process on July 24th 2026, targeting HK$40-50B (about $5.1-6.4B); no prospectus filed yet.", "venue": "Hong Kong", "url": "https://www.caixinglobal.com/2026-07-24/agibot-begins-hong-kong-ipo-process-as-chinas-embodied-ai-startups-race-to-list-102467856.html", "url_status": "verified", "note": "Rumored, not filed: sponsors (Citic, CICC, Morgan Stanley) are hired but no A1 is public. The company it would be judged against just changed places with it. AgiBot shipped 8,400 humanoids in H1 2026, 44% of the world market, overtaking Unitree in the half Unitree spent going public. Backers include Tencent, Hillhouse and BYD.", "sources": ["https://www.caixinglobal.com/2026-07-24/agibot-begins-hong-kong-ipo-process-as-chinas-embodied-ai-startups-race-to-list-102467856.html", "https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3363544/agibot-overtakes-unitree-top-global-humanoid-robot-vendor-first-half-amid-ipo-push"]}
{"id": "aiai-holdings-s1", "added": "2026-08-11", "name": "AIAI Holdings Corp", "kind": "ipo", "status": "filed", "what": "Form S-1 on file with the SEC.", "venue": "United States", "url": "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2096362/000149315226003639/ex99-2.htm", "url_status": "verified", "note": "Filed with EDGAR, so this is the primary document and not coverage of it. Included because the filing itself is readable, which is rare in a pipeline built mostly of confidential submissions.", "sources": ["https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2096362/000149315226003639/ex99-2.htm"]}