State of the radar
20,480 companies tracked across YC, Techstars, 500 Global, Plug and Play, SOSV and a16z speedrun, with YC coverage from W24 through S26. The headline is that the AI-agent wave has stopped expanding and started differentiating. Vertical AI agents are still the largest single cluster at 25.8% of the latest batch and 546 companies since W24, but they lost 3.2pp over the last two batches — the sharpest decline on the board. Agent infrastructure is flat at 16.6%. What is absorbing that share is not a new abstraction layer: it is hardware, money, compute and regulated industries. Meanwhile 546 YC companies materially rewrote their pitch since February, and the direction of those rewrites is more informative than the batch composition.
Rising
- Robotics and physical world (13.1% of latest batch, +2.0pp, 129 total) — the fastest-growing cluster; software-first founders are moving to problems where a competitor cannot ship a copy in a weekend.
- Fintech (4.4%, +1.8pp, 96 total) — after two years of neglect, agents that move money and credit products rebuilt on cheaper distribution are pulling teams back.
- AI infra and compute (7.4%, +1.7pp, 82 total) — inference cost, not model quality, is now the binding constraint, and founders are selling into that.
- Healthcare and bio (5.7%, +1.7pp, 74 total) and Defense and space (3.9%, +1.5pp, 46 total) — both are slow-sales-cycle categories that founders avoided when generic AI wrappers were easy to fund.
Crowded
- Vertical AI agents — 546 companies since W24 and 188 of 710 tracked rewrote their pitch. That is a quarter of the cluster changing its story in six months: a saturation signal, not a momentum signal.
- Agent infrastructure — 255 companies, 198 of them mapped to a single RFS theme ("Self-Maintaining APIs"). Highest supply against any request on the board.
- Consumer — 783 tracked companies, but only 1 acquisition and 34 rewrites since February. Large, static, and low-liquidity.
What happened to last season's startups
Since 28 February: 651 companies added, 63 acquired, 56 marked inactive, 209 delisted. B2B SaaS produced the most exits (10 acquired of 752). Vertical AI agents produced the most churn. Three repositionings show where teams are going: Sciloop (F25) moved from "AI Co-Scientist that automates ML experimentation" to "Expert STEM reasoning data for frontier AI labs," and hillclimb (F25) from a "human superintelligence community" to "Training Data for Recursive Self-Improvement" — both abandoned the application layer to sell data to labs. LogosGuard (F25) went from enterprise AI risk management software to "the sensitive data redaction layer for AI," trading a governance narrative for a concrete piece of plumbing. Vespper (F24) narrowed from an AI document editor to "the best DOCX MCP for agents." The pattern: from product to picks-and-shovels, and from broad to painfully specific.
Open windows
- The Future of American Defense — only 37 companies in the mapped cluster since 2025, the thinnest supply against any Fall 2026 request.
- Proving You're Human and AI-Native Compliance Infrastructure — 38 companies each. Two distinct problems sharing one undersupplied cluster.
- Multiplayer AI — 41 companies. Nearly all assistant work is still single-user, single-session.
What the state is funding
1,111 open federal opportunities (282 close within 30 days) and 3,380 NSF awards worth $2,559M. The largest gap between public money and founder attention is healthcare and bio: 131 open calls and 138 awards against 244 startups since 2024, a 15.5pp gap. Then AI infra and compute (10.3pp), robotics (8.6pp) and climate and energy (7.0pp). Two calls a small team can actually answer: the SBA's Manufacturing and Small Business Cybersecurity Resilience Program 2026, closing 4 September 2026, and the NIH Parent SBIR (R43/R44), open until 5 April 2027 and the standard non-dilutive entry point for a two-person healthcare team.
Idea candidates
- Provenance and human-verification infrastructure for agent-to-agent transactions — the "Proving You're Human" problem inverted, with 38 companies of competition.
- A shared-session layer for AI assistants: multiple people, one agent, persistent context — the least-built request against 41 companies.
- Cybersecurity compliance tooling for small manufacturers, funded by the SBA resilience program closing 4 September, sold into a segment with 27 open federal calls behind it.