New startup ideas · AI and software · Horizontal AI assistants
startup idea
Provenant
An agent runtime that turns every AI action into regulator-admissible evidence.
Provenant is an assistant for licensed professionals in supervised industries (broker-dealers, insurers, pharma commercial teams) that drafts, sends and acts, with each step passed through a jurisdiction rule pack and written to Provenant's own write-once retention infrastructure with cryptographic attestation.
- AI agent as a service
- Enterprise
- $1-10B market
- Creates a new category
- Global from day one
3/5
venture judge
2
similar startups, last 2 years (9 all-time)
81%
of 4 nearest real companies still alive
yes
8 matching federal grants and programs
Direction supported by government programs and grants
Test it before you build it
$1,800 · 6 weeks · 20 prospects
For about $1,800 and six weeks, prove that broker-dealer compliance officers will pay $3,000 up front for supervised AI drafting with an attested record, before any retention infrastructure is built.
1Focus group: who and where
Chief Compliance Officer at an independent US broker-dealer with 50-500 registered reps, fresh off the SEC and FINRA off-channel communications sweep, who suspects producing reps are already pasting client emails into ChatGPT with no supervision record
where to find 20 · The NSCP (National Society of Compliance Professionals) membership and regional events, the SIFMA Compliance and Legal Society, LinkedIn Sales Navigator (title 'Chief Compliance Officer' plus broker-dealer keywords), with the account list built from FINRA's public firm directory filtered to firms of 50-500 reps
2Sell first, build later
A 60-day design-partner pilot: AI email drafting for 10 named producing reps, every draft and send written to a write-once log, a weekly supervision queue for the CCO, and an examiner-ready export at the end; delivered concierge-style behind a thin interface, starting within 45 days of signature
the ask · $3,000 per pilot invoiced up front, converting to $60 per rep per month at firm rollout
a real yes · A real yes is a paid invoice or countersigned pilot with a start date and 10 named reps; not a yes: 'send it to vendor due diligence' with no date, an unpaid sandbox, or conference-booth enthusiasm
3Small experiments
The first one attacks the riskiest assumption; each ends with a number that says whether to run the next.
1. Fifteen CCO problem calls
$150 · 12 days
Book 15 calls with CCOs sourced from the FINRA firm list and Sales Navigator, opening on the off-channel sweep. Ask each: do your reps use AI drafting today, what would an examiner find if asked for those records, and what did your last comms-supervision remediation cost.
keep going if · 10 of 15 confirm ungoverned AI drafting is happening now, and 6 call the missing supervision record a likely exam finding
2. Attested export prototype walkthrough
$200 · 10 days
Build a Figma prototype of the supervision queue plus a sample 'attested export' PDF formatted the way a firm would hand it to an examiner. Walk 12 CCOs through it on 30-minute calls and ask them to mark what their counsel would reject.
keep going if · 6 of 12 book a pilot-scoping call with their head of supervision or outside counsel present
3. Paid supervision audit concierge
$300 · 15 days
Offer a paid audit: the firm exports 200 already-retained rep emails under NDA, the team runs a FINRA 2210 and 3110 rule pack by hand with LLM assist, and returns a flagged supervision queue plus a mock attested export within 10 business days. Invoice $2,500 up front; this uses only data the firm already retains, so no security review of new infrastructure is needed.
keep going if · 2 of 20 firms pay the $2,500 invoice before delivery
4Collect a deposit up front
Tesla took $1,000 refundable reservations for the Model 3 and $100 for the Cybertruck before building either: the deposit is the measurement, not the revenue.
$3,000
per prospect, refundable
how · A paid design-partner pilot invoiced 100% up front at $3,000 after NDA, signed by the CCO; roughly 4% of a first-year 100-rep contract, inside the range a small broker-dealer can approve without board sign-off set up: Stripe Invoicing ↗
what it reserves · One of 5 design-partner slots, the firm's jurisdiction rule pack built first, and $60 per rep per month locked for year one
refund · Fully refundable until the pilot start date, and refunded after start if the attested export fails review by the firm's counsel
target · 3 paid pilots from 20 CCO conversations within 45 days
Go: build it if
3 pilots paid ($9,000 collected), 6 or more additional firms in vendor review with dated next steps, and the audit finding real flaggable AI drafts at 2 of 2 audited firms; then fund the retention estate
Kill: stop if
Zero payments after 45 days, or 10 of 15 CCOs say their existing archiving vendor already captures AI drafts well enough for their examiner, or every willing firm demands SOC 2 and a 9-month due-diligence cycle before any money moves
Would you run this test?
One tap. The yes-share feeds the Demand pillar of this idea's score; nobody sees who answered.
Budgets are out-of-pocket estimates for a team of one to three, US market. Size the deposit to the deal, and check the terms before taking money in a regulated line.
Scorecard
One score that balances how trendy the idea is, the demand for it and its potential for 100x, with competition measured relative to every other idea in the catalog. Recent startup trends first, government priorities second.
41
Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 25.2 x 1.64
Warm
competition: more crowded than 32% of ideas · headwind x0.84
+3.3
government priorities, secondary (26 matching grants)
Trend
6
Is the wave forming now? 2025-26 entrants vs 2023-24, rounds since 2025, the sector's live-batch direction, the 2026 trend analyst.
- Entrants 2025-26 vs 2023-24 (similar companies)0
- Rounds announced 2025+ in the sector0
- Sector direction (live batch)0
- 2026 trend analyst25
Demand
60
Does anyone want it? YC's current RFS, companies already paid for something similar, the operator judge, founders' yes-rate in decks, readers who would run the test.
- YC asks for it (current RFS: idea / sector)30
- Someone already pays (similar companies, recent / all-time)75
- Operator judge: real pain75
100x potential
48
Can it return a fund? The venture judge (double weight), market-size and moat axes, neighbours still alive, the technologist judge.
- Venture judge50
- Market size axis33
- Moat axis80
- Neighbours still alive1
- Technologist judge75
Score = 100 x cbrt(Trend x Demand x 100x) x (1 - 0.5 x crowding) + government bonus (max 5), calibrated so the 95th-percentile idea scores 90 (order never changes). A geometric mean: a weak pillar cannot be papered over. Percentiles are among the 272 ideas in the catalog; the terms matched were runtime, action, regulator-admissible, evidence, assistant, licensed, professionals, supervised.
The idea in full
- What
- Provenant is an assistant for licensed professionals in supervised industries (broker-dealers, insurers, pharma commercial teams) that drafts, sends and acts, with each step passed through a jurisdiction rule pack and written to Provenant's own write-once retention infrastructure with cryptographic attestation. A rep signs up per seat and works normally; the compliance officer gets a supervision queue and an export a regulator will accept without argument. Provenant owns the retention estate in each jurisdiction it serves, which is why it can attest rather than promise.
- Why now
- NSF is funding 'Collaborative Research: RI: Conditioning Uncertainty on Epistemic Context in Human-AI Communication' at ~$941k, which is the calibration problem a supervision queue depends on. Meanwhile AirCaps (yc F25) and COACH (yc S26) are building conversation copilots for sales reps with no supervisory record at all, and Solari AI died in 2024 giving non-technical staff agents that 'work right out of the box' with nothing accountable behind them.
- Wedge: first customer and entry point
- US broker-dealer branch offices, one workflow: client email and message drafting under a supervision review queue, sold seat by seat to producing reps whose firm already retains communications.
- Path to 100x
- Supervision and regulated-communications tooling is a $2-8B market that expands as agents start acting rather than suggesting, and Provenant prices per licensed professional in a population of millions. Distribution is the compounding asset: seats spread bottom-up inside a firm, firm-wide policy then makes the runtime mandatory, and OEM deals put it under other regulated desktop tools until it is the default place regulated AI actions get written.
- Ceiling
- Regulators publish a simple logging schema every vendor implements natively, and evidence-grade recording becomes a checkbox feature rather than a runtime anyone pays for.
- Closest real companies, as the generator saw them
- AirCaps and COACH assist the same conversations but for unregulated sales floors, with no retention, no rule pack and no attestation. Caretta and Nomi do realtime sales call assistance and stop at the call. Provenant's product is the record, not the suggestion.
- Main risk
- Building certified retention and attestation infrastructure across jurisdictions takes three years, and a compliance archiving incumbent bolts a rule pack onto an existing estate in one.
Five judges
Each judge scores every idea in the catalog with a named rubric; the venture judge decides whether a card is shown at all (4-5 is venture-grade).
Venture investor
3/5
Per-seat pricing across millions of licensed professionals is real, but a $2-8B market and three years of retention buildout limit the power-law upside.
Bootstrapper
1/5
Owning certified retention infrastructure in every jurisdiction is a three-year, eight-figure build before the first broker-dealer seat pays.
Operator
4/5
Broker-dealers already pay for supervision and retention, and the compliance officer owns that budget, though the three-year attestation build invites a faster archiving incumbent.
Technologist
4/5
Owning certified write-once retention plus per-jurisdiction rule packs is three years of unglamorous infrastructure no conversation copilot like AirCaps can bolt on.
Risk
4/5
Owns certified retention estate per jurisdiction and sells seat by seat to producing reps, so no single firm or channel gates it.
trends
2/5
A three-year R&D build into certified retention races bolt-on archiving incumbents, and its why-now leans on a $941k NSF grant, secondary at best.
Similar startups in the directory
Companies whose pitch matches most of the idea's terms (runtime, action, regulator-admissible, evidence, assistant, licensed, professionals, supervised): 9 all-time, 2 from the last two years. Same matching as Idea Check.
Personal doctors through chat
The AI Assistant for Gmail
Runtime supervision for AI agents.
Workforce platform to recruit, license, credential & manage clinicians
A mental health benefits platform for employers.
The Only Oncology Clinical Reasoning Engine. Turning intelligence into expertise at the speed of care.
mediVR is a Medical equipment which applies the video technology of Virtual Reality, etc.
betterment + mint all within a single app.
Rocket Doctor is a telemedicine marketplace that enables physicians to bring an advanced doctor's office directly to patients’ homes.
The generator's reference companies
Real companies the model named as closest when it wrote the card, with their fate. A check mark is a company the radar could verify in its directory.
Public money in this direction
US federal grants, SBIR/STTR awards and open opportunities from the radar's public-money feed, matched to the idea's terms; the sector totals give the context.
8
grants and programs matching the idea
15
startup-relevant grants in Horizontal AI assistants
$30M
awarded in the sector, tracked
- SBIR Phase II: Ai-mediated Neurotechnology for Enhanced Access to Virtual and Physical Realityawardhigh relevance
National Science Foundation · SBIR Phase II · $1M · posted 2026-08-04
- III: Building Reliable Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Agents for Health Applicationsawardhigh relevance
National Science Foundation · Info Integration & Informatics · $706K · posted 2026-07-20
National Science Foundation · SBIR Phase II · $1M · posted 2026-07-16
National Science Foundation · SBIR Phase I · $304K · posted 2026-07-08
- Developing a Learning Platform to Support Minimally Verbal Individuals with Autismawardhigh relevance
NIH / NIDCD · STTR phase I · $313K · posted 2026-07-01
- The Development of a Personalized Feedback Program for Substance Use Disorder Riskawardhigh relevance
NIH / NIDA · STTR phase I · $305K · posted 2026-06-01
NIH / NINDS · SBIR phase II · $50K · posted 2025-12-01
- CaringGPT: Empowering Dementia Caregivers with Personalized and Accessible Resources to Match Their Needs, Enhance Cope with Caregiving, and Reduce Stressawardhigh relevance
NIH / NIA · SBIR phase II · $500K · posted 2025-09-20
Market signal
What the radar sees in Horizontal AI assistants: new companies by cohort year, the forming YC batch, and outcomes since the February snapshot.
Horizontal AI assistants · 30 → 77 → 84 → 57 → 28 new companies 2022 → 2026 · 89% aliveYC S26: 7 in this cluster, 3% of the batch (was 3% in X26) (F26 is still forming: 21 listed)Since February, of 129 YC companies here: 3 acquired, 3 shut down, 30 rewrote their pitch
Design attributes
The card is one cell of a designed set: every axis below was chosen before the text was written, and the text had to realize it.
- Buyer
- Enterprise
- Business model
- AI agent as a service
- Path to 100x
- Creates a new category
- Market size
- $1-10B market
- Capital intensity
- Capital-heavy (hardware, bio, infra)
- Speed to revenue
- R&D first, revenue after 3 years
- Technical depth
- Deep tech: ML, hardware, bio
- Go-to-market
- Self-serve
- Moat
- Distribution moat
- Geography
- Global from day one
- Regulation
- Heavily regulated
- Vibe
- Boring business
Listed under
An idea sits in its own sector and in any sector its text clearly touches.
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