New startup ideas · Consumer and commerce · Consumer
startup idea
Perpetua
A marketplace for persistent AI worlds that remember every player who visits.
Perpetua trains a real-time interactive world model with durable state, so a generated world keeps its geography, characters and consequences between sessions and across different visitors.
- Marketplace
- Consumer
- $100B+ market
- Creates a new category
- Global from day one
4/5
venture judge
5
similar startups, last 2 years (26 all-time)
94%
of 4 nearest real companies still alive
yes
8 matching federal grants and programs
Direction supported by government programs and grants
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.
58
Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 35.3 x 1.64
Active
competition: more crowded than 52% of ideas · headwind x0.74
+3.8
government priorities, secondary (40 matching grants)
Trend
28
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)61
- Rounds announced 2025+ in the sector25
- Sector direction (live batch)0
- 2026 trend analyst25
Demand
53
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)60
- Someone already pays (similar companies, recent / all-time)100
- Operator judge: real pain0
100x potential
52
Can it return a fund? The venture judge (double weight), market-size and moat axes, neighbours still alive, the technologist judge.
- Venture judge75
- Market size axis100
- Moat axis20
- Neighbours still alive16
- Technologist judge25
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 marketplace, persistent, worlds, remember, player, visits, trains, real-time.
The idea in full
- What
- Perpetua trains a real-time interactive world model with durable state, so a generated world keeps its geography, characters and consequences between sessions and across different visitors. Creators publish worlds self-serve, players subscribe or pay per world, and Perpetua takes a cut while covering inference. It is a model company before it is a marketplace: multi-year training runs, a simulation data pipeline and a large standing GPU commitment come well before meaningful revenue.
- Why now
- Five AI game products launched in the last three batches of this cluster (Instaplay, Pops, Playabl.ai, Fifth Door, Pax Historia) and YC's Fall 2026 request list asks for AI-powered consumer products for a billion people, yet all of these generate throwaway sessions with nothing that survives the tab closing.
- Wedge: first customer and entry point
- One genre, one surface: persistent top-down social worlds published into Discord and mobile web, 50 hand-picked creators, tipping revenue while the state layer is still a database rather than a learned model.
- Path to 100x
- Games and interactive entertainment is a $100B+ market, and persistent playable worlds is a new category rather than a share grab, because the unit sold is a place people come back to instead of a title they finish. There is no moat at the start - unless creators and accumulated world state compound faster than commodity world models improve, this is only a storefront.
- Ceiling
- Generated worlds stay novelties with week-one retention collapse, so ARPU never reaches real game economics.
- Closest real companies, as the generator saw them
- Playabl.ai, Fifth Door, Pops and Instaplay all generate games on someone else's model and reset between sessions; Perpetua owns the model and sells persistence, which is what makes a world worth returning to. Wuri in the graveyard shows that generated story content without persistence or a creator economy does not hold users.
- Main risk
- A frontier lab ships a world model API and every competitor gets Perpetua's core capability for a monthly bill.
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
4/5
$100B+ games market and a durable-state world model is a real power-law bet, discounted because a frontier lab API could commoditize the core.
Bootstrapper
1/5
Multi-year training runs and a standing GPU commitment in the hottest hype space, with a frontier lab able to commoditise it by API.
Operator
1/5
Nobody has a budget for persistent worlds; it is a multi-year training run in front of a consumer entertainment bet.
Technologist
2/5
A durable-state real-time world model is a multi-year frontier bet that one lab's world model API commoditises overnight.
Risk
1/5
Publishes into Discord and mobile web on a self-built world model that a frontier lab API could commoditise, with Wuri already in the graveyard.
trends
2/5
Cites the billion-user consumer RFS, but persistent worlds need no 2025-2026 shift and five cited AI game peers show the trend already crowded.
Similar startups in the directory
Companies whose pitch matches most of the idea's terms (marketplace, persistent, worlds, remember, player, visits, trains, real-time): 26 all-time, 5 from the last two years. Same matching as Idea Check.
The intelligent development platform for robotics
AI Infra for real-time vision applications
Large-scale real-world robot & human data for embodied AI
EPA-approved, powered by AI and computer vision, Xplorobot is the most cost-effective, labor-efficient methane detection solution—streamlining inspections, optimizing emissions reporting, and ensuring compliance.
Misprint is building Robinhood for Pokemon cards
IRIS is poised to revolutionize the surgical training marketplace with its collaborative augmented reality (AR) software that is device agnostic. The company's innovative platform enables surgeons to train and collaborate with each other in real time. This immersive and interactive learning experience is proven to improve surgical skills and outcomes. In addition, IRIS's non-provisional patent protects its unique technology, giving it a competitive edge in the rapidly growing AR/VR surgical training market, which had $2.7 billion in revenue in 2022. IRIS is well-positioned to capture a significant share of this lucrative market.
Arc Simulations
End-to-end content, learning, & deal intelligence for B2B sales teams
Ecosystem Platform for Restaurants in India
AI workspace for professional gamers
Operator of a SaaS-based platform intended to help music labels and artists track their songs to collect royalties. The company's tracking system authenticates, verifies, and validates media streamed in real-time and reduces the tracking discrepancies between Digital Service Providers (DSPs) and rights holders, enabling DSPs to increase their royalty revenue for rights holders while limiting legal exposure to royalty lawsuits.
AI motion capture for youth athletes.
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
29
startup-relevant grants in Consumer
$8M
awarded in the sector, tracked
National Science Foundation · STTR Phase I · $305K · posted 2026-08-21
National Science Foundation · CSCS: Circuits and Systems for · $550K · posted 2026-08-04
- I-Corps: Translation Potential of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Simulation for Crisis-Ready Behavioral Health Trainingawardhigh relevance
National Science Foundation · I-Corps · $50K · posted 2026-07-29
- CPS-FR: A Cyber-Physical-LLM-Human System (CPLHS) Framework for Vision-based Drone Applicationsawardhigh relevance
National Science Foundation · CPS-Cyber-Physical Systems · $900K · posted 2026-07-26
- SBIR Phase II: Solving the 4,023-Year-Old Logistics Control Problem Using Modern IoT Standards and a Novel Combination of Passive RFID, UWB, and Cellular Technologyawardhigh relevance
National Science Foundation · SBIR Phase II · $1M · posted 2026-07-24
National Science Foundation · SBIR Phase I · $304K · posted 2026-07-08
National Science Foundation · STTR Phase I · $305K · posted 2026-07-06
- SBIR Fast-Track: Home-Based Stroke Rehabilitation: Researching and Developing the Bluetooth Electromyography-Based StrokeTherapeutic (BEST) Systemawardhigh relevance
National Science Foundation · SBIR Fast-Track · $305K · posted 2026-06-25
Market signal
What the radar sees in Consumer: new companies by cohort year, the forming YC batch, and outcomes since the February snapshot.
Consumer · 170 → 218 → 206 → 153 → 49 new companies 2022 → 2026 · 87% aliveYC S26: 8 in this cluster, 3% of the batch (was 5% in X26) (F26 is still forming: 21 listed)Since February, of 787 YC companies here: 2 acquired, 4 shut down, 37 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
- Consumer
- Business model
- Marketplace
- Path to 100x
- Creates a new category
- Market size
- $100B+ 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
- No moat yet
- Geography
- Global from day one
- Regulation
- Unregulated
- Vibe
- Hot space
Listed under
An idea sits in its own sector and in any sector its text clearly touches.
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Fictional company written 2026-08-23 from MarkosWeb data; the companies, grants and numbers around it are real and tracked. Treat the idea as a research prompt, not a plan.