Synthetic Sciences is a Y Combinator (W26) startup building AI co-scientists that run the full research loop - literature review, hypothesis generation, experiment design, code execution on GPUs, analysis, and publication-ready drafts. Founded in 2025 by Aayam Bansal and Ishaan Gangwani, the company pairs a research product (synsci, plus the open-source OpenScience workbench and the Atlas compute layer) with a thesis that proprietary research-process data is the path to scientific foundation models with genuine research 'taste'. Its biology mode reached 92% on the BixBench Verified benchmark.
Axoniq is a Dutch-founded enterprise software company that builds the backend infrastructure for event-sourced systems and, increasingly, for enterprise AI. Born from the open-source Axon Framework created by Allard Buijze in 2009, the company provides an event-sourcing platform - Axon Framework, Axon Server, and an agent runtime - that gives applications a complete, replayable memory of every decision they make. That memory is the foundation for auditability, explainability, and observability that regulated industries need before they trust AI in production. Axoniq's tools are downloaded 70 million+ times and used by more than 65,000 organizations worldwide.
LiveKit is an open-source platform and global edge network for building real-time voice, video, and physical AI applications. Born as a WebRTC media server for livestreaming and conferencing, it has grown into the infrastructure layer that lets AI agents see, hear, and speak with sub-100ms latency. Its technology powers ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode and is used by developers at OpenAI, xAI, Salesforce, Tesla, and Spotify, collectively facilitating billions of real-time calls each year.
FounderNest is an AI-native market intelligence platform that helps innovation teams at large corporations, CVCs, R&D, M&A and strategy groups discover, evaluate and track emerging startups, technologies and trends. Its AI Market Intelligence Analyst (AMIA) scans 50M+ companies, 160M+ patents and billions of data points to surface opportunities faster than traditional research.
Please (formerly MultiOn) is a Palo Alto consumer AI company building a thinking reminders and planning app that captures ideas, connects the dots between them, and nudges users at the right moment so they never miss a thing.
OpenRouter is a unified API gateway for large language models. Through a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint, developers can reach 400+ models from 60+ providers, with automatic routing, price comparison, and failover across vendors. It removes the need to maintain separate integrations for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral and dozens of others, and now processes around 100 trillion tokens per month for more than 8 million users.
George Sivulka is the founder and CEO of Hebbia, the AI platform that turns piles of unstructured documents into answers for asset managers, banks, and law firms. He cold-called NASA as a teenager, finished a Stanford math degree in 2.5 years, then walked away from a fully funded PhD to build software that lets AI agents do the multi-step grunt work of professional analysis. By 2024 Hebbia had raised $130M at a $700M valuation on $13M of profitable revenue, with Peter Thiel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and Google Ventures behind it.
Edison Scientific is a San Francisco AI company building autonomous 'AI scientists' that can run hundreds of research tasks in parallel. Spun out of the nonprofit FutureHouse in 2025, its flagship product Kosmos compresses what researchers call six months of work into a single day, reading 1,500 papers and writing 42,000 lines of analysis code per run. The company raised $70M in seed funding at a $250M valuation in December 2025.
Toma builds AI voice agents that answer the phone for U.S. car dealerships, booking service appointments, fielding parts requests, and saving BDC teams hundreds of hours a week. Founded by Monik Pamecha and Anthony Krivonos in early 2024, the company has raised a $17M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz and is approaching eight-figure ARR with more than 100 dealership customers.

Wildcard is a Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platform that helps e-commerce brands get their products discovered and purchased through AI shopping channels like ChatGPT Shopping, Google Gemini, Amazon Rufus, and Perplexity. Founded by Kaushik Mahorker and Yagnya Patel - both veterans of Scale AI, Tesla, and Amazon - Wildcard addresses the core problem that 67% of products lack the structured attributes AI engines need to recommend them. Their platform provides SKU-level analytics, catalog optimization, and content creation tools so brands can win in the emerging AI-first commerce landscape.

Zarna is building the first cohort of AI associates for private capital - autonomous agents that plug directly into a firm's data and work like a deal team that never sleeps. Founded by four UC Berkeley alumni who were previously forward-deployed engineers at AEA Investors, Zarna automates the grunt work of private equity: tearing down CIMs, building LBO models, drafting IC memos, updating CRMs, and surfacing warm introductions. Backed by Y Combinator (F25), the platform recovers ~80 hours per week for 15-person deal teams and promises full ROI in under 90 days.

Tim Dettmers is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), best known for making large language models accessible on consumer hardware. He created the bitsandbytes library (2.2M monthly installs), co-authored QLoRA - a technique enabling fine-tuning of 65B-parameter models on a single GPU - and pioneered LLM.int8() quantization. With over 18,000 citations across his work, Dettmers has become one of the most influential voices in efficient deep learning, consistently arguing that computational democratization - not AGI hype - is where the real progress lives.