Identifying the most interesting early-stage startups is as much art as science, requiring a feel for the technology, the people, and the market opportunity when there aren’t a lot of numbers.

No one is better positioned to assess all of that than top AI founders themselves, many of whom have been in the room at our Newcomer summits.

We’ve done well at spotting them early at our Cerebral Valley AI Summits.

For just a few examples, we hosted Etched founder Robert Wachen at our second-ever summit in 2023, and he’s since gone on to raise nearly $2 billion in funding (and will be speaking onstage next week). We had Chelsea Finn from Physical Intelligence present in 2024 after the company came out of stealth. Matan Grinberg, the CEO of Factory, is also a past Cerebral Valley attendee who will be on stage this year.

The founders of Exa, Higgsfield, Wonderful, Fluidstack, and many more came to the summits while they were still at the beginning of their companies.

This time, with our friends at Felicis, we asked current and former founder speakers to nominate seed-stage (or earlier) companies on the cusp of greatness.

The result is our new Emergent list: 29 companies that have been nominated by one or more of their peers as having the potential to become a generational startup. To quality, each company cannot have raised more than a seed round. Felicis has a post on it too.

The companies are listed with a blurb from the established founder who nominated them explaining why they had exceptional potential. Some cite the brilliance of the founder, others describe what’s intriguing about the tech, or the market opportunity, and collectively they give a good window into how founders think about their peers.

A few quick highlights:

The biggest group of startups is building the tools to run and control agents. But hardware is also hot.
Commitment to open source comes up again and again, either as a key way to keep costs down or for running queries locally on smaller devices like phones and laptops.
AI-native services and support companies have been a big theme with investors this year and we’re seeing plenty of them here.

Felicis, in its own analysis, highlights agent-infrastructure startups and the crucial challenge of getting workflows right. It also points to healthcare, bio, and creator tools.

Aydin Senkut, Felicis’ founder and managing partner, broke down his biggest takeaways from the list on the Newcomer podcast.

The full list is below. If you’d like to meet them, many of these founders will be attending our upcoming Cerebral Valley AI Summit next Thursday, November 12 in San Francisco.

Apply to attend the summit

Our first cohort of Emergent startups:

Agentcard

Founders: Karen Serfaty, Felipe Abello

“Agentcard believes agents should have full autonomy to pay for things online. The company powers payments for agentic startups, consumer apps, B2B companies, and crypto teams run their agents’ purchases.”
— Guillermo Rauch, Founder & CEO, Vercel

Agrippa Industries

Founders: David Hoyt, Jared Dunnmon, Jason Stack, William Healzer, Kyle Duchynski

“Agrippa is building the future of US maritime logistics.”
— Alex Ratner, Founder & CEO, Snorkel AI

Alljoined

Founder: Jonathan Xu

“I’m very interested in the intersection of machine learning and science, and Alljoined is doing some of the most interesting work here, with non-invasive hardware that decodes what people see directly from brain activity. EEG approaches to BCI have been limited in the past, but Alljoined has shown that massive scale can improve effectiveness, similar to LLMs and world models.”
— Cristóbal Valenzuela, Founder & CEO, Runway

Almanac Health

Founder: Cyril Zakka

“Almanac is applying AI to healthcare, where accuracy and trust are critical. By grounding clinical AI in reliable medical evidence, they demonstrate how the right context can turn powerful models into genuinely useful tools for professionals.”
— Arvind Jain, Founder & CEO, Glean

Ampersand

Founders: Jai Kondapalli, Joey Wang, Josh Dresner

“Ampersand is enabling the era of autonomous enterprises. Their platform understands how a business works and builds a living model of its operations, which we use to rearchitect the business, eval agents against reality, and build automation. Early partners including leading AI-native services companies use Ampersand to set their product roadmap and accelerate engineering, with down-to-the-second insight into their operators’ actions. Founding team is ex-Palantir, OpenAI, and Google, and led the largest engagement in Palantir’s history.”
— Ryan Daniels, Founder & CEO, Crosby

Armature

Founders: Théodore Otzenberger, Louis Scremin

“The new normal: users reach products through Claude, ChatGPT, and coding agents. Armature captures every session on your MCP server, Claude Connector, or ChatGPT App, and shows what users ask, what agents think, and how they use product.”
— Guillermo Rauch, Founder & CEO, Vercel

Arrakis Security

Founders: Tal Baron, Omer Efrat, Ron Shani

“Arrakis discovers the AI agents running inside an enterprise, profiles their behavior, and blocks or revokes what they do in real time. Security tooling was built for humans using machines; agents now act autonomously inside CRMs and financial systems — and Arrakis solves it. Very topical for current time & age!”
— Mati Staniszewski, Founder & CEO, ElevenLabs

Attention Engineering

Founders: Aidan Guo, Julian Windeck

“Recording the context or ‘analyst exhaust’ that comes from actions you take on your computer, to provide richer context and/or training signal for increasingly specialized, personalized AI.”
— Alex Ratner, Founder & CEO, Snorkel AI

Cartwheel

Founders: Jonathan Jarvis, Andrew Carr

“Animation is one area that’s particularly well-suited to hybrid workflows, with both AI and traditional tools in the mix. Cartwheel turns video, text, and motion libraries into 3D character animation that fits within existing studio pipelines. We share a lot of the same DNA at Runway: build tools to help people tell stories.”
— Cristóbal Valenzuela, Founder & CEO, Runway

Convergent

Founders: Omkar Savant, Debnil Sur, Vivek Katara

“Convergent optimizes agent deployments by mining failures from production traces to create high-fidelity evaluation environments, and deploying coding agents to directly fix observed issues. They work with companies building agents in legal, finance, HR, SRE, and other verticals. The team has worked across all parts of the agent reliability problem at DeepMind, Meta, Mercor, Perplexity, Glean, and similar companies.”
— Ryan Daniels, Founder & CEO, Crosby

Conway

Founder: Anne Brandes

Conway builds a foundation model for predictions. Companies power decisions like recommendations, pricing, and credit by connecting the Conway runtime to their event streams.
Nominated by Brendan Foody, Founder & CEO, Mercor

Enigma

Founders: Jonathan Jacobi, Gal Niv

Enigma builds AI systems that make any robot intelligent and intuitive to use, with software designed to work across different types of robots.
Nominated by Karan Goel, Founder & CEO, Cartesia

Ghost

Founder: Zain Javaid

Ghost is building a personal AI computer designed to run autonomous agents that understand your life and perform tasks on your behalf. Its first product, Core, is a screenless device that connects to your apps, files, and smart home devices, running AI models locally to keep personal data private while continuously working in the background.
Nominated by Ryan Daniels, Founder & CEO, Crosby

Hercules

Founders: Brendan Falk, Grant Gurvis

“Hercules helps customers create their own software. Just by chatting with an agent, customers can build business critical applications, like a CRM or inventory management system. By using open-weight models to power their app builder, Hercules ensures customers can build sophisticated applications at a much lower cost.”
— Lin Qiao, Founder & CEO, Fireworks AI

Icarus Robotics

Founders: Ethan Barajas, Jamie Palmer

“I’ve been interested in how AI is moving beyond software into robotics and the physical world. Icarus is building AI-powered robots to handle physical work in space. It’s an ambitious application of AI, and I like that they’re tackling a problem where human labour is incredibly expensive and constrained.”
— Eoin Hinchy, Founder & CEO, Tines

Instance Bio

Founders: David Scott, Shawn Morel

“I’m really excited about AI’s potential to solve major problems in biology, but to do so, we need to close the loop on bio models’ ability to run real-world experiments. Instance has convinced me that the right way to build a physical RL environment for bio models is not (only) by building automated wet labs. You actually need to change the atomic unit of experimentation away from a simple pairwise ‘does this protein bind to this target’ towards measuring the full distribution of interactions between m protein binders and n targets. They have this cool tech where models can call an API with a long list of candidate binder sequences and targets, and Instance will run that m × n analysis all in a single massively parallel reaction, which is both a better representation of biological reality and vastly more scalable.”
— David Luan, Founder, Adept

Martian

Founders: Etan Ginsberg, Shriyash Upadhyay

“Martian built a model router that sends each request to the model best suited to it in real time, so teams get frontier-level quality at a fraction of the cost. As the number of models keeps growing, picking the right one for each task becomes core infrastructure, and Martian is ahead on it.”
— Brendan Foody, Founder & CEO, Mercor

Mirai Labs

Founders: Dmytro Shvets, Alexey Moiseenkov

“Mirai is an on-device inference engine and SDK that runs text, voice, and vision models directly on phones and laptops - no cloud, no per-query cost, no latency. Founders built Reface and Prisma, so they’ve shipped on-device AI to hundreds of millions before.”
— Mati Staniszewski, Founder & CEO, ElevenLabs

Mistos

Founder: Andrew Zbytek

Mistos is the AI-native engineering firm for power infrastructure. AI data centers are running out of power, and every new plant is gated by years of engineering. Mistos does that engineering with AI.
Nominated by Naveen Rao, Founder & CEO, Unconventional AI

Mnemom

Founders: Alex Garden, Wassim Wehbi

“Mnemom’s products let companies put AI agents to work with confidence and prove what they did: every action is signed as it happens, confirmed against what the company asked for, and kept on an independent record the company owns. As agents do more of the world’s work, trust in them will have to be earned from a record, the way it is with people, and Mnemom is built around that from day one.”
— Reid Hoffman, Founder, LinkedIn

Nowadays

Founders: Anna Sun, Amy Yan

“Nowadays is an AI agent that plans corporate events for companies like Google, Amazon, and Notion — sourcing venues, negotiating with vendors, and comparing proposals so planners just decide. Event planning is mostly email and chasing, exactly the work agents are already good at, so it replaces a services business rather than adding a tool to one.”
— Mati Staniszewski, Founder & CEO, ElevenLabs

Peak

Founder: Veer Bhatia

“AI agents now write code faster than teams can test it, and CI has become a critical bottleneck to throughput. Peak is building the fastest cloud for code. Teams switch by changing one line, and their builds run several times faster. Peak has run millions of CI jobs, and usage is growing more than 10x month over month. Veer Bhatia and his small team of infrastructure vets ship remarkably fast.”
— Gabriel Stengel, Founder & CEO, Rogo

Phylo

Founders: Kexin Huang, Yuanhao Qu, Jure Leskovec, Le Cong

“Phylo makes it easy for scientists to use AI to accelerate their research. By customizing open-weight models for biology use cases, they give scientists the control and expertise they need at a fraction of the cost.”
— Lin Qiao, Founder & CEO, Fireworks AI

Resin

Founder: Pedro Tsividis

“Resin generates new stems that fit the track an artist is already working on, so a musician can hear a bass line or a string part the moment they imagine it. It’s much closer to a creative partner than a pure music generator, and I see a lot of similarities to how we’ve approached creative tools at Runway.”
— Cristóbal Valenzuela, Founder & CEO, Runway

Scuba

Founders: Noah Desai Weiss, Dolapo Falola

“I’m a huge fan of Noah Weiss at Scuba. Noah just raised a seed round from Accel and IVP. His founding team are largely ex-Slack leaders who are obsessed with the future of AI-native work. Noah was chief product officer at Slack, he has exceptional taste and judgement - what it will take to stand out in that crowded space.”
— Shiv Rao, Founder & CEO, Abridge

SkillBench

Founders: Matt Beane, Juho Kim

“SkillBench is building the intelligence layer that helps companies scale high-quality AI automation by developing the human expertise it depends on. SkillBench helps people automate more tasks while growing into more valuable work that draws on their judgment, discretion, and relationships. The biggest AI returns will go to companies that also expand their employees’ individual potential.”
— Reid Hoffman, Founder, LinkedIn

Tako

Founders: Alex Rosenberg, Bobby Abbott

“Tako is an incredible product but not getting nearly the attention they should. They’ve aggregated a ton of data across many different sources and cleaned it up so LLMs can actually read it in sensible ways. You can ask pretty insane analytics questions to Tako and they answer with quality data. I use it as an API, and it works really well.”
— Kanjun Qiu, Founder & CEO, Imbue

Tomo

Founders: Justin Quan, Raymond Chen

“Tomo is a human-centric personal assistant AI that is growing like crazy among a different demographic than the typical agent startup — people outside of Silicon Valley.”
— Josh Tobin, Founder, Recursive Superintelligence

Wonder Studios

Founders: Xavier Collins, Justin Hackney

“Wonder is an AI-native film studio in London producing commercial and original work for brands, labels, and studios — the Lewis Capaldi video with DeepMind and Universal, a documentary with Campfire. The bet is that the winner here is a studio: AI-native creators plus Hollywood craft, owning the IP, at a fraction of the cost per minute.”
— Mati Staniszewski, Founder & CEO, ElevenLabs

Introducing Emergent: The Founder-Generated…