👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with Data & AI. ICYMI, we just launched the “Automating my VC job end-to-end” live experiment with free Slack community here
👋🏻 Welcome to another edition of our Sunday “Resources” stream where we share our most valuable data & resources across four rotating formats:
For 1. and 3., we collaborate with best-in-class partners to ensure you get the highest quality data. For 2. and 4., we leverage our ever-growing product portfolio and share selective snapshots of the most sought-after resources from The Lab.
RESOURCES OVERVIEW🛠️
✅ Evaluating startups with ChatGPT
✅ VC Co-Pilot for deal sourcing
✅ Top 10 Prompts for startup sourcing
✅ Top 10 Prompts for startup screening & due diligence
✅ Top 10 Prompts for deal winning & closing
✅ List of 312 family offices
✅ List of 59 pension funds
✅ List of 1513 angel investors
✅ List of 997 accelerators
Access these and more resources like our Slack community, 100+ masterclasses, automation templates, Notion templates, copilots, and more via our Annual and Premium subscriptions to The Lab.
30 Hottest Startups of December 2025
For today’s Picks of the Month, we’re excited to partner with Specter: The Bloomberg of Private Markets serving leading VC firms like Bessemer, Index, Insight, and 300+ more.
Instead of ranking startups case by case via different growth signals, we unify all dimensions into a single metric: investor interest measured by the number of investors visiting the respective stealth/startup profiles on the Specter platform.
We cover the top 10 stealth founders, top 10 early-stage startups that raised less than $10M, and the top 10 growth-stage startups that raised more than $10M. Global and across industries.
This month, we find 5 key themes among trending startups:
Senior, repeat founders with deep technical + product pedigrees: Almost all stealth founders have prior VC-backed experience, major-tech backgrounds (TikTok, Alibaba, IBM, Docker, Wix), or serial founder histories, indicating a strong shift toward highly experienced operators building next-gen AI companies
AI-native infra and automation dominating early-stage innovation: Early startups heavily concentrate on AI agents, autonomous systems, performance enablement, operating-system-level frameworks, and vertical AI automation (retail, supply chain, compliance).
Strong investor pull toward AI workflows, assistants, and human-in-the-loop augmentation: Growth startups show massive capital movement into AI copilots and agents for public safety, tax, enterprise automation, and internal knowledge workflows.
Signals of rapid momentum despite funding scarcity: Many companies show headcount surges, traffic momentum, and social growth even with limited or no recent funding, suggesting product-led traction and efficient early scaling
Heavy concentration of top-tier investors validating the space: Across categories, leading funds (a16z, NEA, Lightspeed, DST, Temasek, Bessemer etc.) cluster around AI automation, video/genAI, deep tech, and robotics, reinforcing a strong thematic conviction in foundational AI infrastructure and applied agents
Here are the 30 most sought-after founders/startups in December 2025 you don’t want to miss👇 ranked by investor interest and page visits on the Specter platform.
10 Hottest Stealth Founders 🥷🏻
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