👋 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:
30 Hottest Startups of the Month (this is today!)
Top Downloaded Resources from The Lab (“how to leverage AI for portfolio insights and value creation” here)
State of the Market (December’s multiples & benchmarks here)
Top Downloaded Resources from The Lab (“how to integrate data sources and make them actionable with AI” here)
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🛠️
✅ Summarize 50+ newsletters with ChatGPT
✅ 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 January 2026
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:
Founder-market fit is more important than ever before, with many founders having spent years inside the exact technical, regulatory, or operational domains they are now productizing (security, ML infra, fintech ops, insurance, dev tools, health, energy)
AI is being applied as a force multiplier on expert workflows rather than as generic tooling, targeting high-friction, high-cost knowledge work (research, underwriting, sales enablement, legal prediction, documentation, recruiting, ops)
Products are built bottom-up for practitioners but sold top-down into enterprises, combining developer- or operator-first adoption with enterprise-grade compliance, security, and scalability
Teams skew heavily toward elite technical and operator talent with prior scale exposure, often blending Big Tech execution, prior VC-backed startups, and repeat-founder experience
The dominant wedge is speed and automation in systems that historically change slowly, enabling customers to move from manual, stale, or fragmented processes to continuously updated, AI-native workflows
Here are the 30 most sought-after founders/startups in January 2026 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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