๐ฅ30 Hottest Stealth, Early & Growth Startups in July 2025
Ranked by Investor Interest & Profile Views
๐ย Hi, Iโm Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data-Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with Data & AI. Join 34,500 thought leaders from VCs like a16z, Accel, Index, Sequoia, and more to understand how startup investing becomes more data-driven, why it matters, and what it means for you.
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Welcome to another edition of our Sunday โResourcesโ 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 #1 (see 312 Family Offices that actively invest in funds & startups here)
State of the Market (see last episode here)
Top Downloaded Resources from The Lab #2 (see 59 Pension Funds that invest in alternative asset classes & funds 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.
For todayโs Picks of the Month, weโre 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:
AI Infrastructure & Software Tooling: This category reflects the foundational shift toward agentic computing, developer productivity, and secure, scalable AI systems. These tools abstract away infrastructure complexity for developers building the next generation of intelligent apps.
Next-Gen AI & Data Applications: We're seeing an explosion of companies leveraging AI to rethink SaaS, analytics, developer tools, and search. These products are often API-first, modular, and designed to integrate seamlessly into enterprise and developer workflows.
Cybersecurity & Privacy: With the growing deployment of LLMs and AI agents, security is now core infrastructure. These startups reflect a new wave of โAI-nativeโ cybersecurity models and privacy-preserving systems, crucial for regulated industries and enterprise adoption.
Web3 & Decentralized Infrastructure: Despite market volatility, next-gen cryptographic primitives (ZKPs) and privacy-first blockchain infrastructure are gaining traction againโespecially where AI and decentralized data intersect.
DeepTech / HardTech (Robotics, Bio, Hardware): This cluster reflects resurgence in frontier science and hardware-driven innovation, particularly at the intersection of biology, energy, robotics, and computation. These startups aim to deliver 10x performance gains or cost reductions in their domains.
Here are the 30 most sought-after founders/startups in July 2025 you donโt want to miss๐ ranked by investor interest and page visits on the Specter platform.