👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.
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Welcome to another edition of our Sunday “Resources” stream where we share our most valuable data & resources across four rotating formats:
Hottest Startups of the Month (this is today - powered by Harmonic)
Top Downloaded Resources from The Lab (“building a hyper-automated micro VC with Alex Patow from Inflection” here)
State of the Market (March’s multiples & benchmarks here)
Top Downloaded Resources from The Lab (“how investors use OpenClaw to automate daily workflows” 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🛠️
✅ Join our free “AI & Automation for VC” Slack group
✅ 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.
World’s Hottest Startups in April 2026
For today’s Picks of the Month, we’re excited to partner with Harmonic: The leading startup discovery engine serving top VC firms like Accel, Bessemer, Firstmark, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, and hundreds 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 Harmonic platform.
This is a unique scoring you won’t find anywhere else!
It’s about quality, not quantity: We cover the top 5 stealth founders, top 5 early-stage startups that raised less than $10M, and the top 5 growth-stage startups that raised more than $10M. Global and across industries.
This month, we find 3 key themes among trending startups:
Vertical AI agents are the dominant early-stage bet. The hottest early companies this month are narrow by design: one industry, one workflow, full automation. Founders are not building horizontal platforms. They are picking sectors with complex processes, high error costs, and incumbents slow to respond.
Deep technical pedigree is the common thread. Lab-to-company stories dominate the high-signal profiles this week: research backgrounds at top AI labs, faculty positions at leading universities, and PhDs building in infrastructure and simulation rather than SaaS. The most credentialed people on this list are not building the obvious thing.
At growth stage, capital follows track record. Prior exits, prior VC-backed companies, and multi-time founding experience show up consistently across the Series A+ names this month. First-time founders are winning seed rounds. Repeat founders are winning the larger checks.
Here’s the needle in the haystack - here are the 15 most sought-after founders/startups in April 2026 you don’t want to miss👇 ranked by investor interest and page visits on the Harmonic platform.
5 Hottest Stealth Founders 🥷🏻
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