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👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.

This week: Free virtual roundtable on July 8th – “The Compounding Data Layer: Building an Edge When Everyone Uses the Same AI Model” with Eight Roads, Offline Ventures, and Kruncher here

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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:

  1. Hottest Startups of the Month (this is today!)

  2. Top Downloaded Resources from The Lab (“Behind-the-Scenes of an Agentic VC Firm” here)

  3. Top Downloaded Resources from The Lab (“Building a Single Source of Truth for Investment Firms” here)

  4. State of the Market (June’s multiples & benchmarks here)

For 1. and 4., we collaborate with best-in-class partners to ensure you get the highest quality data. For 2. and 3., 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


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World’s Hottest Startups in July 2026

For today’s Picks of the Month, we’re excited to partner with Harmonic. Thousands of investors from firms such as General Catalyst, Earlybird, and Pear use Harmonic every day to find and evaluate investment opportunities.

Harmonic just released X followers as a data field. This version of the Picks highlights founders followed by major investors, who often aren’t on their cap table… yet 👀

Visit harmonic.ai to catch the next batch before it’s listed.

Test Harmonic NOW

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, now paired with X followers as a new signal of who's already watching.

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, and the top 5 growth-stage startups. Global and across industries.

This month, we find 3 key themes among trending startups:

  • One workflow, one tool. Document processing, performance management, and executive prep each show up as their own dedicated tool this month.

  • Security across code, cloud, and crypto. This batch spans protecting software supply chains, cloud environments, and digital assets.

  • Research pedigree at the stealth stage. Several stealth picks hold degrees from elite research universities, with backgrounds spanning academic research and applied AI work.


Here’s the needle in the haystack - here are the 15 most sought-after founders/startups in July 2026 you don’t want to miss👇 ranked by investor interest and page visits on the Harmonic platform.


5 Hottest Stealth Founders 🥷🏻

  1. Zhuoran Qiao 🇺🇸

  • Notable X followers: Miles Grimshaw (Thrive), Ellen Chisa (Boldstart)

  • Experience: Founding Scientist at Chai Discovery ($230M raised, AI antibody design). Previously Lead ML Scientist at Iambic Therapeutics. Graduate research at Caltech (chemical physics & geometric learning) and Harvard (RNA folding).

  • Education: Caltech Ph.D. Theoretical Chemistry (minor: Quantum Science & Engineering), Peking University B.S. Chemistry (minor: Sociology & Anthropology)

  • Highlights: Top university, Research-to-founder

  1. Kostas Tzoumas 🇩🇪

  • Notable X followers: Eric Vishria (Benchmark), Intel Capital

  • Experience: Co-founded Ververica as CEO (commercialized Apache Flink, $9.4M raised, acquired by Alibaba). Apache Flink committer. Postdoc at TU Berlin. Research intern at Microsoft.

  • Education: National Technical University of Athens Diploma in Electrical & Computer Engineering, Aalborg University Ph.D. Computer Science

  • Highlights: Prior exit, Deep technical background

  1. Misha Denil 🇬🇧

  • Notable X followers: Steph Zhang (a16z), Elad Gil, Conviction Partners

  • Experience: Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind for 10 years. AI researcher and angel investor.

  • Education: University of Oxford DPhil Machine Learning, University of British Columbia M.Sc. Machine Learning

  • Highlights: Top AI experience, Top university experience, Deep research background

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