You asked, we listened:
We extended the deadline until this Friday for you to participate in the 2026 DDVC Landscape survey and win 3x €100 Amazon voucher + 3x €1500 The Lab Premium membership (with access to all our content, recordings, products, meetups etc.)
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 (“Why ‘who else is investing’ isn’t lazy, but actually smart” here)
State of the Market (April’s multiples & benchmarks here)
Top Downloaded Resources from The Lab (“How to predict startup success with alternative data” 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 May 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 is eating enterprise back-office. Eight of the fifteen companies attack regulated, legacy-software verticals (ERP, procurement, lending, insurance, SAP environments, home care), replacing systems-of-record workflows with AI-native software. The pattern: pick an industry where Workday, SAP, or Oracle still rule, then automate the human layer sitting on top.
Agents have replaced copilots as the default product shape. Across stages, the pitch is no longer "assist the user" but "execute the task end-to-end" via procurement agents, supply chain agents, customer interaction agents, and financial process agents. Seed and Series A rounds are now underwriting autonomous workflow execution, not chat interfaces.
Repeat operators and big-tech alumni dominate the founder pool. The stealth cohort skews heavily toward second-time founders and senior operators from Palantir, Meta, Spotify, AWS, and Moderna, while the funded cohort includes founders from n8n, Onfido-grade exits, and academic heavyweights like Max Welling. Capital is concentrating on people who have already shipped at scale, not first-time founders learning the category.
Here’s the needle in the haystack - here are the 15 most sought-after founders/startups in May 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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