👋 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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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
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World’s Hottest Startups in September 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.
These are some of the founders and startups receiving the highest investor interest on the platform this month. Visit Harmonic to catch the next batch before it’s listed.
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, and the top 5 growth-stage startups. Global and across industries.
This month, we find 3 key themes among trending startups:
Prior exits become table stakes. All 5 stealth founders carry a prior exit, so this batch skews toward proven builders with a company sale already behind them.
Hard tech, big checks. The three largest rounds this month went to physical infrastructure AI: inference chips, grid capacity, and industrial robotics.
Built by the people who lived the problem. Founders behind picks in retail, health plan management, and grid capacity are each automating the exact function they used to run.
Here’s the needle in the haystack - here are the 15 most sought-after founders/startups in September 2026 you don’t want to miss👇 ranked by investor interest and page visits on the Harmonic platform.
5 Hottest Stealth Founders 🥷🏻
Tim Sadler 🇬🇧
Experience: Co-founded Tessian, the AI email security platform ($130M+ raised), and was CEO until its acquisition by Proofpoint in 2023. Later GVP and GM of the Tessian Group at Proofpoint, and a founder advisor at Sequoia.
Education: Imperial College London MEng and MSc. Royal College of Art M.A.
Highlights: $50M+ club, Prior exit, Prior VC backed founder, Followed by notable investors
Manik Gupta 🇺🇸
Experience: Former Chief Product Officer at Uber and Corporate VP for Microsoft Teams. Product lead for Google Maps for 7+ years. Co-founded BuyItTogether, acquired by CoShopper.
Education: Indian School of Business MBA. Nanyang Technological University B.Eng. Computer Engineering
Highlights: Seasoned executive, Major tech company experience, Prior exit, Followed by notable investors
Experience: Founded Modsy, the 3D home-design platform ($107M+ raised), and sold it to Lennar, where she became CPO. Earlier founded Sim Ops Studios, acquired by Autodesk, and was a Partner at Google Ventures.
Education: Carnegie Mellon University M.S. Entertainment Technology, B.F.A.
Highlights: $50M+ club, Prior exit, Prior VC backed founder, Top university
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