YC's Latest Signal: 9 Startups Top VCs Are Flocking To

Original Title: "YC Latest Compass: 9 Startups Coveted by Top VCs"

Original Source: Silicon Rabbit

Every year, YC (Y Combinator) Demo Day serves as a global venture capital compass—having once launched Airbnb and Dropbox, it's now the stage for showcasing muscular AI-era startups.

Last week, YC's 2025 Summer Demo Day came to a close, with over 160 startups taking center stage. Unlike previous batches, this year's trend was clear: many companies are no longer focused on "AI-driven" products but are instead building AI agents or developing the infrastructure and tools needed for these agents.

Silicon Rabbit spoke with several investors focused on YC to understand which startups they found most interesting and which companies received the highest levels of investment interest. Hopefully, this can serve as a starting point for your insight and deeper thinking.

Autumn

Business Description: The Stripe (payment solution) of the AI startup world.

Why It's Favoured: Many AI startups adopt complex pricing models, often a mix of seat-based fixed subscription fees, usage-based billing, credits, and various add-on fees. Managing this complex AI pricing on Stripe is a time-consuming and manual process.

Therefore, Autumn has developed an open-source infrastructure that simplifies integration with Stripe for AI startups. The company claims that its technology has been used by hundreds of AI applications and 40 YC startups. Given Stripe's dominance in the payment space and the explosive growth of the AI market, could a billing solution designed specifically for AI become the next significant fintech success story?

Dedalus Labs

Business Description: The Vercel (frontend development and deployment platform) of the AI agent-building world.

Why It's Favoured: Just as Vercel helps developers deploy and host websites, Dedalus Labs claims its platform can automate the infrastructure needed to build AI agents, reducing hours of coding work to a few clicks. The company handles tasks like auto-scaling and load balancing and states that this makes deploying AI agents fast and simple.

Design Arena

Business Description: Crowdsourced ranking of "vibe coded" designs.

Why It's Hot: AI can quickly generate a vast amount of designs, posing a new challenge: how to discern which designs are truly outstanding. Design Arena tackles this issue by crowdsourcing ranking of AI-generated visual works, creating a feedback loop that compels AI models to improve. Large AI labs have seen value in training their models to generate better designs, with some labs already being clients of Design Arena.

Getasap Asia

Business Description: Tech-driven distributor for Southeast Asian retailers.

Why It's Hot: Founded by Raghav Arora three years ago when he was just 14, Getasap Asia has since generated millions of dollars in revenue as a startup that uses technology to deliver supplies to corner shops, restaurants, and large supermarkets across Southeast Asia within eight hours. According to its website, Getasap Asia has closed a funding round from top-tier investor General Catalyst, and we hear the company's valuation is one of the highest in this YC batch.

Keystone

Business Description: AI engineer fixing software vulnerabilities in production environments.

Why It's Hot: Founded by the 20-year-old Pablo Hansen, who just graduated with a master's in AI last year, Keystone's mission is to reduce software crashes. The company's AI hunts down and fixes vulnerabilities for clients like Lovable, and Hansen has mentioned rejecting a multimillion-dollar acquisition offer.

RealRoots

Business Description: AI matchmaking platform for women to find friends.

Why It's Hot: Amidst a sea of dating apps, RealRoots is addressing a different kind of loneliness. The company's AI matchmaker "Lisa" conducts interviews with women and organizes social experiences, connecting them with like-minded friends.

While the AI portion may be more of a performance—conversations with Lisa may not provide RealRoots with more insights about participants compared to written responses—RealRoots may be on the right track. Its founder stated that just last month, the company generated $782,000 in revenue from 9,000 paying customers.

Solva

Business Focus: AI-powered automation for insurance claims.

Why It's Hot: Solva's AI automates the most routine tasks for insurance claims adjusters, from filling out complex claim forms to preventing improper payouts. Only ten weeks after launch, Solva's Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) has reached $245,000, a number that excites investors.

Pingo AI

Business Focus: AI-driven foreign language tutoring.

Why It's Hot: Apps like Duolingo have made language learning easy and fun, but they often lack a key element for mastering a language fluently: consistent conversation. Pingo addresses this by enabling users to engage in oral communication with its AI acting as a native speaker. The company's unique approach is gaining significant popularity, with the founder claiming a 70% monthly growth rate and monthly revenue of $250,000.

The above is a brief overview of the most prominent projects. However, for astute investors, the value of information goes beyond this. Looking beneath the surface, Silicon Rabbit and its expert team have distilled four key trends, which may be the best entry point for understanding the current innovation direction in Silicon Valley.

One: Transition from "Empower" to "Native" and "Agent"

The clearest signal from this YC cohort is that startups are no longer content with adding an "AI feature" to an existing product but are directly building AI-native applications, even AI agents capable of autonomous task execution.

For example, Keystone's "AI Engineer" and Solva's "AI Claims Adjuster" are not mere assistive tools but are digital employees directly replacing parts of workflows. This signifies that the moat of AI startups is transitioning from "owning data" to "restructuring processes," with market substitution potential and business value that are incomparable.

2: The Rise of Infrastructure and Tooling

Amid the AI gold rush, the "water seller" model, which provides tools and services to gold miners, remains an investment hotspot and has become more vertical and specialized. Autumn focuses on the unique "billing" challenge in the AI field; Dedalus Labs is committed to lowering the deployment threshold for AI agents; Design Arena addresses the "quality assessment" issue of AI-generated content.

Investing in these types of companies is equivalent to investing in the entire AI track. Regardless of how upper-layer applications iterate, as long as the AI economy continues to grow, these infrastructure providers will continue to benefit.

3: The "Verticalization" and "Must-Have" of AI Application Scenarios

AI is accelerating from general domains such as chatbots and graphics to more vertical, higher business value industries, addressing specific, high-cost pain points. Whether it's Solva in the traditional insurance industry, Pingo AI transforming the language education industry, or Perseus Defense targeting the defense industry, they all share the same characteristics: a clear business model and a strong willingness of customers to pay. Investors are increasingly valuing strong commercial execution like Solva, which can generate significant revenue (ARR) shortly after launch.

4: The Huge Potential of "Non-Mainstream" Tracks and Innovative Models

Although AI is the absolute protagonist, one of the highest valued projects in this YC batch, Getasap Asia, is a typical case of "technology-driven transformation of traditional industries." Additionally, RealRoots, which has generated amazing revenue, proves that business model innovation that targets genuine human needs (social interaction) can unleash tremendous commercial power, even if the technology is not so "hardcore." This reminds us that the investment perspective needs to transcend mere technological worship and return to the essence of business.

These trends reveal the investment logic behind public information, but real decision-making requires answering more profound questions:

How deep is Keystone's technological moat?

What is Solva's customer acquisition cost, and can its model scale?

How will Autumn's open-source model monetize?

The answers to these questions cannot be found in any public report but can only come from in-depth conversations with project founders, early investors, or core technical experts.

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