Tip-offs
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Each week, we surface promising startups & founders through data signals.
This week, we're spotlighting agent infrastructure →
Agents are staffing the assembly lines
From "can agents code" to "who owns the factory floor”
Stripe now merges 1,300+ pull requests a week containing zero lines of human-written code. At Uber, an internal system called Minion opens 11% of all PRs. A three-person team at StrongDM ships software no engineer writes or reviews.
Today, the factory is the product, and your software is only as good as the agents maintaining it.
As code generation becomes abundant, the bottleneck becomes coordinating, governing, and trusting thousands of autonomous workers. That's why the scarce layer is moving upstream: persistent memory, orchestration, sandboxes, and identity.
Agent Infrastructure Startups
Recently funded startups building AI agent memory, orchestration, runtimes, identity, and observability.
Superplane
An open-source control plane where engineers and AI agents run production workflows side by side, from deployments to incident response. Raised a $2.6M Pre-Seed in June 2026.
San Francisco, US
General Analysis
Security infrastructure for agentic AI, running continuous adversarial testing against live agents and applying runtime defenses where the attacks land. Raised a $10M Seed in April 2026.
San Francisco, US
TraceRoot.AI
An open-source observability layer for AI agents that traces every LLM call and tool invocation, then ships fix PRs from a sandboxed debugging agent. Raised a $3.5M Seed in June 2026.
San Francisco, US
HydraDB
Graph-native context infrastructure that gives agents persistent memory across sessions, built to replace vector search with structured entity and time relationships. Raised a $6.5M Seed in March 2026.
San Francisco, US
Manufact
An open-source SDK and managed cloud for building, deploying, and running MCP servers for AI agents. Raised a $6.3M Seed in February 2026.
San Francisco, US
Agent Infrastructure Founders
Recently funded founders building the runtime, evaluation, and governance layers AI agents depend on.
Fabian Maximilian Jakobi
Co-founded Boxplot (acquired by Hyperscience). Now co-founder & CEO of Interloom, which captures expert knowledge and turns it into permanent memory for AI agents. Raised $16.5M Seed in Mar 2026.
Munich, Germany
Christian Pickett
Previously a software engineer at Coinbase and Vercel. Now co-founder & CEO of Orthogonal, the discovery, orchestration, and payments layer for AI agents. Raised $4.3M Seed in Jun 2026.
San Francisco, US
Chamath Palihapitiya
Early Facebook growth executive. Founder of Social Capital. Now Founder & CEO of 8090 Labs, building an agentic coding system for enterprise engineering teams in regulated sectors. Raised $135M Series A in June 2026.
San Francisco, US
Gabriel-James Safar
Co-founded Madumbo, acquired by Datadog in 2019. Now co-founder & CEO of Tsuga, the bring-your-own-cloud observability platform built for AI agent workloads. Raised $35M Series A in Jun 2026.
Paris, France
Guanlan Dai
Technical lead on Cloudflare's edge team, then built the core proxy at Kong Inc. Now founder and CEO of Runta, the runtime execution & sandboxing layer that gives AI agents a secure "computer" abstraction. Raised $20M Seed in Jul 2026.
San Francisco, US
Carried Interest
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