the frontrun blog
What investors did before the round.
deal flow research built on our own data - who tracked investors started following, which companies raised months later, and what actually works for sourcing. receipts included.
latest / data
the weekly rundown, october 2: 10 rounds flagged before they were announced, 5 founders in stealth, 10 early startups.
Oct 2, 2026 / 3 min read
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data / 1 min read
underdog ai announced its round backed by a16z, khosla ventures and hummingbird ventures, and frontrun flagged it 19 days before.
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data / 2 min read
4 receipts on october 1, 2026: fundraise. every one flagged by the follow graph before the news.
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data / 2 min read
frontrun flagged 5 founders who moved into stealth in september 2026, from Sarvam, Atlassian, Mira Mace, Kinetic and XPENG, before any of them named a company.
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data / 4 min read
ex-DeepMind. ex-Meta. before the round. 10 AI labs under 500 followers, none with a seed round we could find.
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data / 2 min read
five yc f26 companies across ai, healthcare, fintech, robotics, and space, each spotted under 20 followers before the batch went public.
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data / 3 min read
5 receipts on september 24, 2026: fundraise. every one flagged by the follow graph before the news.
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data / 5 min read
a fork of the hiring velocity list, ranked by attention instead of headcount. the 35 startups investors started following fastest on X over the past 90 days, led by TypeSafe AI and Discovery Loop.
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data / 6 min read
YC lists 79 fall 2026 companies as of today. these 19 aren't on it, and none of them were on our last fall list either.
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data / 3 min read
3 receipts on september 22, 2026: fundraise. every one flagged by the follow graph before the news.
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data / 2 min read
frontrun flagged 13 startups that announced rounds this week before the news went public, 126 days early on average. the longest lead was Tare at 212 days before its $13.25M seed led by Blockchain Capital.
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watchlist / 2 min read
updated as the lane runs. who has been flagged, where they came from, and the dated cases where the flag came before the funding.
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guide / 4 min read
robotics stays quiet longer than software, because there is nothing to demo until there is. that is exactly why the founder is findable before the company is.
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watchlist / 3 min read
fifteen people who left strong jobs to build something that does not publicly exist yet, flagged with a date while the company is still unnamed.
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guide / 3 min read
everyone wants the list. the reason nobody has it is structural, not competitive. here is what actually exists and what it can and cannot tell you.
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guide / 3 min read
registry filings, domains, github and linkedin titles are all the same kind of signal. investor attention is a different kind. knowing which you are buying is the whole evaluation.
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guide / 2 min read
the reference page. every tool the server exposes, grouped by what you would actually ask an agent to do with it.
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receipt / 4 min read
august 19 we published jacob zietek as #1 on our stealth lineup. september 9 he announced a pre-seed from a16z and accel. here is every date in between.
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guide / 7 min read
stealth hides the company, not the founder. nine signals that surface a person before there is anything to search for, and an honest read on which of them is worth your time.
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guide / 3 min read
roughly 40,000 people self-declare it on linkedin. we have judged 2,478 and rate 896 strong. those numbers are not measuring the same thing.
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data / 3 min read
4 receipts on september 17, 2026: fundraise. every one flagged by the follow graph before the news.
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guide / 2 min read
the tutorial. install, authenticate, verify the tools loaded, then three prompts that prove it is working.
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guide / 2 min read
a short, honest list. the category is young enough that the gaps matter more than the entries.
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guide / 3 min read
automating the search is easy and mostly useless. the value is in automating the filtering, and knowing which decisions to keep.
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guide / 3 min read
the reason agents are bad at sourcing is not the model, it is the data they can reach. here is how to give one a signal it cannot get from the public web.
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data / 3 min read
4 receipts on september 16, 2026: fundraise. every one flagged by the follow graph before the news.
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data / 3 min read
5 receipts on september 15, 2026: fundraise. every one flagged by the follow graph before the news.
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watchlist / 3 min read
we flagged Jacob Zietek in stealth on august 19. 21 days later Ixian Robotics raised a pre-seed from a16z and Accel. here are 10 more founders from OpenAI, xAI, DeepMind and Thinking Machines, all still in stealth.
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data / 2 min read
2 receipts on september 14, 2026: fundraise. every one flagged by the follow graph before the news.
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data / 14 min read
YC S26 demo day was september 10. 103 of the 234 companies in the batch were on frontrun before it, average lead time 51 days, and 24 were there before YC's own directory listed them. all 103 by sector.
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data / 1 min read
1 receipt on september 10, 2026: fundraise. the founder was on frontrun 189 days before the company had an X account.
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data / 3 min read
5 receipts on september 9, 2026: fundraise. every one flagged by the follow graph before the news.
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data / 4 min read
4 receipts on september 8, 2026: fundraise, other. every one flagged by the follow graph before the news.
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data / 2 min read
2 receipts on september 3, 2026: fundraise. every one flagged by the follow graph before the news.
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data / 2 min read
2 receipts on september 2, 2026: fundraise. every one flagged by the follow graph before the news.
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data / 1 min read
2 receipts on september 1, 2026: fundraise. every one flagged by the follow graph before the news.
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data / 4 min read
four of these are from the YC fall 2026 batch. one has three followers. between all five there are 245, and two of them are not in the Y Combinator directory yet.
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data / 9 min read
frontrun had 8 fall 2026 companies before the YC directory did. a month later, 4 of them are listed. the other 4 still aren't.
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data / 7 min read
a $2.5B valuation in a year. the follow graph showed it in july, when the founder had 74 followers and three tracked investors had just followed him.
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data / 3 min read
a launch receipt, not a fundraise receipt. the account was called Superbank when the graph flagged it on december 27. 242 days and one rename later, it launched as Sugar.
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data / 1 min read
frontrun flagged Arga Labs, a validation framework for AI agents out of YC, 175 days before the company announced a $10M seed led by General Catalyst.
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data / 4 min read
two raises in one day, $66M between them. the automated lab behind Anthropic's protein-design work, flagged 131 days early. the search index for agents, flagged 94 days early, with Conviction's founder following two months before announcing the round.
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data / 6 min read
three rounds announced today, all flagged before the news. Smack at 162 days, Space at 20, Synthefy at 63. and on Synthefy, the flag WAS the lead investor's follow.
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data / 5 min read
ten rounds announced this week, from a $40M Series A down to a $2.3M pre-seed. frontrun flagged all ten before the news, with an average lead time of 120 days.
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data / 3 min read
a $7M a16z seed flagged at 15 followers, a $2.3M pre-seed flagged 65 days out, and an acquisition flagged 199 days before the deal. one day, three receipts.
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data / 2 min read
the person-before-the-company receipt. tracked investors started following an ex-SIG quant in may. the company account appeared in august, 3 days before launch. the flag through the founder was 85 days early.
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data / 3 min read
two raises announced the same day, both flagged back in february. 174 days and 180 days of lead, and neither company has cracked 1,000 followers yet.
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data / 3 min read
two seed rounds announced the same day, both flagged in april. one of them we caught eleven days after the company's X account was created.
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data / 3 min read
launch receipts, not fundraise receipts. a checkout company flagged 31 days before it shipped while it had double-digit followers, and a YC S26 dataset company flagged 147 days early.
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data / 6 min read
the Y Combinator startup directory lists 581 companies across its live batches. these ten are in none of them, and one has four followers.
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data / 4 min read
ten rounds announced this week, from a $57M Series B to a $5M seed. frontrun flagged all ten before the news, with an average lead time of 111 days.
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data / 3 min read
we flagged Gravity at 36 followers, 92 days before the round. then the fund that led it followed the company a week before the news broke.
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data / 2 min read
two seed rounds announced the same day. we flagged one 63 days early at 168 followers, and the other 56 days early, while the round was still private.
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data / 3 min read
two AI raises announced the same day. we flagged one 180 days early at 677 followers, and the other 54 days early, off a single tracked follow.
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guide / 4 min read
stop doomscrolling x to find startups. connect claude directly to frontrun's mcp and your agent surfaces companies, founders, and funding in one prompt. here's the full setup.
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data / 6 min read
the full a16z speedrun 007 cohort - 29 startups with founders and websites, surfaced by the follow graph weeks before demo day.
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data / 3 min read
launch receipts, not fundraise receipts. an agentic trading desk flagged 44 days early, a genome company flagged 102 days early via an a16z GP's follow, and its founder's second launch flagged by Visa's head of crypto 2 days before the reveal.
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data / 4 min read
fine-tuning, post-training, distillation, RL environments. the 10 startups building the own-your-model stack, sourced with one sentence in claude code connected to frontrun's mcp.
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data / 4 min read
$1.63B of raises announced in one day. we flagged them 91 to 168 days early, and watched the lead investors hit follow before the news.
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data / 2 min read
three AI raises announced inside 24 hours. we flagged one 27 hours early, one 144 days early, and one 160 days early, back when it had a different name.
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data / 2 min read
46 rounds, 83 days of average lead time, and one company flagged at 13 followers 24 days before an $8M round.
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data / 2 min read
two physical-ai seed rounds announced the same day. we flagged both in the same week of march, four months earlier.
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comparison / 3 min read
cb insights is enterprise market intelligence. here's what to use if you want early sourcing signal instead of research reports - 4 alternatives compared by job.
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comparison / 4 min read
frontrun, harmonic, inven, pitchbook, crunchbase, cb insights - 6 ai deal sourcing tools honestly compared, by job.
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data / 2 min read
the 15 companies tier-1 investors quietly started following this week - most still under 500 followers, none with a round on record yet.
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comparison / 3 min read
crunchbase shows you announced rounds. here's what to use when you want to find companies before the announcement.
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guide / 2 min read
deal flow explained - and how ai agents are rewriting sourcing in 2026.
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watchlist / 2 min read
quiet robotics companies vcs are following before there is anything to demo.
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comparison / 2 min read
records vs signal - the early-stage stack that costs less than one seat.
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guide / 2 min read
what your ai assistant can do once it's connected to live deal flow - setup, tools, and the patterns that work.
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guide / 2 min read
the engineering and data behind the follow-graph diff - 42,000 companies, provenance included.
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guide / 3 min read
the actual mechanics of pre-round sourcing, ranked by earliness - with dated receipts.
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guide / 3 min read
one prompt from company discovery to enriched founders and drafted outreach - the 5-minute mcp setup.
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comparison / 3 min read
when the index is worth $26k/yr and when $99/mo of pre-round signal beats it.
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watchlist / 2 min read
under-the-radar ai companies gaining tracked investor follows, refreshed from live data.
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open source deal flow
companies and founders surfaced on frontrun. curated, every week.
live data, not articles