About & Methodology

What AI Startup Radar is, and how it's researched

A small, independent research project tracking how AI companies actually make money — not funding headlines, not hype, just what's checkable.

What this is

AI Startup Radar publishes two ongoing research dossiers: The YC Ledger, covering 25 of Y Combinator's highest-funded companies across every sector, and Small, AI-Native, a growing list of smaller AI-native companies examined for how they make money, how they found their first customers, and how repeatable their playbook is.

It is an independent project, not affiliated with Y Combinator or any company covered.

Why this exists

Most startup coverage optimizes for a good headline — a funding round, a valuation, a "unicorn" milestone. Those numbers say almost nothing about whether a business actually works. We wanted a place that answers a more useful question: what does this company actually sell, to whom, for how much, and could someone else copy it?

How we research

Every entry is built from public sources: company filings, press coverage, funding announcements, and (for recent YC companies) the company's own YC listing and launch post. We do not have access to private data or founder interviews for most entries — this is desk research, not exclusive reporting.

Two tags run through both dossiers:

• confirmed a claim sourced directly to a specific public statement, filing, or report.
• best guess a claim we could not find disclosed anywhere, inferred from founder background, buyer type, and how similar companies in the category typically operate — explicitly flagged as inference, never presented as fact.

Where a figure is disputed across sources (funding totals especially), we note the range rather than picking one number with false precision. Where we found nothing at all, we say so rather than leaving a gap that reads as confirmed.

How companies are selected

The YC Ledger is drawn from Y Combinator's own public "Top Companies" list, weighted toward the largest funding and valuation outcomes, spanning every industry rather than filtered to AI. Small, AI-Native is sourced by hand from YC's directory (filtered to recent batches and the Artificial Intelligence industry tag), plus occasional non-YC companies included deliberately for contrast. New entries go through an automated duplicate check against the existing list before publishing.

Corrections

If you're a founder or team member of a company covered here and something is wrong or outdated, we want to fix it. There's no contact form yet — reach out via the channels linked from the site once they're live.