What Companies Are in a16z Speedrun in 2026?

Acceler8

HR Tech / AI Agents

Acceler8 builds AI-powered workforce intelligence and planning software for large organizations.

Its platform helps leadership teams understand which roles can be automated, where employees can be redeployed, what capabilities an organization will need next, and how workforce structures should evolve as humans and AI agents increasingly work together.

Acceler8 was founded by Chinmay Chauhan and Trisha Pathak. Chauhan previously scaled a company to hundreds of employees after raising approximately $80 million, while Pathak has worked on workforce restructuring across dozens of companies.

Advocate

Healthcare / AI Agents

Advocate builds an AI chief of staff for seniors and their families.

Users can call one number and ask for help with tasks such as rides, groceries, home repairs, and appointments. Advocate handles requests end to end, updates family members when tasks are completed, and keeps activity in a shared family record.

Founder Andrew Baran previously co-founded Leilo, led software and AI work at McKinsey, and invested in healthcare and vertical SaaS companies.

Alike

Future of Work / AI Agents

Alike is building an agent collaboration layer for enterprises.

Its technology enables autonomous AI agents working across different teams and systems to communicate and coordinate directly with one another, reducing the manual handoffs required between automated workflows.

The company has reported that its technology is live inside multiple teams, with additional design partners and companies on its waitlist.

Amdahl

AI Infrastructure / Sales

Amdahl builds a context layer for enterprise go-to-market teams.

The product structures information across Sales, Support, Customer Success, and channel performance, giving AI systems the context required to reason about customer relationships and commercial workflows rather than relying on isolated records.

Its team brings experience from companies including Databricks and Coinbase.

Antihero Studios

Gaming

Antihero Studios is a Barcelona-based mobile game studio focused on social-first multiplayer experiences.

The studio is building MISFITZ, a mobile extraction game designed around social interaction, emergent player behavior, and creator-driven growth.

Its team includes veterans of Supercell, King, and Blizzard, with experience across games including Brawl Stars, Clash Royale, Candy Crush, and Hearthstone.

August

Fintech / AI Agents

August builds autonomous AI bankers.

The company applies domain-specific AI to commercial banking workflows where relationship managers and other employees spend significant time working across fragmented documents, customer information, and manual processes.

August is focused on bringing agentic automation into financial workflows where accuracy, customer context, and industry knowledge matter.

Auto

Consumer AI

Auto is building an AI-powered camera that turns photographs into interactive personal applications.

Rather than treating a photograph as static media, Auto uses AI to understand what is inside an image and create interactive software experiences around it.

The company was founded by a team with previous experience at Snapchat.

Belong

Consumer / Fintech

Belong is building infrastructure around the relationship between artists and fans.

Its approach is designed to give creators deeper ownership of their fan relationships while creating new ways for audiences to participate economically in the communities they support.

Co-founder Nick Holmsten previously founded Tunigo, which Spotify acquired, and later became Spotify's Global Head of Music. Co-founder Ash Pournouri is known for managing Avicii.

Bilrost

Real Estate / Fintech / AI Agents

Bilrost builds AI-native infrastructure for commercial credit and real estate lending.

Its system turns deal documents, financials, borrower history, and underwriting context into a structured context graph supporting the lending lifecycle from intake and underwriting through servicing and monitoring.

The company says its platform has processed thousands of deals and is being tested with major lenders.

Bota

AI Infrastructure / Hardware

Bota builds infrastructure that gives AI agents access to real-world context, beginning with voice data.

The company is positioning itself as a context engine for AI agents operating across sales, healthcare, legal, finance, productivity, and other workflows.

Its founders bring experience from Stanford Robotics, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, and AWS.

Cascade

Construction Tech / AI

Cascade builds an AI prediction layer for construction projects.

Its technology helps contractors, developers, and project owners identify risk earlier so they can make better decisions about how projects are planned, financed, and built.

The founding team combines experience from Google Pay, Google Search, machine learning, and infrastructure technology.

Cedar

HR Tech / AI Agents

Cedar is building an AI-native professional network, beginning with recruiting and employee referrals.

Its agents map trusted professional relationships through employee conversations, identify potential candidates, and create a relationship graph that becomes more useful as more employees participate.

Founders Greg Gunn and Beier Cai bring experience scaling large software organizations.

Concorda

Legal Tech

Concorda builds an AI operating system for litigation and trial lawyers.

The platform targets document review, case organization, legal research, and other information-intensive workflows involved in litigation.

Concorda is designed as an integrated AI layer for litigation teams rather than an isolated point solution.

Grove Tax

Tax Technology / AI Agents

Grove Tax builds an AI workforce for tax firms.

Its agents automate parts of tax preparation and client service, including intake, document extraction, return preparation, review support, and delivery.

The company is targeting a tax industry facing growing workloads and a shortage of experienced professionals.

Hammock

Healthcare / Fintech / AI Agents

Hammock helps consumers identify healthcare and wellness purchases that may qualify for HSA or FSA spending.

Its AI agent can identify potentially eligible expenses and work with an integrated physician network to generate Letters of Medical Necessity for qualifying products and services.

Co-founder Jesse Rose previously built Berry Street, while co-founder Will Dennis previously led product at WeightWatchers and worked at WhatsApp and Houseparty.

Heavi

Transportation / AI Agents

Heavi builds an AI workforce for heavy vehicle mechanics.

The product helps mechanics work across diagnostic information, service history, technical manuals, and repair workflows for trucks and other heavy vehicles.

Co-founder Sanjay Dasari is an ASE-certified diesel mechanic, while Michael Holkesvik previously built machine-learning infrastructure for the timber industry.

Hotbox

Sales / AI Agents

Hotbox builds predictive intelligence for social commerce.

The platform analyzes signals such as likes, comments, and direct messages to identify people who resemble a company's ideal customer, enrich those prospects, and move them into sales workflows.

Founder Harpriya Bagri previously sold a company to Salesforce and worked on LinkedIn's ranking algorithm.

Idilio

Media / Generative AI

Idilio builds an AI-powered microdrama platform for Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking audiences.

The company applies generative AI to serialized entertainment, helping reduce production costs and increase the speed at which short-form narrative content can be created and tested.

Its approach brings AI-native production economics to a large Spanish- and Portuguese-language entertainment market.

Kaaro

Transportation / AI Agents

Kaaro builds AI agents for railway operations.

Rail companies still rely on manual processes for paperwork, incident reporting, billing, scheduling, and communication between field teams. Kaaro applies AI agents to automate those operational workflows.

The company has reported partnerships with railway operators including CPKC and Gulf & Ohio Railways.

Meridian

Enterprise AI

Meridian builds an AI operating system for consulting firms.

Consulting businesses generate large amounts of institutional knowledge across presentations, reports, research, and previous client engagements. Meridian organizes that information, makes prior work searchable, and helps consultants generate new deliverables using firm knowledge and templates.

Modaic

Developer Infrastructure / AI

Modaic builds verification and alignment infrastructure for AI systems making judgment-heavy decisions.

Its technology evaluates model confidence, routes uncertain cases to people, and incorporates human feedback to improve subsequent decisions.

The founding team has backgrounds spanning MIT, Harvard, IBM, Bloomberg, and the MIT Media Lab.

Modern Industrials

Industrial / Supply Chain AI

Modern Industrials builds an AI workforce for building-material distributors.

Its first product, the AI Sales Engine, automates workflows including quoting, order entry, and analytics. The company is initially focused on building-material distribution, with a longer-term goal of becoming an operating system for physical-goods distribution.

The founding team combines experience from xAI, Google, McKinsey, Uber, and Roon.

Oasiz

Gaming / Consumer AI

Oasiz is building a social discovery platform for AI-native software, beginning with games.

Its premise is that AI-generated software can become something users discover and share in the same way they discover videos and other online content.

The company has reported significant user activity and a partnership with Atari.

PayPath

Fintech / AI

PayPath builds an AI operating system for debt.

The platform modernizes debt-management workflows that are frequently fragmented across spreadsheets, servicing systems, communications, and manual processes.

PicPet

Consumer / Social

PicPet combines photo sharing with a shared virtual pet.

Users feed photos to their virtual pet, turning everyday photo sharing into an ongoing social game rather than another traditional social feed.

Piper-ai

Construction Tech / AI

Piper-ai builds an AI workforce for construction.

Construction teams routinely work through large collections of bid documents, drawings, specifications, and project information. Piper uses AI to extract and organize that information so teams can understand scope, pricing, and project risk more quickly.

The product brings specialized AI into construction workflows that remain heavily dependent on manual document analysis.

Quanto

Accounting / AI Agents

Quanto builds an AI workforce for accounting firms.

Its agents automate workflows including prospecting, onboarding, bookkeeping cleanup, and other repetitive processes inside accounting practices.

Quinn

HR Tech / AI Agents

Quinn builds an AI training platform for frontline employees.

The company targets frontline workers who often lack access to the same modern training infrastructure available to office-based employees.

Quinn was founded by Ben Anderson, previously co-founder of Amino Apps, and Arlen Marmel, who previously worked on Hulu and Crunchyroll.

Sellara

Fintech / AI Agents

Sellara builds custom AI agents for financial institutions.

The company works with banks, broker-dealers, hedge funds, asset managers, and wealth managers to automate front-, middle-, and back-office workflows.

Its founding team includes former Citi professionals with experience serving institutional financial clients.

Sentra

Enterprise AI / Infrastructure

Sentra builds organizational memory infrastructure for enterprise AI.

The platform captures interactions across meetings, messages, email, and agent traces and turns them into shared organizational memory that AI models can use to understand and coordinate work.

Sentra's team includes founders and researchers with backgrounds spanning MIT, IBM, Caltech, Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and Databricks.

Sirius Technology

Enterprise SaaS / AI

Sirius Technology builds an AI retention platform for subscription businesses.

The product focuses on reducing customer churn by identifying retention opportunities and automating parts of the workflows businesses use to keep subscribers engaged.

Its positioning combines AI-driven analysis with automated retention operations.

Smart Bricks

Real Estate / AI Agents

Smart Bricks is an applied AI company building agentic reasoning systems for real estate investing.

Its platform combines autonomous agents, multi-model reasoning, and continuous learning to turn fragmented property-market information into decision-ready intelligence for discovering, evaluating, and managing real-world assets.

Its team brings experience from Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and OpenAI.

Snapp Stats

Sports / Consumer AI

Snapp Stats builds a 24/7 AI agent for sports fans.

The product brings sports statistics, context, fantasy implications, and other information into a personalized conversational experience rather than requiring fans to switch between multiple applications.

CEO Shawn Tsao previously co-founded Caviar, which was acquired by Square and later DoorDash.

Sparta

AI / Data Infrastructure

Sparta builds an intelligent data-delivery layer that dynamically optimizes large-scale transfers across clouds, clusters, and distributed systems.

Its reinforcement-learning engine adapts transfer parameters based on live network conditions, helping reduce idle GPU time, improve bandwidth utilization, and make high-performance computing infrastructure more efficient.

Sparta was founded by Arya Kanna, Saad Asad, and Lalith Posam.

Straia

EdTech / AI Agents

Straia builds agentic AI software for higher education.

The company applies AI agents to operational workflows across colleges and universities, helping institutions automate administrative work that has traditionally required significant staff time.

SUN

Consumer / Generative Media

SUN builds personalized interactive AI audio.

Users can create podcasts, audiobooks, and other structured audio experiences on virtually any topic while choosing characteristics such as length, voice, and language. Listeners can also ask questions during playback and receive responses in real time.

The founding team includes Artin Bogdanov, Mehmet Günhan Ertosun, and Amy Hua.

Third Space

Insurtech / AI

Third Space is building AI-native commercial insurance.

The company focuses on categories where traditional commercial insurance workflows can be fragmented and difficult for operators to navigate.

VariantNow

Marketing / Commerce / AI Agents

VariantNow builds infrastructure for what it calls the Adaptive Web, where websites change dynamically for individual visitors or AI agents.

Its real-time decisioning and generation layer can adjust content, imagery, products, and user flows based on context and intent.

The company was founded by Elad Nissenberg and Ben Segal.

Vereda

AgriTech / AI Agents

Vereda builds an AI procurement agent for agriculture.

Its product uses a conversational, WhatsApp-native interface to help agricultural businesses source products and connect demand with suppliers.

ZeroDrift

Fintech / Cybersecurity

ZeroDrift builds infrastructure that checks enterprise communications for regulatory, security, and organizational-policy violations before messages are sent.

The product is designed for environments where both employees and autonomous AI agents communicate with customers and counterparties at increasing scale.

Founder Kumesh Aroomoogan previously built financial NLP company Accern.

Primitive Labs

Enterprise AI / Behavioral Intelligence

Primitive Labs builds behavioral intelligence for AI-native software.

The company is developing systems that model how users perceive, hesitate, and make decisions inside digital products, helping product teams understand customer behavior during development.

Primitive Labs was founded by Rohit Talluri, Jean Farmer, and Gabriel F., with team experience including Amazon AGI and AWS.

The founders announced their participation in a16z Speedrun SR007 in 2026.

Munari Labs

Robotics / Physical AI Infrastructure

Munari Labs is building infrastructure for physical AI and robotics.

The company focuses on reliability infrastructure that helps robots operate consistently outside controlled laboratory environments, with work spanning edge computing, machine learning, physical AI infrastructure, and robotics.

Munari Labs has been identified in this research as associated with a16z Speedrun SR007.