“what are great startups today that are at a seed or Series A stage and have super cracked/smart/legit founders?”
“redo search + exclude all previous results”
A fully new live-web scan as of October 21, 2026 surfaced 15 additional Seed and Series A startups with exceptional founders — every company from the previous report (Pit, Rhoda AI, Cogent Security, Entire, Mosaic, Runlayer, Contrario, Sazabi, Wyre AI, Ando, Hang Ten Systems, Inferact, Gimlet Labs, Photon, and Trajectory) was excluded. The 15 rounds total roughly $887M, from a $1.65M strategic seed (Dimension) to a $300M mega-seed (Walden Robotics); 5 are Seed, 10 Series A. Ordering is a research heuristic, not an investment ranking.
Nine stand out on the combination of founder pedigree and concrete, if company-reported, traction.
Click a header to sort. Links: discovery source and an independently found verification source.
Method: 15 Seed/Series A startups from a new live-web scan on 2026-10-21 of 3,000+ merged results across funding news plus biotech, climate, defense, industrial, fintech, robotics, health, energy, developer infrastructure and space; all 15 companies from the previous report were excluded. Round amount is the latest disclosed institutional round in $M and may miss unannounced later rounds; bar length is log-scaled. Traction metrics are company-reported and unaudited, not independently audited facts. Discovery rows span 12 hosts; Business Wire is largest at 4/15 (26.7%). Verification strength ranges from 1 to 6 independent hosts per company. Founder and traction text truncated in cards and table for space; full detail on bar hover.