The 9 most sought-after startups from YC Demo Day (techcrunch.com)

Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 Demo Day showcased 160+ startups and reinforced a notable shift: founders are moving beyond generic “AI‑powered” apps toward building AI agents, agent infrastructure, and tooling to monetize the new AI economy (ads, marketing, voice interfaces). Investors gravitated to companies that solve hard production problems—billing, autoscaling, human feedback loops—or that demonstrate real revenue traction, signaling a maturation from experimentation to scalable, productized AI services. Standouts reveal the pattern. Autumn provides open‑source Stripe integrations tailored to complex, usage‑based AI pricing and is already used by hundreds of apps and 40 YC startups—addressing a pervasive fintech pain point. Dedalus Labs bills itself as “Vercel for AI agents,” automating deployment concerns like autoscaling and load balancing. Design Arena crowdsources rankings to turn AI‑generated visuals into training feedback. Enterprise/vertical winners include Solva (automated claims workflows with $245k ARR in 10 weeks), Keystone (an AI that finds and fixes production bugs), and Perseus (low‑cost counter‑drone missiles with military demos). Consumer plays with strong unit economics—RealRoots (friends matchmaker) and Pingo (conversational language tutor)—show rapid revenue growth. Collectively these startups highlight where AI investment is flowing: infrastructure for reliable, scalable agents and verticalized models that produce measurable revenue and operational leverage.