Signals

May 13, 2026

Collectibles Get Provably Fair Mystery Packs

New Intel: CatchBack Cards is building custom mystery packs with cryptographic odds, digital openings, physical fulfillment, and instant payouts. The Steph Curry card collaboration could push it deeper into sports collectibles.

CatchBack Cards

Consumer Marketplace

YC Winter 26

May 13, 2026

Agent Certification Becomes The Enterprise Gate

New Intel: Cascade is building evaluation, red teaming, guardrails, and uncertainty tooling for high-stakes AI agents. If enterprise buyers demand certification before deployment, Cascade could become the trust layer.

Cascade

AI Safety & Reliability

YC Winter 26

May 13, 2026

Agents Need Continuous Performance Tuning

New Intel: Carrot Labs is building continuous optimization for production AI agents, including evals, prompt tuning, retrieval changes, and selective fine-tuning. The bet is that agents need upkeep after launch as data and tools change.

Carrot Labs

Machine Learning Infrastructure

YC Winter 26

May 13, 2026

Live Call Support Targets Technical Sales

New Intel: Caretta is building a live AI assistant for technical sales calls, pulling answers from docs, Slack, CRM, and internal playbooks. The larger product could become deal intelligence trained on every customer conversation.

Caretta

AI Sales Enablement

YC Winter 26

May 13, 2026

Outbound Consolidates Into One Workflow

New Intel: Cardinal is running outbound for 40+ YC companies by combining lead gen, enrichment, signal monitoring, personalization, and sequencing. The play is replacing a messy SDR stack with one workflow.

Cardinal

Sales Technology

YC Winter 26

May 13, 2026

Video Editing Moves Into The Browser

New Intel: Cardboard is building browser-based video editing with natural language commands and exports to Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. The wedge is AI editing that still fits professional post-production workflows.

Cardboard

Video Editing

YC Winter 26

May 13, 2026

Knowledge Search Becomes API Infrastructure

New Intel: Captain is building API-first enterprise knowledge retrieval with multimodal ingestion, cited answers, RBAC, and SOC 2. The bigger play is becoming the retrieval layer behind internal AI apps.

Captain

Knowledge Search

YC Winter 26

May 13, 2026

Code-Aware QA Becomes The Gatekeeper

New Intel: Canary is building QA that reads code diffs, writes Playwright tests, and comments on PRs with failure analysis. As AI coding speeds up, code-aware testing becomes the release gate.

Canary

Developer Tools

YC Winter 26

May 13, 2026

Verified Math Becomes Scientific Infrastructure

New Intel: Cajal is building AI mathematicians that verify proofs in Lean, starting with quantum computing and finance. The wedge is high-stakes research where plausible answers are useless unless they can be checked.

Cajal

Formal Verification

YC Winter 26

May 13, 2026

File Transfer Becomes Data Pipeline Infrastructure

New Intel: Byteport is building a protocol for massive file transfers across unreliable networks. If DART’s speed claims hold up, the company could become data pipeline infrastructure for robotics, satellites, AI, and defense.

Byteport

Data Infrastructure

YC Winter 26