📝 Request For Startups

👋 Hey - Egemen here.

I went through YC's Spring 2026 Request for Startups this morning.

It's the guide currently live for founders applying to the Summer 2026 batch, which has a May 4 deadline.

Most founders will read the list as a checklist of ideas to copy. That's the wrong framing.

Here's a snapshot of what's on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight

What 2,000 SaaS Companies Reveal About Growth in 2026

Is your growth in-line with your peers in B2B SaaS & AI? 

Benchmark yourself against actual billings data for Maxio's 2000+ global customers, alongside firsthand company perspectives to understand how growth varied by company size, business model, and strategic focus.

Key takeaways from the report: 

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🧠 Deep-Dive: Where YC Is Leaning

The Request for Startups (Summer 2026) list isn't what to build.

It's where Garry Tan, Tom Blomfield, and the rest of the partner bench think the next category-defining companies will get built.

Read it that way and one pattern jumps off the page: only 3 of the 10 categories are software for software people. The other 7 push AI into places venture historically avoided.

AI has stopped being a feature. YC is saying it out loud: AI is now the operator, not the wrapper.

The trap is reading these categories at the surface. "AI for Government" sounds like a horizontal platform. It isn't.

If you're applying by May 4, the question isn't which RFS item to copy. It's whether your pitch picks a market specific enough that a big software company can't be bothered, and whether AI is doing the operating work inside it (not just sitting next to it).

👉 YC's RFS is a permission slip to go vertical. If your "AI for X" could be a feature inside someone else's product, you picked the wrong X.

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🗺️ Method

[Webinar] Stop babysitting your coding agents

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⚾️ Catch

Turn Google Ads into predictable customer acquisition

Echelonn manages over $15M/mo in Google and YouTube Ads for 300+ ecommerce brands. One vertical. One channel. Total focus. If you're not confident your account is performing the way it should, book a free audit.

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☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Sooth Labs

Sooth Labs has successfully raised $50 million in a Seed funding round led by Felicis.

Sooth Labs is a software-as-a-service platform that provides advanced observability and debugging tools specifically designed for the next generation of distributed AI applications.

Their tech allows engineering teams to trace complex data flows and identify bottlenecks within autonomous systems in real-time, effectively bringing "sanity" to the often unpredictable behavior of large-scale agentic workflows.

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