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News pulse

Know first. Every signal from the autopilot economy.

TL;DR: agents read the internet so you don't. Every funding round, launch and interview from the autopilot economy — plus the tech stack behind it (Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, OpenRouter…) through a solo-builder lens. Deduped, heat-ranked, fresh daily.

Live signalsheat-ranked · cools in real time

4073 signals · refreshed 2026-10-11 13:00 UTC · ▲ votes are stored in your browser

sources: gnews ✓ 719 · hn ✓ 678 · techmeme ✓ 4 · youtube ✓ 15 · linkedin ⚠ 212 failed 0 · x ⚠ 157 failed 0 · investor ⚠ 3 failed 0 · discovery ✓ 0 · reddit ⚠ 1 failed 0

🔀 Stack switch log

Production workloads voting with their wallets — the strongest infra demand signal there is. When an indexed company moves providers, it lands here.

📡 Radar — possible new entrants

Unvetted candidates surfaced by keyword discovery ("autonomous company", "AI employees", "one-person unicorn"…). Nothing here is verified yet — promotion requires passing the Autopilot Criteria.

Know a company that belongs here? Submit it — 3 steps, live preview.

Curated milestoneshand-verified · the canonical story

  1. 2026-09-15Andon Labs

    Preview page reviewed: applicants can bring an existing business or propose a new one; access is gradual and experiments can fail.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  2. 2026-09-14Andon Labs

    Pion research preview opens a waitlist for existing businesses and new experiments. Andon reports that its market and cafe are still unprofitable.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  3. 2026-09Listen Labs

    Walked away from a $1.5bn Series C term sheet to hold acquisition talks with Salesforce at ~$2bn; talks unfinalised.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  4. 2026-08Polsia

    DISPUTED: 'hollow shell' allegations — an independent X investigation spot-checked three Polsia-launched businesses and found landing pages with no working product; Trustpilot at 1.9/5 (74 reviews) citing unauthorized redeployments and unapproved cold outreach. Counterpoints: documented rapid autonomous output (Granot, Klinger) and unusual founder transparency — Ben Cera discloses ~50% month-one churn and that ~10% of customer companies have made at least a dollar. An ARR breakdown pegs subscriptions at $6.96M of the $10.22M headline (~1/3 non-recurring).

    Site ↗
  5. 2026-08Polsia

    Sapiom — the spend-routing layer in Polsia's stack — raises a $35M Series A (Dragonfly lead; Anthropic among the backers). Press coverage credits its task-to-cheapest-model routing in Polsia's $1.2M → $100K bill cut, adding third-party corroboration to the founder-reported arc.

    Site ↗
  6. 2026-08Naïve

    $28.5M Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners (YC, Zetta, Liquid 2 participating) to build 'the infrastructure for autonomous companies'.

    Site ↗
  7. 2026-08Egbe

    Says GLM-5.2 (Z.ai) now powers the majority of its AI co-founder's building workload — production requests and processed tokens up nearly 8× in a single month since the switch (self-reported, from a one-month-old base) — and joins the Z.ai Startup Program.

    Site ↗
  8. 2026-08London Coffee Indexfield experiment

    A separate project from the Sydney index (different team, independently built): TheDX's voice agents contacted 2,288 independent coffee shops across all 33 London boroughs; 677 responded and 416 flat-white prices were captured. Median £3.50, average £3.40; Westminster the priciest borough (median £3.85). Shop identities anonymised and map points displaced for privacy. Figures site-verified; self-reported, no independent press yet.

    flatwhiteindex.thedx.ai ↗
  9. 2026-07Polsia

    Self-documentary ('I Built a $250M AI Company. The Bill Is $1.2M a Month') reveals the unit-economics arc: monthly Anthropic bill climbed $500K → $1.2M, then dropped to ~$100K in June after moving routine workloads to open-source models on rented GPUs (Sciforium inference; Sapiom handling agent spend). Next move: a free tier. Figures founder-reported; independent analysts dispute the margin math.

    Site ↗
  10. 2026-07Polsia

    WSJ reports 10,000 paying customers and ~$10M projected revenue.

    Site ↗
  11. 2026-07Egbe

    Launches publicly: 'the first companies are already running on Egbe' (numbers not disclosed).

    Site ↗
  12. 2026-07FoodTruckBench — can AI run a food truck?field experiment

    The control-group experiment for the autopilot thesis: a 30-day simulated food truck in Austin, TX — $2,000 starting capital, 34 tools covering location choice, dynamic pricing, inventory, staffing, weather, and event calendars — with humans and models competing under identical rules on one leaderboard. 41 models tested: 25 survived, 16 went bankrupt. Best AI run (Claude Opus 5) turned $2,000 into $75K net worth (+3,663% ROI); Gemini 3 Flash once wrote 'Let's go' 574 times in a single response and never went anywhere. The sobering caveat: the best human still beats every model, roughly doubling the top AI score. Simulated rather than real-world — charted as the cleanest benchmark yet of whether agents can actually run a business.

    foodtruckbench.com ↗Tuscan Agency write-up ↗Skeptical take (Tech Trenches) ↗
  13. 2026-06-16Atoms

    MarkTechPost: Research, app delivery, SEO and ads agents coordinated with founder approvals; sponsored by Atoms.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  14. 2026-06Boardy

    Boardy Pro launch; ~$63B in capital introductions reported to date.

    Site ↗
  15. 2026-05-28Atoms

    TechRound: Founder Alex Wu describes a team for launching and growing businesses; automatic income generation is a roadmap goal.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  16. 2026-05Polsia

    Raised $30M at a $250M valuation with zero employees — the AI reportedly ran much of the fundraise.

    Site ↗
  17. 2026-05Polsia

    Approaching $10M annual run rate with one human.

    Site ↗
  18. 2026-05Nanocorp

    Launched as Phospho's autonomous-company platform (Show HN); founder reported $193K ARR within 3 days.

    Site ↗
  19. 2026-05ChainOpera AI

    Launched AI Trading Arena; integrated Lit Protocol's 'Vincent' autonomous trading agents.

    Site ↗
  20. 2026-05Wordware (Sauna)

    Launched Sauna (sauna.ai) — rebranding around an always-on proactive AI assistant.

    Site ↗
  21. 2026-05Base44

    Wix Q1 2026 earnings: Base44 surpasses $150M ARR.

    Site ↗
  22. 2026-05Artisan

    Ava 2.0 general availability with self-serve onboarding and $300 free credits.

    Site ↗
  23. 2026-05Payman

    Citizens State Bank (Colorado) partners with Payman to pioneer 'agentic banking'.

    Site ↗
  24. 2026-05Moritz

    $9M oversubscribed seed closed in 4 days (20VC, YC, Urban Innovation Fund, Inception Fund, 20+ unicorn-founder angels). Press reports $2B in aggregate contract value across 100+ companies in the first 3 months; YC profile says $3B — figures self-reported.

    Site ↗
  25. 2026-05Le Baguette Indexfield experiment

    Explicitly inspired by the Guinndex: an AI voice agent named 'Brigitte' phoned French bakeries asking 'Combien coûte votre baguette tradition ?'. ~11,190 calls reached 5,173 bakeries across 146 communes (hung up on 1,400+ times); 1,638 prices retained. Average: €1.25; a third of bakeries charge exactly €1.30. Fun finding: cheaper baguettes correlate with better Google ratings. Out-of-pocket cost: ~€30. Most bakers never realized they were talking to a machine.

    lebaguetteindex.fr ↗Cybernews ↗Write-up (Substack) ↗
  26. 2026-05SliceDex — the NYC pizza slice price indexfield experiment

    Explicitly inspired by the Guinndex: voice agent 'Heather' (ElevenLabs + Twilio) phoned pizza shops across all five NYC boroughs asking the price of a plain cheese slice. 1,766 shops called, 1,346 answered (76% pick-up), 838 gave a price; 829 prices live in the index across 2,252 shops mapped. Headline average: $3.42 (distribution mean $3.56, σ $0.62); most common price $3.50; range $1.00–$6.00. Claude parsed the call transcripts into structured data. Updated in batches via Heather plus community submissions. Figures site-verified; no mainstream press yet (one independent mention by Lander Analytics).

    slicedex.com ↗Lander Analytics ↗
  27. 2026-04Feltsense

    Claims ~10,000 'Founder Agencies' spun up within months (self-reported); launched Gutcheck diligence tool in beta.

    Site ↗
  28. 2026-04RentAHuman

    Joins Y Combinator (Spring 2026 batch); reports 500K+ registered humans across 100+ countries and $20K MRR.

    Site ↗
  29. 2026-04Retell AI

    Sacra estimates ~$60M annualized revenue, up ~650% YoY, on ~$5.1M total raised. Headcount disputed across sources (21–143) — efficiency claims flagged.

    Site ↗
  30. 2026-04Egbe

    Pre-launch: founder tells the MIT AI Summit he has created 100 AI-run e-commerce startups 'on a few Mac minis and some cloud servers' (Boston Globe; founder-reported).

    Site ↗
  31. 2026-04Medvi

    NYT front page: 'A $1.8 Billion Business Built With A.I. and a Payroll of Just Two' — financials verified by the Times; Sam Altman says it won him a bet. Backlash follows: Techdirt and Futurism dispute the framing, and Business Insider finds thousands of Meta ads fronted by fake AI doctor personas.

    Site ↗
  32. 2026-03-30Atoms

    Unite.AI: Reviewer builds and publishes an app; prompt quality, custom-build limits and credit costs still matter.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  33. 2026-03-17Atoms

    Design News: Alex Chenglin Wu describes automated setup, backend integration and iteration for engineers and small teams.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  34. 2026-03Polsia

    500 → 5,000 paying users in one month, driven by the 'Polsia raises its own round' stunt — the live dashboard at polsia.com/live showed the AI working on every customer company (user counts founder-reported).

    Site ↗
  35. 2026-03Nanocorp

    Independent review reports ~190 companies founded per day — but disputes the revenue claims, finding just ~$264 cumulative revenue across all platform-created companies.

    Site ↗
  36. 2026-03Cofounder

    Cofounder 2 research preview + Fellowship program for agent-run startups.

    Site ↗
  37. 2026-03Base44

    Calcalist: Base44 hits $100M ARR nine months after the Wix acquisition.

    Site ↗
  38. 2026-03Midjourney

    V8 Alpha: native 2K, 5x faster generation.

    Site ↗
  39. 2026-03Minimal

    $3.6M seed led by YC and Rebel Fund, with 15 of its own customers investing as angels; reports 7-figure ARR resolving up to 90% of e-commerce tickets with a 3-person team.

    Site ↗
  40. 2026-03Medvi

    Class action filed in the Central District of California alleging its affiliate marketers sent spam with spoofed domains and falsified headers ($1,000 sought per email).

    Site ↗
  41. 2026-03Guinndex — the Guinness price indexfield experiment

    Annoyed by a €7.80 Dublin pint, he built an AI voice agent named 'Rachel' (friendly Northern Irish accent) that phoned 3,000+ pubs across all 32 Irish counties asking the price of a pint of Guinness. 2,052 pubs answered; 1,000+ verified prices. National average: €5.95. Cheapest: €3.00 (Glynn's Bar, Dunmore); priciest: €10 (Temple Bar). Total cost: ~€200. Only a handful of publicans realized it was an AI — and at least one pub cut its price €0.40 afterward. Now runs as a crowdsourced 'living CPI for the pint'. June 2026: Rachel crossed to the UK (guinndex.co.uk, co-built with AI researcher John Fleming) — 46,237 pubs mapped, 35,659 dialed, 6,544 verified prices across 108 counties, national average £5.82, for ~£500 in API fees. Only 4% of UK publicans detected the AI (0.6% in Northern Ireland, where Rachel matched the local accent). Sister project: Gas Index USA (Apr 2026).

    guinndex.ai ↗guinndex.co.uk ↗Fortune ↗Vice ↗tech.eu ↗Inside the Cask (UK) ↗
  42. 2026-02-03Atoms

    VKTR: One founder coordinates specialist AI agents across product development, marketing and operations.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  43. 2026-02Feltsense

    Raised $5.1M seed led by Draper Associates for 'agentic founders' that build startups from zero.

    Site ↗
  44. 2026-02Basis

    Raises $100M Series B at $1.15B led by Accel.

    Site ↗
  45. 2026-02RentAHuman

    Launches and breaks the internet: 73K humans registered in two days; Wired profiles 'the first marketplace for bots to hire humans'.

    Site ↗
  46. 2026-02Medvi

    FDA warning letter (Feb 20) for misbranding compounded semaglutide/tirzepatide — marketing implied FDA approval. Same month: men's health line launches and claims 50,000 customers in month one.

    Site ↗
  47. 2026-01-21Atoms

    Official announcement: $31M across Series A and A+, led by Ant Group and Cathay Innovation.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  48. 2026-01-15Atoms

    Barchart / ABNewswire: Launch announcement positions Atoms as an AI business team for one-person companies; founder approves the plan before execution.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  49. 2026-01Polsia

    Reported running ~6,000 customer companies at $6M+ ARR (Henry Shi profile).

    Site ↗
  50. 2026-01Listen Labs

    $69M Series B led by Ribbit Capital at a $500M valuation.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  51. 2026-01Delphi

    CEO calls 2026 'the tipping point for digital minds'.

    Site ↗
  52. 2026-01Beacon Health

    YC W26; goes live with an independent physician association supporting 40,000 patients — agents run prior auth, referrals, screenings and risk adjustment inside the EHR.

    Site ↗
  53. 2026Flat White Index — Sydneyfield experiment

    Voice agent 'Mia' called 847 independent Sydney cafés (chains excluded, weekday business hours only) asking 'How much is a regular flat white?'. Average: A$5.80, range A$4.00 (Ashfield) to A$7.20 (Darling Harbour) across 23 suburbs, re-surveyed monthly. The dataset is published open under CC BY 4.0 (JSON + llms.txt) with the code on GitHub. Melbourne edition slated for 2026. Figures site-verified; self-reported, no independent press yet.

    flatwhiteindex.com.au ↗GitHub ↗
  54. 2025-12Cofounder

    Announced Cofounder 1.5 and $8.7M seed led by Union Square Ventures.

    Site ↗
  55. 2025-12Boardy

    Launches AI-led venture fund / scout network (Boardy Ventures).

    Site ↗
  56. 2025-12Medvi

    First full year closes at $401M sales, 250,000 customers, 16.2% net profit — with two employees, seven contract account managers, and two contract engineers.

    Site ↗
  57. 2025-11Gamma

    Founder reports ARR above $100M, 50 employees and two years of profitability; announces $68M Series B at a $2.1B valuation.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  58. 2025-10Caffeine

    DFINITY launches Caffeine publicly — production apps from natural-language prompts.

    Site ↗
  59. 2025-09Cofounder

    Launched; thousands of users in the first week.

    Site ↗
  60. 2025-09ChainOpera AI

    $COAI became the first project listed on Binance Alpha.

    Site ↗
  61. 2025-09Lunavo

    Joins YC Fall 2025; claims 85% of repetitive freight-forwarder back-office work automated within 60 days (self-reported; no third-party coverage yet).

    Site ↗
  62. 2025-08Midjourney

    Meta partnership to license Midjourney's 'aesthetic technology'.

    Site ↗
  63. 2025-08Lindy

    Lindy 3.0 launch with Autopilot — autonomous computer-use agents.

    Site ↗
  64. 2025-07Caffeine

    Early access opens after 'Hello, Self-Writing Internet' event; 15,000+ alpha users.

    Site ↗
  65. 2025-06-27Andon Labs

    Anthropic documents the first Project Vend experiment, including losses and human support for physical operations.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  66. 2025-06Base44

    TechCrunch: 6-month-old, solo-owned vibe coder Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash.

    Site ↗
  67. 2025-04Artisan

    TechCrunch: the 'stop hiring humans' startup raises $25M — and is still hiring humans.

    Site ↗
  68. 2025-0311x

    TechCrunch: 'a16z- and Benchmark-backed 11x has been claiming customers it doesn't have'.

    Site ↗
  69. 2025-01Boardy

    $8M seed led by Creandum — round largely negotiated by the AI itself (TechCrunch).

    Site ↗
  70. 2025Delphi

    $16M Series A led by Sequoia.

    Site ↗
  71. 2024-12-04Andon Labs

    Axel Backlund announces founding Andon Labs with Lukas Petersson.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  72. 2024-12Basis

    $34M Series A led by Khosla Ventures.

    Site ↗
  73. 2024-11Wordware (Sauna)

    $30M seed led by Spark Capital; previously the #1 Product Hunt launch of all time.

    Site ↗
  74. 2024-09Medvi

    Launches after a two-month, $20,000 build; 300 customers in month one, 1,000 more in month two.

    Site ↗