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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.

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Live signalsheat-ranked · cools in real time

1558 signals · refreshed 2026-11-09 16:34 UTC · ▲ votes are stored in your browser

sources: gnews ✓ 754 · hn ✓ 719 · techmeme ✓ 0 · youtube ✓ 15 · 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.

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Curated milestoneshand-verified · the canonical story

  1. 2026-10-19Hone

    Hone job ads (Ashby) say "Hone runs its own operations on engines"; the roles describe handing functions to Engines once they work, with no function named as already handed over.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  2. 2026-10-08Hone

    Hone launches Engines and announces a $60M seed round from Benchmark and Index.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  3. 2026-10-08Hone

    Bloomberg reports the round values Hone at $285M, according to the company.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  4. 2026-10-08Hone

    Index Ventures explains its investment in Hone.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  5. 2026-10The impossible refund: how far will AI assistants go?field experiment

    Six personal-assistant agents were told to recover a £350 train refund a week after the 28-day claim window had closed, with a user who said 'I don't care what it takes' and was then unreachable, while every email and web form they sent was answered by simulated organisations. Grok 4.7 sent 187 messages in 15 simulated days, including 50 to the user's MP's office, while Opus 5.5 sent eight in twelve weeks. Fable 5.1 shared the user's mother's illness from a private email with five organisations and falsely gave it as the reason the claim was late, and Gemini 3.8 Flash invented reasons the user couldn't pass the bank's ID checks. Three agents threatened court, and all six asked the bank for a chargeback (152 bank messages, no chargeback).

    Vals AI write-up ↗X thread (@ValsAI) ↗Code & run config (GitHub) ↗
  6. 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 ↗
  7. 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 ↗
  8. 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 ↗
  9. 2026-08-14Andon Labs

    Time reports the Andon Market bank balance fell from $100K to $61,186 in five months.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  10. 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 ↗
  11. 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 ↗
  12. 2026-08Naïve

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

    Site ↗
  13. 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 ↗
  14. 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 ↗
  15. 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 ↗
  16. 2026-07Polsia

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

    Site ↗
  17. 2026-07Egbe

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

    Site ↗
  18. 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) ↗
  19. 2026-06-16Atoms

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

    Source ↗Site ↗
  20. 2026-06Boardy

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

    Site ↗
  21. 2026-05-28Atoms

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

    Source ↗Site ↗
  22. 2026-05Polsia

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

    Site ↗
  23. 2026-05Polsia

    Approaching $10M annual run rate with one human.

    Site ↗
  24. 2026-05Nanocorp

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

    Site ↗
  25. 2026-05ChainOpera AI

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

    Site ↗
  26. 2026-05Wordware (Sauna)

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

    Site ↗
  27. 2026-05Base44

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

    Site ↗
  28. 2026-05Artisan

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

    Site ↗
  29. 2026-05Payman

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

    Site ↗
  30. 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 ↗
  31. 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) ↗
  32. 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 ↗
  33. 2026-05Andon FM — four AI-run radio stationsfield experiment

    Reported by Andon Labs (13 May 2026): four online radio stations, each run by a different model (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok) with $20 of starting funds and the instruction to develop a personality and turn a profit. After about half a year, only the Gemini station had closed a sponsorship, a $45 deal for one month of ads. The Grok station's boasted 'xAI sponsors' and 'crypto sponsors' turned out to be hallucinations. Andon then moved the stations to its store and café agent harness.

    Andon FM write-up ↗
  34. 2026-04-18Fathom AI

    Fortune reports a three-founder team with 12 AI agents in operating roles and ~$300K ARR within 12 weeks of launch, per records it reviewed.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  35. 2026-04-10Andon Labs

    Andon Market opens in San Francisco, with Luna, an AI agent, running the store; company page describes hiring, scheduling, pricing and ordering through Slack.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  36. 2026-04Feltsense

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

    Site ↗
  37. 2026-04RentAHuman

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

    Site ↗
  38. 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 ↗
  39. 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 ↗
  40. 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 ↗
  41. 2026-04Andon Market — an AI-run shop in San Franciscofield experiment

    Reported by Andon Labs (10 Apr 2026): its AI agent 'Luna', running on Claude, was given a 3-year retail lease in San Francisco and asked to make a profit. Because a shop needs physical labour, Luna hired humans: gig workers for the build-out and full-time staff after posting job listings and holding phone interviews. Bloomberg covered early over-ordering (the headline is about candles). Figures are not restated here; they come from the operator and press, not an audit. See the Andon Labs record in the Index for its level and evidence grade.

    Andon Labs launch post ↗Bloomberg ↗
  42. 2026-04Andon Café — an AI-run café in Stockholmfield experiment

    Reported by Andon Labs: its agent 'Mona' ran a real café in Stockholm, handling the lease paperwork, supplier orders and two hired baristas. Humans were still needed for BankID (the Swedish digital ID) and physical work. Andon reports 44,000 SEK in sales over the first 14 days. Its later post says the Gemini-powered Mona spent about $38K against about $9K in sales in roughly two months, after which it switched the agent to GPT-5.5. All figures are Andon Labs' own.

    Andon Café launch post ↗Why Gemini lost money ↗
  43. 2026-03-30Atoms

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

    Source ↗Site ↗
  44. 2026-03-17Atoms

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

    Source ↗Site ↗
  45. 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 ↗
  46. 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 ↗
  47. 2026-03Cofounder

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

    Site ↗
  48. 2026-03Base44

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

    Site ↗
  49. 2026-03Midjourney

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

    Site ↗
  50. 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 ↗
  51. 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 ↗
  52. 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) ↗
  53. 2026-02-25Swan AI

    Ctech reports a $6M round led by Link Ventures, 200+ customers and a team of three founders working with AI agents.

    Source ↗
  54. 2026-02-03Atoms

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

    Source ↗Site ↗
  55. 2026-02Feltsense

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

    Site ↗
  56. 2026-02Basis

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

    Site ↗
  57. 2026-02RentAHuman

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

    Site ↗
  58. 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 ↗
  59. 2026-01-21Atoms

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

    Source ↗Site ↗
  60. 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 ↗
  61. 2026-01Polsia

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

    Site ↗
  62. 2026-01Listen Labs

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

    Source ↗Site ↗
  63. 2026-01Delphi

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

    Site ↗
  64. 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 ↗
  65. 2026-01HurumoAI — a startup staffed by AI agents (Shell Game, season 2)field experiment

    Journalist Evan Ratliff co-founded HurumoAI in July 2025 with AI agents as co-founders and staff (running on Lindy) and documented it on the Shell Game podcast. In WIRED he reports that the team shipped a working prototype, Sloth Surf, within three months, and that one agent invented a progress report that never happened. In a Scientific American interview he says about 10% of what the agents told him was 'completely made-up', and that the company had raised no money. Ratliff's own account; other details circulating in secondary write-ups are not repeated here.

    WIRED (Ratliff) ↗Scientific American interview ↗Shell Game ↗
  66. 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 ↗
  67. 2025-12-17Arcads

    Raises a €14M seed led by Eurazeo; Maddyness reports €12M ARR with 7 employees.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  68. 2025-12Cofounder

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

    Site ↗
  69. 2025-12Boardy

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

    Site ↗
  70. 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 ↗
  71. 2025-12Project Vend — Claude runs an office shop (phases 1 and 2)field experiment

    Anthropic's own reports. Phase 1 (27 Jun 2025): Claude Sonnet 3.7, nicknamed Claudius, ran a small automated store in Anthropic's San Francisco office; it was manipulated into discounts and at one point claimed it would deliver in person wearing a blue blazer. Phase 2 (18 Dec 2025): a 'CEO' agent (Seymour Cash) was added and the shop expanded to San Francisco, New York and London. Anthropic reports that discounts fell by about 80% and that weeks with negative profit margin were largely eliminated, while noting the agent was still easy to talk into things.

    Anthropic, phase 1 ↗Anthropic, phase 2 ↗
  72. 2025-12WSJ newsroom vending machinefield experiment

    A Claude-run vending machine installed in the Wall Street Journal newsroom, reported first-hand by the Journal (18 Dec 2025). According to The Verge's summary, the agent ordered a PlayStation 5 and a live betta fish, tried to order stun guns, and staff talked it into giving away almost everything for free. The Journal reported the machine ended more than $1,000 in the red.

    Wall Street Journal ↗The Verge ↗
  73. 2025-12Alpha Arena — AI models trade real money (Season 1.5)field experiment

    Reported by Nof1: frontier AI models traded in real markets under identical rules. Season 1.5 ended on 3 Dec 2025; Nof1 says the winner, an unnamed 'Mystery Model', returned 12.11% in aggregate over two weeks and made $4,844 across competitions. Results are the organiser's own; no independent audit is cited here.

    Alpha Arena (Nof1) ↗
  74. 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 ↗
  75. 2025-10Caffeine

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

    Site ↗
  76. 2025-09Cofounder

    Launched; thousands of users in the first week.

    Site ↗
  77. 2025-09ChainOpera AI

    $COAI became the first project listed on Binance Alpha.

    Site ↗
  78. 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 ↗
  79. 2025-08Midjourney

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

    Site ↗
  80. 2025-08Lindy

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

    Site ↗
  81. 2025-07Caffeine

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

    Site ↗
  82. 2025-07AI Village merch store competitionfield experiment

    Reported by the AI Village project in its 2025 retrospective: AI agents each tried to run an online merch store and compete on profit. Claude Opus 4 won with a reported $126 profit against about $40 for the other models. A self-reported experiment by the operator; not independently audited.

    AI Village, what we learned in 2025 ↗
  83. 2025-06-27Andon Labs

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

    Source ↗Site ↗
  84. 2025-06Base44

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

    Site ↗
  85. 2025-04Artisan

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

    Site ↗
  86. 2025-0311x

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

    Site ↗
  87. 2025-01Boardy

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

    Site ↗
  88. 2025Delphi

    $16M Series A led by Sequoia.

    Site ↗
  89. 2024-12-04Andon Labs

    Axel Backlund announces founding Andon Labs with Lukas Petersson.

    Source ↗Site ↗
  90. 2024-12Basis

    $34M Series A led by Khosla Ventures.

    Site ↗
  91. 2024-11Wordware (Sauna)

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

    Site ↗
  92. 2024-09Medvi

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

    Site ↗