Request for startups - ideas from top investors Spring 2026
Submissions from investors at Google Ventures, CRV, Forerunner, XYZ, and more
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“What should I work on?” is a question we receive numerous times every week.
Today, we’re sharing a list of startup and side-project ideas we collected from many top venture capitalists and angel investors (i.e. people who spend all day talking to founders, understanding markets, and searching for ideas).
There’s a bunch of interesting (not obvious) ideas in this list. If one excites you, we encourage you to get exploring. You can also reach out to the investor who submitted (and potentially wants to fund!) the idea as you make progress and get feedback.
We’re hopeful this will help people discover what’s next. You never know!
Sam O’Donnell, Investor at Forerunner Ventures
Family OS: A shared space designed to help families feel more connected in everyday life. Instead of focusing on tasks and calendars, Family OS holds lightweight shared context — what’s going on with each person, moments that matter, photos, notes, and small updates — and uses that to surface memories, patterns, and simple opportunities to spend time together. It reduces the mental load of “keeping everyone in sync” while bringing moments of joy, togetherness, and reflection back into view.
GenZ Financial Planner: A consumer fintech product that helps Gen Z save and invest by making progress visible and motivating, rather than restrictive. It turns long-term financial health into something users can feel day to day — through milestones, momentum, and simple guidance — while avoiding the shame-based patterns of traditional finance apps.
Personal Security Monitor is a consumer security product that acts as an early warning system for modern digital threats like AI-driven scams, impersonation, and account takeover. It passively monitors signals across a user’s identity, financial accounts, and communications — including detecting when a phone call or message may be generated or manipulated by AI — and looks for patterns that don’t match normal behavior. When something looks genuinely off, it interprets what’s happening and tells the user how serious it is and what to do next, from safely ignoring it to taking a single guided action. The product replaces alert fatigue and guesswork with early clarity and calm, coordinated response.
Looking to meet a co-founder? Be sure to check out Friends of Next Play, where you’ll get added to our Slack group and invited to loads of interesting events with like-minded people.
Rex Woodbury, Managing Partner at Daybreak Ventures
AI-native wealth advisory firm — employs advisors but supercharges them with bespoke AI tools, helping them be more efficient and take on lower-AUM clients profitably.
Voice-led unbundling of Indeed.com, with verticalized players cut by function (e.g., sales) and industry (e.g., manufacturing)
Vivek Sodera, Founder & GP at Supercharge
Would love to see founders building devtools/infra for facial liveness verification. There’s a skyrocketing level of AI-driven fraud (financial, recruiting, content, etc.) and bot/agent activity (pretending to be humans) that is increasingly chipping away at our trust-based society.
Would love to see an AI upskilling solution in the market for prosumers. Humans are notoriously bad at changing and adopting new behaviors on a self-serve basis, and a “personal trainer for AI adoption” fills a need for professionals, especially with how fast new AI technologies and systems are being dropped on a daily basis. Ironically this should scale beyond human trainers; I for one would love an always-on desktop client/agent that monitors my activity, powers the relevant AI upskilling, and holds me accountable.
Veronica Orellana, Partner at CRV
I’m looking for a company tackling the direct procurement market with AI. This market contains tons of unstructured data, high volume and repetitive decisions, and it’s the perfect wedge for moving into demand forecasting, pricing optimization, supplier management, etc.
Michael Bloch, Partner at Quiet Capital
Endgame Businesses: Controlling What AI Can’t Replace (inspired by this post I wrote): As intelligence gets cheap, the scarce resources become energy, physical space, regulatory permission, and accountability. The most interesting companies being started right now aren’t building AI, they’re using AI to lock up positions in things that remain scarce regardless of how smart models get. Think: entities that bear liability and risk (insurers, licensed operators, fiduciaries), companies that control physical access or capacity, and businesses that hold regulatory authorizations others can’t easily obtain. If a sufficiently advanced AI could trivially replicate what you do, the moat isn’t real. Build the thing AI makes better but can’t become.
National Resilience Beyond Defense: Everyone’s excited about defense tech, but there are arguably more VCs chasing defense deals than there are fundable defense companies. The broader opportunity is in national resilience: critical supply chains that depend on single foreign sources, government services that are decades behind, and infrastructure bottlenecks that hold back everything else. These are businesses where the forcing function is obvious (you can’t build a data center without power, you can’t re-shore manufacturing without the raw materials, you can’t modernize government without someone actually doing the work) and the competitive moats are structural. The founders who will win here aren’t building dashboards, they’re building the actual operating companies that fill these gaps.
Ross Fubini, Founder & Managing Partner at XYZ Venture Capital
America is reindustrializing after decades of offshoring critical manufacturing. To make this shift successful, we need new software systems that enable full-stack autonomy across design, production, and factory operations. This company will build the AI-powered backbone for next-generation manufacturing, modernizing how we produce goods in critical industries like defense, energy, and semiconductors, and strengthening the resilience of the physical economy.
Jordan Segall, Partner at Redpoint
Enterprise modernization companies that leverage AI to upend System Integrators (e.g., Accenture) - for example, facilitating complex and costly enterprise migrations such as to SAP 4/HANA.
Damir Becirovic, Founding Partner at Relentless
Second Opinion - The world’s first truly global doctor network. The US faces a fundamental shortage of doctors. Meanwhile, patients have been trained to access care online. I imagine someone recruiting verified doctors from around the world and allowing them to provide care to US-based patients, virtually to start. I imagine this being particularly valuable in high-value specialities where there are particularly severe doctor shortages in the US. I deeply believe that the economic arbitrage exists - what a patient would be willing to pay out of pocket would deeply motivate a doctor to provide care in many geos in the world. One obstacle will be figuring out what specialities of care can be delivered virtually - but even blood test results and MRIs can be uploaded and shared. Of course, another challenge will be regulation, but I don’t see why in a world of ubiquitous digital connectivity and high familiarity with travel/other cultures we can’t aggregate doctor supply into a global network. As validation of the opportunity, I have many family members who video consult and even fly back to Bosnia to get medical care from doctors based there.
KJ Sidberry, Partner at Google Ventures
Post-secondary education is structurally misaligned with labor market outcomes. Tuition has inflated far faster than wages, student debt comes with ~20 year payback periods, and the majority of new graduates are underemployed even years after graduation. Education optimizes for degrees; hiring optimizes for signals - neither for outcomes. Would love to see a company that’s able to sit at the intersection of education and labor infrastructure, redesigning the bridge between the two from first principles.
What if the future of media was not about more stimulus but rather about presence, co-creating stories, or building worlds? Of course, there’s a ton of fanfare about how media is being produced in the world of AI. But there’s also movement in consumption, which could bifurcate into two forms:
1. Interactive media, where audiences directly shape outcomes vs a more lean-back experience. Prioritizes agency or stories as systems to be played. Think: games absorbing film-like storytelling or films borrowing game mechanics.
2. Layered media, where audiences explore depth without altering the core narrative. Think: characters you can converse with outside the main plot, worlds you can interrogate without changing canon, or fan fiction evolving into highly developed, sanctioned experiences.
Both sound fun :)
Bo Berluti, VP at RTP
I’m looking to meet builders working on AI-native quant firms for prediction markets—the idea that the next great hedge funds will be built on AI, not by bolting AI onto legacy strategies but capitalizing on any event across various platforms. If you’re using agentic systems to synthesize information, generate trades, and manage risk in these markets, would love to chat.
I’m looking to meet builders creating an AI-native operating system for solopreneurs and SMBs that lets one person deliver agency-level outcomes with software-like margins. As AI reshapes work and more traditional jobs disappear, more people will become business owners, and lightweight operating systems to run, sell, and deliver will become essential.
Jessica Peltz Zatulove, Managing Partner at Hannah Grey
We're interested in the picks and shovels infrastructure to support what we're calling “Emergent Organizations”, small collectives capable of building trillion-dollar ecosystems through fluid, hybrid AI-human corporate structures. Instead of large hierarchies, lean teams of human strategists will focus on defining problems and orchestrating resources, surrounded by an on-demand periphery of AI agents, open-source models, and expert freelancers that can be summoned or dismissed as needed.
We’re especially excited about startups that will power these new organizations and operating systems. Specifically:
- Orchestration: Platforms to deploy swarms of both human and AI resources with trust and accountability.
- Management: Tools to handle credentialing, security, and access control for millions of ephemeral AI agents.
- Payments: Systems that automate complex, real-time financial operations for a task-based workforce.
- Trust-as-a-Service: APIs to instantly verify the identity, capabilities, and past performance of any resource—human or AI. (What does the next wave of background checks look like?)
Jared Newman, Partner at Daybreak Ventures
Someone def needs to build a dating app which monetizes via data labeling a la Handshake or Mercor. As model providers shift from expertise-based evals to taste/sensibility-based evals, it’s only a matter of time that the human data teams start to value real-world appearance, communication, and social behaviors as the way to train models for “vibe.” Could be crazy/cool to give away premium features for free in exchange for access to users’ chats and swipe history.