What do a developer documentation startup, an IT agents platform, a voice model provider, and Anthropic all have in common?
They’ve got investors frothing at the mouth.
We partnered with the venture capital firm Wing for the second year in a row to survey top venture capitalists about what startups they think are the most promising right now. The ET30 list is broken up into early, mid, late, and giga stages. The name has become a misnomer — 60 companies made the list this year.
This year, Mintlify, Serval, ElevenLabs, and Anthropic took first in their respective categories.
Agent platform Dust, voice-powered note-taking application Granola, frontend platform and vibe coding tool Vercel, and infrastructure juggernaut Databricks took second place across early, mid, late, and giga.
With investors at most of the top venture firms participating, the survey provides a snapshot of VC sentiment, highlighting startups that are quietly fundraising, categories that are attracting investor dollars, and also indicating where enthusiasm has cooled.
You can see fun rivalries play out on the list:
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In the battle of customer support startups, the less highly valued Decagon beat out rival Sierra by two ranks.
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In legal, Harvey and Legora were neck-and-neck ranking 14 and 15 respectively on the late stage list.
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Anthropic beat out OpenAI this year, ranking first on the giga list compared to OpenAI’s fourth place.
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AI infrastructure provider Baseten ranked 10 on the late stage list with rival Fireworks AI coming in at 12.
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Neither Deel nor Rippling made the list this year. Corporate credit card startup Ramp ranked seventh on the giga list. Software companies need to figure out an AI story or lose the investor zeitgeist.
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OpenEvidence ranked third in the late stage list, but Abridge did not secure a ranking.
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Even with the massive outcome for Scale AI, data supply companies are getting largely snubbed. Mercor, which ranked fourth on the mid stage list last year, did not make the cut this year, nor did Surge AI. Only David AI, which ranked 11 on the mid stage list, got recognized for its work in voice data.
Wing’s Peter Wagner pointed out that the list features “a large number of companies that are building products that assist the development of agents — a group that didn’t exist a couple years ago.”
AI infrastructure is booming even as application companies are still getting their footing. In many cases, investors are more bullish on the infrastructure providers than the applications building on top of them.
On the application front, investors have suddenly opened their hearts to vertical applications. “It wasn’t long ago that venture capital would have thought these were killing fields,” Wagner observed. The wisdom used to be: “vertical applications — you can’t make money doing that.” Basis is building in accounting. Avoca answers calls, texts, and emails in home services. Pace provides AI operations for insurance carriers, brokers, and wholesalers.
Taking a step further, venture capitalists are even starting to make bets on full-blown services businesses that are selling outcomes instead of seats. That trend, which investors have been watching closely, is best represented by Crosby, number six on the early list, which is building its own law firm.
The startups on the list are grouped by how much money they have raised: early stage is up to $35 million, mid stage is $35 million to $150 million, late stage is $150 million to $1 billion, and giga stage is over $1 billion.
Voice companies did extremely well. ElevenLabs topped the late stage list and Granola ranked second on the mid stage list. (Newcomer is hosting the Cerebral Valley Voice Summit in San Francisco in May.)
You can read Wing’s full report on the ET30 here.
