🤖 Perplexity’s Most Complete AI Agent System

🚨11 High-Impact Accelerators Open in 2026

Praveen Panjiar

— 7 min read
🤖 Perplexity’s Most Complete AI Agent System

In This Edition:

  • 🚀 11 Accelerators Open Now for Founders
  • 💰 11 Startups. One Clear Pattern
  • 📊 The Series A to B Gap Is Brutal — Here's the Data
  • 🤖 Perplexity’s Most Complete AI Agent System
  • 🧠 How to Sell AI Services
  • 🔥 ChatGPT Pro Lite Incoming

🚨11 High-Impact Accelerators Open in 2026

🚀 11 Accelerators Open Now for Founders

Most founders apply to accelerators too late.

They wait until the product feels ready. Until the deck is perfect. Until the timing seems right.

By then, the best cohorts are already full.

The founders who get into top programs are not always the ones with the strongest companies. They are the ones who moved early, applied strategically, and gave themselves multiple shots.

Here are 11 accelerators currently accepting applications, from pre-seed AI programs to biotech residencies:

  1. Y Combinator — $125K for 7% + $375K SAFE. The benchmark. Apply before the window closes.
  2. LAUNCH Accelerator — Rolling admissions. Coaching-heavy and investor-focused.
  3. Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun — Up to $1M. Built for founders moving fast in AI, crypto, and enterprise.
  4. HF0 Residency — An in-person founder residency in SF. 3 to 6 months of focused building.
  5. IndieBio — $250K for biotech, climate, and deep tech. Lab access included.
  6. Founder Institute — Idea to traction in 14 weeks. Rolling. Available across multiple US cities.
  7. Berkeley SkyDeck — $200K SAFE. Deep-tech ecosystem with strong university ties.
  8. Funding Breakthrough Lab — Non-profit. Fundraising mastery and pitch refinement, not just capital.
  9. Pear VC PearX — $250K to $2M. A pre-seed AI accelerator built by an active seed fund.
  10. Plug and Play Tech Center — Corporate network access. Fintech, health, IoT, and more. Rolling.
  11. Conviction Embed — AI cohort with cloud credits and an in-person retreat. 8 to 10 weeks.

A few things worth knowing before applying:

Apply to 3 to 5 programs, not one. Targeting a single program is the highest-risk strategy.

Rolling admissions programs like HF0, LAUNCH, and Plug and Play mean the window is open now, but it closes without warning.

Tailor every application. Reviewers notice when an application could have been sent anywhere.

Early traction matters more than market size slides. A hundred real users beats a billion-dollar TAM graphic every time.

🚀 11 Startups. Hundreds of Millions. One Clear Pattern.

🚀 This Week's Biggest Fundings — Where Smart Money Is Moving

Hundreds of millions deployed. The signal is clear: AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, and vertical SaaS are on fire.

Here's where capital landed this week:

The pattern? Two-year-old companies raising seed rounds at Series A sizes. Investors aren't waiting for traction — they're betting on timing and team.

The window for early-stage AI is still open. But it's moving fast.

Want to decode what these deals reveal about where AI is heading next? Read the full breakdown here.

The Series A to B Gap Is Brutal — Here's the Data

Timing your Series A isn't just strategy. It's survival.

From 10,562 US startups (2018–2025), the graduation rate from Series A to B swings wildly — not because of founder quality, but because of market timing.

Here's what the data shows:

  • 2020 cohort: 40% reached Series B within 2 years. Cheap capital. Easy mode.
  • 2022 cohort: Only 10–12% made it to B. Interest rates spiked. Rounds dried up.
  • 2024 cohort: 11% in year one, projecting ~20% by year two. Recovering — but still hard.

In the strongest markets, half of Series A startups still never raise a B.

The ones who don't make it aren't always bad businesses. They run out of runway. They miss the window. They optimize for the wrong metrics at the wrong time.

The market cycle is out of your hands. The execution playbook isn't.

Founders who reach Series B aren't just lucky — they make sharper decisions, faster, with less margin for error.

→ Want the exact moves that separate the 20% who graduate from the 80% who don't? Click here.

Perplexity Just Launched the Most Complete AI Agent System Yet

This isn't a chatbot upgrade. It's an autonomous operating system for work.

Perplexity Computer runs entire projects — planning, delegating, and executing across 19 specialized AI models. Automatically.

Here's what makes it different:

Describe an outcome. It builds the plan, assigns the agents, and executes.

One complex prompt built a full stock trading simulator — with heatmaps, sentiment analysis, and a Bloomberg Terminal aesthetic — deployed to Netlify with live data updates.

Coding is just one lane. Research, reports, content pipelines, document processing — all coordinated in one system.

The model-choosing era is over. Describe what's needed. The system figures out the rest.

See exactly how founders are using this to replace entire workflows — click here.

✨ ICYMI — These Resources Blew Up This Week

Founders were scrambling for these drops—each one unlocked deal flow, investor access, or tactical fundraising shortcuts. If you missed them the first time, this is your chance to catch up before everyone else does.

Don’t wait. These are the kind of links founders bookmark—and competitors quietly use.

🔥 The Most Clicked Founder Resources

🔹 1000+ Angel Investors You Can Reach Today — One massive list to shortcut months of outreach.

🔹 Steal 100 Pitch Decks That Actually Closed — See exactly what winning decks look like.

🔹 101 Fintech VCs Most Founders Overlook — A free list built for fintech startups ready to raise.

🔹 300 Angels Backing Startups Right Now — A curated database for serious founders.

🔹 500 Ultra-Active Angels in One Place — Meet the angels writing checks this year.

🔹 Top 100 Angels You Should Pitch First — Your shortcut to high-signal early backers.

🔹 The 200 Angels Funding Fast-Growing Startups — A must-have list for early outreach.

🔹 The Pre-Seed Playbook Every Founder Needs — A practical guide to nailing your first raise.

🔹 2,500+ Verified Angels in AI & SaaS — Backers actively funding technical founders.

🔹 Fundraising Mistakes From a $13M Raise — Avoid the painful errors most founders repeat.

Don’t just save these—use them. The founders who act fastest raise fastest. Want these in a searchable Notion library?

How to Sell AI Services When Nobody Knows You Exist

No audience. No brand. No budget. Still possible.

The AI services market is wide open — and the founders winning right now aren't the most technical. They're the most visible.

Here's what's actually working:

  • Host a local AI meetup: One event = instant expert status. One founder walked away with 7 qualified leads. One became a client within a week.
  • Door knock local businesses: Walk into 10. Offer a free 15-minute audit. One or two will say yes. That's enough.
  • LinkedIn cold DMs (done right): Target 10–50 employee businesses. Ask about their pain. Don't pitch. Send 20/day — 5–10 conversations start within a week.
  • Free AI audits for your network: Free work builds case studies, referrals, and trust. One free audit can turn into $999 paid audits later.
  • Partner with agencies and consultants: They have the clients. Offer a referral cut. Instant sales team — zero hires.
  • AI Office Hours at coworking spaces: Show up weekly. Answer questions. Warm leads come naturally.
  • Document every win on social: Post 3–5x per week for 90 days. Consistency beats virality every time.

Pick one. Execute for 30 days. Then stack another.

Want the exact scripts and templates behind each method? Get them here.

🔥WEB PICKS

This Week in AI — The Deals, Drops, and Drama You Need to Know

The industry moved fast this week. Here's what matters:

  • Anthropic vs. The Pentagon: Anthropic has until Friday to strip Claude's safety guardrails for military use — or face potential Defense Production Act enforcement from Secretary Pete Hegseth. The AI safety debate just got a government deadline.
  • ProducerAI hits Google Labs: DeepMind's Lyria 3 powers this new AI music collab tool. Grammy-winner Wyclef Jean already cut a track with it. Free to access via Google Labs right now.
  • Meta + AMD — $100B compute deal: 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct compute. Meta receiving warrants for 160 million AMD shares at $0.01 each (~10% of the company). First shipments H2 2026. AMD stock jumped 9% on the news.
  • MatX raises $500M: Ex-Google TPU engineers building chips that reportedly outperform Nvidia's upcoming Rubin Ultra on compute per mm². Jane Street and Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness fund led the round.
  • ChatGPT Pro Lite incoming: A $100/month tier spotted in OpenAI's code — sitting between Plus ($20) and Pro ($200). Likely tied to always-on agent features. Not announced yet. Coming soon.

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