EarlySignals Weekly
Sunday, May 17, 2026
Every firm deep-researched by agentic AI, scored for potential and scoop, and fact-checked before publish.
Correction: This issue was corrected after publication.
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Scores run 0 to 100. Potential: how likely the firm is to become a real winner, judged across the six dimension scores and held consistent with them, whether or not anyone has heard of it. Scoop: how unlikely a well-read tech investor is to have heard of it yet. High means it has not reached the outlets that reader follows, whatever the firm's quality or age. How our top potential scores did.
Launched (1)
InsForge
Verifiedpotential 81 · scoop 58
San Francisco, USFounded 2025 · Announced May 17, 2026 (demo day)Surfaced May 17, 2026
InsForge offers an open-source Postgres backend for AI coding agents that uses Model Context Protocol servers. The project beat Supabase and Postgres MCP in its own MCPMark test run and reached 9,900 GitHub stars after admission to YC P26.
After six YC rejections, two engineers released an open-source Postgres backend that now beats Supabase on MCPMark tasks in its own tests, at 1.6 times the speed with 30 percent fewer tokens.
Stealth Reveals (1)
Heaviside Industries
Verifiedpotential 79 · scoop 82
Los Angeles, United StatesFounded 2026 · Announced May 13, 2026 (stealth reveal)Surfaced May 17, 2026
Heaviside Industries makes low-cost autonomous precision munitions for air, sea, and land use in jammed environments. The 2024 Los Angeles startup emerged from stealth in 2026 with a $28 million Series A after live tests with U.S. and NATO special forces.
Engineers behind the Black Hornet 4 nano-UAS and a $94 million IDIQ contract now staff a Los Angeles startup testing munitions with special forces ahead of its $28 million raise.
Building (3)
MasterDnsVPN
Verifiedpotential 55 · scoop 85
San Francisco, USAnnounced May 17, 2026 (pre company build)Surfaced May 17, 2026
Amin Mahmoudi released MasterDnsVPN, a Go based DNS tunneling VPN with custom ARQ and 5 to 7 byte headers. The repo reached 3500 stars after 70 days of real world testing during Iranian blackouts.
An Iranian developer with prior Twitch bypass and restreaming projects posted a DNS tunnel on GitHub that hit 3500 stars after explicit 70 day blackout testing in Iran.
Stakgod
Verifiedpotential 52 · scoop 88
Seattle, USAnnounced May 16, 2026 (pre company build)Surfaced May 17, 2026
Stakgod is an open-source AI interface that builds native iOS and Android apps on a full Cloudflare serverless stack and submits binaries to the App Store and Play. A solo UVA NICU fellow ships it after earlier tools like Speak Sumhead.
PGY-5 UVA NICU fellow Nicholas Heitkamp open-sourced Stakgod after shipping 71 commits to a repo that still shows zero stars.
Manifest
Verifiedpotential 62 · scoop 74
Paris, FranceAnnounced May 13, 2026 (pre company build)Surfaced May 17, 2026
Manifest routes LLM calls across free tiers, paid APIs, and local models for personal agents. The self-hosted router reached 6.5k GitHub stars after its February 2026 release and handled 10.8 billion tokens in one month.
Bruno Pérez left his fifteen-year Paris agency to join Berkeley SkyDeck and open-sourced Manifest on February 23, 2026; the router now routes over a billion tokens a month inside the OpenClaw ecosystem.
27 more firms surfaced this week
7 from United States, 6 from Europe, 5 from Canada, 3 from Africa and 6 from Other.
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