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- Afresh Technologies ↗ emerging
AI ordering engine for fresh and perishable grocery categories — flagship Albertsons rollout across 2,200+ US stores, ~$148M raised across seed, Series A ($12M, March 2020) and Series B ($115M, Dec 2022, Spark Capital led), with a reported ~$34M follow-on in April 2026.
Rec: − Maybe - American Electric Power ↗ well positioned
The transmission-heaviest investor-owned utility in the US — ~40,000 miles of wires across 11 states and ~5.6M customers — now rebuilt around a $70B five-year capex plan, 24 GW of signed data-center load, and the AEP Ohio tariff that forced hyperscalers in Columbus to pay the freight themselves.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Bloomreach ↗ emerging
Three-product ecommerce personalization bundle (Discovery search + Engagement CDP/MA + Content CMS) at a stale $2.2B 2022 mark now charging past $260M ARR on Loomi AI positioning — squeezed between Shopify Audiences and Klaviyo at the SMB end and Salesforce + Adobe at the enterprise end.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Burlington Stores, Inc. ↗ at risk
The #3 off-price chain and the structural laggard of the three — $10.6B of FY2025 net sales (year ended 31 January 2026) at a ~7.6% operating margin, versus ~12% at TJX and Ross — now five years into 'Burlington 2.0', ex-Ross COO Michael O'Sullivan's attempt to close a per-store productivity gap that still has Burlington ringing roughly half of TJX's sales per box and ~70% of Ross's, while Shein/Temu attack the apparel floor and TJX HomeGoods owns the home category Burlington 2.0 was supposed to replace coats with.
Rec: − Maybe -
Sunnyvale humanoid-robot company building a bipedal general-purpose robot — Figure 01, 02 and 03 — plus Helix, the vertically-integrated vision-language-action model it built after walking away from OpenAI, with a $1B BMW pilot, a Brookfield data partnership, and a $39B mark that bakes in a decade of execution the company has not yet done.
Rec: − Maybe - Harbinger Motors ↗ emerging
Proprietary Class 4-7 electric chassis for upfitters — $175M+ raised, Thor Industries locked in as reference buyer and strategic investor, and a two-year window before Rivian, Ford Pro, Daimler, and BYD-via-Mexico close in.
Rec: − Maybe - Markel Group Inc. ↗ at risk
~$22B-market-cap Richmond-based 'mini-Berkshire' built on three engines — Markel Insurance (~$8B GWP specialty P&C including Lloyd's Syndicate 3000), Markel Ventures (~$5B revenue, 20+ unrelated operating subsidiaries from Costa Farms plants to AMF Bakery), and Tom Gayner's ~$30B listed-equity portfolio — now under 1.4% activist pressure from JANA Partners (Nov 2024 letter) to separate Ventures and buy back $2B of stock, after a decade in which Markel's compounder story trailed the S&P 500 while Chubb, Travelers and W.R. Berkley all out-underwrote the Insurance segment's 93-100 combined ratio.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Masco Corporation ↗ at risk
Behr paint plus Delta Faucet, both pinned to the same Home Depot aisle — 97 years from a one-cylinder screw-machine shop in Detroit to a $12-14B building-products company whose two profit engines each depend on a single big-box customer and a housing-turnover cycle at generational lows.
Rec: − Maybe - Canadian National Railway Company ↗ well positioned
~CAD $90B-market-cap, 107-year-old Montreal-headquartered Class I railroad — North America's only transcontinental, triple-coast network (Pacific, Atlantic, Gulf) across ~18,800 route-miles — that pioneered Hunter Harrison's precision scheduled railroading at CN in 1998, lost the $29.8B Kansas City Southern bid in 2021 after the US STB rejected its voting trust, surrendered the Mexico corridor to Canadian Pacific Kansas City in 2023, took a Teamsters-triggered national lockout in August 2024 that forced binding arbitration, and now runs a 61-point operating ratio with mid-single-digit volume growth under ex-TC Energy / ex-CP CEO Tracy Robinson while an attempted Union Pacific–Norfolk Southern transcontinental tie-up threatens to leave CN the smaller of two surviving North American duopolies.
Rec: − Maybe -
Computer-vision construction progress monitoring — handheld 360° and lidar capture compared element-by-element to the BIM model, with budget-and-schedule risk surfaced to project controls. $55-57M raised through an August 2021 Insight-led Series B at ~$220M; a 2016 Stanford-origin autonomous-robot pivot that has gone unusually quiet while OpenSpace, Buildots and Procore each took a bigger slice of the category.
Rec: − Maybe -
Zendrive-spinout commercial auto MGA pricing fleet policies on 200B+ miles of mobile telematics — raised ~$88M across 2022-23, quietly rebranded to LEEO in December 2025 under a new CEO as founder Jonathan Matus's original data engine, Zendrive, was wound down and sold to Credit Karma/Intuit.
Rec: − Maybe -
Multi-carrier shipping API and SMB dashboard — ~$1B 2021 unicorn now sandwiched between Shopify Shipping's native carrier bundle upstream, Pirate Ship's free USPS wedge below, and Thoma Bravo's $12B WWEX-Auctane merger consolidating the paid-SaaS tier.
Rec: − Maybe - The TJX Companies, Inc. ↗ well positioned
~$145B-market-cap off-price retail incumbent — four decades of positive comps, FY26 net sales of $60.4B at a 12.3% pretax margin, ~5,100 stores across nine banners (TJ Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, Sierra, Homesense, Winners, T.K. Maxx, Homesense UK), a 1,300+ buyer organisation sourcing opportunistically from ~21,000 vendors in 100+ countries — and the clearest beneficiary of the exact Shein/Temu/Amazon-Haul flood that is supposed to kill mall apparel, because excess inventory in a brutal e-commerce cycle is TJX's raw material.
Rec: − Maybe - Toll Brothers, Inc. ↗ well positioned
The largest US luxury homebuilder — ~$1.07M average selling price, ~10,800 FY2025 deliveries at ~$10.6B of home-sale revenue, ~22% adjusted gross margin and a build-to-order franchise that lets Toll Brothers raise its FY2026 outlook in a quarter when D.R. Horton, Lennar and PulteGroup are all cutting; ~$10-11B market cap in September 2026, a 59-year-old family firm just-handed by Doug Yearley to his COO Karl Mistry in a January 2026 succession, and the only major builder for whom the ~$1M+ customer still underwrites at full-rate mortgages.
Rec: ★ Interesting - The Travelers Companies, Inc. ↗ well positioned
~$75B-market-cap, 161-year-old property & casualty incumbent, Dow component, and the cleanest-run large P&C balance sheet in US insurance: FY2025 combined ratio 85.6%, FY2025 core ROE 17.2% and Q2 2026 core ROE 24.9% on record net written premiums of $11.5B — all despite absorbing a $1.7B Palisades/Eaton California wildfire catastrophe charge in Q1 2025 — delivered by Alan Schnitzer's independent-agency, middle-market commercial, and tech-modernisation strategy, including a February 2026 OpenAI-built agentic AI claim assistant and a May 2025 $2.4B Canada divestiture to Definity.
Rec: − Maybe -
Enterprise carbon accounting software for the Fortune 500 — ~$108M ARR per Latka 2025, $1B+ valuation on a $100M Series C from Greenoaks in Feb 2024, now rebuilding its demand thesis as the Trump SEC rescinds climate disclosure and the EU Omnibus pushes CSRD into 2028.
Rec: − Maybe - American International Group, Inc. ↗ at risk
~$39B-market-cap, 107-year-old global specialty and commercial P&C insurer that survived the largest corporate bailout in US history, spent a decade shedding assets to shrink into shape, and finally hit a sub-90 combined ratio under Peter Zaffino — only to arrive at the start of a commercial P&C softening cycle with a flagship Lexington E&S property book in retreat, Personal Insurance down 12% in FY2025, an 11.1% core ROE that still trails Travelers (19%) and Chubb by half, and an untested broker-background CEO (Eric Andersen, ex-Aon) taking over mid-2026.
Rec: − Maybe - Cover Whale ↗ emerging
Telematics-priced commercial trucking MGA for owner-operators and small fleets — ~$83M raised, $1.3B of all-time premium written on Everspan paper, running against Nirvana's $1.5B Series D and Progressive Commercial's book.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Fabric (fabric.inc) ↗ emerging
Composable commerce platform that spent $293M to flank Shopify Plus and Salesforce Commerce Cloud in mid-market retail — $140M Series C at a $1.5B valuation in 2022, a 2023 CEO reset after a $35M CFO crypto scandal, and now caught between a pivoting Shopify and a scaled commercetools.
Rec: − Maybe - O'Reilly Automotive ↗ well positioned
The Springfield, MO parts chain that out-margins every peer in US big-box retail — 6,750+ stores across 48 states + Mexico + Canada, FY2025 revenue $17.78B at a 19.5% operating margin, a dual-market DIY/DIFM mix that is nearly 50/50 (vs. AutoZone's ~one-third commercial), 32 regional DCs carrying 160,000-170,000 SKUs feeding stores up to five times a day, and a $27.5B lifetime buyback machine that has quietly compounded a $17.50 1993 IPO into a ~$69B company.
Rec: − Maybe - PulteGroup ↗ well positioned
The third-largest US homebuilder — $16.7B in home-sale revenue and 29,572 closings in 2025 at a $564K ASP, running the margin-discipline trade against DHI's volume and LEN's land-light pivot, but Q1 2026 incentives spiked to 10.9% of price (vs. a 3-3.5% historical norm), gross margin fell to 24.4% from 27.5% a year earlier, and the stock sits ~$22-23B market cap in late September 2026 — a well-positioned peer whose Del Webb active-adult moat is doing the heavy lifting while first-time Centex buyers absorb the rate shock.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Republic Services ↗ well positioned
The Phoenix-based #2 of North American trash — ~15% of the U.S. solid-waste market, roughly $16.6B revenue, 208 active landfills, a 32% EBITDA margin that now runs tighter than Waste Management's, and the only Big-Three waste operator with a real hazardous-and-industrial-services franchise after the $2.2B US Ecology deal — but Cascade's 37% anchor stake, a 22%-unionized workforce fighting multi-state strikes, and the simple fact that WM still owns more airspace keep this from being purely 'cleanest compounder in waste.'
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Virtual-ridealong AI that records and grades HVAC, plumbing and roofing technicians' in-home sales conversations — $70M ARR by April 2026 on a $758M valuation, with ServiceTitan's native Field Pro built on rival Siro the single largest overhang.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Redwood City autonomous-drone maker that killed its consumer line in 2023, pivoted hard into US defense, public safety and utility inspection, and is now the largest NDAA-compliant sUAS vendor as the DJI ban tightens — $842M raised, ~$180M 2024 revenue, $4.4B mark on the April 2026 Series F.
Rec: − Maybe - Antora Energy ↗ emerging
Thermal batteries that store renewable power in 1,800°C carbon blocks and discharge as industrial heat or TPV-converted electricity — $770M raised, a 5 GWh POET deployment, and Rondo still ahead on live commercial sites.
Rec: − Maybe -
A UK-born rebate management platform that hit $1.12B in 2023, bought a pricing engine in 2025, and cut 50% of Customer Success in October — the category-definer question meets the ERP-bundling question.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Formic Technologies ↗ emerging
Robotics-as-a-Service for American manufacturing — $8-15/robot-hour, 400k+ production hours, and a debt-financed motion whose payback math has not been publicly proven.
Rec: − Maybe - The Hanover Insurance Group ↗ at risk
A 174-year-old Worcester-based P&C carrier (NYSE: THG) that has bet the franchise on winning share inside independent agencies — Core Commercial, Specialty and Personal Lines run entirely through ~2,200 agents — now delivering a record 91.2% combined ratio while insurtech quoting platforms and MGA carve-outs quietly disintermediate the very channel it calls its moat.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Metropolis Technologies ↗ emerging
Checkout-free parking that swallowed a public incumbent — $5B valuation, ~$420M revenue, and a heap of consumer complaints trailing behind the vision.
Rec: − Maybe - Snap-on Incorporated ↗ at risk
The 105-year-old Kenosha tool-truck monopoly that owns the American mechanic's toolbox — $4.7B in revenue, ~40% gross margins, a captive $2B finance book, and roughly 3,000 franchise vans hitting the same repair bays every week — now grinding through a soft-goods cycle as Milwaukee, Icon and Amazon Business gnaw at the professional installed base.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Waste Management ↗ well positioned
The Houston-based fortress of North American trash — ~24% share of solid waste, a landfill footprint no permit regime would ever let anyone rebuild, ~$25B in revenue, a fresh $7.2B bet on medical waste via Stericycle, and a renewable-natural-gas business that could out-earn recycling — but pricing above cost, an integration slog and PFAS liability keep the story from being purely 'buy and hold forever'.
Rec: − Maybe - Weyerhaeuser ↗ at risk
The 10.4-million-acre American timber REIT that has spent 126 years turning trees into commodities and dividends — running down a soft housing cycle in 2026, cutting Canadian duties and Section 232 tariffs into competitors, monetising carbon and CCS pore space, and selling non-core acres while paying a variable dividend tied to cash flow that just doesn't quite cover the payout.
Rec: − Maybe - Watsco, Inc. ↗ at risk
The largest HVAC/R distributor in North America — 700+ locations, 80/20-controlled Carrier Enterprise joint venture, and a $7.2B revenue base that just gave back the margin the A2L refrigerant transition lent it in 2025.
Rec: − Maybe - C.H. Robinson Worldwide ↗ at risk
The 120-year-old Eden Prairie freight broker that still moves 20 million shipments a year through phones, email and a proprietary TMS called Navisphere — now running a 'Lean AI' cost-out program that cut headcount 29% in two years to defend margin an activist forced it to defend, while Uber Freight, RXO, Flexport and DAT's resurrected Convoy platform chase the same shippers with software-first cost structures.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Copart, Inc. ↗ well positioned
Dallas-based online salvage-vehicle auction operator running VB3 virtual bidding across 250+ owned yards in 11 countries — the duopolist (with IAA/RB Global) that insurance carriers use to liquidate roughly 4M total-loss vehicles a year in the US alone; agreed to buy ACV Auctions for ~$1.9B in September 2026 to push into clean-title wholesale just as Progressive's shift of salvage volume toward RB Global and a 25%+ stock decline in 2026 test whether the land-and-insurer moat is as durable as the bull case assumes.
Rec: − Maybe - Pie Insurance ↗ emerging
Denver + Washington DC insurtech that underwrites small-business workers' comp in under three minutes through an agent-facing API, now a full-stack rated carrier writing its own paper after a costly 2021-2023 transition — 55,000+ policies in-force and 39 states as of January 2026, but a 2023 layoff, thin per-seat combined-ratio disclosure, and no priced round since the September 2022 Series D leave the $2B mark unverified.
Rec: − Maybe -
Berkeley-born synthetic-biology agtech that gene-edits nitrogen-fixing bacteria (PROVEN 40, RETURN, Proven G3) to grow on corn and cereal roots as a substitute for synthetic nitrogen fertilizer — over $680M raised, a $2B+ 2021 mark, 5M+ acres claimed in 2023, but mixed university field-trial results, three-to-four rounds of layoffs since 2023, a 2025-2026 exit from Berkeley to Minnesota/St. Louis, and a 30% self-imposed price cut for 2026 that concedes the value proposition was overpriced against crashed urea.
Rec: − Maybe - Uber Freight ↗ emerging
Digital freight brokerage born inside Uber ATG in 2017, transformed by the $2.25B Transplace acquisition in 2021 into a top-5 US truck broker with a managed-transportation and TMS software business bolted on — majority-owned by Uber, $5.14B in FY24 segment revenue on a shrinking top line and a ninth-straight quarter of negative Adjusted EBITDA as of late 2024, in a freight-brokerage market that just watched Convoy, its most direct venture-funded peer, die in October 2023 doing almost exactly the same thing.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
Philadelphia instant-commerce operator and the last scaled Western survivor of the 2020-2022 quick-commerce cohort — but the survivor's most recent mark is $8.5B (Eldridge/Valor, Nov 13 2025), 43% below the $15B Series H SoftBank underwrote in July 2021, after Spain/France/Luxembourg exits, a UK headcount cut from 1,707 to 842 in 2023, four US layoff rounds, a stalled IPO and a Fidelity holdings markdown that took the position from a 60% gain in Feb 2022 to a ~64% loss by mid-2023; the owned-MFC plus owned-inventory plus Gopuff Ads flywheel is the case, and DoorDash DashMart plus Instacart plus Uber Eats grocery are the wolves at the 30-minute occasion.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Kemper Corporation ↗ at risk
The Chicago non-standard auto and home-service life insurer that assembled its $3B specialty-auto book by rolling up Infinity (2018) and American Access Casualty (2021), then abruptly exited its $500M preferred home-and-auto business in August 2023, ran through two CEOs and roughly 340 layoffs in the fourteen months to November 2025, and took a $460M goodwill impairment on that same specialty-auto franchise in Q2 2026 as its stock lost half its value on the back of California severity, adverse commercial-auto reserve development and a widening moat gap versus Progressive.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Octopus Energy Group ↗ emerging
London-based retail energy + Kraken utility software + Octopus EV + Octopus Energy Generation renewable-fund manager — took UK #1 from British Gas in January 2025 with 7.3M households, but the real business is Kraken, the utilities SaaS licensed onto EDF, E.ON, Origin Energy, Tokyo Gas and Tenaska covering 75M contracted accounts, being spun out at $8.65B in December 2025 ahead of a potential $15B IPO; the falsifiable question is whether Kraken compounds SaaS-style faster than UK retail margin commoditises under OFGEM's ~2% price-cap allowance and native-tech competitor parity.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The Carmel, Indiana wholesale-auction incumbent formerly known as KAR Auction Services — the same operator that took ~$3.7B of Kelso/Goldman Sachs/ValueAct/Parthenon LBO money in 2007, IPO'd in 2009, and in 2022 sold the ADESA US physical-auction chain to Carvana for $2.2B — now stripped down to a digital marketplace plus AFC floorplan lender, growing again but competing with ACV Auctions on transparency, Manheim on scale, and a Carvana-owned ADESA on its old brand.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Pool Corporation ↗ at risk
The Covington, Louisiana wholesale distributor that quietly built a ~40% share of the US swimming-pool and irrigation trade channel — and is now watching new-pool starts collapse from roughly 117,000 in 2021 to ~59,000 in 2024 per PK Data, its own 'base business' comp turn negative through 2024-2025, chlorine and trichlor prices deflate as OxyChem / Clearon capacity comes back online, and its distribution moat get squeezed from above by SRS-inside-Home-Depot on adjacent green-goods and from below by Amazon Business and Fluidra's own direct-to-builder ambitions.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Lehi, UT post-purchase platform whose ~2-2.5% consumer-funded package-protection attach at Shopify checkout is the core P&L — while Shopify's own Shop app and Shop Pay ecosystem progressively swallow tracking and post-purchase surface, three CEOs cycle through in three years, and a persistent BBB / Trustpilot pattern of denied claims sits underneath the checkout-widget growth story.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
San Francisco vertical SaaS turning the AIA G702/G703 pay-application, retention and lien-waiver workflow into a subcontractor-side billing operating system — $18.4M total raised (seed plus Series A led by Menlo Ventures, February 24, 2022), roughly 43-49 employees as of 2026, and a specific structural risk that Procore (with Procore Pay), Autodesk (via the January 2024 Payapps/GCPay acquisition) and Trimble (via the May 2024 Flashtract acquisition, now Trimble Pay) each ship a native subcontractor billing module bundled with the GC platform the sub already touches before Siteline reaches enterprise breakout on a standalone contract.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Southwest Gas Holdings ↗ at risk
The 95-year-old Las Vegas natural-gas utility that ran a Berkshire-Hathaway-crossing bidding war for Questar Pipeline, absorbed a Carl Icahn proxy siege, then sold the pipeline for a wash to Williams, IPO'd Centuri into a leadership crisis, deconsolidated it inside sixteen months, and is now a shrinking pure-play LDC in three states where the building codes point the other way.
Rec: − Maybe - Ascend Elements ↗ emerging
The Westborough, Massachusetts spin-out of a Worcester Polytechnic battery lab that raised more than $1.1B and won $480M in DOE grants to make cathode active material from recycled lithium-ion batteries via its patented Hydro-to-Cathode process — and, after the Trump DOE clawed back most of that grant money in 2025, filed Chapter 11 on April 9, 2026 with its Kentucky flagship 60% built and a Section 363 sale to Bluegrass Infrastructure Partners now setting the going-concern outcome.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The public ecommerce SaaS platform that renamed itself Commerce.com and pivoted to AI-agentic and headless composable commerce — but the numbers say a company Shopify Plus and Adobe have flanked at both ends of its market, its stock down ~97% from the 2020 peak and growth stuck near 3%.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Monterrey-based digital freight forwarder for Latin America — over $242M raised through a May 2022 SoftBank-led Series C at $1.1B (LatAm's first logtech unicorn), then a 2023-2025 retrenchment that closed offices in Peru, Colombia and Brazil and cut headcount as the freight down-cycle collided with a nearshoring shipper story that has not yet returned in gross-margin form.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Physical Intelligence ↗ emerging
San Francisco robotics-AI lab building a single vision-language-action foundation model — the π-series — that trains once on a dozen robot bodies and is meant to fold laundry, bus tables, or run a factory cell without per-task engineering.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Vienna spin-off from TU Wien that turned a PhD on multilingual social-media signals into an AI supply-chain risk platform tuned to the EU's due-diligence laws — €63M Series B in June 2024 led by Hedosophia, 200+ enterprise customers including BMW, Hilti, Kärcher and Lufthansa, and a business model whose gravity depends on how heavily Brussels and Berlin actually enforce CSDDD after the 2025 Omnibus delay.
Rec: − Maybe -
The 281-year-old auction house is now a leveraged, PE-owned trophy business whose 2024 sales collapsed 23% to $6B, forcing a $909M sovereign-wealth rescue and a $765M bond refinance — the recovery is real but the debt stack and cultural damage are permanent.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Trex Company ↗ at risk
The Winchester, Virginia composite-decking pioneer that pulled roughly 380 million pounds a year of grocery-bag film out of the waste stream to build a ~30-year lead in wood-plastic-composite decking — and is now watching a James Hardie–backed AZEK take share, a repair-and-remodel down cycle stretch into a third year, and its own stock lose roughly a third of its value while a $400M Arkansas plant ramps into a market that no longer wants the volume.
Rec: − Maybe - UGI Corporation ↗ at risk
The 143-year-old Pennsylvania utility holding company whose regulated natural gas rate base now subsidises AmeriGas — the largest US propane distributor, losing customers by six figures a year under electrification, natural gas conversions and its own service reputation — while a rebuilt board, a second-chance CEO and a levered AmeriGas Partners note ladder try to stop the bleed.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Base Power Company ↗ emerging
Austin battery-as-utility bundling a whole-home LFP pack with retail electricity in ERCOT — Zach Dell and Justin Lopas raised $2.3B+ in three years to turn residential batteries into a virtual power plant that monetises across retail markup, wholesale arbitrage and ancillary services.
Rec: ★ Interesting - CenterPoint Energy ↗ at risk
Houston's regulated electric-and-gas monopoly (NYSE: CNP) — ~2.8M electric meters plus 3.4M gas customers across six states, ~$8.6B FY2024 revenue, ~$25B market cap — running a $66.7B ten-year capex plan under the shadow of the July 2024 Hurricane Beryl blackout (2.26M customers dark, 44 attributed deaths, $800M in idle Life Cycle Power generators that never rolled during the storm), a PUCT investigation with 20+ mandated fixes, and a governor who publicly ordered them to do better.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Convex Insurance ↗ emerging
Stephen Catlin's 2019 do-over — a Bermuda + London specialty (re)insurer purpose-built for the post-XL Catlin hard market, now recapitalised at ~$7B by Onex and AIG after the IPO route closed.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Groupon, Inc. ↗ at risk
The 2008 Andrew Mason daily-deals experiment that once turned down a $6B Google bid and IPO'd at a first-day $16B market cap in November 2011, now a ~$770M market cap turnaround under Czech investor Dusan Senkypl (Pale Fire Capital, ~22% stake) — FY24 revenue $492.6M against a 2014 peak of ~$3.0B, active customers ~15.4M against a 2015 peak north of 55M, and a workforce shrunk from >11,000 at peak to under 2,000 with another 400 layoffs announced in August 2026 as management pivots to being an 'AI-native' local commerce marketplace.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Mohawk Industries, Inc. ↗ at risk
The world's largest flooring manufacturer — carpet, ceramic tile, LVT, laminate, hardwood — has run five years of flat-to-declining revenue ($11.74B FY2021 peak → $10.99B FY2025), taken an $876M non-cash impairment in Q3 2023, closed out a $60M securities-fraud class action tied to 2017-2019 revenue-recognition allegations, and just handed the CEO seat to a Unilin-family lifer as the LVT category quietly cannibalises the ceramic and hardwood books that Mohawk spent $6B of M&A to assemble.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Estonian-founded, Mountain-View-headquartered AI startup that invented the 'autonomous negotiation' category in 2019, ran the reference Walmart deployment putting chatbots across ~2,000 tail-spend suppliers with reported 3% savings, then raised ~$108M across five rounds (Insight Partners led a $54M Series C in June 2025) — and now has to prove the category-specific playbooks and Fortune-100 references compound into a moat before SAP Ariba's Joule, Coupa's agent framework, Ivalua's IVA and Zip's orchestrator ship native LLM negotiation inside the suite the customer already renews annually.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Sally Beauty Holdings ↗ at risk
The 1964-founded Denton, TX beauty-supply operator — spun out of Alberto-Culver in November 2006 in a $3B CD&R-sponsored transaction after the Regis merger blew up, now a two-segment business (~3,096 Sally Beauty Supply stores for DIY hair-color shoppers plus ~1,085 CosmoProf professional-only stores in Beauty Systems Group) generating $3.70B of FY2025 revenue on essentially flat comps, defending itself with cost cuts, a Happy Beauty Co pilot and a TikTok Shop launch while Ulta, Amazon, TikTok-native DTC brands and L'Oréal's SalonCentric chew both ends of its franchise.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
A Mexico City freight-payments fintech that pays carriers within minutes on the shipper's behalf, then finances the receivable — bootstrapping an AI-audit layer (Solvento Audita) on top of a $180M-and-growing invoice book across Mexico's fragmented, cash-starved trucking base.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Bunge Global SA ↗ at risk
One of the four legacy 'ABCD' global grain traders (ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus), now recast by the 2 July 2025 close of the $34B Viterra merger into a scaled origination-and-processing platform running pro-forma toward $60-67B of revenue against a ~$14B market cap — a 208-year-old physical commodities incumbent trying to reset its moat as post-2022 crush margins normalize hard and ADM's January 2024 accounting scandal re-priced the entire sector's multiple.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Casey's General Stores, Inc. ↗ well positioned
The fourth-largest US convenience-store chain, built on a rural whitespace nobody else wanted — one gas-station-plus-pizza box in each of ~2,500 small towns, 100% company-operated, selling more pizzas per store than Papa John's.
Rec: ★ Interesting - D.R. Horton, Inc. ↗ at risk
The largest U.S. homebuilder by volume — 84,863 closings and $34.3B revenue in fiscal 2025 — running the affordability trade at scale, with roughly three of every four buyers getting a mortgage-rate buydown, gross margin down ~360 bps in a year (23.6% Q4 FY24 to 20.0% Q4 FY25), a $1.0B litigation reserve overwhelmingly tied to construction-defect claims, and a fiscal 2026 guide cut to $32.5-33.0B.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
AI-native fleet operating system born as KeepTruckin — ELDs, AI dashcams, telematics, a Mastercard-rails fleet card and workforce management stitched into one subscription — chasing Samsara from second place while trying not to get bundled by it.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Shift Technology ↗ emerging
Paris-founded AI/ML SaaS for insurers — fraud detection, claims automation, subrogation, financial crime, and underwriting risk — that rode 2018-2021's pattern-matching wave to a $220M Series D and a $1B+ valuation, then hit the same reset every AI-native insurtech did in 2023-2024: layoffs, valuation compression, and a race to prove the platform bet before core-systems incumbents (Guidewire, Duck Creek, Sapiens) ship native AI and LLM commoditization erodes the moat.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Europe's largest secondhand fashion marketplace — a C2C network that charges sellers nothing, moved to first profit in 2023, and hit a €5B tender valuation on the road to IPO.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
San Francisco EV managed-charging SaaS that sells to utilities — ~$65-70M raised, ~$35M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures in Feb 2023, live at DTE, Xcel, PG&E, Duke, ConEd, National Grid, Portland General, Salt River Project.
Rec: ★ Interesting - W. R. Berkley Corporation ↗ well positioned
$26B-market-cap, 59-year-old specialty commercial P&C compounder run as a federation of ~60 decentralized operating units, printing an 89.4% Q4 2025 combined ratio and 21.2% ROE on $14.7B FY2025 revenue — the archetypal well-run incumbent whose founder-family control, disciplined underwriting culture and E&S/professional-liability tilt have produced 25 consecutive years of dividend growth even as the specialty market softens back toward 2020 rate levels.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
An AI-dispatched network of next-flight-out, on-board-courier and ground capacity that routes organs, aircraft-on-ground parts and semiconductor tooling across 30,000+ drivers and commercial airline belly space — a $138M-raised time-critical logistics platform that has not announced new capital since its May 2022 Series D.
Rec: ★ Interesting - BrightView Holdings, Inc. ↗ at risk
The largest commercial landscaping company in the US — a KKR-built roll-up of Brickman (1939) and ValleyCrest (1949) that IPO'd in 2018, spent 2022-2023 unwinding a botched integration and a bad acquisition strategy, brought in ex-United Rentals COO Dale Asplund plus a $500M One Rock Capital preferred-equity infusion in October 2023, and by Q2 2026 had finally strung together consecutive quarters of positive Land (maintenance) revenue growth — on a $2.67B FY2025 revenue base, an 88% Maintenance / 12% Development mix, and a stock still trading near $11, roughly half its 2018 IPO price.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Cheniere Energy, Inc. ↗ well positioned
The largest LNG exporter in the United States and second-largest globally, running two Gulf Coast liquefaction complexes (Sabine Pass, Louisiana and Corpus Christi, Texas) toward a 60+ mtpa run-rate by 2028, with 95% of nameplate production locked under 20-year take-or-pay Sale and Purchase Agreements — a ~$55B-market-cap incumbent whose contracted-cash-flow moat is colliding, in 2026-2028, with the largest LNG supply wave in the industry's history.
Rec: − Maybe - Diamond Age ↗ emerging
A Phoenix robotics startup that trucked a gantry-based concrete 3D-printer to Arizona home lots, printed 30 production houses for Century Communities between 2022 and early 2024, pivoted to light-gauge-steel panels when the printer economics didn't scale — and ran out of capital eight weeks after the pivot proved itself, filing for bankruptcy on 12 December 2024 and auctioning its robots in January 2025.
Rec: ★ Interesting - hyperexponential ↗ emerging
London-founded pricing decision intelligence platform for specialty and commercial (re)insurers — hx Renew runs over $75B of annual commercial P&C premium at 40+ carriers including Beazley, Convex, Aviva, Allianz and Sompo, on $91M raised through a $73M Series B led by Battery Ventures (January 2024), and is now pivoting from a pricing tool into an 'agentic underwriting workbench' with the July 2026 launch of hyperoperator.
Rec: ★ Interesting - KoBold Metals ↗ emerging
Berkeley AI-first exploration company that mines a century of geochemical, geophysical and satellite data with machine learning to find undrilled copper, cobalt, nickel and lithium deposits — now a $2.96B-valuation, $1B+-raised outfit betting its Zambian Mingomba copper find can prove the model works end to end, from prediction to a producing mine.
Rec: ★ Interesting - NCR Voyix Corporation ↗ at risk
The 1884-founded cash-register originator, spun out of NCR Corp on 16 October 2023 as the pure-play retail-and-restaurant commerce software business, now trading around a ~$1.3B market cap on NYSE: VYX after selling its Digital Banking crown jewel to Veritas Capital for $2.45B in 2024 — a company shrinking its way to focus while Toast eats Aloha's hospitality installed base and cloud-native retail platforms erode its enterprise POS position.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Rockwell Automation, Inc. ↗ at risk
$47.7B-market-cap, 123-year-old US industrial-automation leader (Allen-Bradley 1903, Rockwell International 1985, 2001 spin) whose Logix PLC platform and FactoryTalk/Plex software stack are staging a real FY2026 rebound — 10% organic growth and raised guidance in Q3 2026 — after two brutal years of guidance cuts and distributor destocking, but which still sells almost entirely through a ~500-strong third-party distributor channel that Siemens, Schneider and Emerson are all outflanking with direct enterprise software deals and vertically-integrated industrial-AI acquisitions (Emerson/AspenTech, Schneider/Cognite).
Rec: ★ Interesting - AiDash, Inc. ↗ emerging
Palo Alto satellite-plus-AI vegetation-and-asset-risk platform for electric utilities, founded 2019 by a trio of IIT alums to solve the post-Camp Fire wildfire-liability problem — raised $91.5M across four rounds culminating in a $58.5M April 2024 Lightrock-led Series C, then agreed on 30 July 2026 to be acquired by Schneider Electric for a $350M all-cash enterprise value, folding the IVMS/CRIS/AIMS/BNGAI stack into Schneider's One Digital Grid platform in one of climate adaptation's largest-ever exits.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Big 5 Sporting Goods Corporation ↗ at risk
El Segundo-headquartered ~414-store western-US neighborhood sporting-goods chain (formerly NASDAQ:BGFV) taken private on 2 October 2025 by a Worldwide Golf / Capitol Hill Group partnership at $1.45 per share — a ~$112.7M enterprise-value all-cash rescue at the trailing edge of a four-year revenue collapse from $1.16B FY21 to $795M FY24, dividend eliminated Q3 2024, and a Nasdaq minimum-bid non-compliance notice received 13 May 2025.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Built Robotics, Inc. ↗ emerging
San Francisco autonomous heavy-equipment startup that raised $112M from Tiger Global, NEA and Founders Fund on a 2016-2022 arc as the retrofit-kit disruptor of construction, cut ~25-30% of headcount across two 2023 layoff rounds, and has since bet the company on a purpose-built solar-piling robot (RPD 35 + RPS 25) whose September 9, 2025 three-year contract with Blattner (Quanta) is either the wedge that saves the franchise or the last dance before Caterpillar/Komatsu and Trimble bundle it away.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Dexterity, Inc. ↗ emerging
Redwood City, CA full-stack 'physical AI' robotics company founded in 2017 by Stanford roboticist Samir Menon that raised $95M in March 2025 at a $1.65B post-money to build the Mech dual-armed truck-loading superhumanoid and the Foresight world model — chasing FedEx, UPS, Sagawa Express and Maersk parcel workflows in a category Amazon effectively acquihired in August 2024 when it absorbed Covariant's founders.
Rec: − Maybe - Eversource Energy ↗ at risk
New England's largest energy delivery company (NYSE:ES) — ~$28-30B rate base electric + gas monopoly serving ~4.4M customers in CT, MA and NH — is a franchise that has, in three years, torched roughly $1.6B pre-tax on an aborted offshore-wind push, been credit-downgraded six times by Moody's since October 2023, cut A- to BBB+ by S&P in December 2024 for a 'recent pattern of adverse regulatory developments' in Connecticut, sold its Aquarion water utility at a ~$300M loss to raise cash, and is now trying to fund a $26.5B 2026-2030 capex program under an openly adversarial Connecticut regulator.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Heartland Express, Inc. ↗ at risk
North Liberty, Iowa dry-van truckload carrier whose $525M all-cash CFI acquisition from TFI International on 31 August 2022 pushed the fleet from ~4,300 to ~6,320 tractors and ~$1.3B run-rate — then rode the freight recession from an 85% operating ratio (2019-2021) down to a 107.1% OR and a $52.5M net loss on $805.7M revenue in FY25, before a Q2 2026 print of 91.0% OR on $184.1M signaled the cycle finally turning.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Nuro, Inc. ↗ emerging
Mountain View autonomy company founded in 2016 by ex-Waymo engineers Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu that raised $2.13B through 2021 at an $8.6B peak valuation, then re-cut itself twice — 20% in November 2022, 30% in May 2023 — abandoned its custom R2/R3 delivery pod, and pivoted in September 2024 to licensing the Nuro Driver Level-4 stack to OEMs and mobility platforms; the July 2025 Uber–Lucid–Nuro deal for 20,000+ Lucid Gravity robotaxis over six years is either the resurrection or the final chapter.
Rec: − Maybe - The Travelers Companies, Inc. ↗ well positioned
$65B-market-cap, 172-year-old top-tier US property-casualty franchise built around independent-agency distribution and disciplined commercial underwriting, printing a 83.6% Q2 2026 combined ratio and 24.9% core ROE while returning $4.2B to shareholders in 2025 — the archetype of the well-run incumbent whose scale, agency lock-in and Bond & Specialty crown jewel keep it durably ahead of Progressive/GEICO on the commercial side even as direct-to-consumer models chew away at its Personal Insurance flank.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Santa Clara autonomous-retail platform from Duke computer-vision PhDs Steve Gu and Ying Zheng, powering 300+ camera-only cashierless stores globally by September 2025 across Zabka Nano, Aldi pilots, Verizon's Destination Store, Compass cafeterias and 74+ NFL/NBA stadium concessions — the last well-capitalised challenger left standing after Grabango's October 2024 collapse and Amazon's retreat from running its own Just Walk Out stores.
Rec: − Maybe -
Paris-headquartered actuarial AI platform building transparent GLM/GAM pricing and reserving software for P&C and now life insurers — 330+ carriers in 40+ countries, $180M raised through a $120M Series C led by One Peak in September 2024, expanded via the Arius (Milliman) reserving buyout in September 2024 and the Slope Software life-actuarial acquisition in March 2026.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Beazer Homes USA, Inc. ↗ at risk
Atlanta-headquartered public homebuilder in 13 states agreed on 6 August 2026 to sell to Dream Finders Homes for $33.50 per share in cash — a ~$916M equity / ~$2.2B enterprise-value take-out at 0.8x book that is the market's own verdict that the standalone Beazer franchise cannot earn its cost of capital in a Horton/Lennar-scaled production-builder era.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Commonwealth Fusion Systems ↗ emerging
MIT PSFC spinout building the SPARC compact high-field tokamak in Devens, MA and the 400MW ARC first commercial fusion plant in Chesterfield County, VA — raised ~$4B by July 30, 2026 (including a $1B pension/sovereign-wealth round and a $863M August 2025 Series B2 with Nvidia, Google, Khosla and Breakthrough Energy Ventures), with first plasma slipped from 2025 to 2027 and first grid power to the early 2030s.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. ↗ at risk
The New York prestige-beauty conglomerate whose $15.6B FY24 revenue collapsed to $14.3B in FY25 as Hainan travel-retail broke, whose 5,800-7,000-job restructuring (Feb 2025) and $1.2-1.6B in charges finally produced a 5%-reported / 3%-organic 'return to growth' in FY26 to $15.0B — but where challenger brands (Sol de Janeiro, Rare Beauty, Fenty, e.l.f.) keep taking prestige share, credit was cut by S&P and Moody's, and the Lauder-family Class B super-voting stack shields management from the activist pressure the multi-year numbers would otherwise trigger.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - PG&E Corporation ↗ at risk
The 1905-vintage California IOU whose stock lost roughly 20% in a single session on 31 August 2026 when the legislature let SB 492 die without the wildfire-subrogation shield the utility needed — repricing PG&E's cost of capital to include the open-ended tail risk that AB 1054's $21B fund was never designed to cover.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Prudential Financial, Inc. ↗ at risk
The 150-year-old Newark life-insurance-and-retirement franchise printing mid-teens ROE on a legacy general account while Athene, Global Atlantic and Corebridge underwrite the same pension risk transfer and annuity spreads on private-credit balance sheets that structurally beat Prudential's cost of funds.
Rec: − Maybe - Slip Robotics ↗ emerging
Atlanta supply-chain robotics company selling SlipBot — 12,000-lb omnidirectional automated loading robots that ride inside trailers, roll on and off any standard dock in under five minutes with no facility or IT integration, and are sold as Robots-as-a-Service to John Deere, GE Appliances, Valeo and Nissan; closed a $28M Series B led by DCVC on December 17, 2024 for ~$45M total raised.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Bengaluru autonomous cargo-drone startup building a tail-sitter, blended-wing-body aircraft that weighs less than the parcel it carries — aiming for one-cent-per-parcel drone delivery at trucking-competitive economics.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
San Francisco AI startup from Amazon Shipping alum Sean McCarthy building 'Relay,' an AI-native operating system that reads unstructured messages, logs into vendor portals, and makes phone calls to run shipper and 3PL back-office workflows — files 100% of eligible carrier claims automatically, cuts customer response time 93%, and raised a $26M Series A led by Theory Ventures on March 12, 2026.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Bath & Body Works ↗ at risk
The 1990 Wexner-era mall retailer that spun out of L Brands on August 3, 2021 as a $10B+ standalone — now on its second CEO in two years, comps down four of the last five years, and FY2026 guided to a 4% to 2.5% revenue decline as body care fragments to Sol de Janeiro, Rare Beauty, Fenty, and Ulta private label.
Rec: ★ Interesting - CNA Financial Corporation ↗ at risk
The 90%-Loews-owned Chicago commercial P&C insurer whose Q2 2026 P&C combined ratio deteriorated 240bps to 96.5% while net-written-premium growth halved to 4%, layered on a legacy long-term-care runoff block and a Tisch-family holding-company structure that keeps dividending CNA cash up to Loews rather than reinvesting in the specialty franchise that Chubb and W.R. Berkley are compounding.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Peloton Interactive ↗ at risk
The connected-fitness bellwether whose Q2 FY2026 revenue slipped 3% YoY to $657M and lost 214,000 paid Connected Fitness subscribers in a single year — now a $2.2B market cap, running a fresh $100M restructuring, staffed by ~2,900 people (down from ~8,700), and trying to reverse an at-home-fitness contraction with Peter Stern's Peloton IQ / Cross Training relaunch before the 2029 convertibles come due.
Rec: − Maybe - Reframe Systems ↗ emerging
A Massachusetts modular-homebuilding startup using robotic microfactories, QR-tracked panelization and a 'pixels to parts' software stack to fabricate wall and ceiling assemblies near dense demand centers — then truck them to site — for missing-middle single-family, duplex and small multifamily housing.
Rec: − Maybe - Tutor Intelligence ↗ emerging
Watertown, Mass. MIT-CSAIL spinout building a fleet of bimanual pick-and-pack robot workers for CPG kitting, priced as $12/hour Robots-as-a-Service and delivered to a customer site in 30 days — betting a centralized 'Ti0' vision-language-action model trained in its own 100-robot Data Factory 1 will out-learn every prior pick-and-pack rival before Amazon's Sequoia stack and Symbotic's ASRS eat the workflow from above.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Under Armour ↗ at risk
The 1996 Georgetown-basement HeatGear T-shirt company that peaked at $5.27B and $53 a share in 2015 has now shrunk five straight years to a ~$5.0B FY26 (-4%) with FY27 guided lower again — and Kevin Plank, back as CEO since April 2024 with 65% super-voting control, is trying to premium-price his way out while On and Hoka each cross him going in the other direction.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Consolidated Edison, Inc. ↗ at risk
The 200-year-old NYC-area regulated utility (NYSE: ED) — CECONY plus Orange & Rockland — serving roughly 5.1 million electric, gas and steam customers across the five boroughs, Westchester, Rockland, Orange and adjacent New Jersey; a Dividend King with 52 consecutive years of raises, a $38B 2026-2030 capital plan, and a pure T&D franchise that sold its ~4 GW clean-energy arm to RWE for $6.8B in March 2023 to bet the company on regulated wires and pipes — right as the AI load-growth cycle went to hyperscaler geographies Con Ed cannot serve.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Erie Indemnity ↗ at risk
The 1925 Pennsylvania attorney-in-fact that collects a 25%-of-premium management fee from the Erie Insurance Exchange — a reciprocal owned by its policyholders that is bearing a 103.9% Q2 2026 combined ratio while public shareholders keep clipping the fee.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Locus Robotics ↗ emerging
Wilmington, Mass. autonomous mobile robot maker that pioneered the collaborative pick-assist warehouse bot as a RaaS subscription — now with ~$180M ARR and ~4,000 bots in the field, but forced back to existing investors for a $41.6M Series G at a reported ~$1.35B valuation, down from the ~$2B mark of its 2022 Series F, while it bets its next act on the Locus Array manipulation platform against Amazon Robotics from above and Geek+ from below.
Rec: − Maybe - Louisiana-Pacific Corporation ↗ at risk
The 1972 Georgia-Pacific antitrust spin-out that survived clear-cut scandals, Ketchikan pulp criminal fines, and a rotten-siding class action to become the SmartSide engineered-wood-siding leader — now cycling through a nasty 2026 in which Q1 revenue collapsed 21% to $574M, Siding volumes fell 18% for the first time on record, and OSB flipped to an EBITDA loss.
Rec: − Maybe - NormanMax Insurance Holdings ↗ emerging
The Miami-based parametric (re)insurance platform launched in 2023 by Universal Insurance Holdings' founder Bradley Meier, spanning a US E&S carrier, Lloyd's Syndicate 3939 (managed by Apollo), the New Paradigm and FloodFlash MGAs, and servicing entities across the US, Bermuda and Amsterdam — now in a Stonybrook-led 2026 equity capital raise after Lloyd's slashed its stamp capacity 72% (from £108M to £30M) following a 289% combined ratio in its 2024 debut year and an underwhelming 2025 that missed premium plan.
Rec: − Maybe - Odyssey Energy Solutions ↗ emerging
A Boulder software marketplace stitching together 6,000+ solar installers and EPCs with development-finance capital across 50+ emerging markets — the digital plumbing that a $750M World Bank program in Nigeria and a 205% India acceleration are now running through, funded in September 2026 with $27M equity (Broadscale, FMO, Al Mada) plus $47M debt (BII, BIO, FEI, EEGF).
Rec: ★ Interesting - Publix Super Markets ↗ at risk
The Lakeland, Florida, employee-owned grocer — 1,498 stores across eight Southeast states, $62.7B of FY2025 sales, no debt, and a private stock priced quarterly at $19.60 — just posted its rarest number: a Q1 2026 earnings decline of 21.5%, and started quietly closing stores again while Aldi swallows 200 Winn-Dixies in its home state.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Gig-driver last-mile parcel delivery for cross-border discount e-commerce — the primary Canadian and US carrier for Shein, Temu, TikTok Shop and AliExpress, running roughly a million parcels a day through 100+ warehouses at price points UPS and FedEx cannot match.
Rec: ★ Interesting - AutoNation ↗ at risk
The Wayne Huizenga franchise-dealer roll-up that hit $27.6B in 2025 revenue across ~245 stores, watches Carvana out-register it on new Stellantis units, buys back stock hard enough that Bill Gates's Cascade Investment quietly grew from 20.1% to 21.1% of the float without buying a share — and just posted a Q2 2026 where new-vehicle gross profit per unit fell to $2,381 from $2,785 a year earlier.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Cowbell Cyber ↗ emerging
The Pleasanton, California, cyber insurance MGA underwriting SMB and lower-middle-market policies with continuous, 1,000-signal risk scoring — with Zurich Insurance Group on its cap table since July 2024 and its own admitted carrier and reinsurance captive stitched underneath twenty-plus fronting and reinsurance partners.
Rec: − Maybe -
The Roseville, California point-of-sale lender that turned a mortgage brokerage into the largest residential-solar loan platform in the United States — $30B+ cumulative originations, 22 securitizations, and a business model wholly hostage to the 30% residential solar Investment Tax Credit that Congress killed in July 2025.
Rec: − Maybe - JELD-WEN Holding ↗ at risk
The 66-year-old Klamath Falls door and window manufacturer that Onex LBO'd in 2011, IPO'd at $23 in January 2027… sorry 2017, was forced to divest its Towanda doorskin plant after losing the Steves & Sons antitrust case, ended 2025 with $3.31B in revenue at 5.7x net leverage, and printed a $124M market cap at $2.27/share in September 2026 as Owens Corning-Masonite and MITER Brands consolidated the doors-and-windows category around it.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Old Republic International Corporation ↗ well positioned
The 103-year-old Chicago multi-line insurer running the No. 3 US title book, a fast-growing specialty P&C engine and a 45-year streak of dividend hikes — while the title franchise remains hostage to the mortgage cycle.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Reibus International ↗ emerging
The Atlanta B2B online marketplace for industrial metals that raised $100M+ at a $750M SoftBank-led valuation in 2021, closed its metals marketplace in June 2025, and re-emerged as Reibus Logistics — a specialty flatbed and open-deck freight brokerage still burning through the residual cap table.
Rec: − Maybe -
The San Diego-based utility holding company (NYSE: SRE) that owns SoCalGas + SDG&E in California, an 80.25% stake in Oncor in Texas, and — until the KKR/CPP deal closes in Q3 2026 — 70% of Sempra Infrastructure's Cameron/ECA/Port Arthur LNG franchise, remaking itself in 2025-2026 into an almost-pure regulated utility with a record $65B 2026-2030 capital plan and 11% projected rate-base CAGR.
Rec: − Maybe - Simbe Robotics ↗ emerging
The eleven-year-old South San Francisco robotics company selling Tally — a five-foot, LiDAR-and-RealSense shelf-scanning robot — into Wakefern, Schnucks, BJ's, SpartanNash, Albertsons and CarrefourSA on a Robotics-as-a-Service subscription reportedly starting near $2–4k per store per month, with $104M raised across three rounds and Goldman Sachs' Growth Equity arm underwriting the Series C at a more-than-tripled valuation.
Rec: − Maybe - Costco Wholesale Corporation ↗ well positioned
The $270B membership warehouse machine that runs on ~13% gross margin, ~4,000 SKUs, and a Kirkland private label that alone did ~$90B in 2025 — with a 92.2% US/Canada renewal rate and the first membership-fee hike in seven years now printing an incremental $1.33B of near-100%-margin fee income per quarter.
Rec: − Maybe - Cornerstone Building Brands ↗ at risk
The CD&R-owned $5.4B North American exterior building products giant — Ply Gem siding, Silverline / Simonton / MI / Harvey windows, metal buildings — now four years into a $5.8B take-private with more than 90% of its creditors sitting on a February 2026 cooperation agreement while a softening single-family housing market compounds the pressure on a ~$1.5B secured-notes stack coupon-clipping at 8.75% and 9.50%.
Rec: − Maybe - CVS Health Corporation ↗ at risk
The $126B integrated pharmacy-PBM-insurer that raised 2026 guidance under new CEO David Joyner even as Caremark ceded PBM share to Express Scripts, Aetna took a Medicare Advantage star-ratings body blow, 900 stores went dark, activist Glenview took four board seats, and Amazon Pharmacy plus Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs kept eating the edges.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
The Munich-based YC S23 company (formerly askLio) selling agentic AI as a virtual procurement workforce — closed a $30M Series A led by a16z on March 5, 2026 with SV Angel, Harry Stebbings and YC participating, bringing total funding to $33M, on the back of Munich Re, Brose and Novozymes as reference customers and a claim of 100+ Fortune 500/Global 2000 enterprises managing billions of dollars in spend through Lio's agents.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Stand Insurance ↗ emerging
The San Francisco startup underwriting the California and Florida homes State Farm, Allstate and Hartford abandoned — pricing wildfire and hurricane risk with a first-principles physics-plus-AI 'World Model' and pairing HO-5 policies with paid home-hardening plans, on Concert Specialty A- surplus-lines paper.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
The Nairobi-headquartered off-grid solar and PAYGO consumer-finance operator (formerly Greenlight Planet) that has reached 82M+ people with solar home systems across 40+ African and Asian markets, closed the sector's largest-ever Series D at $260M in April 2022 led by BeyondNetZero, and in November 2025 announced a $5.6B / 50M-kit / 200M-people 2030 plan requiring a further $1.3B of blended debt-and-equity — a plan that lives or dies on the receivables-securitisation machine Citi built for it in 2023 and 2025.
Rec: ★ Interesting - The Hartford Insurance Group ↗ well positioned
The 215-year-old Connecticut multi-line insurer that hit 19.4% ROE in 2025, rejected Chubb's $23B takeover in 2021, sold Hartford Funds to Wellington in June 2026 — and watched its Personal Insurance book shrink 7% in Q2 2026 as AARP-anchored direct auto lost ground to Progressive and GEICO.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Vecna Robotics ↗ emerging
The Waltham, Massachusetts autonomous-pallet-jack and warehouse-orchestration company that spun out of Vecna Technologies in 2018, closed a $100M Series C in June 2024 (with a $40M top-up onto the January 2022 Tiger Global-led $65M round), added a $14.5M insider bridge in November 2024 alongside naming ex-Motional CEO Karl Iagnemma as chief executive, and is trying to convert a decade of DARPA-adjacent R&D into a repeatable RaaS business selling case-picking and pallet-move automation to DHL, FedEx, GEODIS and Milton CAT — while cycling through four CEOs in six years and periodic layoffs.
Rec: − Maybe -
The $70B Dublin-domiciled global broker that spent $13.4B on NFP in 2024 to buy US middle-market growth, then in August 2026 doubled the bet with a $17B all-cash acquisition of USI from KKR — right as reinsurance rates cracked double-digit lower at 1/1/26 renewals and S&P cut its outlook to Negative.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Y Combinator S22 'Plaid for insurance' clearinghouse that connects the customer's carrier login to a single API, cleared >US $100B in coverage across 4,000+ dealers, rental fleets, mortgage lenders and employers, and closed a US $17.5M Series A on August 11 2026 led by Base10 Partners.
Rec: ★ Interesting - CSX Corporation ↗ at risk
The 1980 Chessie + Seaboard merger that Hunter Harrison force-marched into Precision Scheduled Railroading in 2017 and left with a 55% operating ratio, now the last stand-alone Eastern Class I as Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern race to close America's first transcontinental — either the next M&A target for BNSF or CPKC or a stranded 21,000-mile network that just answered UP-NS with a coast-to-coast BNSF intermodal handshake.
Rec: − Maybe -
Six-year-old Wollongong-founded AI capacity-management platform whose digital twin of a distribution network — fed by smart-meter data across 700,000 monitoring points on Endeavour Energy alone — let that DNSP double household solar export limits from 5 kW to 10 kW for 95% of the year, unlocked ~600 MW of additional rooftop solar and roughly A$100M of customer value, and now, after a US$26M Series B on September 1 2026 led by Insight Partners with Galvanize participating, is trying to sell the same math to Xcel Energy, Avangrid's United Illuminating and the rest of a US IOU sector planning ~US$1.3T of grid CapEx through 2030.
Rec: ★ Interesting - MasTec, Inc. ↗ well positioned
A 1969 Cuban-exile pole-and-wire contractor that leveraged 100-plus acquisitions into a $21.4B-backlog specialty-utility platform now trading at a ~35x forward P/E on the thesis that every AI data center in America needs a MasTec crew to plug it into the grid — and where the Mas family still leases their jet to the company.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Medici Brands ↗ emerging
Peter Rahal's post-RXBar house of better-for-you CPG brands — David Protein bars (28g protein, 150 calories, 0g sugar), a 30g-protein frozen dessert that sold out in 28 minutes on launch, and the newly launched HallPass 70-calorie candy line at Walmart — sitting on the proprietary EPG plant-fat platform Medici bought outright in May 2025 and now producing sales pace of ~US $300M in year two, valued at US $2.25B on a US $250M Series B co-led by Greenoaks and Valor on September 2 2026.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Dubai-headquartered heavy equipment fleet-management SaaS founded in 2018 by Arjun Mohan out of Y Combinator S18, pivoted from a rental marketplace into an AI-powered telematics platform that stitches OEM APIs, third-party devices and Tenderd-branded hardware into a single dashboard for construction, mining, energy and logistics fleets — 300+ customers across UAE and Saudi Arabia as of mid-2024, ~60 staff on LinkedIn (Sept 2026), and a US $30M Series A led by A.P. Moller Holding on June 11, 2024 that took cumulative funding to roughly US $36M (Tracxn, 2026).
Rec: − Maybe - V.F. Corporation ↗ at risk
The 1899 Pennsylvania glove maker that became a lifestyle-apparel holdco of The North Face, Vans, Timberland and eleven other brands — now $4B in net debt, five years into a Vans decline that has taken the crown jewel from a $4.2B peak (FY2022) to ~$2.3B (FY2025), with ex-Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell selling Supreme, Dickies and everything else non-core to buy time to fix it.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
An 'agentic process outsourcer' for insurance — AI agents that navigate carriers' internal apps, read documents, and make phone calls to run the back-office work insurers historically shipped to BPOs, priced by the workflow rather than the seat.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The 1990 Ashland spin-out that walked out of self-perform construction in 2020, rebuilt itself as a $27.8B-backlog professional-services pure play, and just paid $390M for a Norwegian AI startup that claims to cut engineering time 90% — either the biggest AEC-industry AI bet or the moment the labor-pyramid business model started eating itself.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
AI-native financial management for the American 'real economy' — bookkeeping, bill pay, wallet and spending cards for farms, ranches, trucking fleets, contractors and property managers that QuickBooks never really fit.
Rec: ★ Interesting - August Robotics ↗ emerging
Nine-year-old Hong Kong / Melbourne construction robotics company whose autonomous mobile robot for downward drilling — sold as DALE through Stanley Black & Decker's DEWALT brand — cut a hyperscaler's data-center floor-prep schedule from eight-to-nine weeks down to seven-to-nine days, and whose original Lionel exhibition-floor-marking robot has now laid more than one million marks across five continents; the pivot from event halls into AI infrastructure triggered the May 21 2026 US $30M Series B led by Big Pi Ventures.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Blank Street ↗ emerging
The venture-backed coffee chain that used $50K Swiss espresso robots and 350-square-foot kiosks to compress Starbucks' cost structure — now $650M and pushing onto Beverly Hills real estate that has never been kind to challengers.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Marsh McLennan ↗ at risk
The 120-year-old inventor of modern insurance broking — now a $92B four-legged risk, strategy and people conglomerate (Marsh, Guy Carpenter, Mercer, Oliver Wyman) — that just spent $7.75B on McGriff to buy back US mid-market growth, then watched Wall Street downgrade the stock as organic decelerated to ~4% into a softening P&C and reinsurance rate cycle.
Rec: ★ Interesting - MSC Industrial Direct Co., Inc. ↗ at risk
The 1941 Sid Tool Company that Sid Jacobson founded from a Little Italy storefront with $4,100 is now the No. 3 US MRO distributor at $3.77B FY2025 revenue — a metalworking-heavy technical distributor visibly losing ground to Grainger's scale, Fastenal's on-plant embed, and Amazon Business's price transparency, with a 2023 dual-class collapse behind it and a January 2026 CEO handoff from founder-family scion Erik Gershwind to outsider Martina McIsaac as the pivot point.
Rec: ★ Interesting - RH (Restoration Hardware) ↗ at risk
Corte Madera luxury home retailer that Gary Friedman turned from a near-bankrupt hardware kitsch chain into a $3.7B market cap gallery-and-hospitality brand, then levered its balance sheet with $2.2B of debt-funded buybacks at prices double today's — now navigating a five-year US housing freeze, a ~$45M Q1 tariff hit, and a European capex program the market has yet to underwrite.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Tel Aviv / New York AI-powered whole-trip travel insurance startup that on August 5, 2026 raised a $50M Series C led by Madrona at a reported ~$500M valuation, bringing cumulative funding to $100M and revenue to a reported ~$200M ARR — with the differentiator that AI approves and pays claims mid-trip in minutes, and humans handle the denials.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The Finnish (Espoo) SAR-satellite operator that put the world's first sub-100kg radar satellite in orbit in January 2018, now runs the largest commercial X-band constellation on the planet (76 satellites launched by July 2026), and closed a June 9, 2026 Series F led by General Atlantic that took reported total round size above €1B at a >€10B valuation — split between a €1.7B Bundeswehr contract via Rheinmetall on one side and Swiss Re / Munich Re parametric-flood partnerships on the other.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Munich TUM-spinout that raised $85M Series D on August 6, 2026 led by The Jordan Company to make itself the spatial-data foundation layer for factories, refineries and construction sites — the reality-capture rails NVIDIA Omniverse, SAP and Autodesk plug into before any physical-AI or humanoid deployment can start.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Peoria, Illinois specialty insurer that grew out of a 1965 contact-lens insurance start-up into a compounder with 30 straight years of underwriting profit — and whose Q2 2026 casualty combined ratio spiked to 99.3%, the first serious crack in the record.
Rec: − Maybe - TFI International ↗ at risk
Alain Bédard's 30-year Montreal roll-up — 200-plus tuck-ins compounded into a top-tier North American carrier — whose 2021 $800M grab of UPS Freight has become the anchor dragging LTL operating ratios into the mid-90s while Old Dominion sits near 74%.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
London-based live-auction app founded in 2021 by two early Revolut alumni that spent 2025 quietly becoming the default fashion-first live-shopping destination in the UK, Italy, Spain and Poland, and on June 2, 2026 announced a $26M round led by TQ Ventures with Vinted Ventures joining alongside Balderton, Earlybird and Seedcamp — bringing the total to over $50M and turning the company into Europe's clearest live-commerce challenger to Whatnot and TikTok Shop.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Torrid Holdings ↗ at risk
Sycamore Partners' mall-anchored plus-size specialty chain, IPO'd at $21 in July 2021 and trading near $1 by mid-2026, closing 171 stores while comps drop and lender-friendly digital pure-plays and mass extended sizes compress it from both sides.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The US silicon-carbide pioneer that spent $6B+ building 200mm capacity for an EV wave that arrived late — filed Chapter 11 on June 30, 2025, emerged September 30, 2025 with 70% less debt and 95% of the equity in creditors' hands, and continues to miss estimates as Infineon and Chinese entrants pull ahead on cost.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Buildforce ↗ emerging
The Austin- and Houston-based tech-enabled electrician staffing platform that raised a $10M Series A on July 28, 2026, led by Saepio Capital, to convert a fragmented, phone-and-referral commercial-electrical labor market into a W-2 marketplace priced to sit between union halls and PeopleReady.
Rec: ★ Interesting - FreightCar America ↗ at risk
The 125-year-old Johnstown-Bethlehem coal-car builder that closed its US plants, moved everything to Castaños, Mexico, took a majority-PIMCO capital structure — and just watched Q2 2026 gross margin collapse from 15.0% to 5.5% as it took $2.2M of workforce realignment costs against a #3 slot behind Trinity and Greenbrier.
Rec: − Maybe - Gravis Robotics ↗ emerging
Four-year-old Zurich autonomy company that spun out of Marco Hutter's ETH Robotic Systems Lab (the HEAP walking excavator, the In-Situ Fabricator) and, on August 17, 2026, announced a $200M all-SoftBank Series A at a reported $1B post-money — the largest Series A in construction-robotics history — to sell a machine-agnostic retrofit kit (Gravis Rack) and operator co-pilot (Gravis Copilot) that turn Caterpillar, Volvo, Develon, Hitachi, JCB and John Deere excavators into autonomous or semi-autonomous machines.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Hike Medical ↗ emerging
San Francisco healthtech that raised $22.5M in combined seed + Series A on August 25, 2026 to turn orthotics, prosthetics and DME — a category still routed by fax, foam boxes and phone calls — into a single referral-to-dispense platform, with an in-house 3D-printing farm in Peoria to make the devices.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Leslie's, Inc. ↗ at risk
The 63-year-old US pool-supplies retailer — 900+ stores, a chlorine-and-water-testing chain built by Phil Leslie in 1963 that L Catterton and GIC took private in 2017 and IPO'd at a $3.2B EV in 2020 — is now a penny stock closing 80-90 stores, carrying ~$757M of debt against ~$61M of EBITDA, and openly weighing Chapter 11.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Selective Insurance Group ↗ at risk
The Branchville, NJ super-regional commercial P&C carrier that turned 99 years old in 2025 and now has to prove the middle-market book its 1,600 independent agencies write can outrun the social-inflation trend that already forced $311M of casualty reserve strengthening in 2024.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Universal Logistics Holdings ↗ at risk
Warren, Michigan trucking, intermodal drayage and auto-plant contract-logistics holding controlled ~72% by the Moroun family of Ambassador Bridge fame — a $1.5B-revenue mixed-asset carrier whose 2025 was capped by an $81M intermodal impairment, a Q3 restatement, and a Q2 2026 trucking-segment margin compressed to 4.5%.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Voya Energy ↗ emerging
A one-year-old California startup that raised $35M Series A in August 2026 (on top of a $13M November 2025 seed) to convert low-grade scrap aluminum into onsite 2 MW backup power for data centers via a metal-air electrochemical generator — reviving a category, aluminum-fuel electricity, that has been publicly promised and publicly missed for the better part of half a century.
Rec: − Maybe - Lennar Corporation ↗ at risk
The second-largest US homebuilder — a 72-year-old Miami public company that in the twelve months after spinning off its land bank to Millrose Properties in February 2025 has watched incentives climb to 12.9% of ASP, home-sales revenue slip 2% year over year in Q2 fiscal 2026 to a $7.9B miss, gross margin collapse from 22.1% to 17.7% and full-year fiscal 2026 delivery guidance cut to 82,000-83,000 homes.
Rec: − Maybe - Accelerant Holdings ↗ well positioned
The specialty-insurance marketplace that Thoma Bravo is taking private for over $4B one year after its IPO — $20.25 a share, below the July 2025 IPO price of $21 — despite Q2 2026 revenue of $356.9M and 62.9% YoY growth.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The Texas-by-way-of-London livestock software company that raised a $27M Series B on August 27, 2026 led by Partech's impact fund to stitch a mobile-first cattle-management app, an AI-verified marketplace and an embedded cattle-finance fund into a single closed-loop system for a US beef supply chain where four packers control 85% of slaughter capacity and the herd just hit its smallest level since 1951.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Buzz Solutions ↗ emerging
Palo Alto AI grid-inspection platform that closed a $20M Series A in August 2026 led by S3 Ventures — PowerAI ingests drone, helicopter, ground and fixed-camera imagery from transmission lines, distribution networks, substations and utility-scale solar and returns georeferenced defect lists in about 0.6 seconds per image, versus the 1-2 minutes utility field engineers still spend on manual review.
Rec: − Maybe -
Six-year-old San Francisco startup that raised a $26M Series A on August 27, 2026 to turn the messy patchwork of buried-utility maps, easements, environmental overlays and land-ownership records into a single map layer that civil engineers, developers and utility owners plan against — a workflow that today runs on phone calls, PDFs and 811 tickets.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - FedEx Freight ↗ at risk
The largest US less-than-truckload carrier by revenue — spun out of FedEx Corp on June 1, 2026 and now trading as NYSE:FDXF at roughly $22.6B of equity, ~$26.7B of enterprise value, and a structural operating-ratio gap of ~15-20 points to Old Dominion that the standalone company has to close on its own.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The $700B-revenue Bentonville incumbent whose Aug 20 2026 Q2 print — US comps of 2.6% versus 3.5% expected, Q3 and FY27 EPS guidance below the Street, and a ~6% share drop — put the market's newest question about the company on the tape: with Walmart Connect ads compounding 40%+ and Walmart+ past 30M members, is the core US supercenter comp finally being nibbled away by Costco, Aldi, Amazon, Temu, Shein and TikTok Shop simultaneously?
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The Minneapolis workforce-trust platform betting that a single point-in-time background check is a broken model — a six-year-old company that raised a $30M Series B on August 27, 2026 led by Harbert Growth Partners to sell gig marketplaces, staffing firms, and logistics operators continuous post-hire monitoring of criminal records, driving records, license and insurance expirations, and OIG exclusion lists.
Rec: − Maybe - Emerald AI ↗ emerging
The Washington DC unicorn — a 22-month-old software company that raised $150M Series A at a $1.05B valuation on August 25, 2026 to sell hyperscalers, colocation operators and utilities a workload-scheduling layer that lets AI data centers cut power 25% for hours on grid-stress days while keeping training and inference online, unlocking capacity that would otherwise sit stuck behind seven-year interconnection queues.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The unionized 103-year-old Fort Smith LTL that missed its own once-in-a-generation windfall — Old Dominion, Saia and XPO took most of Yellow's capacity, ABF Freight took a 97.3% operating ratio into Q1 2026 and a 44% year-over-year profit collapse.
Rec: − Maybe -
The Austin-based digital transformer broker Brian Tochman started after leaving Trust Ventures, promising to compress 100-plus-week transformer lead times by matching utility specs against 150+ global OEMs — and to run the full EPC job from spec parse to concrete pad — freshly seed-funded with $26M co-led by 8VC and Congruent Ventures in a market where a single 300 MVA unit sitting in the queue can hold up a hyperscaler campus for three years.
Rec: ★ Interesting - InRisk Labs ↗ emerging
The Ahmedabad-based climate insurtech that combined a state-owned agricultural-insurance CRO, a former AIC of India chairman and a data-science founder to build EarthRe, the first locally incorporated reinsurer in India's GIFT City, and raised a $27M Series A at ~$70M post co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Northpoint Capital to underwrite parametric extreme-heat, cyclone, monsoon, crop, marine cargo and motor risk across India and the broader Global South.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Ex-Spotify recommendations team building 'Vector AI' — a real-time behavioral personalization engine for ecommerce that reads hovers, clicks, scrolls and search refinements to predict shopper intent without cookies or logins, live on Shopify since June 2026 with a $10M Bessemer/Gradient seed.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Owens Corning ↗ at risk
The pink-insulation and asphalt-shingle powerhouse that just spent 2024-2026 pivoting from a diversified industrial into a pure branded-building-products bet — right as roofing volume softened, the Masonite doors deal took a $1.2B impairment, and net earnings from continuing operations fell 85% year-over-year in Q1 2026.
Rec: − Maybe - The Southern Company ↗ well positioned
The Atlanta-based Southeast utility holding — Georgia Power, Alabama Power and Mississippi Power on the electric side, Southern Company Gas across four states — that just finished the only newly-built US nuclear reactors in a generation (Vogtle 3 and 4) and is now converting a 17 GW contracted hyperscaler pipeline, including a 3.2 GW 25-year OpenAI deal, into regulated rate base under a Georgia PSC that lets it earn up to 11.9% ROE.
Rec: − Maybe - Whirlpool Corporation ↗ at risk
The 115-year-old name that defined US appliances — squeezed by LG and Samsung at the top, Midea and Hisense at the bottom, softer housing turnover in the middle, and $2B of new secured debt tightening the neck.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Old Dominion Freight Line ↗ well positioned
The Congdon family's 92-year-old less-than-truckload carrier that turned service quality into an industry-best 70.1% operating ratio, a wide moat, and a ~$41B market cap — and just watched Yellow's collapse permanently remove a tenth of LTL capacity.
Rec: − Maybe -
AI-powered platform for residential builders — pre-construction estimates, blueprint collaboration, homeowner handoff and warranty — now Builders FirstSource's default AI stack across a 140,000-builder distribution book.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Exelon Corporation ↗ well positioned
The nation's largest pure-play regulated transmission and distribution utility — six state-franchised electric and gas companies (ComEd, PECO, BGE, Pepco, Delmarva, ACE) serving 10.7M customers across IL/PA/MD/DC/DE/NJ — with a $41.7B 2026-2029 capital plan pointed at PJM data-center load, a 25 GW data-center interconnection pipeline (Q2 2026), and 5-7% EPS CAGR guidance through 2029; the tail is affordability (PECO's April 2026 $510M rate-case withdrawal) and the ComEd bribery DPA hangover.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The 1984 Babbage's-lineage US mall video-game retailer — down to 1,598 US stores as of January 31, 2026 after closing 727 in FY2025 alone, FY2025 revenue $3.63B (-5% YoY) with hardware still 50.7% of a shrinking mix, but sitting on $8.7B of cash, marketable securities and 4,710 bitcoins (~$528.6M) as of Q2 FY2026 after Ryan Cohen used the meme-stock windfall to reinvent GME as a hybrid collectibles-retailer/bitcoin-treasury-and-warrant machine.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
AI-native logistics orchestration platform sold to importers — a control tower that unifies ERP, carrier, customs and warehouse data so import operators run one dashboard instead of thirty email threads per container.
Rec: ★ Interesting - RockRose Risk ↗ emerging
The Napa wildfire brokerage Andrew Engler founded after handing Kettle to a new CEO, now raising $12.5M to buy tree trimmers and roofers and become the vertically integrated middleman that turns mitigation work into admitted-market insurance in California, Colorado and Nevada.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
An AI-first system of record for 500+ independent paint, hardware, lawn & garden and farm & feed stores — betting a vertical SaaS wedge can migrate the mom-and-pop supply base off Epicor and ECI before the incumbents ship agents of their own.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The Milwaukee-born PE roll-up of front-office insurance broker tools — nine acquisitions in five years, a stack that ends everywhere except the agency management system Applied Systems owns, and a wall of AI-native attackers moving up the workflow.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Bilt Rewards ↗ emerging
The rent-payment loyalty program that talked itself into a $10.75B mark by convincing Wells Fargo to underwrite ~$120M of annual losses — and now has to reprice the whole model without them.
Rec: − Maybe -
The largest US used-car retailer — 256 superstores, 780,684 retail used units and ~$26B revenue in the fiscal year ended February 28, 2026, only ~3.6% share of the 0-10-year vehicle market, a $16.4B captive auto-finance book showing rising loss provisions on 2022-23 vintages, and a brand-new outsider CEO (Keith Barr, ex-IHG, started March 16, 2026) inheriting a share-losing incumbent whose stock nonetheless ripped ~50% in 2026 on hopes his four-pillar cost-and-pricing reset can defend the franchise against Carvana's ~43% unit growth.
Rec: − Maybe - Cover Genius ↗ emerging
Sydney-founded embedded insurance platform whose XCover API and >60-country licence stack quietly underwrite protection inside Booking.com, Uber, Klarna, Ryanair, eBay and dozens more marketplaces — the largest pure-play distribution engine in a category BCG says grows from $13B to $70B+ GWP by 2030, now scaling on Vista Credit Partners debt at a $1.9B mark.
Rec: − Maybe -
The São Paulo legal-AI company running mass litigation for Brazil's biggest banks and airlines — Latin America's first AI unicorn, 32 months after founding.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
Payment compliance and credit-ops software for construction's back office — preliminary notices, lien waivers, statutory tracking, and integrated payments, sold to the credit teams at the largest material suppliers in the US.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The overnight-delivery, one-portal supply chain for 16,000 independent coffee shops — betting SMB cafe wholesale is defensible before Sysco or US Foods notices the density.
Rec: ★ Interesting - The Sherwin-Williams Company ↗ well positioned
The 1866 Cleveland paint pioneer that is the only major architectural coatings player to own its distribution — ~4,900 company-operated stores in North America selling under a single Pro-first franchise, 46 straight years of dividend hikes, 14-of-15 quarters of gross-margin expansion, and share continuing to move its way even as the Home Depot/Behr Pro push and PPG's price cuts crank up in 2025-2026.
Rec: − Maybe - Wesco International, Inc. ↗ at risk
The 1922 Westinghouse distribution arm that PE flipped twice, IPO'd in 1999, and used a $4.5B all-in 2020 Anixter merger to bulk up to a $23.5B electrical, data-comm and utility distributor — now riding a data-center backlog that camouflages how exposed the rest of the middle is to Amazon Business, procurement-platform disintermediation, and manufacturer-direct programs.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Xcel Energy ↗ well positioned
A Minneapolis-based four-state regulated utility (~3.9M electric, ~2.1M gas customers) whose $60-70B 2026-2030 capex plan and ~$56B → ~$94B rate-base ramp position it as one of the cleanest AI-power beneficiaries — while the $640M Marshall Fire settlement, the Texas AG's Smokehouse Creek suit, and the MISO/SPP interconnection queue backlog remind investors the moat is regulated, not automatic.
Rec: − Maybe -
The SMS-marketing platform that made 90-character texts the highest-ROI channel in ecommerce — and priced itself, at $7B, as if that channel would compound forever.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Aurora Solar ↗ emerging
San Francisco solar design and sales SaaS — ~$523.5M raised across four rounds through a Feb 2022 Series D at $4B, market-share leader inside the 80% of top-75 US residential installers, and now three layoffs and a founder-CEO change in two years as the 30% residential ITC dies Dec 31, 2025 under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Fluor Corporation ↗ well positioned
The 114-year-old Swiss-immigrant California carpenter's oil-and-gas EPC that walked itself into a 2019-2022 fixed-price near-death, sold the NuScale SMR stake for ~$2B in 2025-2026, took an A$1.07B Santos judgment in August 2025, and rebuilt an $26.9B backlog that is now 85% reimbursable and pointed at semiconductor fabs, LNG trains, gas-fired power for data centers, and Department of Energy nuclear cleanup.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Halliburton ↗ at risk
The 107-year-old Duncan-Oklahoma cementer that Jeff Miller has been re-tilting toward international and offshore since 2019, still the #2 US pressure pumper by fleet count, now shipping ZEUS all-electric frac spreads outside North America for the first time (YPF / Vaca Muerta, Q4 2026) — and running a 14% consolidated operating margin at $5.71B Q2 2026 revenue while SLB pulls ahead on digital ARR and Baker Hughes pivots to LNG.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The 2020 San Francisco insurtech that built a 140-million-parameter deep-learning wildfire model, launched parametric reinsurance on California brush before the Palisades and Eaton fires, replaced its own co-founder-CEO with a Root reinsurance veteran in late 2024, and now bets a ~23-person MGA can convert a modeling edge into durable capacity from PartnerRe and RLI before Munich Re, Swiss Re or a state-sponsored public model out-Kettles Kettle.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Kodiak AI (Kodiak Robotics) ↗ emerging
Mountain View autonomous-trucking company hauling proppant driverless for Atlas Energy in the Permian and chasing highway long-haul — now public via a September 2025 SPAC at a $2.5B enterprise value, but sitting on ~$185M of pro forma cash against $160-170M of 2026 free cash burn and racing Aurora, Waabi, and Torc/Daimler to defensible unit economics.
Rec: − Maybe - US Foods Holding Corp. ↗ at risk
The #2 US broadline foodservice distributor — ~$39.4B FY2025 revenue, ~30,000 employees, 70+ distribution centers, 90+ CHEF'STORE cash-and-carry units — a KKR/CD&R post-LBO IPO whose sales growth has trailed Sysco for a decade, whose 4.9% adjusted EBITDA margin still lags peers, and whose September 2025 attempt to merge with Performance Food Group collapsed under antitrust and activist crossfire from Sachem Head.
Rec: − Maybe - Willis Towers Watson (WTW) ↗ at risk
The #3 global insurance broker — a 1828 London commodities-brokerage that merged its way into a 46,900-person, 140-country consultancy-and-broker hybrid, still trailing Marsh McLennan and Aon on organic growth, margin and M&A firepower five years after the DOJ blew up its Aon merger and cost it Willis Re.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Cintas Corporation ↗ well positioned
The 97-year-old Cincinnati rag-cleaner that Doc Farmer's grandson turned into a ~$80B NASDAQ compounder — 490 facilities, ~22,900 route trucks, a 42-year dividend growth streak, and a pending $5.5B UniFirst deal that would leave one true national uniform-rental competitor standing.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Genuine Parts Company ↗ at risk
The 97-year-old Atlanta distributor of NAPA Auto Parts and Motion Industries — a Dividend King with 69 straight annual dividend hikes through 2026 whose auto business has been comping several points behind O'Reilly for two straight years, drew a $1B+ Elliott stake in September 2025, an unsolicited $10B O'Reilly bid for NAPA in July 2026, and is now separating NAPA and Motion into two public companies by early 2027.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Kinsale Capital Group ↗ well positioned
The Richmond, VA excess & surplus specialist Michael Kehoe founded in 2009 with Moelis Capital backing — IPO'd 2016 at $16, ran seven straight years of 30%+ premium growth on an in-house tech stack, and now has to prove a mid-70s combined ratio and 25%+ ROE can survive a softening E&S property cycle.
Rec: − Maybe -
AI-forward US-Mexico cross-border freight forwarder and customs broker with an owned Mexican customs license — ~$75M raised through a $250M Series B (June 2023, QED-led), nearshoring tailwind, and a 2025 Trump tariff regime that is either a moat or a moat-breaker.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Occidental Petroleum ↗ well positioned
The 1920 California oil company Vicki Hollub bet the balance sheet on to steal Anadarko from Chevron in 2019, sold to Berkshire Hathaway a chunk of itself twice over — first as $10B of 8% preferred and 80M warrants, then as the entire OxyChem chlor-alkali business for $9.7B cash on 2 Jan 2026 — and is now a Permian pure-play E&P with ~26.5% Berkshire common ownership and a $1.3B direct air capture plant nobody else has the CO2-injection reservoirs to run economically.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
Austin- and Dundalk-based supply chain risk management platform for high-value in-transit freight — GPS-plus-humans intervention model, $215M raised through Jan 2025 plus a $105M Springcoast-led Series C in Aug 2025, and a January 2024 SensiGuard bolt-on that gave it the largest cargo-security ops footprint in the category.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Charlotte-based residential-solar marketplace and financing platform — $500M+ equity through 2023, $1.2B in project capital plus $706M of 2025 ABS to fund the LightReach solar-as-a-service book, betting the challenger channel model survives the Dec 31, 2025 residential ITC cliff that the One Big Beautiful Bill wrote into law.
Rec: − Maybe -
San Francisco startup insurance broker for high-growth technology companies — full-stack MGA-plus-carrier from 2018 through 2025, then sold its Corix MGA and Vouch Insurance Company to Hiscox in Aug 2025 and pivoted to an AI-forward digital broker under a multi-year Hiscox distribution deal.
Rec: − Maybe -
The 1985 Bermuda-startup ACE Limited that bought the historic Chubb name in a $28.3B 2016 merger, now a ~$135B market-cap global P&C insurer that Warren Buffett's Berkshire has quietly built into an ~$11B position — running an 81.2% Q4 2025 combined ratio while eating a $1.47B California wildfire loss in Q1 2025.
Rec: − Maybe - Coterie Insurance ↗ emerging
Cincinnati-based API-first MGA for small-commercial P&C — instant quote-and-bind for BOP, general and professional liability at sub-$50K premium accounts, distributed through independent agents, wholesalers and embedded partners.
Rec: − Maybe - Hadrian Automation ↗ emerging
Software-defined precision-parts factories for aerospace and defense — Torrance, Mesa and a 2.2M-sq-ft Navy submarine plant in Alabama — now valued at $7.87B on a Series D that only prices well if the factories-as-a-service model actually runs at prime scale.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Matson, Inc. ↗ well positioned
The 144-year-old US-flag Pacific ocean carrier whose Jones Act franchise on the Hawaii, Alaska and Guam lanes prints reliable cash while a premium China Expedited service catches every rate spike the international container market throws off — including the one Red Sea diversions have been throwing off since late 2023.
Rec: − Maybe - Ross Stores, Inc. ↗ well positioned
The perennial No. 2 in American off-price — 2,328 stores across Ross Dress for Less and dd's DISCOUNTS, an $81B market cap, and a first quarter fiscal 2026 that printed the largest comp of its 40-year history days after a new CEO from Boot Barn took the seat Barbara Rentler held for eleven years.
Rec: − Maybe -
AI-underwritten B2B net terms and financing embedded into merchant checkout and invoicing — $77M equity plus $175M debt raised, JP Morgan Payments as lead investor and lender, now powering credit for Amazon sellers and Fiserv's SnapPay.
Rec: − Maybe - Trane Technologies ↗ well positioned
The Ingersoll Rand climate carve-out that emerged in 2020 as a pure-play HVAC company and is now the American winner of the AI data center cooling build-out — $21.3B FY2025 revenue, a $12.1B record backlog up 70%, applied bookings up 130%, an NVIDIA reference design for gigawatt AI factories, and a ~$100B market cap to defend.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The rebranded DroneBase — an 11-year-old Santa Monica marketplace that pivoted from real-estate imagery to AI inspection software for solar, wind, transmission and property, now with a 70,000-pilot network in 80+ countries and $170–174M raised, betting a mid-scale services-plus-SaaS model can hold the operating layer as OEMs and drone-in-a-box vendors close in.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Artificial Labs ↗ emerging
London-market insurtech building the algorithmic rails for Lloyd's — a broker Contract Builder, an underwriter workbench and a Blueprint Two-compliant data layer for specialty and commercial risk.
Rec: − Maybe - Cincinnati Financial ↗ at risk
The 1950 agent-sponsored P&C carrier that just posted a 100.8 Q2 2026 combined ratio and a 104.1 commercial line on catastrophe and casualty pressure — while running a ~$12.5B equity-heavy investment book that no peer of similar size dares carry.
Rec: − Maybe -
A carrier-agnostic 'SuperCarrier' that stuffs ecommerce parcels into unused belly cargo on scheduled flights, then hands them to regional final-mile carriers — 30M+ packages a year, 95 airports, and a deep graveyard behind anyone who has tried this before.
Rec: − Maybe - Dominion Energy, Inc. ↗ at risk
A Richmond-based investor-owned utility ($21.8B FY2025 revenue) whose Virginia service territory now sits on top of the largest data-center concentration on earth — an unearned tailwind the Virginia SCC keeps trying to price back to hyperscalers instead of shareholders, at the same time a $11.65B, six-months-late offshore wind build absorbs another tariff-driven overrun and a 2020 pure-play restructuring is still delivering a smaller company than the one investors bought.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Moment Energy ↗ emerging
A Coquitlam-based, four-founder SFU spinout building the world's largest second-life battery factory — repurposing retired EV packs from Mercedes and Nissan into containerized BESS while new-cell LFP prices race downward beneath it.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
Trade-specific materials procurement platform for subcontractors and self-performing GCs — RFQ to PO to delivery to invoice reconciliation on one system, wired into the construction ERP.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Ulta Beauty ↗ at risk
The category-defining US beauty retailer — 1,540 stores, 47 million loyalty members, and margins compressing under Sephora-at-Kohl's, Amazon Premium Beauty, and a Target partnership ending in August 2026.
Rec: − Maybe -
The 1931 Sears spin-off that dropped from #2 to #4 US private-auto insurer, is running an NAIC complaint index near 2.7 (2.7× the market), and just posted the best quarter of Tom Wilson's 19-year tenure while UBS and KBW cut price targets on the argument that loss ratios can only get worse from here.
Rec: − Maybe -
London- and Paris-based industrial-AI deployment platform from ex-Accel investor Rafael Quintanilla and three Palantir/Delivery Hero alumni — $38M raised in six months, $140M post-money at a July 2026 Series A, and a pitch to embed forward-deployed engineers inside aerospace, energy and manufacturing customers before Palantir, Cognite-inside-Schneider or SAP Joule Studio absorbs the category.
Rec: − Maybe - FirstEnergy Corp. ↗ at risk
A ~6M-customer investor-owned utility across Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York ($15.1B FY2025 revenue) still trying to outrun the HB6 bribery scandal ($230M federal DPA, 2021; $250.7M Ohio PUCO order, Nov 2025) while its Northeast Ohio grid keeps failing — a July 2026 Lakewood outage complaint drew a proposed $3M PUCO fine and blocked the company's own bid to loosen reliability standards.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - The Home Depot ↗ well positioned
The $164.7B big-box category king turned itself into a specialty-trade distributor in eighteen months — $18.25B for SRS in 2024, $5.5B for GMS in 2025, an AI takeoff tool that quotes an entire single-family house in two days — and reports Q2 fiscal 2026 on August 18 into the worst existing-home-sales year in three decades.
Rec: − Maybe -
An AI-driven medical malpractice startup writing out of a South Carolina risk retention group — Vertical AI on top of physician risk data, with barely two years of loss experience underneath it.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Norfolk Southern ↗ at risk
The eastern Class I that fired its CEO for a workplace affair in September 2024, absorbed a $1.7B+ East Palestine bill, and is now betting its independence on an $85B stock-and-cash sale to Union Pacific — held in abeyance at the STB while a 65%-operating-ratio franchise waits to find out whether it becomes half a transcontinental or a wounded standalone.
Rec: − Maybe -
A Stuttgart spin-out selling a vision-language-action 'brain' — Cortex, plus its PickGPT lineage — that runs on any warehouse or manufacturing robot arm, pitched as the software layer under BMW, PepsiCo and Zalando picking cells rather than yet another custom cell.
Rec: − Maybe - Valar Atomics ↗ emerging
Three-year-old El Segundo microreactor startup that hit criticality faster than anyone else in the DOE pilot, powered an Nvidia chip off it, and turned that footage into a $1B Sequoia-led Series B at a $6B valuation — while suing the regulator it says can't license it in time.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - CoverForce ↗ emerging
The independent quote-and-bind API for US commercial insurance — one integration to 20+ carriers and MGAs including AmTrust, Chubb, Liberty Mutual and Travelers, sold to 10,000+ agencies through the wholesaler channel.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
A London-Brooklyn managed-charging platform turning consumer EVs into utility grid assets — 200,000+ vehicles orchestrated daily across 55+ utility programs in North America and Europe, built by two ex-BCG consultants who saw National Grid staring at a load problem it could not solve alone.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Fastenal Company ↗ well positioned
The Winona, Minnesota fastener shop that Bob Kierlin opened with $31,000 in 1967 is now a $56B-market-cap, ~20% operating margin industrial distributor bolted inside its customers' factories — 1,950 Onsite locations and ~137,000 FMI vending devices — so deeply that FMI alone drove 44.9% of revenue by Q1 2026.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Foot Locker ↗ at risk
The 50-year-old mall sneaker chain that spent three years trying to fix itself under Mary Dillon, then sold to Dick's Sporting Goods for $2.4B in September 2025 rather than finish the turnaround alone.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The 54-year-old intermodal marketing company that built the industry — and is now finishing a $77M accounting restatement, its second CFO and COO exit of the year, and a distant #2 slot behind J.B. Hunt in the only segment that defines it.
Rec: − Maybe - Loop Returns ↗ emerging
The Columbus, Ohio Shopify-native returns platform that turned exchanges into a revenue-retention product — $125M+ raised through a $65M CRV-led Series B at $340M post, a 2024 CEO handoff and 20% RIF, and an April 2026 AI relaunch aimed at the Shopify mid-market its native Return APIs increasingly threaten.
Rec: ★ Interesting - State Farm ↗ at risk
The 1922 Bloomington mutual that has been the largest US private auto insurer since 1942 — just lost the crown to Progressive on a trailing-12-month basis at 31 March 2026, is fighting a market-conduct action in California and a 27% homeowners rate fight in Illinois, and is cutting the take-home of 19,000 captive agents to fund a bet on AI.
Rec: − Maybe -
A Korean-founded, LA-headquartered retrofit-and-subscription company selling task-specific autonomy — solar piling, panel lift, material handling — to the utility-scale solar EPC oligopoly, and by Q1 2026 doing it profitably at a $21M ARR run-rate.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Beam AI (by Attentive.ai) ↗ emerging
Human-vetted AI takeoff for construction — upload site plans, get quantity takeoffs back in minutes to days, with an in-house QA team signing off before delivery.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The house that Don and Doris Fisher built in 1969 is now four aging brands and a $7-8B market cap — a Barbie-Movie CEO, a Zac Posen creative director, and an Old Navy that just missed the dress cycle it was hired to catch.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
A CMU-spinout physical-AI platform that flies commodity drones through warehouses, reads pallet imagery with computer vision, and reconciles the picture against the WMS — pitched as a hardware-agnostic 'curious' AI for the 90% of DCs that never automated.
Rec: − Maybe - Honeycomb Insurance ↗ emerging
The habitational-property MGA that never sends an inspector — aerial imagery and computer vision underwrite condo, HOA and small-multifamily buildings the admitted market keeps mispricing.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Lennox International ↗ at risk
The 130-year-old Texas furnace company that IPO'd out of a family trust in 1999, exited Europe and refrigeration to bet the house on North American residential HVAC — now $5.2B revenue, running a direct-to-dealer model against Carrier's Viessmann-fueled catalog and a Chinese-Korean flanking maneuver, with the residential segment down 7% while commercial roars 24% and the stock has round-tripped from $689 to below $500.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Progressive Corporation ↗ at risk
The auto-insurance share-taker that just tripped — June 2026 NWP grew only 3% Y/Y, commercial premiums turned negative for the first time since 2017, and Wells Fargo pulled the stock to Underweight.
Rec: − Maybe -
Ceiling-mounted RFID-plus-vision sensors that give apparel chains 99% item-level inventory accuracy — 1,400+ storefronts, American Eagle and Old Navy as anchor accounts, and a $170M May 2026 Series B at $1B that has to answer whether hardware-led retail intelligence can scale past the wardrobe of specialty apparel.
Rec: ★ Interesting - W.W. Grainger, Inc. ↗ well positioned
The 1927 Chicago electric-motor mail-order shop that became the largest and most profitable MRO distributor in North America, now compounding a 39% ROIC across a high-touch branch network and an Endless Assortment web arm (Zoro + MonotaRO) while Amazon Business, Fastenal onsite, and Home Depot's pro push nibble at the flanks.
Rec: − Maybe -
The largest US auto-parts retailer — ~7,850 stores, $18.9B in FY2025 sales, DIY-native and now one-third DIFM — whose real product is not parts but availability: a 156-mega-hub network that puts any of ~110,000 SKUs in a mechanic's bay in under 30 minutes across most metros, funded by one of the most aggressive share-buyback machines on the market ($42B+ authorised, share count down ~89% since 1998).
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
An AI compliance platform for federally funded infrastructure — parsing certified payrolls and reading Davis-Bacon rules so contractors don't lose their IRA tax credit at audit.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Duke Energy ↗ well positioned
A regulated Carolinas-Florida-Midwest electric monopoly (~8.6M electric customers, ~$33B revenue) betting an industry-record $103B five-year capex plan on the data-center demand wave — turning 7.8 GW of signed hyperscaler ESAs and a 15.4 GW pipeline into rate base at a 9.8% NC-settled ROE, while behind-the-meter bypass, a $10B equity overhang, and unhealed coal-ash scars test whether the regulated compounding machine keeps working.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
Munich TUM spinout selling snap-together modular robot arms to Europe's Mittelstand and America's SMB manufacturers — a robots-as-a-service pitch that just took $100M from Lightspeed to prove RaaS can beat Universal Robots on the factory floor.
Rec: − Maybe -
The largest US foodservice distributor — ~$84.6B revenue, ~72,000 employees, ~333 distribution facilities and ~14,000 tractors moving cases from warehouse to restaurant back door — whose share of US broadline foodservice has slid from a peak near 75% in the 1990s to about 32% today as US Foods, Performance Food Group and a wave of ordering-app disruptors quietly rewire the way independent restaurants buy.
Rec: − Maybe - Werner Enterprises ↗ at risk
A 70-year-old Omaha truckload carrier — 13,000+ tractors across dedicated, one-way, intermodal and logistics — whose Q2 2026 GAAP operating margin collapsed to 1.8% from 8.8% while an autonomous-truck cohort led by Aurora and Kodiak began commercially hauling freight in Texas over the same 600-mile lanes Werner uses to move Walmart, Dollar General and Home Depot pallets.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
Ex-ironSource founders and Israeli Unit 81 AI operators betting that 60+ specialised agents on a unified data layer can do — cheaper and without buying the brand — what Thrasio raised $3B to try.
Rec: − Maybe - Belk, Inc. ↗ at risk
The 137-year-old Southeastern department-store chain William Henry Belk started in Monroe, N.C. in 1888 with $750 and a no-haggle price tag — now a ~290-store, ~$3B-revenue regional incumbent that Sycamore Partners took private in a $3B LBO in 2015, ran through the fastest Chapter 11 in U.S. history in 2021, and lost control of in 2024 when creditors KKR and Hein Park seized the keys.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Flock Freight ↗ emerging
The company that turned a truck into a bus — algorithmically pooling LTL-sized shipments into one direct multi-stop truckload, a mode it named 'shared truckload' and now has to prove survives a freight upturn.
Rec: − Maybe -
An ex-Tesla robotics team rebuilding warehouse storage from scratch — a 3D cube-climbing ASRS that moves 3,000-lb pallets in any direction, sold as programmable material-flow infrastructure.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Ore Energy ↗ emerging
A TU Delft spinout building iron-air 'rust batteries' for multi-day storage — Europe's answer to Form Energy, betting that 100-hour storage at a tenth of lithium's cost can retire the gas peaker.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The 'Should I buy this?' button — a Gen-Z AI shopping agent from Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni that price-checks any item against 40,000 new and resale sites, monetized on affiliate commissions and dogged by cookie-stuffing and data-harvesting scandals.
Rec: − Maybe - SolarEdge Technologies ↗ at risk
The Israeli inverter maker that built the DC-optimized rooftop solar architecture into a $3B+ category leader, then watched revenue collapse from $2.98B (2023) to $901M (2024) amid a European inventory glut and $1.8B in losses — now clawing back share and margin against a resurgent Enphase and a fast-rising Tesla.
Rec: − Maybe -
The number-two agency management platform for U.S. property-and-casualty insurance — the software the back office of ~20,000 independent agencies runs on, spun through four private-equity owners in a decade before Roper paid $5.35B for its ~49% EBITDA margins and its switching-cost lock-in.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Vulcan Materials Company ↗ well positioned
The largest US producer of construction aggregates — crushed stone, sand and gravel dug from ~425 quarries near America's fastest-growing metros — whose real product is not rock but freight economics: aggregates are too heavy and too cheap to ship far, so each quarry is a local near-monopoly with the pricing power to raise prices per ton almost every single year.
Rec: − Maybe - Albertsons Companies ↗ at risk
The No. 2 traditional U.S. supermarket operator — 2,240-odd stores across 22 banners (Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco, Acme, Shaw's) doing ~$83B in FY2025 sales — still ~30% owned and board-controlled by Cerberus, wearing ~$15B of net debt out of a collapsed $24.6B Kroger merger and into a price war it is structurally losing to Walmart and Aldi.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Calpine Corporation ↗ well positioned
The largest independent power producer in the United States — a ~27 GW fleet of natural-gas combined-cycle plants, the world's biggest geothermal complex at The Geysers, and a retail electricity arm — that went bankrupt in 2005, was taken private by Energy Capital Partners in 2018, and was bought by Constellation Energy in a ~$26.6B deal that closed January 2026, handing ECP one of the most profitable private-equity exits in history.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Dusty Robotics ↗ emerging
Construction layout automation — the FieldPrinter, an autonomous robot that prints the BIM model directly onto the concrete slab to 1/16-inch accuracy, replacing the two-person chalk-line crew that has laid out buildings by hand for a century.
Rec: − Maybe - EMCOR Group ↗ well positioned
The $17B-revenue mechanical and electrical contractor assembled from the wreckage of JWP Inc.'s 1994 bankruptcy — a roll-up of specialty trade firms that installs and services the HVAC, power, plumbing, and fire-protection guts of America's buildings, now riding a record $13B backlog and the data-center/electrification build-out into one of the best-performing industrial stocks of the decade.
Rec: − Maybe -
On-demand warehousing as a software network — a marketplace and WMS layer that lets brands rent short-term space and fulfillment across 3,000+ third-party warehouses without signing a lease or building a DC.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Group14 Technologies ↗ emerging
Silicon-carbon battery material (SCC55) engineered as a drop-in replacement for graphite — a porous carbon scaffold that packs in silicon to lift lithium-ion energy density up to 50%, made at factory scale in Washington State and South Korea.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Marshmallow ↗ emerging
UK motor insurer that prices the drivers legacy carriers misprice — newly arrived migrants and thin-file drivers — using alternative data instead of a UK credit and claims history most incumbents demand.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The channel-management incumbent stitched together from CommerceHub and ChannelAdvisor — the plumbing that syndicates 40,000+ brands' and retailers' product data, dropship orders, marketplace listings and retail-media feeds across 400+ channels like Amazon, Walmart and Target, moving $50B+ in annual GMV — now a twice-flipped, Insight Partners-controlled roll-up defending a commoditizing layer against Amazon, Shopify and BigCommerce pulling the same functions in-house.
Rec: − Maybe - Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. ↗ well positioned
The third-generation family firm that turned a 1927 Chicago insurance agency into the world's third-largest brokerage by never stopping the acquisition machine — 48 tuck-ins in 2024 alone, then the $13.45B AssuredPartners mega-deal in 2025 — funded by commissions, contingent kickers, a giant claims-administration arm (Gallagher Bassett), and, for two decades, an oddly lucrative side business harvesting U.S. clean-energy tax credits that is now winding down.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The 2016 'InsurSec' startup founded by ex-Unit 8200 operators that fused cyber insurance with active attack-surface monitoring, rode the ransomware hard market to a $1.35B unicorn valuation in July 2021, bought its own licensed carrier in 2023, and now bets that pairing policies with a CrowdStrike-powered MDR product produces a loss-ratio edge durable enough to survive competitors copying it and reinsurers repricing cyber.
Rec: − Maybe - NextEra Energy ↗ well positioned
A 1925 Florida electric utility that became the largest power company in the world by market cap — pairing Florida Power & Light, a ~5.9M-account regulated monopoly earning a state-blessed ~10.95% return, with NextEra Energy Resources, the planet's biggest wind-and-solar developer — now riding the AI/data-center demand boom while a suspended yieldco (XPLR), a Florida dark-money scandal, and the political fragility of IRA tax credits test whether the compounding machine keeps running.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Quanta Services ↗ well positioned
The 1997 roll-up of four small electrical contractors that John Colson welded into the largest specialty-infrastructure contractor in North America — 68,000 workers, ~52,000 of them craft-skilled, self-performing ~85% of the transmission lines, substations, pipelines and utility-scale solar and wind farms that the electrification and AI-data-center boom now depends on, riding a record ~$48-50B backlog to a ~$100B market cap while skeptics warn the grid story is already in the price.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Qube Holdings ↗ well positioned
The 2006 roll-up that former Patrick raiders Chris Corrigan and Sam Kaplan spun out of the wreckage of Toll's Patrick takeover, listed as a fund in 2007, corporatised into ASX:QUB in 2011, then bought half of Australia's biggest container network in the 2016 Asciano break-up — and in February 2026 agreed to be taken private by a Macquarie Asset Management-led consortium for A$11.7B (~US$8.3B) at A$5.20 a share, a 28% premium that quietly retires one of the country's few integrated ports-and-rail platforms from public markets.
Rec: − Maybe - Sila Nanotechnologies ↗ emerging
The 2011 spinout of a Georgia Tech materials lab and a Tesla battery engineer, betting that a nano-engineered silicon powder called Titan Silicon can drop into existing lithium-ion cell lines and replace graphite — now, after $1.35B+ raised and a $3.3B peak mark, staking everything on whether its 160-acre Moses Lake, WA plant can turn Mercedes-Benz and Panasonic design wins into cost-competitive volume before the silicon-anode field consolidates around it.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The 2016 Israeli-founded contech startup that bolts a camera-and-sensor pod under a crane hook, turns every lift into structured productivity data, and raised ~$109M (Bosch, Insight Partners, Tiger Global) betting that the crane — the one machine that touches nearly every material on a jobsite — is the cheapest place to install a system of record for how buildings actually get built.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The AxleHire founder's second act: a 2021-founded, asset-light middle-mile freight network that blends LTL and truckload across ~50 cross-docks and 10,000+ carrier vehicles, now betting a $10M 2025 Series A on the industry's first fully robotic cross-dock — a capital-intensive automation gambit layered on top of a thin-margin brokerage in the shadow of Convoy's collapse.
Rec: − Maybe - Assurant, Inc. ↗ well positioned
The 130-year-old La Crosse mutual that Fortis rebuilt and spun out in 2004 — now a capital-light specialty insurer protecting 300M+ phones for the carriers and force-placing insurance on delinquent mortgages, riding fee income while hurricanes test the housing book.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
A construction-finance automation platform that pointed AI agents at the back office CFOs still run on Excel — WIP reports, cash forecasting and AP — and is now rebranding around an 'orchestration layer' for 20+ agents, after a 2023 that saw it cut headcount 45% and raise a flat-valuation extension rather than a Series C.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Burlington Stores, Inc. ↗ well positioned
The perennial No. 3 in American off-price — a 1972 New Jersey coat wholesaler that Bain Capital bought, broke and rebuilt, now shrinking its own stores to a third of their old size while comps keep compounding under an ex-Ross operator.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
An invite-only, vetted load board turned integrated marketplace for US–Mexico (and now Canada) cross-border freight — a founder-market-fit bet that the nearshoring boom needs neutral matching infrastructure, wagering that trust and liquidity in the most fraud-prone corner of trucking can be productized before Uber Freight or an incumbent broker replicates it.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Coupang, Inc. ↗ well positioned
The 'Amazon of Korea' that spent a decade and billions building an end-to-end owned logistics network to put next-morning 'Rocket Delivery' within 10 minutes of most of the country — and, in 2023, finally turned its first profit, only to have a 34-million-customer data breach detonate its 2025.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Electric Hydrogen ↗ emerging
The green-hydrogen industry's first unicorn — a First Solar alumni team building 100MW turnkey PEM electrolyzer plants ('HYPRPlant') at a 1.2GW Massachusetts gigafactory, betting that halving the installed cost of green hydrogen can outrun a demand collapse that has already gutted the sector.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
An AI underwriting workbench that reads messy commercial-insurance submissions — broker emails, SOVs, loss runs, supplemental apps — and surfaces the hidden exposures underwriters miss, betting that a human-in-the-loop 'Copilot' that keeps the underwriter deciding can out-compete both the autonomous-agent insurtechs raising four times its capital and the carriers building ingestion in-house.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Landstar System, Inc. ↗ well positioned
The asset-light truckload giant that owns no trucks and employs almost no drivers — a $4.7B-revenue freight network run by ~1,200 independent agents and ~9,500 owner-operators, built to bleed cash even through the worst freight recession in a generation, now facing the question of whether AI-native brokers can undo its edge.
Rec: − Maybe -
A Michigan insurance brokerage that used roughly 1,000 acquisitions to vault into the global top ten in a decade, now repositioning as an AI-driven fintech platform — a debt-heavy roll-up whose leverage, margins and integration lawsuits are testing the machine that built it.
Rec: − Maybe - Brown & Brown, Inc. ↗ well positioned
The lean, decentralized Daytona Beach roll-up that grew from a 1939 two-man agency into the fifth-largest U.S. insurance broker — now digesting the $9.825B Accession deal, the biggest bet in its history, while organic growth stalls.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Constructor ↗ emerging
An AI product-discovery platform that reranks ecommerce search, browse and recommendations to maximize revenue-per-visitor rather than text relevance — a capital-efficient challenger to Algolia and Bloomreach now betting its behavioral data moat can survive LLM shopping agents that route around on-site search entirely.
Rec: − Maybe - Constellation Energy ↗ well positioned
America's largest producer of carbon-free power — 21 reactors, a nation-leading nuclear fleet, and, after swallowing Calpine for $26.6B, the biggest merchant generator in the country, now selling electrons straight to the hyperscalers building AI.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Counterpart ↗ emerging
An AI-native managing general agent for management and professional liability, selling D&O, EPLI and E&O to small businesses through brokers — betting a proprietary risk score beats a legacy underwriting market that still runs on questionnaires, while renting the balance sheets it needs to grow.
Rec: − Maybe - First Solar ↗ well positioned
The last American solar manufacturer at scale — a $25B+ maker of cadmium-telluride thin-film panels that skipped the crystalline-silicon race China won, and now rides tariffs and IRA credits to fat margins while a $13.6B backlog quietly shrinks.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - FleetWorks ↗ emerging
AI voice-and-text agents that automate the phone calls, emails and rate haggling that keep freight moving — a YC-born 'always-on dispatcher' turning a broker-side tool into a two-sided carrier marketplace, up against a rival worth eight times as much.
Rec: − Maybe -
The autonomous-trucking company that skipped the glamorous robotaxi race and the long-haul highway war to master the boring, repeatable middle mile — driver-out box trucks looping between Walmart and Kroger depots — betting that a constrained problem is the only one that pays.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Herc Holdings ↗ at risk
The #3 North American equipment-rental house — spun out of Hertz in 2016 — that just outbid United Rentals to buy H&E for $5.3B, betting a debt-funded land grab into data-center and megaproject demand can close the gap on United and Sunbelt.
Rec: − Maybe - Knight-Swift Transportation Holdings ↗ well positioned
North America's largest truckload carrier — a 2017 merger of two Phoenix rivals now rolling up LTL, digesting the U.S. Xpress turnaround, and grinding through a three-year freight recession from ~26,000 tractors.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Lunar Energy ↗ emerging
A former Tesla Energy chief's home-battery-plus-VPP-software play — the sleek Lunar System battery sold through installers, and Gridshare, the AI dispatch platform already orchestrating ~130,000 mostly-rival home batteries for Sunrun and across Japan.
Rec: − Maybe - Schneider National ↗ well positioned
The 90-year-old Green Bay trucking dynasty that went public in 2017 but kept family voting control — a scaled truckload, intermodal and logistics carrier grinding through a multi-year freight recession by buying its way into stickier dedicated contracts.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Terabase Energy ↗ emerging
A solar-construction software and robotics company betting that utility-scale solar farms should be built the way factories build cars — with a digital twin, an on-site assembly line and autonomous rovers snapping panels onto trackers 24/7, instead of thousands of workers hand-bolting glass in the desert heat.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Boston-built, cellular-and-5G IoT trackers plus a cloud platform for real-time in-transit shipment visibility — a hardware-led challenger betting that owning the sensor on the pallet beats the software-only control towers of project44 and FourKites.
Rec: − Maybe -
A 'self-driving operating system' for independent grocers — POS, inventory, ordering, pricing, loyalty and payments in one stack — built by a third-generation grocer betting AI agents can run the back office the other 75% of the grocery market still runs on paper.
Rec: − Maybe - Dollar Tree ↗ well positioned
The everything-for-a-dollar chain that torched $7.5B buying Family Dollar in 2015 and sold it for $1B in 2025, broke its own buck twice ($1.25 in 2021, up to $7 by 2025) — and emerged a focused 9,282-store treasure-hunt machine posting the best comps in discount retail, while traffic slips, tariffs hang over a China-heavy import pipeline, and its poorest customers grumble about price stickers they no longer trust.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Expeditors International ↗ well positioned
A Seattle freight forwarder that owns no planes and no ships, pays branch managers a quarter of their branch's operating income, refuses to make acquisitions, and has out-earned every rival per shipment for four decades — now defending that model against DSV's post-Schenker scale, tariff whiplash, and a generation of digital forwarders that promised to make it obsolete.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
AI-native commerce experience platform that spins up a bespoke post-click shop for every ad, email and creator link — $74M raised, ARR up 5x into a $45M VMG-led Series B, and a positioning that has already changed three times in four years.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Berlin digital freight forwarder — founded 2016 as FreightHub, ~$610M raised, $2.1B SoftBank-era valuation — that cut a third of its staff, swapped its founder-CEO for its ex-J.P. Morgan CFO, shopped itself via Moelis, and is now pivoting to selling its AI stack to the industry it set out to disrupt.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The insurance core-systems vendor Thoma Bravo took private for $729M in 2020 has used six years of PE ownership to buy seven companies, triple revenue to roughly $500M, bolt a GenAI copilot onto thirty-year-old policy-admin DNA, and swallow Vitech to expand into pensions — a quiet roll-up assembling the #2 seat behind Guidewire while Duck Creek and Sapiens change owners around it.
Rec: ★ Interesting - NRG Energy ↗ well positioned
The twice-restructured Texas power-and-retail giant that Elliott has raided twice, that bought a door-to-door alarm company for $2.8B and got its CEO fired over it — and that just doubled its gas fleet with a $12B LS Power deal to chase an AI power-demand supercycle it has yet to sign a single definitive hyperscaler contract for.
Rec: − Maybe -
AI takeoff and quoting software for commercial HVAC manufacturer reps and distributors — computer vision that reads a plan set, counts the equipment and drafts the quote in minutes — fresh off a $14M Series A led by Prudence.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
Procurement orchestration for the enterprise — a single intake front door that routes every purchase request across finance, legal, IT, security and the ERP stack underneath — now valued at $2.2B and racing to convert an approvals wedge into an agentic AI suite before the suites it sits on bundle it away.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Alliant Insurance Services ↗ well positioned
The specialty brokerage that grows by hiring your best team on a Tuesday morning — a 1925 San Diego agency turned $5.7B-revenue, majority-employee-owned lift-out machine that has out-litigated Aon twice, outrun four private equity owners, and climbed to No. 4 in America without ever going public.
Rec: − Maybe -
AI accounting automation for large insurance brokerages — carrier statement ingestion, direct-bill reconciliation and commission recovery — that hit 8-figure revenue in under three years, then collided head-on with Applied Systems in court.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
Per-vehicle fleet-maintenance SaaS out of Birmingham that bootstrapped for four years, raised $624M, and bought Auto Integrate to own the authorization rail behind 13 million repair orders a year.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
America's biggest pure-play grocer spent two years and $1B+ trying to buy Albertsons, lost, lost its CEO to an ethics probe, wrote off $2.6B of robot warehouses — and is now betting a Walmart veteran, a $1.65B Giant Eagle deal, and a $1.5B retail-media profit stream can stop a slow bleed of market share to Walmart, Costco, and Aldi.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Portable 1 MW nuclear microreactors off a production line — TRISO-fueled, helium-cooled, shipped fueled in a container, aimed squarely at the diesel generator.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The creator-commerce platform premium brands actually pay for — creator storefronts, SKU-level affiliate links, automated gifting and paid campaigns in one system, now adding a consumer shopping app called Circles.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Talen Energy ↗ well positioned
The PJM power producer that hedge funds pulled out of bankruptcy in 2023, sold a data-center campus to Amazon, and turned one Pennsylvania nuclear plant into an ~$18B, 17-year AWS contract — then levered up on $7B of gas plants while regulators, county commissioners, and its own valuation multiple pushed back.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
A roll-up of 400+ small-town lumberyards that rode lumber inflation to $11.5B in revenue, took on single-B LBO debt under Bain and Platinum, and is now refinancing at 9.5% coupons while revenue slides toward $6.8B and Home Depot, QXO, and Builders FirstSource consolidate the industry around it.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
An all-in-one cloud TMS for trucking carriers, freight brokers and hybrid operations — dispatch, EDI, compliance and accounting in one system, priced per load, now wrapped in an AI-automation layer.
Rec: − Maybe -
The perennial number two in home improvement spent $10B in 2025 buying its way into the Pro market Home Depot already owns — a debt-funded bet by Marvin Ellison that distribution, not DIY foot traffic, is where the next decade of growth lives.
Rec: − Maybe -
The factory-direct 'affordable luxury' retailer that ships a $50 Mongolian cashmere sweater straight from the mill to your door — and rode dupe culture to a $10.1B valuation and ~$2B in annualized revenue by early 2026.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Relation Insurance Services ↗ well positioned
The quiet 100-acquisition roll-up: a de novo brokerage built by three PE firms in 2007, sold to Aquiline in 2019, tripled to $315M of revenue, and flipped to BayPine in February 2026 — with a 2.9-star Glassdoor along the way.
Rec: − Maybe - TerraFirma ↗ emerging
Two ex-SpaceX engineers building a vertically integrated robotic earthworks contractor — retrofitted semi-autonomous excavators run from a mission-control room, sold to customers as ordinary construction bids, not as robots.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Union Pacific ↗ well positioned
The 1862 land-grant railroad wants to finish the job: Jim Vena's 59%-operating-ratio machine is betting $85B on Norfolk Southern to build America's first true transcontinental — while shippers, unions, BNSF and half of Washington line up at the STB to stop it.
Rec: − Maybe -
The reborn corpse of history's largest LBO bust is now a $50B, ~50 GW Texas power machine signing 20-year nuclear deals with Meta and AWS — repriced by Wall Street as AI infrastructure while its batteries burned in California and PJM politicians reached for price caps.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - WithCoverage ↗ emerging
A flat-fee, AI-assisted commercial insurance brokerage from Opendoor co-founder JD Ross that audits a company's policies for gaps and overspend, makes carriers quote net of commission, and wraps placement, COIs, claims and captives into one platform.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Vista's 2012 lab experiment in software roll-ups is now a $3.55B, 56-acquisition vertical ERP machine owned by TA, Insight and Charlesbank — running food plants, fleets and factories on products its customers complain they can't afford to leave.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
Modern fleet and fuel cards for trucking — Mastercard-rails payments with telematics-linked fraud controls, per-driver spend limits, instant driver payouts and factoring integrations, sold against the closed-loop fuel-card duopoly of WEX and Corpay.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Dick's Sporting Goods ↗ well positioned
The bait-and-tackle shop that became America's sporting-goods monopoly-in-waiting — a $13B core business comping 6%, a family with 78% voting control, and a $2.4B bet that it can fix the mall retailer everyone else left for dead.
Rec: − Maybe -
The enterprise marketplace operating system — SaaS that lets Best Buy, Macy's, Kroger and Airbus run their own third-party marketplaces, dropship programs and retail media, now repositioning as the neutral infrastructure for AI-agent commerce.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The tech-enabled commercial insurance brokerage that recruited veteran producers with better splits and an AI back office, reached a $2.2B valuation with a16z-adjacent Silicon Valley backing and Goldman money — then sold to WTW in January 2026 for $1.05B upfront, roughly the multiple a traditional brokerage fetches.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Procore Technologies ↗ well positioned
The construction industry's system of record — a founder's home-renovation side project that nearly died for a decade, IPO'd at $9.6B, stumbled on a sales reorg, and is now betting a new CEO and an AI layer can restart growth.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Rondo Energy ↗ emerging
Heat batteries for industry: insulated stacks of refractory brick charged with cheap wind and solar electricity through toaster-style resistance heaters, storing heat at up to 1,500°C and discharging continuous 1,000°C+ air and steam to ethanol plants, cement kilns, chemical sites and breweries — a direct electric replacement for the gas-fired boiler.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The 101-year-old Louisiana freight line that bought Yellow's corpse at auction, crashed 30% in a day in April 2025, and just posted the rebound quarter the bulls were waiting for.
Rec: − Maybe -
The car-vending-machine company that went from a $376 stock to $3.72 and back — record Q2 2026 profits, a $73B valuation, and a father-son ownership story short sellers still circle.
Rec: − Maybe - Core & Main ↗ well positioned
The St. Louis waterworks distributor that passed through Vivendi, Home Depot, and an $8.5B LBO before Clayton, Dubilier & Rice carved it out of HD Supply for $2.5B in 2017 — now the largest US pure-play seller of pipe, valves, hydrants, and water meters, a ~10-deals-a-year consolidation machine riding IIJA water money while its stock derates and Ferguson bids the same trenches.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
A London-run, Karachi-and-Delhi-powered B2B marketplace that puts the world's secondhand-clothing bale trade online — 2,000+ verified wholesalers selling graded vintage to 50,000+ retailers in 100+ countries — now betting a $25M Series B that its Fleek Sort vision model becomes the grading and pricing standard for the 24 billion used garments sorted by hand every year.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Autonomous AI agents that run supply-chain spend for Fortune 500 enterprises — auditing freight and supplier invoices, negotiating billing disputes, enforcing contracts and processing payments inside ERP systems, replacing the outsourced back-office teams that have done this work for decades.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
San Francisco physical-AI startup that bolts Kawasaki arms onto rented skid steers to place utility-scale solar panels — an eight-person crew goes from 800 to 3,000-4,000 panels a day — out of stealth July 2026 with a $26M Series A and 2.8 GW under contract.
Rec: − Maybe - Ominimo Insurance ↗ emerging
A profitable Hungarian-Serbian MGA that sells AI-priced car insurance on other insurers' balance sheets — 7% of Hungary's motor market in year one, a €1.4B valuation two years after launch, and a plan to take its own licence and cross the Atlantic.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Ryder System ↗ well positioned
The company that invented truck leasing in 1938 spent a decade quietly swapping residual-value roulette for boring contractual revenue — and just posted its seventh straight earnings gain in the middle of a freight depression.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - USI Insurance Services ↗ at risk
The 1994 roll-up that Bernard Mizel built and three PE giants passed down the line — Goldman to Onex to KKR/CDPQ at $4.3B in 2017 — now a $2.78B-revenue middle-market broker betting on a proprietary knowledge engine while faster-moving rivals shove it out of the top ten.
Rec: ★ Interesting - CCC Intelligent Solutions ↗ well positioned
The 46-year-old toll booth of the American fender bender — a three-sided network wiring 300+ insurers to 31,000 repair shops that crossed $1B revenue in 2025, monetized AI before its attackers could, and is now in a Morgan Stanley-run sale process with Elliott's private equity arm circling a stock the public market cut in half.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Comfort Systems USA ↗ well positioned
The 1997 Houston HVAC roll-up that survived its own consolidation hangover, quietly compounded for two decades, and then became the purest picks-and-shovels trade of the AI buildout — $3.3B of quarterly revenue, a $14.1B backlog, 58% of sales from hyperscaler data centers, and a stock up 60x in ten years.
Rec: ★ Interesting - FedEx Corporation ↗ at risk
The company that invented overnight delivery is spending its 55th year dismantling itself — spinning off Freight, merging Express and Ground into one network, cutting $6B of structural cost — while Amazon, which delivered nearly twice FedEx's US parcel volume in 2025, starts selling its logistics machine to everyone else.
Rec: − Maybe -
New York AI manufacturing platform for packaged goods from Handy founders Oisin Hanrahan and Umang Dua — free for brands and retailers, paid by manufacturers — that indexed 30,000+ North American manufacturers, reached $1B+ in monthly project volume by August 2025, signed 8 of the top 10 US retailers, and is now selling KeychainOS as an AI-era ERP to the plants themselves, with roughly $78M raised through the November 2025 W23 Global round.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
The 125-year-old Seattle department store that a fourth-generation family finally wrestled off the public market — at $24.25 a share with Mexico's El Puerto de Liverpool holding 49.9% — less than half the $50 the same family offered in 2018, and just in time to watch rival Saks Global collapse into Chapter 11.
Rec: − Maybe -
London-born computer-vision company whose AI reads photos of crashed cars and damaged homes and writes the repair estimate — the world's first computer-vision unicorn in financial services (June 2021), ~$185M raised from Insight, Georgian and SoftBank, $7B in claims processed annually through its platform, customers including GEICO, The Hartford, Aviva, Admiral and all four of Japan's largest insurers — now three years past its last round, past a founder-CEO handoff, and past a seven-year legal war with CCC that ended in a quiet January 2025 settlement.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Triple Whale ↗ emerging
Columbus-and-Jerusalem ecommerce analytics platform born from the iOS 14.5 attribution crisis — founders who ran their own Shopify brands built the Triple Pixel first-party tracking layer, raised ~$55M through a Shopify-backed 2023 Series B, grew to 60,000+ brands and a reported $21.6M ARR, and are now betting the company on Moby, AI agents that don't just measure ad spend but move it.
Rec: ★ Interesting - AES Corporation ↗ well positioned
The 45-year-old global power company that nearly died with Enron, reinvented itself as the world's biggest seller of clean energy to hyperscalers — and is now being carried off the public market by BlackRock's GIP and EQT at $33.4B enterprise value, a 40% premium to a share price the equity market had left for dead.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
San Francisco AI startup from Deliverr co-founder Harish Abbott whose freight-native 'AI teammate,' Augie, reads email, makes phone calls, logs into TMS platforms and carrier portals to run broker and carrier workflows from order to cash — $110M raised in five months of 2025, $35B in freight under management by September 2025, Penske Logistics deployed in January 2026, and an April 2026 acquisition pushing it into $8T wholesale distribution.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Macy's, Inc. ↗ at risk
The 168-year-old department store trying to shrink its way to relevance — a $21.8B, three-banner retailer whose real estate may be worth more than its $6B market cap, now four activist campaigns deep, one year past a rejected $6.9B take-private bid and a $151M accounting scandal, and finally printing its best comps in four years under Bloomingdale's-lifer CEO Tony Spring.
Rec: − Maybe -
360° reality capture for construction — a camera on a hardhat, a walk someone was doing anyway, and Spatial AI that pins every frame to the floor plan; 275,000+ users and 43B+ square feet captured, now pushing from documentation into progress tracking (Disperse, acquired Nov 2025) and field task management (OpenSpace Field, Feb 2026).
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The Toronto-born 3PL that puts Western brands' inventory in fulfillment centers next to their factories in Shenzhen and Vietnam and air-ships each order direct to the customer's door in 5-8 days — the Shein playbook sold as a service, $18M Series A from Commerce Ventures in May 2025, and a business that got 'buried in inbound' the day de minimis died.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Redwood Materials ↗ emerging
JB Straubel's Carson City battery company: North America's dominant lithium-ion recycler (~70% share), builder of a domestic cathode and copper-foil supply chain, and — since June 2025 — an energy-storage developer that turns used EV packs into microgrids for AI data centers, closing a $425M Series E at a $6B+ valuation with Nvidia and Google in January 2026 and then cutting 10% of staff to chase storage.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The 43-year-old Israeli insurance core-systems vendor — 600+ carrier customers, $542M of 2024 revenue, and a growth rate that sagged from 8.4% to low single digits — sold itself to Advent International for $2.5B at a 64% premium, and within weeks the new owner had cut ~700 jobs, replaced the entire management team, and moved headquarters from Holon to London.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The Wilmington, Massachusetts warehouse-automation company a grocery billionaire built in secret inside C&S Wholesale Grocers, took public through a $5.5B SoftBank SPAC in June 2022, and scaled to a $22.5B backlog automating all 42 of Walmart's regional distribution centers — before a November 2024 restatement, a second accounting error in February 2025, a delayed 10-K revealing an SEC investigation into whistleblower interference, an adverse auditor opinion on internal controls, and a newly disclosed cap on what Walmart will pay turned the robot story into an accounting story.
Rec: − Maybe -
AI construction-progress tracking — 360° cameras on hardhats capture the whole site, computer vision aligns every element to the BIM model and schedule, and the platform forecasts delays weeks before they land.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Fervo Energy ↗ emerging
Houston-based enhanced geothermal developer that ported shale drilling — horizontal wells, multistage fracs, fiber-optic sensing — to hot granite, contracted 500 MW of 24/7 power at Cape Station in Utah to Southern California Edison, Google, and Shell, and went public on Nasdaq (FRVO) in May 2026 at a $7.7B valuation on $138K of trailing revenue.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The world's largest third-party claims administrator — 33,000 colleagues in 80 countries handling 8M+ claims a year and moving $33B in other people's claim payments — passed through five private equity hands on its way to a $13.2B valuation, while injured workers and regulators call its claim handling something much darker.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The London/New York 'commerce operating system' that started in returns, rode the death of de minimis into DDP cross-border shipping, and is now sprinting into tax, inventory planning, payments, and AI agentic storefronts — $149M raised through a January 2026 Series C co-led by DST Global and ICONIQ.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
The $104.8B 'cheap chic' mass merchant that turned its 1,980 stores into America's best same-day fulfillment network, then spent four years going sideways — squeezed by Walmart's scale, Costco's value, and TJX's treasure hunt, self-wounded by a DEI-rollback boycott, and now betting a 22-year insider CEO and 1,800 corporate job cuts can restart traffic that finally inflected in May 2026.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
Toronto- and Texas-based autonomous trucking company betting that a neural simulator — Waabi World — can train and prove a driverless truck safe with a fraction of the road miles rivals burn, now expanding the same 'Waabi Driver' into Uber robotaxis after a $750M January 2026 Series C.
Rec: − Maybe -
CD&R paid HD Supply $2.9B in 2020 for a concrete-accessories distributor, bolted on Construction Supply Group, and built a ~500-branch, $6B+ jobsite supply machine — carrying 6x-plus leverage into a nonresidential cycle held up almost entirely by data centers.
Rec: − Maybe - WiseTech Global ↗ at risk
The Sydney logistics-software empire whose CargoWise platform runs 14 of the world's top 25 freight forwarders on 99% recurring revenue — built by a guitar-repairer-turned-refrigeration-mechanic who founded it as an EDI shop in 1994, took it public at A$3.35 in 2016, and whose misconduct scandal, board exodus, ASIC/AFP raid and A$30 share price (down ~75% from the October 2024 peak) have turned a compounding machine into a governance case study.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Enphase Energy ↗ at risk
The Fremont company that invented the solar microinverter, nearly died in 2017, staged one of tech's great turnarounds under Badri Kothandaraman to a $45B peak valuation — and is now defending a shrinking, Tesla-invaded US residential solar market after the One Big Beautiful Bill killed the 25D homeowner tax credit with no phase-down.
Rec: − Maybe -
The Körber/KKR supply-chain-software joint venture — a decade-long roll-up of HighJump, inconso, enVista's OMS, and MercuryGate rebranded as Infios in March 2025 — now a ~$500M-1B-revenue, 5,000-customer WMS/TMS incumbent that is a Gartner Leader for the eighth straight year while its own employees describe layoffs, three rebrands, and an exodus of tenured domain knowledge.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
AI workforce for logistics back offices — CoPallet agents that log into brokers', 3PLs' and forwarders' existing TMS/WMS systems and execute order entry, quoting, and track-and-trace end-to-end, priced against headcount rather than software seats.
Rec: ★ Interesting - PermitFlow ↗ emerging
TurboTax for construction permits — an AI-plus-expediter platform that researches, prepares, files, and chases building permits across 7,000+ US jurisdictions for contractors, developers, and enterprise chains.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Slide Insurance ↗ at risk
The Tampa 'insurtech' Bruce Lucas built in four years by buying the books of dead Florida insurers and taking 150,000+ policies out of Citizens — $1.80B of 2025 gross premium, a 52.1% combined ratio, a $444M profit, and a June 2025 Nasdaq IPO — now facing the end of the dislocation that made it: a softening Florida market, falling rates, and a hurricane tail that never goes away.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Syrup Tech ↗ emerging
AI demand forecasting and inventory planning for apparel and footwear brands — a neural-network engine that turns ERP, PLM, and real-time sales signals into SKU-level buying, allocation, and markdown recommendations. Acquired by Thoma Bravo-owned Anaplan in September 2025.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
Flywheel-plus-battery hybrid storage from Lehi, Utah — modular power plants that pair a spinning steel rotor's millisecond response with LFP battery duration, sold to utilities, data centers, and industry and aggregated into Rocky Mountain Power's Wattsmart virtual power plant.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Williams-Sonoma, Inc. ↗ well positioned
The San Francisco multi-brand home retailer — Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn, West Elm, Rejuvenation, Mark & Graham — that Chuck Williams started as a Sonoma cookware shop in 1956 and Howard Lester built into a catalog-then-ecommerce machine, now a $7.81B-revenue (FY2025), debt-free operator with an 18.1% operating margin that is the envy of retail — earned by refusing to promote, running its own ecommerce stack, and quietly building a $1B+ B2B business — while the housing market it ultimately depends on stays frozen and furniture tariffs eat at merchandise margins.
Rec: − Maybe - Coupa Software ↗ well positioned
The 2006 ex-Oracle rebellion that turned corporate purchasing into an Amazon-like shopping experience, rode 'business spend management' to a 2016 IPO and a $1.5B Llamasoft supply-chain-design deal, then sold to Thoma Bravo for $8.0B in February 2023 — now a PE-owned, ~$1B-plus-revenue incumbent racing to bolt agentic AI onto an $8T spend-data moat before AI-native attackers like Zip unbundle it.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Monumental ↗ emerging
Amsterdam-built fleets of small electric bricklaying robots sold as a subcontractor — contractors pay per brick laid, not for robots — now scaling from Dutch housing sites into the UK and US.
Rec: − Maybe -
An AI-native wholesale E&S brokerage — human producers on top, vertical AI agents underneath — going after the complex-property placements Amwins and Ryan Specialty broker by hand.
Rec: − Maybe - Petco Health and Wellness ↗ at risk
The 1965 San Diego mail-order vet-supply house that became a ~1,400-store pet retailer, went through five ownership flips including a $4.6B CVC/CPP Investments LBO, re-IPO'd at $18 in January 2021, collapsed to ~$2.60, and is now running a three-phase turnaround under ex-Five Below CEO Joel Anderson — ~$6.0B of sales, ~$408M EBITDA, ~$1.5B of debt, and roughly 300 in-store vet hospitals as the differentiator Chewy and Amazon can't ship.
Rec: − Maybe - Quaise Energy ↗ emerging
Superhot-rock geothermal via millimeter-wave drilling — an MIT fusion-lab spinout using gyrotrons to vaporize basement rock, aiming to make 300-500°C geothermal a baseload power source almost anywhere on Earth.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Ryan Specialty ↗ well positioned
The wholesale specialty-insurance distributor Pat Ryan — Aon's founder — built from scratch at age 73, now the No. 2 U.S. wholesaler placing roughly $32B of premium into the excess-and-surplus market, grown to $3.05B of FY2025 revenue by riding the E&S boom and a debt-funded acquisition spree — and now the cleanest public proxy for an E&S cycle that has visibly turned.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The tech-forward truck brokerage Brad Jacobs carved out of XPO in November 2022 and handed to 41-year-old Drew Wilkerson — now North America's third-largest freight broker after the all-equity $1.025B Coyote Logistics purchase from UPS, running ~$5.7B of 2025 gross revenue through the RXO Connect platform on razor-thin, cycle-crushed margins (adjusted EBITDA of just $6M in Q1 2026) while betting everything on operating leverage into a freight recovery.
Rec: − Maybe -
An asset-light network of 60+ fulfillment centers stitched together by proprietary warehouse software — Amazon-grade 2-day shipping sold by the order to the SMB and mid-market DTC brands Amazon doesn't own.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The last big-box electronics chain standing — $41.7B of revenue that has gone sideways for three straight years while Amazon took the category crown, now betting a relaunched third-party marketplace, a retail-media network, and an AI-PC upgrade cycle can outrun tariffs, a $475M health-care write-off, and its fourth CEO handoff.
Rec: − Maybe -
Fremont startup commercializing the nickel-hydrogen battery NASA flew on the ISS and Hubble — a fireproof, 30,000-cycle pressure vessel pitched as infrastructure-grade grid storage — now on its fourth cell design, its second CEO and its second continent after abandoning a Kentucky gigafactory to manufacture in China.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
AI frontline-intelligence platform for infrastructure fieldwork — crews film short videos at the point of work, FYLD's AI converts them into risk assessments and live job visibility, replacing paper forms and windshield-time supervision.
Rec: − Maybe -
AI-native commercial insurance brokerage for middle America — a licensed retail agency where AI reads applications, routes submissions across 165+ carriers, wholesalers and MGAs, and chases underwriters, selling workers' comp, GL and professional liability to daycares, truckers, bars and manufacturers in 24-48 hours instead of a week.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The grocery marketplace that survived Amazon, rode the pandemic to a $39B private valuation, IPO'd at $10B — and now defends a shrinking delivery share against DoorDash with an ads engine, smart carts, and enterprise software.
Rec: − Maybe -
The Ottawa supply chain planner that spent 40 years building one idea — every planning function computing concurrently on one in-memory model — survived a 2024 activist letter demanding its sale and a 16-month CEO vacuum, and re-emerged under ex-Blue Yonder executive Razat Gaurav with ARR growth reaccelerated to 20% and an agentic-AI story it must now prove is a moat rather than a eulogy.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - UPS (United Parcel Service) ↗ at risk
The 119-year-old parcel giant deliberately firing its largest customer — walking away from more than half its Amazon volume by mid-2026, closing dozens of buildings and cutting 30,000-plus jobs to rebuild itself as a smaller, denser, healthcare-heavy network before Amazon and the regional insurgents finish eating the commodity end of the market.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Crowdsourced last-mile parcel delivery for e-commerce brands — gig drivers claiming app-based routes out of Veho-run sortation hubs, next-day delivery with doorstep returns pickup, sold to brands like Macy's, Sephora and HelloFresh as a customer-experience upgrade over UPS and FedEx at a lower price.
Rec: − Maybe -
Resale-as-a-service for brands — the software and logistics layer behind The North Face Renewed, Oscar de la Renta Encore and lululemon Like New, letting brands run their own secondhand businesses across peer-to-peer listings, trade-ins, returns and warehouse inventory.
Rec: − Maybe - Dollar General ↗ well positioned
The 20,893-store rural small-box machine that KKR rebuilt and re-listed — fined $21M+ for blocked fire exits, humbled by a 2023 profit collapse, then hauled back to 3% comps and 34% EPS growth by returning CEO Todd Vasos, who now hands a mid-repair turnaround to an outsider grocer in January 2027.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Epicor Software ↗ well positioned
The 50-year-old vertical ERP consolidator — Triad, Platinum, DataWorks, Activant stitched into one company — that four private equity owners have passed along at ever-higher prices ($2B in 2011, $3.3B in 2016, $4.7B in 2020) and that crossed $1B ARR in 2024, now betting the franchise on forcing its on-premises manufacturing and distribution base to the cloud by 2028.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Ferguson Enterprises ↗ well positioned
The 1953 Virginia plumbing wholesaler that a British sheep-shearing conglomerate bought in 1982, then became — after a Nelson Peltz-prodded NYSE listing in 2022 and full US domestication in 2024 — North America's largest trade distributor of plumbing, HVAC, and waterworks products, now riding data-center megaprojects through a housing slump while QXO and Home Depot's SRS arm build rival empires next door.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
AI-native freight audit and payments — a platform that ingests every invoice, bill of lading and contract in any format, audits 99% of freight bills without human touch, pays carriers through J.P. Morgan rails, and is now repositioning as the 'intelligence layer' for enterprise supply chain spend.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Mainspring Energy ↗ emerging
Menlo Park maker of the linear generator — a flameless, fuel-flexible onsite power machine that reacts natural gas, hydrogen or ammonia at low temperature to shuttle magnets through copper coils — selling firm, fast-to-deploy power to data centers, utilities and industrial sites while gas turbines are sold out through 2030.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
AI-native managing general underwriter for commercial construction and the AI-infrastructure buildout — casualty, excess and builder's risk coverage priced off live jobsite telemetry from Procore, Autodesk, OpenSpace and Samsara, underwriting the data centers, chip fabs and energy projects behind the AI boom on other carriers' paper.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
America's largest residential solar and battery company — 1M+ subscribers on 25-year power contracts, financed by a $14B+ tower of tax equity and non-recourse debt — now the last scaled survivor of a sector in which nearly every major rival has gone bankrupt, and the chief beneficiary of a tax-code loophole (48E third-party ownership) that Congress has already scheduled for demolition.
Rec: − Maybe -
A Miami-born, Atomic-incubated energy startup selling the P3 — a 40-foot containerized module that concentrates sunlight through Fresnel lenses into a thermal battery and dispatches electricity through a Stirling engine — pitched as near-free, 24-hour dispatchable solar for AI data centers in the sun-soaked US Southwest.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Forward Air ↗ at risk
The Tennessee expedited-LTL specialist that spent 30 years as the trucking network airfreight forwarders trusted — until a ~$3.2B Omni Logistics merger, rammed through in 2023 without a shareholder vote, buried it under $1.65B of net debt at 5.4x leverage, triggered three credit downgrades and an activist revolt, and ended in a failed year-long auction that left the equity a stub.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Ledgebrook ↗ emerging
A tech-enabled excess-and-surplus-lines MGA that wins wholesale brokers by being the first quote back — automated submission ingestion, third-party data enrichment and AI-assisted underwriting compress E&S casualty quoting from days to hours, on rented carrier paper from MS Transverse and Obsidian.
Rec: − Maybe - Manhattan Associates ↗ well positioned
The warehouse-software incumbent that has held a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader position in WMS for 18 straight reports — founded in 1990 by a Kurt Salmon consultant and four ex-Infosys engineers, rebuilt from scratch as the cloud-native Manhattan Active platform, debt-free with $2.35B of RPO growing 24% — and still digesting a January 2025 services-guidance cut that erased a quarter of its market value in a day.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
Brad Jacobs' fifth roll-up: a $1B shell turned $18B-revenue building-products distributor in 25 months — #1 in insulation and waterproofing, #2 in roofing — built on serial equity raises, a hostile-takeover machine, and a bet that AI-driven pricing can double distribution margins.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
AI agents for freight brokers and carriers — software co-workers that read broker inboxes, quote freight, key loads into the TMS, call carriers, and schedule appointments, aiming to become the quote-to-cash orchestration layer for the roughly $1T US trucking industry.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Walgreens Boots Alliance ↗ at risk
The 124-year-old pharmacy chain that fell from a $100B+ market cap in 2015 to an $11.45-a-share take-under — bought by Sycamore Partners in August 2025 with 83% debt financing, chopped into five companies on day one, and now being run by the Staples playbook while PBM reimbursement grinds the core business toward zero.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
A marketplace and monetization stack for 'internet businesses' — Discord trading groups, sports-pick cappers, course sellers, software renters and a pay-per-view clipping economy — that pays out roughly $3B a year to sellers in 144 countries and, with Tether's $200M investment, is bolting a stablecoin bank on top.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Bedrock Robotics ↗ emerging
A San Francisco startup founded by ex-Waymo autonomy leaders that bolts a brand-agnostic sensor-and-compute kit onto existing 20-to-80-ton excavators, turning contractors' own machines into supervised-autonomous, 24/7 earthmovers rather than selling them new hardware.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The 57-year-old closeout retailer that drifted from its treasure-hunt roots into national-brand furniture, got gutted when inflation-squeezed low-income shoppers stopped buying discretionary home goods, and collapsed into a September 2024 Chapter 11 — then watched a $620M Nexus Capital rescue fall through, liquidate through going-out-of-business sales, and convert to Chapter 7 in November 2025, leaving only ~220 stores reborn under Variety Wholesalers.
Rec: − Maybe - J.B. Hunt Transport Services ↗ well positioned
The Arkansas trucking family business that a 1989 handshake with the Santa Fe Railway turned into North America's #1 intermodal franchise — a $12B surface-transportation giant whose rail-plus-truck moat is real but whose EPS has fallen every year since the 2022 peak as a multi-year freight recession grinds intermodal yields, brokerage losses, and margins.
Rec: − Maybe - NineDot Energy ↗ emerging
A New York City developer and operator squeezing utility-scale battery storage onto the city's leftover parcels — parking lots, industrial edges, transit-adjacent scraps — and stacking Con Edison grid programs, capacity and energy arbitrage into a distributed virtual power plant that props up a congested urban grid.
Rec: − Maybe -
The Chicago freight-visibility platform that ingests carrier telematics, EDI and API feeds to track shipments across ocean, air, rail, truck and parcel in real time — now recast as an agentic 'Movement' decision-intelligence layer, after a $2.7B peak, two rounds of layoffs and a bruising rivalry with FourKites.
Rec: − Maybe -
The 40-year-old television-shopping empire — QVC, HSN, and the Cornerstone catalog brands — that John Malone's Liberty complex built into a $14B business, watched shrink to $9.2B as cable audiences aged out and cord-cutting bit, and then steered into a prepackaged Chapter 11 in April 2026 that wipes out shareholders and cuts $6.6B of debt to $1.3B, all while betting its survival on a 24/7 pivot to TikTok Shop.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
An AI-native third-party administrator for property-and-casualty insurance — it takes over carriers' and MGAs' claims files, runs them on its own Glance platform, and uses generative AI to let a smaller bench of human adjusters close claims faster and cheaper than legacy TPAs like Sedgwick and Crawford.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Verisk Analytics ↗ well positioned
The insurer-owned ratings bureau founded in 1971 that became a for-profit near-monopoly on U.S. property-casualty data — ISO standardized policy forms, industry loss costs, catastrophe models, and the Xactimate claims-estimating platform that sits inside nearly every U.S. property claim — now a ~$3.1B-revenue, ~56%-EBITDA-margin pure-play after shedding energy and financial-services units, but wearing a rich multiple into an AI-disruption debate.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Advance Auto Parts ↗ at risk
The 1932 Roanoke parts chain that became the third-largest U.S. auto-parts retailer, then spent a decade botching the integration that was supposed to make it a leader — an operating margin near 2.5% against O'Reilly's ~20%, an 83% dividend cut, a $587M loss, ~700 stores marked for closure, and a $1.5B Worldpac fire-sale to fund a turnaround it has not yet proven.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Cleveland-Cliffs ↗ at risk
The 178-year-old iron-ore miner that Lourenco Goncalves turned into North America's largest flat-rolled steelmaker through $5B of debt-funded acquisitions — and that then posted a $708M loss in 2024 and a $1.4B loss in 2025 as its carbon-heavy blast-furnace model met soft auto demand, idled mills, and a leverage problem.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - The Descartes Systems Group ↗ well positioned
The Waterloo logistics-software company that nearly died in the dot-com bust, cut a third of its staff to survive, and then — under a disciplined 50-plus-deal acquisition machine — compounded into a ~$650M-revenue, 45%-EBITDA-margin operator of the Global Logistics Network trading at a premium to almost every software peer.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
A Swedish freight platform selling electric and cab-less autonomous trucking as a turnkey subscription — the trucks, the Saga operating system, the charging, and the remote operators — to blue-chip shippers, now public on Nasdaq via a 2026 SPAC.
Rec: − Maybe -
A Boulder startup refining low-grade iron ore into 99%-pure iron with electricity at the temperature of a hot coffee — aiming to decarbonize the dirtiest step in steelmaking without charging a green premium.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The handmade marketplace that Josh Silverman turned into a $30B pandemic darling — and that has spent the years since unwinding: a stalling core GMS, an eroding buyer base, a dismantled 'house of brands,' and a stock down ~80% from its 2021 peak.
Rec: − Maybe -
A generative-AI 'AI Underwriter' that learns a carrier's book and appetite, ingests each submission, and returns an auditable risk summary, recommendation, and — increasingly — a straight-through path to quote and bind, sitting inside the underwriter's existing workflow.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Sublime Systems ↗ emerging
An MIT spinout replacing the cement kiln with an ambient-temperature electrochemical cell — no limestone calcination, no fossil heat, and therefore no process CO2 — trying to make 'true-zero' cement that meets standard building specs.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
A federated AI map of the global supply chain — enterprises and governments pool proprietary trade data without exposing it, and Altana sells the resulting value-chain 'source of truth' as compliance, risk, and tariff intelligence.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The $5B Series F cyber-insurance MGA that turned continuous vulnerability scanning into an underwriting weapon and just absorbed Allianz's global commercial cyber book — now with Chubb, Travelers (via Corvus) and Beazley shipping their own native scanners at renewal and Munich Re owning At-Bay, the AI-native wedge is racing commoditisation.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The $10B supply-chain roll-up that a consortium of tech giants started in 2000, Insight Partners rebuilt through acquisitions, and a SPAC took public in 2021 — before stalled organic growth, a debt load, and six straight quarters of decline ended with a $3.30-a-share fire sale to Australia's WiseTech Global.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The original C2C marketplace, thirty years on: a cash-gushing collectibles-and-parts machine that spun off PayPal, StubHub and Classifieds to become a leaner but slower-growing platform — now monetizing a shrinking buyer base harder through ads and fees while zero-fee Vinted and live-shopping Whatnot attack the C2C core it invented.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Austin's 3D-printing homebuilder — a gantry robot extrudes concrete walls in layers, sold as the fix for a construction industry that hasn't gotten cheaper in decades, now pivoting from building homes itself to selling printers and software to builders.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Tractor Supply Company ↗ well positioned
The largest US rural-lifestyle retailer, built on the boring genius of selling chicken feed, propane, and horse dewormer to exurban America — a consumables-driven traffic machine that grew straight through the pandemic, then torched its own DEI and climate commitments in 72 hours to keep its conservative base.
Rec: − Maybe -
RiskOps for insurance underwriting — an AI-native workbench that sits on top of the policy-admin core and steers underwriters toward the risks a carrier actually wants to write.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Fluence Energy, Inc. ↗ at risk
The Western world's answer to Chinese battery giants — a Siemens-and-AES joint venture turned public integrator that assembles grid-scale storage from other people's cells, now caught between a record backlog and a margin structure the commoditization wave and the China tariff war are both squeezing.
Rec: ★ Interesting - GE Vernova Inc. ↗ well positioned
The energy company that fell out of the GE breakup — heavy-duty gas turbines sold out through the decade, a grid-equipment franchise riding the transformer shortage, and an offshore-wind wound that keeps the story honest — now a $270B beneficiary of the electricity supercycle.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
A nationwide roadside-sensor grid built by ex-CIA operators that photographs and fingerprints every commercial truck in America — turning physical 'ground truth' into fraud, underwriting, and carrier-vetting intelligence.
Rec: − Maybe - Guidewire Software ↗ well positioned
The COBOL-killer that became the P&C insurance industry's operating system — 500-plus carriers running policy, billing and claims on its stack — now mid-cloud-transition, ARR finally past $1B, and freshly cheap after a ~50% stock round-trip that reset the multiple even as growth decelerates and AI-workflow layers circle the core.
Rec: ★ Interesting - GXO Logistics, Inc. ↗ well positioned
The world's largest pure-play contract-logistics operator — spun out of XPO to run other companies' warehouses at industrial scale, betting that automation and a secular outsourcing wave outrun the thin margins and cyclicality that come with renting out labor and floor space.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Heron Power ↗ emerging
Solid-state transformers for the AI-era grid — a Tesla powertrain veteran betting that silicon carbide power electronics can replace the century-old iron-core transformer that data centers and renewables are now waiting years to get.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - HUB International Limited ↗ well positioned
A merger of eleven Canadian brokerages that Hellman & Friedman turned into the most relentless roll-up machine in insurance distribution — 800-plus acquisitions since 2013, ~$4.8B of revenue, and a $29B private valuation now queued for a $3B IPO, all riding on leverage that never quite comes down.
Rec: − Maybe -
Materials procurement and inventory software for trade contractors — takeoff to PO to delivery to invoice on one platform, now with a distributor, Wesco, as both investor and supplier.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Peak Energy ↗ emerging
Sodium-ion, passively cooled grid-storage systems for utilities and IPPs — a lithium-free BESS built by Tesla, Enovix and Northvolt veterans betting that salt plus a factory in Sacramento beats cheap Chinese LFP.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
The largest US pet-specialty retailer — ~1,600 stores, grooming salons, in-store Banfield vets and PetSmart Charities — bought by a BC Partners consortium in the era's biggest retail LBO, then famous for creating its own disruptor: it acquired Chewy in 2017, fought creditors over the collateral, and spun it out for a fortune while the stores it kept absorb the ecommerce blow.
Rec: − Maybe - SPS Commerce, Inc. ↗ at risk
The dominant retail-supply-chain EDI network — 100 straight quarters of revenue growth, 96% recurring, 55,000 trading partners — now growing at a third of its old rate, its stock down ~60%, with an activist pushing it into Morgan Stanley's hands just as API-native rivals argue its whole managed-service moat is a tax on complexity that no longer needs to exist.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Staples, Inc. ↗ at risk
The superstore that invented the office-supply category, now a Sycamore Partners LBO stripped to its US retail-and-B2B core — a shrinking store fleet bolted to a durable contract-delivery franchise, carrying a wall of high-coupon debt into a market in secular decline.
Rec: − Maybe -
Owned-plus-partner fulfillment network wrapped in in-house OMS/WMS/parcel software — selling independent brands Amazon-grade shipping speed as a 'cloud supply chain,' now rebranded a 'physical intelligence layer for commerce.'
Rec: ★ Interesting -
A no-code decision engine that lets banks, lenders and insurers build, backtest and run automated risk decisions — credit, fraud, KYC and underwriting — then rebrands the whole thing as an 'agentic' decision platform.
Rec: ★ Interesting - Trunk Tools ↗ emerging
AI agents for the built environment — ingest a project's drawings, specs, RFIs, submittals and schedules, then let field and office teams query them by text and hand tedious document work to agents.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
AI-native accounting and AP automation for construction — coding every subcontractor invoice to a job and cost code, then trying to run the whole back office with agents.
Rec: ★ Interesting - At Home Group ↗ at risk
The self-styled 'home décor superstore' that Hellman & Friedman bought for $2.8B in 2021 and lenders repossessed in bankruptcy four years later — a warehouse-box chain whose LBO debt and 90%-imported inventory met a 145% China tariff.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Builders FirstSource ↗ well positioned
The roll-up that became the pro homebuilder's default supplier — #1 in a fragmented market, value-added mix over half of sales, and a share count cut nearly in half by buybacks — now riding out the deepest housing-starts trough since 2020.
Rec: − Maybe - Duck Creek Technologies ↗ well positioned
The cloud-native number two in P&C insurance core software — a Gartner-anointed Leader with sticky policy, billing and claims systems, taken private by Vista for $2.6B and now running dark behind Guidewire's widening lead.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The software-first freight forwarder that raised $2.5B to disrupt a century-old spread business — then spent 2023-2025 learning that ocean rates, not code, still set the price.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Form Energy ↗ emerging
The iron-rusting battery betting that 100-hour grid storage at $20/kWh beats lithium on cost — if utilities can live with sub-50% round-trip efficiency.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
A premium home-insurance MGA that sells only through independent agents — a 15-second quote, guaranteed replacement cost to $5M, and a reinsurance panel carrying the risk it doesn't.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The Brad Jacobs roll-up that spun off everything else to become a pure-play LTL carrier — now the industry's fastest margin-improver, gaining share on real estate it bought out of Yellow's corpse, and trading at a nosebleed multiple that dares it to keep executing.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Applied Systems ↗ well positioned
The agency management system half of the P&C insurance software duopoly — PE-owned since 2004, on its fourth sponsor, and quietly the toll booth between 38,000 independent agencies and their carriers.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
Dave Clark's post-Amazon act: an AI operating layer that sits on top of every supply chain system a company already owns and makes the boring decisions for them.
Rec: − Maybe - Bob's Discount Furniture ↗ at risk
A waterbed salesman's no-gimmick furniture chain became a $2B NYSE listing in February 2026 — and then comps fell to +1.2% and the stock slipped under its IPO price.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Bloom Energy ↗ well positioned
Twenty-five years of unprofitable fuel-cell R&D collided with an AI power shortage — and Bloom went from science project to the fastest way to put a gigawatt on a greenfield site.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Blue Yonder ↗ at risk
The 40-year-old supply chain planning incumbent Panasonic paid ~$8.5B for — $1.42B of revenue, 3,000 customers, a Gartner Leader badge in 18 straight WMS reports, and the ransomware attack that shut down Starbucks' payroll.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
The 'universal' one-click checkout that bet an 80-million-shopper network would out-convert Shop Pay — then, after an $11B peak and a founder implosion, pivoted to a crypto SuperApp.
Rec: − Maybe -
The commerce roll-up that bought its way to a unified stack — storefront software, an order/warehouse OS, and ~14 owned fulfillment centers, sold as one bill.
Rec: − Maybe -
Ryan Cohen's Autoship machine sold to PetSmart for $3.35B in 2017, IPO'd in 2019, and now does $12.6B a year — yet the stock trades below its 2019 debut as BC Partners still holds the votes.
Rec: − Maybe - C.H. Robinson ↗ well positioned
The 120-year-old produce broker that became America's largest freight middleman — and is now cutting a quarter of its people while gaining share, betting that AI agents make the broker stronger, not obsolete.
Rec: − Maybe -
An AI-native insurer for startups that quotes in 30 seconds and books premium like software revenue — with the risk sitting in an unrated, member-owned risk retention group it also controls.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
Started by burning stranded gas to mine bitcoin at the wellhead. Now builds the gigawatt campuses OpenAI, Oracle and Microsoft run on — and is reportedly being priced at $30B.
Rec: − Maybe -
Julie Bornstein's second attempt at the same idea — an AI fashion shopping agent that reads plain-English or an uploaded photo and finds the outfit across 8,000-plus brands, three years after Pinterest bought her last one.
Rec: − Maybe - EquipmentShare ↗ at risk
A construction equipment rental roll-up that sells itself as a software company — now trading at half its first-day price while a short seller picks apart who owns the fleet.
Rec: − Maybe -
The wholesale marketplace that underwrote the independent retailer — net-60 terms, free returns, and a commission brands increasingly call a tax.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
The homebuilding cloud that treats a house as a database, not a drawing — and is now trying to push that database into the lumber yard.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting -
The off-mall department-store chain that outlived the mall — now on its fourth CEO in four years, its dividend gutted, and a July 2025 meme-stock squeeze standing in for a turnaround.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting -
Apollo's arts-and-crafts LBO traded at 34 cents on the dollar in May 2025 and refinanced near par in February 2026 — a specialty retailer that survived the retail apocalypse mostly by outliving the people it was competing with.
Rec: ✗ Not interesting - Nirvana Insurance ↗ emerging
A telematics-native MGA underwriting commercial trucking off 30 billion miles of driving data — pricing forward off behavior while the incumbent market prices backward off loss runs.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The AI company that turned the ecommerce 'thank you' page into a multi-billion-dollar ad network — profitable, cash-generative, and circling a 2026 IPO.
Rec: ★★ Very interesting - Saks Global ↗ at risk
Richard Baker's real-estate playbook met the luxury downturn head-on: a debt-funded merger of Saks and Neiman Marcus that starved its own shelves, collapsed its bonds, and landed in Chapter 11 thirteen months later — now reborn as Exemplar Luxury Group.
Rec: − Maybe -
The asset-light online home-goods pureplay that hit $14B in the pandemic, gave most of it back, cut a third of its people — and in 2026 is back to growth, share capture and a short-squeezing stock near $90.
Rec: − Maybe - Base Power ↗ emerging
A three-year-old Texas company that raised $1.3B to become an electric utility built out of home batteries — and is now reportedly being priced at $12B.
Rec: − Maybe -
The operating system for commercial HVAC, electrical and plumbing contractors — a unicorn built in the unglamorous middle of the trades, in ServiceTitan's blind spot.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The century-old compressor giant Blackstone carved out of Emerson at a $14B valuation — now levered ~6x, filed for an IPO, and cutting shifts into an air-conditioning slump.
Rec: − Maybe - HappyRobot ↗ emerging
AI voice and workflow agents that answer the phone for freight — 70+ enterprise customers, ~10x revenue growth between rounds, and an unresolved moat question.
Rec: − Maybe - Kin Insurance ↗ emerging
The direct-to-consumer home insurer that runs toward the catastrophe markets everyone else is fleeing — and books fees, not risk.
Rec: ★ Interesting -
The live-shopping marketplace that turned collectibles auctions into an $8B GMV machine — and America's best evidence that live commerce works outside China.
Rec: ★ Interesting
| My take | Description | Sector | Stage | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Afresh Technologies ↗ | emerging | AI ordering engine for fresh and perishable grocery categories — flagship Albertsons rollout across 2,200+ US stores, ~$148M raised across seed, Series A ($12M, March 2020) and Series B ($115M, Dec 2022, Spark Capital led), with a reported ~$34M follow-on in April 2026. | Supply chain / Grocery AI | emerging | 2017 | val Not officially disclosed | 2026-10-08 | |
| American Electric Power ↗ | well positioned | The transmission-heaviest investor-owned utility in the US — ~40,000 miles of wires across 11 states and ~5.6M customers — now rebuilt around a $70B five-year capex plan, 24 GW of signed data-center load, and the AEP Ohio tariff that forced hyperscalers in Columbus to pay the freight themselves. | Energy / Electric utility | incumbent | 1906 | val ~$67B market cap | 2026-10-08 | |
| Bloomreach ↗ | emerging | Three-product ecommerce personalization bundle (Discovery search + Engagement CDP/MA + Content CMS) at a stale $2.2B 2022 mark now charging past $260M ARR on Loomi AI positioning — squeezed between Shopify Audiences and Klaviyo at the SMB end and Salesforce + Adobe at the enterprise end. | Ecommerce / Personalization, search, CDP and marketing automation SaaS | emerging | 2009 | val ~$2.2B | 2026-10-08 | |
| Burlington Stores, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The #3 off-price chain and the structural laggard of the three — $10.6B of FY2025 net sales (year ended 31 January 2026) at a ~7.6% operating margin, versus ~12% at TJX and Ross — now five years into 'Burlington 2.0', ex-Ross COO Michael O'Sullivan's attempt to close a per-store productivity gap that still has Burlington ringing roughly half of TJX's sales per box and ~70% of Ross's, while Shein/Temu attack the apparel floor and TJX HomeGoods owns the home category Burlington 2.0 was supposed to replace coats with. | Retail / Off-price apparel, home, specialty | incumbent | 1972 | val ~$13-14B equity market cap | 2026-10-08 | |
| Figure ↗ | emerging | Sunnyvale humanoid-robot company building a bipedal general-purpose robot — Figure 01, 02 and 03 — plus Helix, the vertically-integrated vision-language-action model it built after walking away from OpenAI, with a $1B BMW pilot, a Brookfield data partnership, and a $39B mark that bakes in a decade of execution the company has not yet done. | Robotics / Logistics / Manufacturing | emerging | 2022 | val ~$39B | 2026-10-08 | |
| Harbinger Motors ↗ | emerging | Proprietary Class 4-7 electric chassis for upfitters — $175M+ raised, Thor Industries locked in as reference buyer and strategic investor, and a two-year window before Rivian, Ford Pro, Daimler, and BYD-via-Mexico close in. | Logistics / Commercial EV | emerging | 2021 | val Not disclosed | 2026-10-08 | |
| Markel Group Inc. ↗ | at risk | ~$22B-market-cap Richmond-based 'mini-Berkshire' built on three engines — Markel Insurance (~$8B GWP specialty P&C including Lloyd's Syndicate 3000), Markel Ventures (~$5B revenue, 20+ unrelated operating subsidiaries from Costa Farms plants to AMF Bakery), and Tom Gayner's ~$30B listed-equity portfolio — now under 1.4% activist pressure from JANA Partners (Nov 2024 letter) to separate Ventures and buy back $2B of stock, after a decade in which Markel's compounder story trailed the S&P 500 while Chubb, Travelers and W.R. Berkley all out-underwrote the Insurance segment's 93-100 combined ratio. | Insurance / Specialty P&C and diversified holding company | incumbent | 1930 | val ~$22B equity market cap | 2026-10-08 | |
| Masco Corporation ↗ | at risk | Behr paint plus Delta Faucet, both pinned to the same Home Depot aisle — 97 years from a one-cylinder screw-machine shop in Detroit to a $12-14B building-products company whose two profit engines each depend on a single big-box customer and a housing-turnover cycle at generational lows. | Construction / Building products | incumbent | 1929 | val ~$0K | 2026-10-08 | |
| Canadian National Railway Company ↗ | well positioned | ~CAD $90B-market-cap, 107-year-old Montreal-headquartered Class I railroad — North America's only transcontinental, triple-coast network (Pacific, Atlantic, Gulf) across ~18,800 route-miles — that pioneered Hunter Harrison's precision scheduled railroading at CN in 1998, lost the $29.8B Kansas City Southern bid in 2021 after the US STB rejected its voting trust, surrendered the Mexico corridor to Canadian Pacific Kansas City in 2023, took a Teamsters-triggered national lockout in August 2024 that forced binding arbitration, and now runs a 61-point operating ratio with mid-single-digit volume growth under ex-TC Energy / ex-CP CEO Tracy Robinson while an attempted Union Pacific–Norfolk Southern transcontinental tie-up threatens to leave CN the smaller of two surviving North American duopolies. | Logistics / Class I freight railroad | incumbent | 1919 | val ~$90B | 2026-10-05 | |
| Doxel AI ↗ | emerging | Computer-vision construction progress monitoring — handheld 360° and lidar capture compared element-by-element to the BIM model, with budget-and-schedule risk surfaced to project controls. $55-57M raised through an August 2021 Insight-led Series B at ~$220M; a 2016 Stanford-origin autonomous-robot pivot that has gone unusually quiet while OpenSpace, Buildots and Procore each took a bigger slice of the category. | Construction / Reality capture + progress AI | emerging | 2016 | val ~$220M | 2026-10-05 | |
| Fairmatic ↗ | emerging | Zendrive-spinout commercial auto MGA pricing fleet policies on 200B+ miles of mobile telematics — raised ~$88M across 2022-23, quietly rebranded to LEEO in December 2025 under a new CEO as founder Jonathan Matus's original data engine, Zendrive, was wound down and sold to Credit Karma/Intuit. | Insurance / Commercial auto telematics (Insurtech MGA) | emerging | 2022 | val Undisclosed | 2026-10-05 | |
| Shippo ↗ | emerging | Multi-carrier shipping API and SMB dashboard — ~$1B 2021 unicorn now sandwiched between Shopify Shipping's native carrier bundle upstream, Pirate Ship's free USPS wedge below, and Thoma Bravo's $12B WWEX-Auctane merger consolidating the paid-SaaS tier. | Logistics / Ecommerce — Multi-carrier shipping API | emerging | 2013 | val ~$1B | 2026-10-05 | |
| The TJX Companies, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | ~$145B-market-cap off-price retail incumbent — four decades of positive comps, FY26 net sales of $60.4B at a 12.3% pretax margin, ~5,100 stores across nine banners (TJ Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, Sierra, Homesense, Winners, T.K. Maxx, Homesense UK), a 1,300+ buyer organisation sourcing opportunistically from ~21,000 vendors in 100+ countries — and the clearest beneficiary of the exact Shein/Temu/Amazon-Haul flood that is supposed to kill mall apparel, because excess inventory in a brutal e-commerce cycle is TJX's raw material. | Retail / Off-price apparel, home, specialty | incumbent | 1976 | val ~$145B equity market cap | 2026-10-05 | |
| Toll Brothers, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The largest US luxury homebuilder — ~$1.07M average selling price, ~10,800 FY2025 deliveries at ~$10.6B of home-sale revenue, ~22% adjusted gross margin and a build-to-order franchise that lets Toll Brothers raise its FY2026 outlook in a quarter when D.R. Horton, Lennar and PulteGroup are all cutting; ~$10-11B market cap in September 2026, a 59-year-old family firm just-handed by Doug Yearley to his COO Karl Mistry in a January 2026 succession, and the only major builder for whom the ~$1M+ customer still underwrites at full-rate mortgages. | Construction / Luxury homebuilding | incumbent | 1967 | val ~$0K | 2026-10-05 | |
| The Travelers Companies, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | ~$75B-market-cap, 161-year-old property & casualty incumbent, Dow component, and the cleanest-run large P&C balance sheet in US insurance: FY2025 combined ratio 85.6%, FY2025 core ROE 17.2% and Q2 2026 core ROE 24.9% on record net written premiums of $11.5B — all despite absorbing a $1.7B Palisades/Eaton California wildfire catastrophe charge in Q1 2025 — delivered by Alan Schnitzer's independent-agency, middle-market commercial, and tech-modernisation strategy, including a February 2026 OpenAI-built agentic AI claim assistant and a May 2025 $2.4B Canada divestiture to Definity. | Insurance / US property & casualty (commercial, personal, bond & specialty) | incumbent | 1864 | val ~$75B equity market cap | 2026-10-05 | |
| Watershed ↗ | emerging | Enterprise carbon accounting software for the Fortune 500 — ~$108M ARR per Latka 2025, $1B+ valuation on a $100M Series C from Greenoaks in Feb 2024, now rebuilding its demand thesis as the Trump SEC rescinds climate disclosure and the EU Omnibus pushes CSRD into 2028. | Energy / ESG — carbon accounting software | emerging | 2019 | val ~$1.8B post-money | 2026-10-05 | |
| American International Group, Inc. ↗ | at risk | ~$39B-market-cap, 107-year-old global specialty and commercial P&C insurer that survived the largest corporate bailout in US history, spent a decade shedding assets to shrink into shape, and finally hit a sub-90 combined ratio under Peter Zaffino — only to arrive at the start of a commercial P&C softening cycle with a flagship Lexington E&S property book in retreat, Personal Insurance down 12% in FY2025, an 11.1% core ROE that still trails Travelers (19%) and Chubb by half, and an untested broker-background CEO (Eric Andersen, ex-Aon) taking over mid-2026. | Insurance / Global specialty & commercial P&C | incumbent | 1919 | val ~$39B equity market cap | 2026-09-30 | |
| Cover Whale ↗ | emerging | Telematics-priced commercial trucking MGA for owner-operators and small fleets — ~$83M raised, $1.3B of all-time premium written on Everspan paper, running against Nirvana's $1.5B Series D and Progressive Commercial's book. | Insurance / Commercial trucking (Insurtech MGA) | emerging | 2019 | val Undisclosed | 2026-09-30 | |
| Fabric (fabric.inc) ↗ | emerging | Composable commerce platform that spent $293M to flank Shopify Plus and Salesforce Commerce Cloud in mid-market retail — $140M Series C at a $1.5B valuation in 2022, a 2023 CEO reset after a $35M CFO crypto scandal, and now caught between a pivoting Shopify and a scaled commercetools. | Ecommerce / Composable commerce software | emerging | 2017 | val ~$1.5B | 2026-09-30 | |
| O'Reilly Automotive ↗ | well positioned | The Springfield, MO parts chain that out-margins every peer in US big-box retail — 6,750+ stores across 48 states + Mexico + Canada, FY2025 revenue $17.78B at a 19.5% operating margin, a dual-market DIY/DIFM mix that is nearly 50/50 (vs. AutoZone's ~one-third commercial), 32 regional DCs carrying 160,000-170,000 SKUs feeding stores up to five times a day, and a $27.5B lifetime buyback machine that has quietly compounded a $17.50 1993 IPO into a ~$69B company. | Retail / Auto parts (Aftermarket) | incumbent | 1957 | val Market cap ~$69.1B | 2026-09-30 | |
| PulteGroup ↗ | well positioned | The third-largest US homebuilder — $16.7B in home-sale revenue and 29,572 closings in 2025 at a $564K ASP, running the margin-discipline trade against DHI's volume and LEN's land-light pivot, but Q1 2026 incentives spiked to 10.9% of price (vs. a 3-3.5% historical norm), gross margin fell to 24.4% from 27.5% a year earlier, and the stock sits ~$22-23B market cap in late September 2026 — a well-positioned peer whose Del Webb active-adult moat is doing the heavy lifting while first-time Centex buyers absorb the rate shock. | Construction / Homebuilding | incumbent | 1950 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-30 | |
| Republic Services ↗ | well positioned | The Phoenix-based #2 of North American trash — ~15% of the U.S. solid-waste market, roughly $16.6B revenue, 208 active landfills, a 32% EBITDA margin that now runs tighter than Waste Management's, and the only Big-Three waste operator with a real hazardous-and-industrial-services franchise after the $2.2B US Ecology deal — but Cascade's 37% anchor stake, a 22%-unionized workforce fighting multi-state strikes, and the simple fact that WM still owns more airspace keep this from being purely 'cleanest compounder in waste.' | Logistics / Environmental services | incumbent | 1998 | val ~$67.2B | 2026-09-30 | |
| Rilla ↗ | emerging | Virtual-ridealong AI that records and grades HVAC, plumbing and roofing technicians' in-home sales conversations — $70M ARR by April 2026 on a $758M valuation, with ServiceTitan's native Field Pro built on rival Siro the single largest overhang. | Construction / Trades — AI voice analysis | emerging | 2018 | val ~$758M post-money | 2026-09-30 | |
| Skydio ↗ | emerging | Redwood City autonomous-drone maker that killed its consumer line in 2023, pivoted hard into US defense, public safety and utility inspection, and is now the largest NDAA-compliant sUAS vendor as the DJI ban tightens — $842M raised, ~$180M 2024 revenue, $4.4B mark on the April 2026 Series F. | Energy / Utility infrastructure inspection (Autonomous drones) | emerging | 2014 | val $4.4B post-money | 2026-09-30 | |
| Antora Energy ↗ | emerging | Thermal batteries that store renewable power in 1,800°C carbon blocks and discharge as industrial heat or TPV-converted electricity — $770M raised, a 5 GWh POET deployment, and Rondo still ahead on live commercial sites. | Energy / Climate tech | emerging | 2018 | val Undisclosed | 2026-09-23 | |
| Enable ↗ | emerging | A UK-born rebate management platform that hit $1.12B in 2023, bought a pricing engine in 2025, and cut 50% of Customer Success in October — the category-definer question meets the ERP-bundling question. | Supply chain / B2B software | emerging | 2000 | val $1.12B | 2026-09-23 | |
| Formic Technologies ↗ | emerging | Robotics-as-a-Service for American manufacturing — $8-15/robot-hour, 400k+ production hours, and a debt-financed motion whose payback math has not been publicly proven. | Industrial / Manufacturing automation | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed | 2026-09-23 | |
| The Hanover Insurance Group ↗ | at risk | A 174-year-old Worcester-based P&C carrier (NYSE: THG) that has bet the franchise on winning share inside independent agencies — Core Commercial, Specialty and Personal Lines run entirely through ~2,200 agents — now delivering a record 91.2% combined ratio while insurtech quoting platforms and MGA carve-outs quietly disintermediate the very channel it calls its moat. | Insurance / P&C, independent-agency | incumbent | 1852 | val ~$6.3B | 2026-09-23 | |
| Metropolis Technologies ↗ | emerging | Checkout-free parking that swallowed a public incumbent — $5B valuation, ~$420M revenue, and a heap of consumer complaints trailing behind the vision. | Mobility / Retail infrastructure | emerging | 2017 | val ~$5B | 2026-09-23 | |
| Snap-on Incorporated ↗ | at risk | The 105-year-old Kenosha tool-truck monopoly that owns the American mechanic's toolbox — $4.7B in revenue, ~40% gross margins, a captive $2B finance book, and roughly 3,000 franchise vans hitting the same repair bays every week — now grinding through a soft-goods cycle as Milwaukee, Icon and Amazon Business gnaw at the professional installed base. | Construction / professional tools & diagnostics | incumbent | 1920 | val ~$19.5B | 2026-09-23 | |
| Waste Management ↗ | well positioned | The Houston-based fortress of North American trash — ~24% share of solid waste, a landfill footprint no permit regime would ever let anyone rebuild, ~$25B in revenue, a fresh $7.2B bet on medical waste via Stericycle, and a renewable-natural-gas business that could out-earn recycling — but pricing above cost, an integration slog and PFAS liability keep the story from being purely 'buy and hold forever'. | Energy / Environmental Services | incumbent | 1968 | val ~$83B | 2026-09-23 | |
| Weyerhaeuser ↗ | at risk | The 10.4-million-acre American timber REIT that has spent 126 years turning trees into commodities and dividends — running down a soft housing cycle in 2026, cutting Canadian duties and Section 232 tariffs into competitors, monetising carbon and CCS pore space, and selling non-core acres while paying a variable dividend tied to cash flow that just doesn't quite cover the payout. | Construction / Timber REIT and wood products | incumbent | 1900 | val ~$18.1B | 2026-09-23 | |
| Watsco, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The largest HVAC/R distributor in North America — 700+ locations, 80/20-controlled Carrier Enterprise joint venture, and a $7.2B revenue base that just gave back the margin the A2L refrigerant transition lent it in 2025. | Construction / HVAC distribution | incumbent | 1956 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-22 | |
| C.H. Robinson Worldwide ↗ | at risk | The 120-year-old Eden Prairie freight broker that still moves 20 million shipments a year through phones, email and a proprietary TMS called Navisphere — now running a 'Lean AI' cost-out program that cut headcount 29% in two years to defend margin an activist forced it to defend, while Uber Freight, RXO, Flexport and DAT's resurrected Convoy platform chase the same shippers with software-first cost structures. | Logistics / Freight brokerage | incumbent | 1905 | val ~$21B | 2026-09-22 | |
| Copart, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | Dallas-based online salvage-vehicle auction operator running VB3 virtual bidding across 250+ owned yards in 11 countries — the duopolist (with IAA/RB Global) that insurance carriers use to liquidate roughly 4M total-loss vehicles a year in the US alone; agreed to buy ACV Auctions for ~$1.9B in September 2026 to push into clean-title wholesale just as Progressive's shift of salvage volume toward RB Global and a 25%+ stock decline in 2026 test whether the land-and-insurer moat is as durable as the bull case assumes. | Ecommerce / Retail — Auto salvage auctions | incumbent | 1982 | rev ~$4.6B | 2026-09-22 | |
| Pie Insurance ↗ | emerging | Denver + Washington DC insurtech that underwrites small-business workers' comp in under three minutes through an agent-facing API, now a full-stack rated carrier writing its own paper after a costly 2021-2023 transition — 55,000+ policies in-force and 39 states as of January 2026, but a 2023 layoff, thin per-seat combined-ratio disclosure, and no priced round since the September 2022 Series D leave the $2B mark unverified. | Insurance / Small-business workers' comp | emerging | 2017 | val ~$2B | 2026-09-22 | |
| Pivot Bio ↗ | emerging | Berkeley-born synthetic-biology agtech that gene-edits nitrogen-fixing bacteria (PROVEN 40, RETURN, Proven G3) to grow on corn and cereal roots as a substitute for synthetic nitrogen fertilizer — over $680M raised, a $2B+ 2021 mark, 5M+ acres claimed in 2023, but mixed university field-trial results, three-to-four rounds of layoffs since 2023, a 2025-2026 exit from Berkeley to Minnesota/St. Louis, and a 30% self-imposed price cut for 2026 that concedes the value proposition was overpriced against crashed urea. | Supply chain / Agtech biologicals | emerging | 2010 | val ~$2B | 2026-09-22 | |
| Uber Freight ↗ | emerging | Digital freight brokerage born inside Uber ATG in 2017, transformed by the $2.25B Transplace acquisition in 2021 into a top-5 US truck broker with a managed-transportation and TMS software business bolted on — majority-owned by Uber, $5.14B in FY24 segment revenue on a shrinking top line and a ninth-straight quarter of negative Adjusted EBITDA as of late 2024, in a freight-brokerage market that just watched Convoy, its most direct venture-funded peer, die in October 2023 doing almost exactly the same thing. | Logistics / Digital freight brokerage | emerging | 2017 | val ~$3.3B | 2026-09-22 | |
| Gopuff ↗ | emerging | Philadelphia instant-commerce operator and the last scaled Western survivor of the 2020-2022 quick-commerce cohort — but the survivor's most recent mark is $8.5B (Eldridge/Valor, Nov 13 2025), 43% below the $15B Series H SoftBank underwrote in July 2021, after Spain/France/Luxembourg exits, a UK headcount cut from 1,707 to 842 in 2023, four US layoff rounds, a stalled IPO and a Fidelity holdings markdown that took the position from a 60% gain in Feb 2022 to a ~64% loss by mid-2023; the owned-MFC plus owned-inventory plus Gopuff Ads flywheel is the case, and DoorDash DashMart plus Instacart plus Uber Eats grocery are the wolves at the 30-minute occasion. | Retail / Instant commerce + micro-fulfillment | emerging | 2013 | val ~$15B | 2026-09-21 | |
| Kemper Corporation ↗ | at risk | The Chicago non-standard auto and home-service life insurer that assembled its $3B specialty-auto book by rolling up Infinity (2018) and American Access Casualty (2021), then abruptly exited its $500M preferred home-and-auto business in August 2023, ran through two CEOs and roughly 340 layoffs in the fourteen months to November 2025, and took a $460M goodwill impairment on that same specialty-auto franchise in Q2 2026 as its stock lost half its value on the back of California severity, adverse commercial-auto reserve development and a widening moat gap versus Progressive. | Insurance / Non-standard auto + Life | incumbent | 1990 | val ~$1.6B | 2026-09-21 | |
| Octopus Energy Group ↗ | emerging | London-based retail energy + Kraken utility software + Octopus EV + Octopus Energy Generation renewable-fund manager — took UK #1 from British Gas in January 2025 with 7.3M households, but the real business is Kraken, the utilities SaaS licensed onto EDF, E.ON, Origin Energy, Tokyo Gas and Tenaska covering 75M contracted accounts, being spun out at $8.65B in December 2025 ahead of a potential $15B IPO; the falsifiable question is whether Kraken compounds SaaS-style faster than UK retail margin commoditises under OFGEM's ~2% price-cap allowance and native-tech competitor parity. | Energy / Retail energy + utility SaaS (Kraken) | emerging | 2015 | val ~$9B | 2026-09-21 | |
| OpenLane ↗ | at risk | The Carmel, Indiana wholesale-auction incumbent formerly known as KAR Auction Services — the same operator that took ~$3.7B of Kelso/Goldman Sachs/ValueAct/Parthenon LBO money in 2007, IPO'd in 2009, and in 2022 sold the ADESA US physical-auction chain to Carvana for $2.2B — now stripped down to a digital marketplace plus AFC floorplan lender, growing again but competing with ACV Auctions on transparency, Manheim on scale, and a Carvana-owned ADESA on its old brand. | Logistics / Wholesale vehicle remarketing + floorplan lending | incumbent | 1989 | val ~$4.3B | 2026-09-21 | |
| Pool Corporation ↗ | at risk | The Covington, Louisiana wholesale distributor that quietly built a ~40% share of the US swimming-pool and irrigation trade channel — and is now watching new-pool starts collapse from roughly 117,000 in 2021 to ~59,000 in 2024 per PK Data, its own 'base business' comp turn negative through 2024-2025, chlorine and trichlor prices deflate as OxyChem / Clearon capacity comes back online, and its distribution moat get squeezed from above by SRS-inside-Home-Depot on adjacent green-goods and from below by Amazon Business and Fluidra's own direct-to-builder ambitions. | Construction / Pool + irrigation wholesale distribution | incumbent | 1993 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-21 | |
| Route ↗ | emerging | Lehi, UT post-purchase platform whose ~2-2.5% consumer-funded package-protection attach at Shopify checkout is the core P&L — while Shopify's own Shop app and Shop Pay ecosystem progressively swallow tracking and post-purchase surface, three CEOs cycle through in three years, and a persistent BBB / Trustpilot pattern of denied claims sits underneath the checkout-widget growth story. | Ecommerce / Post-purchase experience + package protection | emerging | 2018 | val ~$1.4B | 2026-09-21 | |
| Siteline ↗ | emerging | San Francisco vertical SaaS turning the AIA G702/G703 pay-application, retention and lien-waiver workflow into a subcontractor-side billing operating system — $18.4M total raised (seed plus Series A led by Menlo Ventures, February 24, 2022), roughly 43-49 employees as of 2026, and a specific structural risk that Procore (with Procore Pay), Autodesk (via the January 2024 Payapps/GCPay acquisition) and Trimble (via the May 2024 Flashtract acquisition, now Trimble Pay) each ship a native subcontractor billing module bundled with the GC platform the sub already touches before Siteline reaches enterprise breakout on a standalone contract. | Construction / Subcontractor billing SaaS | emerging | 2019 | val Not publicly disclosed | 2026-09-21 | |
| Southwest Gas Holdings ↗ | at risk | The 95-year-old Las Vegas natural-gas utility that ran a Berkshire-Hathaway-crossing bidding war for Questar Pipeline, absorbed a Carl Icahn proxy siege, then sold the pipeline for a wash to Williams, IPO'd Centuri into a leadership crisis, deconsolidated it inside sixteen months, and is now a shrinking pure-play LDC in three states where the building codes point the other way. | Energy / Regulated natural gas utility + utility construction | incumbent | 1931 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-21 | |
| Ascend Elements ↗ | emerging | The Westborough, Massachusetts spin-out of a Worcester Polytechnic battery lab that raised more than $1.1B and won $480M in DOE grants to make cathode active material from recycled lithium-ion batteries via its patented Hydro-to-Cathode process — and, after the Trump DOE clawed back most of that grant money in 2025, filed Chapter 11 on April 9, 2026 with its Kentucky flagship 60% built and a Section 363 sale to Bluegrass Infrastructure Partners now setting the going-concern outcome. | Energy / Battery recycling + cathode materials | emerging | 2015 | val ~$1.5B | 2026-09-18 | |
| BigCommerce Holdings (Commerce.com, Inc.) ↗ | at risk | The public ecommerce SaaS platform that renamed itself Commerce.com and pivoted to AI-agentic and headless composable commerce — but the numbers say a company Shopify Plus and Adobe have flanked at both ends of its market, its stock down ~97% from the 2020 peak and growth stuck near 3%. | Ecommerce / SaaS | incumbent | 2009 | val ~$0.4K | 2026-09-18 | |
| Nowports ↗ | emerging | Monterrey-based digital freight forwarder for Latin America — over $242M raised through a May 2022 SoftBank-led Series C at $1.1B (LatAm's first logtech unicorn), then a 2023-2025 retrenchment that closed offices in Peru, Colombia and Brazil and cut headcount as the freight down-cycle collided with a nearshoring shipper story that has not yet returned in gross-margin form. | Logistics / Digital freight forwarding | emerging | 2018 | val $1.1B post-money | 2026-09-18 | |
| Physical Intelligence ↗ | emerging | San Francisco robotics-AI lab building a single vision-language-action foundation model — the π-series — that trains once on a dozen robot bodies and is meant to fold laundry, bus tables, or run a factory cell without per-task engineering. | Robotics / Foundation models / Manufacturing | emerging | 2024 | val ~$5.6B | 2026-09-18 | |
| Prewave ↗ | emerging | Vienna spin-off from TU Wien that turned a PhD on multilingual social-media signals into an AI supply-chain risk platform tuned to the EU's due-diligence laws — €63M Series B in June 2024 led by Hedosophia, 200+ enterprise customers including BMW, Hilti, Kärcher and Lufthansa, and a business model whose gravity depends on how heavily Brussels and Berlin actually enforce CSDDD after the 2025 Omnibus delay. | Supply chain / Risk intelligence | emerging | 2017 | val ~$0.4K | 2026-09-18 | |
| Sotheby's ↗ | at risk | The 281-year-old auction house is now a leveraged, PE-owned trophy business whose 2024 sales collapsed 23% to $6B, forcing a $909M sovereign-wealth rescue and a $765M bond refinance — the recovery is real but the debt stack and cultural damage are permanent. | Retail / Luxury auction | incumbent | 1744 | val Undisclosed post-recap | 2026-09-18 | |
| Trex Company ↗ | at risk | The Winchester, Virginia composite-decking pioneer that pulled roughly 380 million pounds a year of grocery-bag film out of the waste stream to build a ~30-year lead in wood-plastic-composite decking — and is now watching a James Hardie–backed AZEK take share, a repair-and-remodel down cycle stretch into a third year, and its own stock lose roughly a third of its value while a $400M Arkansas plant ramps into a market that no longer wants the volume. | Construction / Building products | incumbent | 1996 | val ~$4.4B | 2026-09-18 | |
| UGI Corporation ↗ | at risk | The 143-year-old Pennsylvania utility holding company whose regulated natural gas rate base now subsidises AmeriGas — the largest US propane distributor, losing customers by six figures a year under electrification, natural gas conversions and its own service reputation — while a rebuilt board, a second-chance CEO and a levered AmeriGas Partners note ladder try to stop the bleed. | Energy / Propane + gas utility | incumbent | 1882 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-18 | |
| Base Power Company ↗ | emerging | Austin battery-as-utility bundling a whole-home LFP pack with retail electricity in ERCOT — Zach Dell and Justin Lopas raised $2.3B+ in three years to turn residential batteries into a virtual power plant that monetises across retail markup, wholesale arbitrage and ancillary services. | Energy / Residential battery + retail electricity | emerging | 2023 | val $13B post-money | 2026-09-17 | |
| CenterPoint Energy ↗ | at risk | Houston's regulated electric-and-gas monopoly (NYSE: CNP) — ~2.8M electric meters plus 3.4M gas customers across six states, ~$8.6B FY2024 revenue, ~$25B market cap — running a $66.7B ten-year capex plan under the shadow of the July 2024 Hurricane Beryl blackout (2.26M customers dark, 44 attributed deaths, $800M in idle Life Cycle Power generators that never rolled during the storm), a PUCT investigation with 20+ mandated fixes, and a governor who publicly ordered them to do better. | Energy / Regulated electric and natural gas utility | incumbent | 1866 | val ~$25B | 2026-09-17 | |
| Convex Insurance ↗ | emerging | Stephen Catlin's 2019 do-over — a Bermuda + London specialty (re)insurer purpose-built for the post-XL Catlin hard market, now recapitalised at ~$7B by Onex and AIG after the IPO route closed. | Insurance / Specialty (Re)insurance | emerging | 2019 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-17 | |
| Groupon, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The 2008 Andrew Mason daily-deals experiment that once turned down a $6B Google bid and IPO'd at a first-day $16B market cap in November 2011, now a ~$770M market cap turnaround under Czech investor Dusan Senkypl (Pale Fire Capital, ~22% stake) — FY24 revenue $492.6M against a 2014 peak of ~$3.0B, active customers ~15.4M against a 2015 peak north of 55M, and a workforce shrunk from >11,000 at peak to under 2,000 with another 400 layoffs announced in August 2026 as management pivots to being an 'AI-native' local commerce marketplace. | Ecommerce / Local commerce marketplace | incumbent | 2008 | val ~$767M | 2026-09-17 | |
| Mohawk Industries, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The world's largest flooring manufacturer — carpet, ceramic tile, LVT, laminate, hardwood — has run five years of flat-to-declining revenue ($11.74B FY2021 peak → $10.99B FY2025), taken an $876M non-cash impairment in Q3 2023, closed out a $60M securities-fraud class action tied to 2017-2019 revenue-recognition allegations, and just handed the CEO seat to a Unilin-family lifer as the LVT category quietly cannibalises the ceramic and hardwood books that Mohawk spent $6B of M&A to assemble. | Construction / Flooring | incumbent | 1878 | val ~$7.8B | 2026-09-17 | |
| Pactum AI ↗ | emerging | Estonian-founded, Mountain-View-headquartered AI startup that invented the 'autonomous negotiation' category in 2019, ran the reference Walmart deployment putting chatbots across ~2,000 tail-spend suppliers with reported 3% savings, then raised ~$108M across five rounds (Insight Partners led a $54M Series C in June 2025) — and now has to prove the category-specific playbooks and Fortune-100 references compound into a moat before SAP Ariba's Joule, Coupa's agent framework, Ivalua's IVA and Zip's orchestrator ship native LLM negotiation inside the suite the customer already renews annually. | Supply chain / Procurement (Autonomous Negotiation) | emerging | 2019 | val ~$0.3K | 2026-09-17 | |
| Sally Beauty Holdings ↗ | at risk | The 1964-founded Denton, TX beauty-supply operator — spun out of Alberto-Culver in November 2006 in a $3B CD&R-sponsored transaction after the Regis merger blew up, now a two-segment business (~3,096 Sally Beauty Supply stores for DIY hair-color shoppers plus ~1,085 CosmoProf professional-only stores in Beauty Systems Group) generating $3.70B of FY2025 revenue on essentially flat comps, defending itself with cost cuts, a Happy Beauty Co pilot and a TikTok Shop launch while Ulta, Amazon, TikTok-native DTC brands and L'Oréal's SalonCentric chew both ends of its franchise. | Retail / Beauty distribution | incumbent | 1964 | val ~$1.4B | 2026-09-17 | |
| Solvento ↗ | emerging | A Mexico City freight-payments fintech that pays carriers within minutes on the shipper's behalf, then finances the receivable — bootstrapping an AI-audit layer (Solvento Audita) on top of a $180M-and-growing invoice book across Mexico's fragmented, cash-starved trucking base. | Logistics / Cross-border trucking fintech | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed at every round | 2026-09-17 | |
| Bunge Global SA ↗ | at risk | One of the four legacy 'ABCD' global grain traders (ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus), now recast by the 2 July 2025 close of the $34B Viterra merger into a scaled origination-and-processing platform running pro-forma toward $60-67B of revenue against a ~$14B market cap — a 208-year-old physical commodities incumbent trying to reset its moat as post-2022 crush margins normalize hard and ADM's January 2024 accounting scandal re-priced the entire sector's multiple. | Supply chain — global agricultural commodities origination, trading and processing | incumbent | 1818 | val ~$14B equity market cap | 2026-09-15 | |
| Casey's General Stores, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The fourth-largest US convenience-store chain, built on a rural whitespace nobody else wanted — one gas-station-plus-pizza box in each of ~2,500 small towns, 100% company-operated, selling more pizzas per store than Papa John's. | Retail | incumbent | 1959 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-15 | |
| D.R. Horton, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The largest U.S. homebuilder by volume — 84,863 closings and $34.3B revenue in fiscal 2025 — running the affordability trade at scale, with roughly three of every four buyers getting a mortgage-rate buydown, gross margin down ~360 bps in a year (23.6% Q4 FY24 to 20.0% Q4 FY25), a $1.0B litigation reserve overwhelmingly tied to construction-defect claims, and a fiscal 2026 guide cut to $32.5-33.0B. | Construction | incumbent | 1978 | val ~$38.6B | 2026-09-15 | |
| Motive ↗ | emerging | AI-native fleet operating system born as KeepTruckin — ELDs, AI dashcams, telematics, a Mastercard-rails fleet card and workforce management stitched into one subscription — chasing Samsara from second place while trying not to get bundled by it. | Logistics / Fleet management software | emerging | 2013 | val $2.85B post-money | 2026-09-15 | |
| Shift Technology ↗ | emerging | Paris-founded AI/ML SaaS for insurers — fraud detection, claims automation, subrogation, financial crime, and underwriting risk — that rode 2018-2021's pattern-matching wave to a $220M Series D and a $1B+ valuation, then hit the same reset every AI-native insurtech did in 2023-2024: layoffs, valuation compression, and a race to prove the platform bet before core-systems incumbents (Guidewire, Duck Creek, Sapiens) ship native AI and LLM commoditization erodes the moat. | Insurance | emerging | 2014 | val ~$1.1B | 2026-09-15 | |
| Vinted ↗ | emerging | Europe's largest secondhand fashion marketplace — a C2C network that charges sellers nothing, moved to first profit in 2023, and hit a €5B tender valuation on the road to IPO. | Ecommerce / Retail | emerging | 2008 | val €5B | 2026-09-15 | |
| WeaveGrid ↗ | emerging | San Francisco EV managed-charging SaaS that sells to utilities — ~$65-70M raised, ~$35M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures in Feb 2023, live at DTE, Xcel, PG&E, Duke, ConEd, National Grid, Portland General, Salt River Project. | Energy / Grid Software — DER / EV Managed Charging | emerging | 2018 | val Not publicly disclosed | 2026-09-15 | |
| W. R. Berkley Corporation ↗ | well positioned | $26B-market-cap, 59-year-old specialty commercial P&C compounder run as a federation of ~60 decentralized operating units, printing an 89.4% Q4 2025 combined ratio and 21.2% ROE on $14.7B FY2025 revenue — the archetypal well-run incumbent whose founder-family control, disciplined underwriting culture and E&S/professional-liability tilt have produced 25 consecutive years of dividend growth even as the specialty market softens back toward 2020 rate levels. | Insurance | incumbent | 1967 | val ~$26.1B equity market cap | 2026-09-15 | |
| Airspace ↗ | emerging | An AI-dispatched network of next-flight-out, on-board-courier and ground capacity that routes organs, aircraft-on-ground parts and semiconductor tooling across 30,000+ drivers and commercial airline belly space — a $138M-raised time-critical logistics platform that has not announced new capital since its May 2022 Series D. | Logistics | emerging | 2016 | val Undisclosed at every round | 2026-09-14 | |
| BrightView Holdings, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The largest commercial landscaping company in the US — a KKR-built roll-up of Brickman (1939) and ValleyCrest (1949) that IPO'd in 2018, spent 2022-2023 unwinding a botched integration and a bad acquisition strategy, brought in ex-United Rentals COO Dale Asplund plus a $500M One Rock Capital preferred-equity infusion in October 2023, and by Q2 2026 had finally strung together consecutive quarters of positive Land (maintenance) revenue growth — on a $2.67B FY2025 revenue base, an 88% Maintenance / 12% Development mix, and a stock still trading near $11, roughly half its 2018 IPO price. | Commercial Services / Landscaping | incumbent | 1939 | val ~$1B | 2026-09-14 | |
| Cheniere Energy, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The largest LNG exporter in the United States and second-largest globally, running two Gulf Coast liquefaction complexes (Sabine Pass, Louisiana and Corpus Christi, Texas) toward a 60+ mtpa run-rate by 2028, with 95% of nameplate production locked under 20-year take-or-pay Sale and Purchase Agreements — a ~$55B-market-cap incumbent whose contracted-cash-flow moat is colliding, in 2026-2028, with the largest LNG supply wave in the industry's history. | Energy / LNG | incumbent | 1996 | val ~$55B equity market cap | 2026-09-14 | |
| Diamond Age ↗ | emerging | A Phoenix robotics startup that trucked a gantry-based concrete 3D-printer to Arizona home lots, printed 30 production houses for Century Communities between 2022 and early 2024, pivoted to light-gauge-steel panels when the printer economics didn't scale — and ran out of capital eight weeks after the pivot proved itself, filing for bankruptcy on 12 December 2024 and auctioning its robots in January 2025. | Construction / Homebuilding | emerging | 2018 | val Undisclosed at every stage | 2026-09-14 | |
| hyperexponential ↗ | emerging | London-founded pricing decision intelligence platform for specialty and commercial (re)insurers — hx Renew runs over $75B of annual commercial P&C premium at 40+ carriers including Beazley, Convex, Aviva, Allianz and Sompo, on $91M raised through a $73M Series B led by Battery Ventures (January 2024), and is now pivoting from a pricing tool into an 'agentic underwriting workbench' with the July 2026 launch of hyperoperator. | Insurance | emerging | 2017 | val Not publicly disclosed at… | 2026-09-14 | |
| KoBold Metals ↗ | emerging | Berkeley AI-first exploration company that mines a century of geochemical, geophysical and satellite data with machine learning to find undrilled copper, cobalt, nickel and lithium deposits — now a $2.96B-valuation, $1B+-raised outfit betting its Zambian Mingomba copper find can prove the model works end to end, from prediction to a producing mine. | Energy | emerging | 2018 | val $2.96B post-money | 2026-09-14 | |
| NCR Voyix Corporation ↗ | at risk | The 1884-founded cash-register originator, spun out of NCR Corp on 16 October 2023 as the pure-play retail-and-restaurant commerce software business, now trading around a ~$1.3B market cap on NYSE: VYX after selling its Digital Banking crown jewel to Veritas Capital for $2.45B in 2024 — a company shrinking its way to focus while Toast eats Aloha's hospitality installed base and cloud-native retail platforms erode its enterprise POS position. | Retail | incumbent | 1884 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-14 | |
| Rockwell Automation, Inc. ↗ | at risk | $47.7B-market-cap, 123-year-old US industrial-automation leader (Allen-Bradley 1903, Rockwell International 1985, 2001 spin) whose Logix PLC platform and FactoryTalk/Plex software stack are staging a real FY2026 rebound — 10% organic growth and raised guidance in Q3 2026 — after two brutal years of guidance cuts and distributor destocking, but which still sells almost entirely through a ~500-strong third-party distributor channel that Siemens, Schneider and Emerson are all outflanking with direct enterprise software deals and vertically-integrated industrial-AI acquisitions (Emerson/AspenTech, Schneider/Cognite). | Industrial automation / Industrials software | incumbent | 1903 | val ~$47.7B equity market cap | 2026-09-14 | |
| AiDash, Inc. ↗ | emerging | Palo Alto satellite-plus-AI vegetation-and-asset-risk platform for electric utilities, founded 2019 by a trio of IIT alums to solve the post-Camp Fire wildfire-liability problem — raised $91.5M across four rounds culminating in a $58.5M April 2024 Lightrock-led Series C, then agreed on 30 July 2026 to be acquired by Schneider Electric for a $350M all-cash enterprise value, folding the IVMS/CRIS/AIMS/BNGAI stack into Schneider's One Digital Grid platform in one of climate adaptation's largest-ever exits. | Energy / Utilities software | emerging | 2019 | val ~$350M | 2026-09-11 | |
| Big 5 Sporting Goods Corporation ↗ | at risk | El Segundo-headquartered ~414-store western-US neighborhood sporting-goods chain (formerly NASDAQ:BGFV) taken private on 2 October 2025 by a Worldwide Golf / Capitol Hill Group partnership at $1.45 per share — a ~$112.7M enterprise-value all-cash rescue at the trailing edge of a four-year revenue collapse from $1.16B FY21 to $795M FY24, dividend eliminated Q3 2024, and a Nasdaq minimum-bid non-compliance notice received 13 May 2025. | Retail | incumbent | 1955 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-11 | |
| Built Robotics, Inc. ↗ | emerging | San Francisco autonomous heavy-equipment startup that raised $112M from Tiger Global, NEA and Founders Fund on a 2016-2022 arc as the retrofit-kit disruptor of construction, cut ~25-30% of headcount across two 2023 layoff rounds, and has since bet the company on a purpose-built solar-piling robot (RPD 35 + RPS 25) whose September 9, 2025 three-year contract with Blattner (Quanta) is either the wedge that saves the franchise or the last dance before Caterpillar/Komatsu and Trimble bundle it away. | Construction / Autonomous heavy equipment | emerging | 2016 | val ~$285M | 2026-09-11 | |
| Dexterity, Inc. ↗ | emerging | Redwood City, CA full-stack 'physical AI' robotics company founded in 2017 by Stanford roboticist Samir Menon that raised $95M in March 2025 at a $1.65B post-money to build the Mech dual-armed truck-loading superhumanoid and the Foresight world model — chasing FedEx, UPS, Sagawa Express and Maersk parcel workflows in a category Amazon effectively acquihired in August 2024 when it absorbed Covariant's founders. | Supply chain / Warehouse robotics | emerging | 2017 | val ~$1.6B | 2026-09-11 | |
| Eversource Energy ↗ | at risk | New England's largest energy delivery company (NYSE:ES) — ~$28-30B rate base electric + gas monopoly serving ~4.4M customers in CT, MA and NH — is a franchise that has, in three years, torched roughly $1.6B pre-tax on an aborted offshore-wind push, been credit-downgraded six times by Moody's since October 2023, cut A- to BBB+ by S&P in December 2024 for a 'recent pattern of adverse regulatory developments' in Connecticut, sold its Aquarion water utility at a ~$300M loss to raise cash, and is now trying to fund a $26.5B 2026-2030 capex program under an openly adversarial Connecticut regulator. | Energy / Regulated Electric & Gas Utility | incumbent | 1966 | val ~$25B market cap | 2026-09-11 | |
| Heartland Express, Inc. ↗ | at risk | North Liberty, Iowa dry-van truckload carrier whose $525M all-cash CFI acquisition from TFI International on 31 August 2022 pushed the fleet from ~4,300 to ~6,320 tractors and ~$1.3B run-rate — then rode the freight recession from an 85% operating ratio (2019-2021) down to a 107.1% OR and a $52.5M net loss on $805.7M revenue in FY25, before a Q2 2026 print of 91.0% OR on $184.1M signaled the cycle finally turning. | Logistics / Trucking (asset-based truckload) | incumbent | 1978 | val ~$853M | 2026-09-11 | |
| Nuro, Inc. ↗ | emerging | Mountain View autonomy company founded in 2016 by ex-Waymo engineers Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu that raised $2.13B through 2021 at an $8.6B peak valuation, then re-cut itself twice — 20% in November 2022, 30% in May 2023 — abandoned its custom R2/R3 delivery pod, and pivoted in September 2024 to licensing the Nuro Driver Level-4 stack to OEMs and mobility platforms; the July 2025 Uber–Lucid–Nuro deal for 20,000+ Lucid Gravity robotaxis over six years is either the resurrection or the final chapter. | Logistics / Autonomy | emerging | 2016 | val ~$6B | 2026-09-11 | |
| The Travelers Companies, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | $65B-market-cap, 172-year-old top-tier US property-casualty franchise built around independent-agency distribution and disciplined commercial underwriting, printing a 83.6% Q2 2026 combined ratio and 24.9% core ROE while returning $4.2B to shareholders in 2025 — the archetype of the well-run incumbent whose scale, agency lock-in and Bond & Specialty crown jewel keep it durably ahead of Progressive/GEICO on the commercial side even as direct-to-consumer models chew away at its Personal Insurance flank. | Insurance | incumbent | 1853 | val ~$63-65B equity market cap | 2026-09-11 | |
| AiFi ↗ | emerging | Santa Clara autonomous-retail platform from Duke computer-vision PhDs Steve Gu and Ying Zheng, powering 300+ camera-only cashierless stores globally by September 2025 across Zabka Nano, Aldi pilots, Verizon's Destination Store, Compass cafeterias and 74+ NFL/NBA stadium concessions — the last well-capitalised challenger left standing after Grabango's October 2024 collapse and Amazon's retreat from running its own Just Walk Out stores. | Retail / Ecommerce | emerging | 2016 | val ~$100M | 2026-09-10 | |
| Akur8 ↗ | emerging | Paris-headquartered actuarial AI platform building transparent GLM/GAM pricing and reserving software for P&C and now life insurers — 330+ carriers in 40+ countries, $180M raised through a $120M Series C led by One Peak in September 2024, expanded via the Arius (Milliman) reserving buyout in September 2024 and the Slope Software life-actuarial acquisition in March 2026. | Insurance | emerging | 2018 | val ~$120M | 2026-09-10 | |
| Beazer Homes USA, Inc. ↗ | at risk | Atlanta-headquartered public homebuilder in 13 states agreed on 6 August 2026 to sell to Dream Finders Homes for $33.50 per share in cash — a ~$916M equity / ~$2.2B enterprise-value take-out at 0.8x book that is the market's own verdict that the standalone Beazer franchise cannot earn its cost of capital in a Horton/Lennar-scaled production-builder era. | Construction / Homebuilding | incumbent | 1985 | val ~$916M | 2026-09-10 | |
| Commonwealth Fusion Systems ↗ | emerging | MIT PSFC spinout building the SPARC compact high-field tokamak in Devens, MA and the 400MW ARC first commercial fusion plant in Chesterfield County, VA — raised ~$4B by July 30, 2026 (including a $1B pension/sovereign-wealth round and a $863M August 2025 Series B2 with Nvidia, Google, Khosla and Breakthrough Energy Ventures), with first plasma slipped from 2025 to 2027 and first grid power to the early 2030s. | Energy | emerging | 2018 | val Undisclosed at all recent… | 2026-09-10 | |
| The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. ↗ | at risk | The New York prestige-beauty conglomerate whose $15.6B FY24 revenue collapsed to $14.3B in FY25 as Hainan travel-retail broke, whose 5,800-7,000-job restructuring (Feb 2025) and $1.2-1.6B in charges finally produced a 5%-reported / 3%-organic 'return to growth' in FY26 to $15.0B — but where challenger brands (Sol de Janeiro, Rare Beauty, Fenty, e.l.f.) keep taking prestige share, credit was cut by S&P and Moody's, and the Lauder-family Class B super-voting stack shields management from the activist pressure the multi-year numbers would otherwise trigger. | Retail / Beauty | incumbent | 1946 | val ~$36.6B market cap | 2026-09-10 | |
| PG&E Corporation ↗ | at risk | The 1905-vintage California IOU whose stock lost roughly 20% in a single session on 31 August 2026 when the legislature let SB 492 die without the wildfire-subrogation shield the utility needed — repricing PG&E's cost of capital to include the open-ended tail risk that AB 1054's $21B fund was never designed to cover. | Energy / Utilities | incumbent | 1905 | val ~$31B market cap | 2026-09-10 | |
| Prudential Financial, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The 150-year-old Newark life-insurance-and-retirement franchise printing mid-teens ROE on a legacy general account while Athene, Global Atlantic and Corebridge underwrite the same pension risk transfer and annuity spreads on private-credit balance sheets that structurally beat Prudential's cost of funds. | Insurance | incumbent | 1875 | val ~$40.75B market cap | 2026-09-10 | |
| Slip Robotics ↗ | emerging | Atlanta supply-chain robotics company selling SlipBot — 12,000-lb omnidirectional automated loading robots that ride inside trailers, roll on and off any standard dock in under five minutes with no facility or IT integration, and are sold as Robots-as-a-Service to John Deere, GE Appliances, Valeo and Nissan; closed a $28M Series B led by DCVC on December 17, 2024 for ~$45M total raised. | Supply Chain / Logistics | emerging | 2019 | val Undisclosed at both discl… | 2026-09-10 | |
| Airbound ↗ | emerging | Bengaluru autonomous cargo-drone startup building a tail-sitter, blended-wing-body aircraft that weighs less than the parcel it carries — aiming for one-cent-per-parcel drone delivery at trucking-competitive economics. | Logistics / Supply chain | emerging | 2023 | val Undisclosed | 2026-09-09 | |
| BackOps ↗ | emerging | San Francisco AI startup from Amazon Shipping alum Sean McCarthy building 'Relay,' an AI-native operating system that reads unstructured messages, logs into vendor portals, and makes phone calls to run shipper and 3PL back-office workflows — files 100% of eligible carrier claims automatically, cuts customer response time 93%, and raised a $26M Series A led by Theory Ventures on March 12, 2026. | Logistics / Supply chain | emerging | 2024 | val Undisclosed at all three … | 2026-09-09 | |
| Bath & Body Works ↗ | at risk | The 1990 Wexner-era mall retailer that spun out of L Brands on August 3, 2021 as a $10B+ standalone — now on its second CEO in two years, comps down four of the last five years, and FY2026 guided to a 4% to 2.5% revenue decline as body care fragments to Sol de Janeiro, Rare Beauty, Fenty, and Ulta private label. | Retail | incumbent | 1990 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-09 | |
| CNA Financial Corporation ↗ | at risk | The 90%-Loews-owned Chicago commercial P&C insurer whose Q2 2026 P&C combined ratio deteriorated 240bps to 96.5% while net-written-premium growth halved to 4%, layered on a legacy long-term-care runoff block and a Tisch-family holding-company structure that keeps dividending CNA cash up to Loews rather than reinvesting in the specialty franchise that Chubb and W.R. Berkley are compounding. | Insurance | incumbent | 1897 | val ~$13.0B market cap | 2026-09-09 | |
| Peloton Interactive ↗ | at risk | The connected-fitness bellwether whose Q2 FY2026 revenue slipped 3% YoY to $657M and lost 214,000 paid Connected Fitness subscribers in a single year — now a $2.2B market cap, running a fresh $100M restructuring, staffed by ~2,900 people (down from ~8,700), and trying to reverse an at-home-fitness contraction with Peter Stern's Peloton IQ / Cross Training relaunch before the 2029 convertibles come due. | Retail / Consumer | incumbent | 2012 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-09 | |
| Reframe Systems ↗ | emerging | A Massachusetts modular-homebuilding startup using robotic microfactories, QR-tracked panelization and a 'pixels to parts' software stack to fabricate wall and ceiling assemblies near dense demand centers — then truck them to site — for missing-middle single-family, duplex and small multifamily housing. | Construction | emerging | 2022 | val Undisclosed | 2026-09-09 | |
| Tutor Intelligence ↗ | emerging | Watertown, Mass. MIT-CSAIL spinout building a fleet of bimanual pick-and-pack robot workers for CPG kitting, priced as $12/hour Robots-as-a-Service and delivered to a customer site in 30 days — betting a centralized 'Ti0' vision-language-action model trained in its own 100-robot Data Factory 1 will out-learn every prior pick-and-pack rival before Amazon's Sequoia stack and Symbotic's ASRS eat the workflow from above. | Logistics / Supply chain | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed | 2026-09-09 | |
| Under Armour ↗ | at risk | The 1996 Georgetown-basement HeatGear T-shirt company that peaked at $5.27B and $53 a share in 2015 has now shrunk five straight years to a ~$5.0B FY26 (-4%) with FY27 guided lower again — and Kevin Plank, back as CEO since April 2024 with 65% super-voting control, is trying to premium-price his way out while On and Hoka each cross him going in the other direction. | Retail | incumbent | 1996 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-09 | |
| Consolidated Edison, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The 200-year-old NYC-area regulated utility (NYSE: ED) — CECONY plus Orange & Rockland — serving roughly 5.1 million electric, gas and steam customers across the five boroughs, Westchester, Rockland, Orange and adjacent New Jersey; a Dividend King with 52 consecutive years of raises, a $38B 2026-2030 capital plan, and a pure T&D franchise that sold its ~4 GW clean-energy arm to RWE for $6.8B in March 2023 to bet the company on regulated wires and pipes — right as the AI load-growth cycle went to hyperscaler geographies Con Ed cannot serve. | Energy / Regulated Electric, Gas & Steam Utility | incumbent | 1823 | val ~$40B | 2026-09-08 | |
| Erie Indemnity ↗ | at risk | The 1925 Pennsylvania attorney-in-fact that collects a 25%-of-premium management fee from the Erie Insurance Exchange — a reciprocal owned by its policyholders that is bearing a 103.9% Q2 2026 combined ratio while public shareholders keep clipping the fee. | Insurance | incumbent | 1925 | val ~$13.7B market cap | 2026-09-08 | |
| Locus Robotics ↗ | emerging | Wilmington, Mass. autonomous mobile robot maker that pioneered the collaborative pick-assist warehouse bot as a RaaS subscription — now with ~$180M ARR and ~4,000 bots in the field, but forced back to existing investors for a $41.6M Series G at a reported ~$1.35B valuation, down from the ~$2B mark of its 2022 Series F, while it bets its next act on the Locus Array manipulation platform against Amazon Robotics from above and Geek+ from below. | Logistics / Supply chain | emerging | 2014 | val ~$1.4B | 2026-09-08 | |
| Louisiana-Pacific Corporation ↗ | at risk | The 1972 Georgia-Pacific antitrust spin-out that survived clear-cut scandals, Ketchikan pulp criminal fines, and a rotten-siding class action to become the SmartSide engineered-wood-siding leader — now cycling through a nasty 2026 in which Q1 revenue collapsed 21% to $574M, Siding volumes fell 18% for the first time on record, and OSB flipped to an EBITDA loss. | Construction / Building Products | incumbent | 1972 | val ~$4.8B | 2026-09-08 | |
| NormanMax Insurance Holdings ↗ | emerging | The Miami-based parametric (re)insurance platform launched in 2023 by Universal Insurance Holdings' founder Bradley Meier, spanning a US E&S carrier, Lloyd's Syndicate 3939 (managed by Apollo), the New Paradigm and FloodFlash MGAs, and servicing entities across the US, Bermuda and Amsterdam — now in a Stonybrook-led 2026 equity capital raise after Lloyd's slashed its stamp capacity 72% (from £108M to £30M) following a 289% combined ratio in its 2024 debut year and an underwhelming 2025 that missed premium plan. | Insurance | emerging | 2023 | val Not disclosed. The Stonyb… | 2026-09-08 | |
| Odyssey Energy Solutions ↗ | emerging | A Boulder software marketplace stitching together 6,000+ solar installers and EPCs with development-finance capital across 50+ emerging markets — the digital plumbing that a $750M World Bank program in Nigeria and a 205% India acceleration are now running through, funded in September 2026 with $27M equity (Broadscale, FMO, Al Mada) plus $47M debt (BII, BIO, FEI, EEGF). | Energy | emerging | 2017 | val Undisclosed. No post-mone… | 2026-09-08 | |
| Publix Super Markets ↗ | at risk | The Lakeland, Florida, employee-owned grocer — 1,498 stores across eight Southeast states, $62.7B of FY2025 sales, no debt, and a private stock priced quarterly at $19.60 — just posted its rarest number: a Q1 2026 earnings decline of 21.5%, and started quietly closing stores again while Aldi swallows 200 Winn-Dixies in its home state. | Retail / Grocery | incumbent | 1930 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-08 | |
| UniUni ↗ | emerging | Gig-driver last-mile parcel delivery for cross-border discount e-commerce — the primary Canadian and US carrier for Shein, Temu, TikTok Shop and AliExpress, running roughly a million parcels a day through 100+ warehouses at price points UPS and FedEx cannot match. | Logistics / Supply chain | emerging | 2019 | val ~$1B | 2026-09-08 | |
| AutoNation ↗ | at risk | The Wayne Huizenga franchise-dealer roll-up that hit $27.6B in 2025 revenue across ~245 stores, watches Carvana out-register it on new Stellantis units, buys back stock hard enough that Bill Gates's Cascade Investment quietly grew from 20.1% to 21.1% of the float without buying a share — and just posted a Q2 2026 where new-vehicle gross profit per unit fell to $2,381 from $2,785 a year earlier. | Retail (Auto Dealers) | incumbent | 1996 | val ~$7B | 2026-09-07 | |
| Cowbell Cyber ↗ | emerging | The Pleasanton, California, cyber insurance MGA underwriting SMB and lower-middle-market policies with continuous, 1,000-signal risk scoring — with Zurich Insurance Group on its cap table since July 2024 and its own admitted carrier and reinsurance captive stitched underneath twenty-plus fronting and reinsurance partners. | Insurance (Cyber MGA) | emerging | 2019 | val ~$100M | 2026-09-07 | |
| GoodLeap ↗ | emerging | The Roseville, California point-of-sale lender that turned a mortgage brokerage into the largest residential-solar loan platform in the United States — $30B+ cumulative originations, 22 securitizations, and a business model wholly hostage to the 30% residential solar Investment Tax Credit that Congress killed in July 2025. | Energy (Solar / Residential Sustainability Finance) | emerging | 2003 | val ~$12B | 2026-09-07 | |
| JELD-WEN Holding ↗ | at risk | The 66-year-old Klamath Falls door and window manufacturer that Onex LBO'd in 2011, IPO'd at $23 in January 2027… sorry 2017, was forced to divest its Towanda doorskin plant after losing the Steves & Sons antitrust case, ended 2025 with $3.31B in revenue at 5.7x net leverage, and printed a $124M market cap at $2.27/share in September 2026 as Owens Corning-Masonite and MITER Brands consolidated the doors-and-windows category around it. | Construction / Building Products (Doors & Windows) | incumbent | 1960 | val ~$124M | 2026-09-07 | |
| Old Republic International Corporation ↗ | well positioned | The 103-year-old Chicago multi-line insurer running the No. 3 US title book, a fast-growing specialty P&C engine and a 45-year streak of dividend hikes — while the title franchise remains hostage to the mortgage cycle. | Insurance (Title / Specialty P&C) | incumbent | 1923 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-07 | |
| Reibus International ↗ | emerging | The Atlanta B2B online marketplace for industrial metals that raised $100M+ at a $750M SoftBank-led valuation in 2021, closed its metals marketplace in June 2025, and re-emerged as Reibus Logistics — a specialty flatbed and open-deck freight brokerage still burning through the residual cap table. | Supply Chain (Industrial Metals B2B Marketplace) | emerging | 2018 | val ~$750M | 2026-09-07 | |
| Sempra ↗ | well positioned | The San Diego-based utility holding company (NYSE: SRE) that owns SoCalGas + SDG&E in California, an 80.25% stake in Oncor in Texas, and — until the KKR/CPP deal closes in Q3 2026 — 70% of Sempra Infrastructure's Cameron/ECA/Port Arthur LNG franchise, remaking itself in 2025-2026 into an almost-pure regulated utility with a record $65B 2026-2030 capital plan and 11% projected rate-base CAGR. | Energy (Utilities + LNG Infrastructure) | incumbent | 1998 | val ~$0.1K | 2026-09-07 | |
| Simbe Robotics ↗ | emerging | The eleven-year-old South San Francisco robotics company selling Tally — a five-foot, LiDAR-and-RealSense shelf-scanning robot — into Wakefern, Schnucks, BJ's, SpartanNash, Albertsons and CarrefourSA on a Robotics-as-a-Service subscription reportedly starting near $2–4k per store per month, with $104M raised across three rounds and Goldman Sachs' Growth Equity arm underwriting the Series C at a more-than-tripled valuation. | Retail (Robotics / Shelf Intelligence) | emerging | 2014 | val Undisclosed. Simbe's own … | 2026-09-07 | |
| Costco Wholesale Corporation ↗ | well positioned | The $270B membership warehouse machine that runs on ~13% gross margin, ~4,000 SKUs, and a Kirkland private label that alone did ~$90B in 2025 — with a 92.2% US/Canada renewal rate and the first membership-fee hike in seven years now printing an incremental $1.33B of near-100%-margin fee income per quarter. | Retail / Membership Warehouse | incumbent | 1983 | val ~$420B | 2026-09-04 | |
| Cornerstone Building Brands ↗ | at risk | The CD&R-owned $5.4B North American exterior building products giant — Ply Gem siding, Silverline / Simonton / MI / Harvey windows, metal buildings — now four years into a $5.8B take-private with more than 90% of its creditors sitting on a February 2026 cooperation agreement while a softening single-family housing market compounds the pressure on a ~$1.5B secured-notes stack coupon-clipping at 8.75% and 9.50%. | Construction / Exterior Building Products (PE-owned) | incumbent | 2018 | val ~$5.8B | 2026-09-04 | |
| CVS Health Corporation ↗ | at risk | The $126B integrated pharmacy-PBM-insurer that raised 2026 guidance under new CEO David Joyner even as Caremark ceded PBM share to Express Scripts, Aetna took a Medicare Advantage star-ratings body blow, 900 stores went dark, activist Glenview took four board seats, and Amazon Pharmacy plus Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs kept eating the edges. | Retail / Pharmacy & Health Services | incumbent | 1963 | val ~$126.8B | 2026-09-04 | |
| Lio ↗ | emerging | The Munich-based YC S23 company (formerly askLio) selling agentic AI as a virtual procurement workforce — closed a $30M Series A led by a16z on March 5, 2026 with SV Angel, Harry Stebbings and YC participating, bringing total funding to $33M, on the back of Munich Re, Brose and Novozymes as reference customers and a claim of 100+ Fortune 500/Global 2000 enterprises managing billions of dollars in spend through Lio's agents. | Supply Chain / Procurement (AI) | emerging | 2023 | val ~$0.1K | 2026-09-04 | |
| Stand Insurance ↗ | emerging | The San Francisco startup underwriting the California and Florida homes State Farm, Allstate and Hartford abandoned — pricing wildfire and hurricane risk with a first-principles physics-plus-AI 'World Model' and pairing HO-5 policies with paid home-hardening plans, on Concert Specialty A- surplus-lines paper. | Insurance / Homeowners (Wildfire / High-Risk P&C) | emerging | 2024 | val Undisclosed at Series B. … | 2026-09-04 | |
| Sun King ↗ | emerging | The Nairobi-headquartered off-grid solar and PAYGO consumer-finance operator (formerly Greenlight Planet) that has reached 82M+ people with solar home systems across 40+ African and Asian markets, closed the sector's largest-ever Series D at $260M in April 2022 led by BeyondNetZero, and in November 2025 announced a $5.6B / 50M-kit / 200M-people 2030 plan requiring a further $1.3B of blended debt-and-equity — a plan that lives or dies on the receivables-securitisation machine Citi built for it in 2023 and 2025. | Energy / Distributed Solar (Off-grid / PAYGO) | emerging | 2007 | val ~$260M | 2026-09-04 | |
| The Hartford Insurance Group ↗ | well positioned | The 215-year-old Connecticut multi-line insurer that hit 19.4% ROE in 2025, rejected Chubb's $23B takeover in 2021, sold Hartford Funds to Wellington in June 2026 — and watched its Personal Insurance book shrink 7% in Q2 2026 as AARP-anchored direct auto lost ground to Progressive and GEICO. | Insurance (Commercial P&C / Personal Lines / Group Benefits) | incumbent | 1810 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-04 | |
| Vecna Robotics ↗ | emerging | The Waltham, Massachusetts autonomous-pallet-jack and warehouse-orchestration company that spun out of Vecna Technologies in 2018, closed a $100M Series C in June 2024 (with a $40M top-up onto the January 2022 Tiger Global-led $65M round), added a $14.5M insider bridge in November 2024 alongside naming ex-Motional CEO Karl Iagnemma as chief executive, and is trying to convert a decade of DARPA-adjacent R&D into a repeatable RaaS business selling case-picking and pallet-move automation to DHL, FedEx, GEODIS and Milton CAT — while cycling through four CEOs in six years and periodic layoffs. | Logistics / Warehouse Automation | emerging | 2018 | val Undisclosed but reported … | 2026-09-04 | |
| Aon ↗ | at risk | The $70B Dublin-domiciled global broker that spent $13.4B on NFP in 2024 to buy US middle-market growth, then in August 2026 doubled the bet with a $17B all-cash acquisition of USI from KKR — right as reinsurance rates cracked double-digit lower at 1/1/26 renewals and S&P cut its outlook to Negative. | Insurance (Broking / Reinsurance / Consulting) | incumbent | 1982 | val ~$70.2B | 2026-09-03 | |
| Axle ↗ | emerging | Y Combinator S22 'Plaid for insurance' clearinghouse that connects the customer's carrier login to a single API, cleared >US $100B in coverage across 4,000+ dealers, rental fleets, mortgage lenders and employers, and closed a US $17.5M Series A on August 11 2026 led by Base10 Partners. | Insurance / Data Infrastructure | emerging | 2022 | val Undisclosed | 2026-09-03 | |
| CSX Corporation ↗ | at risk | The 1980 Chessie + Seaboard merger that Hunter Harrison force-marched into Precision Scheduled Railroading in 2017 and left with a 55% operating ratio, now the last stand-alone Eastern Class I as Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern race to close America's first transcontinental — either the next M&A target for BNSF or CPKC or a stranded 21,000-mile network that just answered UP-NS with a coast-to-coast BNSF intermodal handshake. | Logistics / Rail Transportation | incumbent | 1980 | val ~$63B | 2026-09-03 | |
| Gridsight ↗ | emerging | Six-year-old Wollongong-founded AI capacity-management platform whose digital twin of a distribution network — fed by smart-meter data across 700,000 monitoring points on Endeavour Energy alone — let that DNSP double household solar export limits from 5 kW to 10 kW for 95% of the year, unlocked ~600 MW of additional rooftop solar and roughly A$100M of customer value, and now, after a US$26M Series B on September 1 2026 led by Insight Partners with Galvanize participating, is trying to sell the same math to Xcel Energy, Avangrid's United Illuminating and the rest of a US IOU sector planning ~US$1.3T of grid CapEx through 2030. | Energy / Grid Management (AI) | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed | 2026-09-03 | |
| MasTec, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | A 1969 Cuban-exile pole-and-wire contractor that leveraged 100-plus acquisitions into a $21.4B-backlog specialty-utility platform now trading at a ~35x forward P/E on the thesis that every AI data center in America needs a MasTec crew to plug it into the grid — and where the Mas family still leases their jet to the company. | Construction / Utility Infrastructure Services | incumbent | 1969 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-03 | |
| Medici Brands ↗ | emerging | Peter Rahal's post-RXBar house of better-for-you CPG brands — David Protein bars (28g protein, 150 calories, 0g sugar), a 30g-protein frozen dessert that sold out in 28 minutes on launch, and the newly launched HallPass 70-calorie candy line at Walmart — sitting on the proprietary EPG plant-fat platform Medici bought outright in May 2025 and now producing sales pace of ~US $300M in year two, valued at US $2.25B on a US $250M Series B co-led by Greenoaks and Valor on September 2 2026. | Retail / Consumer Packaged Goods (Food-Tech) | emerging | 2023 | val ~$2.3B | 2026-09-03 | |
| Tenderd ↗ | emerging | Dubai-headquartered heavy equipment fleet-management SaaS founded in 2018 by Arjun Mohan out of Y Combinator S18, pivoted from a rental marketplace into an AI-powered telematics platform that stitches OEM APIs, third-party devices and Tenderd-branded hardware into a single dashboard for construction, mining, energy and logistics fleets — 300+ customers across UAE and Saudi Arabia as of mid-2024, ~60 staff on LinkedIn (Sept 2026), and a US $30M Series A led by A.P. Moller Holding on June 11, 2024 that took cumulative funding to roughly US $36M (Tracxn, 2026). | Construction / Heavy Equipment Fleet Management | emerging | 2018 | val Undisclosed | 2026-09-03 | |
| V.F. Corporation ↗ | at risk | The 1899 Pennsylvania glove maker that became a lifestyle-apparel holdco of The North Face, Vans, Timberland and eleven other brands — now $4B in net debt, five years into a Vans decline that has taken the crown jewel from a $4.2B peak (FY2022) to ~$2.3B (FY2025), with ex-Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell selling Supreme, Dickies and everything else non-core to buy time to fix it. | Retail — apparel & footwear (branded portfolio holdco) | incumbent | 1899 | val ~$5.5B | 2026-09-03 | |
| Pace ↗ | emerging | An 'agentic process outsourcer' for insurance — AI agents that navigate carriers' internal apps, read documents, and make phone calls to run the back-office work insurers historically shipped to BPOs, priced by the workflow rather than the seat. | Insurance (AI Operations) | emerging | 2024 | val ~$375M | 2026-09-02 | |
| AECOM ↗ | well positioned | The 1990 Ashland spin-out that walked out of self-perform construction in 2020, rebuilt itself as a $27.8B-backlog professional-services pure play, and just paid $390M for a Norwegian AI startup that claims to cut engineering time 90% — either the biggest AEC-industry AI bet or the moment the labor-pyramid business model started eating itself. | Construction / Engineering & Infrastructure Services | incumbent | 1990 | val ~$8.8B | 2026-09-02 | |
| Ambrook ↗ | emerging | AI-native financial management for the American 'real economy' — bookkeeping, bill pay, wallet and spending cards for farms, ranches, trucking fleets, contractors and property managers that QuickBooks never really fit. | Supply Chain / Fintech (Real Economy) | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed at Series B | 2026-09-02 | |
| August Robotics ↗ | emerging | Nine-year-old Hong Kong / Melbourne construction robotics company whose autonomous mobile robot for downward drilling — sold as DALE through Stanley Black & Decker's DEWALT brand — cut a hyperscaler's data-center floor-prep schedule from eight-to-nine weeks down to seven-to-nine days, and whose original Lionel exhibition-floor-marking robot has now laid more than one million marks across five continents; the pivot from event halls into AI infrastructure triggered the May 21 2026 US $30M Series B led by Big Pi Ventures. | Construction / Robotics | emerging | 2017 | val Undisclosed | 2026-09-02 | |
| Blank Street ↗ | emerging | The venture-backed coffee chain that used $50K Swiss espresso robots and 350-square-foot kiosks to compress Starbucks' cost structure — now $650M and pushing onto Beverly Hills real estate that has never been kind to challengers. | Retail / Ecommerce (Specialty Coffee) | emerging | 2020 | val $650M | 2026-09-02 | |
| Marsh McLennan ↗ | at risk | The 120-year-old inventor of modern insurance broking — now a $92B four-legged risk, strategy and people conglomerate (Marsh, Guy Carpenter, Mercer, Oliver Wyman) — that just spent $7.75B on McGriff to buy back US mid-market growth, then watched Wall Street downgrade the stock as organic decelerated to ~4% into a softening P&C and reinsurance rate cycle. | Insurance (Broking / Consulting) | incumbent | 1905 | val ~$92B | 2026-09-02 | |
| MSC Industrial Direct Co., Inc. ↗ | at risk | The 1941 Sid Tool Company that Sid Jacobson founded from a Little Italy storefront with $4,100 is now the No. 3 US MRO distributor at $3.77B FY2025 revenue — a metalworking-heavy technical distributor visibly losing ground to Grainger's scale, Fastenal's on-plant embed, and Amazon Business's price transparency, with a 2023 dual-class collapse behind it and a January 2026 CEO handoff from founder-family scion Erik Gershwind to outsider Martina McIsaac as the pivot point. | Supply Chain / Industrial Distribution (MRO) | incumbent | 1941 | val ~$6.7B | 2026-09-02 | |
| RH (Restoration Hardware) ↗ | at risk | Corte Madera luxury home retailer that Gary Friedman turned from a near-bankrupt hardware kitsch chain into a $3.7B market cap gallery-and-hospitality brand, then levered its balance sheet with $2.2B of debt-funded buybacks at prices double today's — now navigating a five-year US housing freeze, a ~$45M Q1 tariff hit, and a European capex program the market has yet to underwrite. | Retail / Home Furnishings | incumbent | 1979 | val ~$3.7B | 2026-09-02 | |
| Faye ↗ | emerging | Tel Aviv / New York AI-powered whole-trip travel insurance startup that on August 5, 2026 raised a $50M Series C led by Madrona at a reported ~$500M valuation, bringing cumulative funding to $100M and revenue to a reported ~$200M ARR — with the differentiator that AI approves and pays claims mid-trip in minutes, and humans handle the denials. | Insurance | emerging | 2019 | val ~$500M | 2026-09-01 | |
| Iceye ↗ | emerging | The Finnish (Espoo) SAR-satellite operator that put the world's first sub-100kg radar satellite in orbit in January 2018, now runs the largest commercial X-band constellation on the planet (76 satellites launched by July 2026), and closed a June 9, 2026 Series F led by General Atlantic that took reported total round size above €1B at a >€10B valuation — split between a €1.7B Bundeswehr contract via Rheinmetall on one side and Swiss Re / Munich Re parametric-flood partnerships on the other. | Insurance / Energy / Climate (Satellite Observation) | emerging | 2014 | val Over €10B post-money at t… | 2026-09-01 | |
| NavVis ↗ | emerging | Munich TUM-spinout that raised $85M Series D on August 6, 2026 led by The Jordan Company to make itself the spatial-data foundation layer for factories, refineries and construction sites — the reality-capture rails NVIDIA Omniverse, SAP and Autodesk plug into before any physical-AI or humanoid deployment can start. | Construction / Industrial Spatial Data | emerging | 2013 | val Undisclosed at the Series… | 2026-09-01 | |
| RLI Corp ↗ | at risk | Peoria, Illinois specialty insurer that grew out of a 1965 contact-lens insurance start-up into a compounder with 30 straight years of underwriting profit — and whose Q2 2026 casualty combined ratio spiked to 99.3%, the first serious crack in the record. | Insurance (Specialty / E&S) | incumbent | 1965 | val ~$5.9-6.0B market cap | 2026-09-01 | |
| TFI International ↗ | at risk | Alain Bédard's 30-year Montreal roll-up — 200-plus tuck-ins compounded into a top-tier North American carrier — whose 2021 $800M grab of UPS Freight has become the anchor dragging LTL operating ratios into the mid-90s while Old Dominion sits near 74%. | Logistics / Trucking (LTL and Truckload) | incumbent | 1996 | val ~$13.2B | 2026-09-01 | |
| Tilt ↗ | emerging | London-based live-auction app founded in 2021 by two early Revolut alumni that spent 2025 quietly becoming the default fashion-first live-shopping destination in the UK, Italy, Spain and Poland, and on June 2, 2026 announced a $26M round led by TQ Ventures with Vinted Ventures joining alongside Balderton, Earlybird and Seedcamp — bringing the total to over $50M and turning the company into Europe's clearest live-commerce challenger to Whatnot and TikTok Shop. | Ecommerce / Retail | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed. Caplight tra… | 2026-09-01 | |
| Torrid Holdings ↗ | at risk | Sycamore Partners' mall-anchored plus-size specialty chain, IPO'd at $21 in July 2021 and trading near $1 by mid-2026, closing 171 stores while comps drop and lender-friendly digital pure-plays and mass extended sizes compress it from both sides. | Retail / Apparel | incumbent | 2001 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-01 | |
| Wolfspeed ↗ | at risk | The US silicon-carbide pioneer that spent $6B+ building 200mm capacity for an EV wave that arrived late — filed Chapter 11 on June 30, 2025, emerged September 30, 2025 with 70% less debt and 95% of the equity in creditors' hands, and continues to miss estimates as Infineon and Chinese entrants pull ahead on cost. | Energy / Power Semiconductors | incumbent | 1987 | val ~$0K | 2026-09-01 | |
| Buildforce ↗ | emerging | The Austin- and Houston-based tech-enabled electrician staffing platform that raised a $10M Series A on July 28, 2026, led by Saepio Capital, to convert a fragmented, phone-and-referral commercial-electrical labor market into a W-2 marketplace priced to sit between union halls and PeopleReady. | Construction / Workforce | emerging | 2019 | val ~$10M | 2026-08-31 | |
| FreightCar America ↗ | at risk | The 125-year-old Johnstown-Bethlehem coal-car builder that closed its US plants, moved everything to Castaños, Mexico, took a majority-PIMCO capital structure — and just watched Q2 2026 gross margin collapse from 15.0% to 5.5% as it took $2.2M of workforce realignment costs against a #3 slot behind Trinity and Greenbrier. | Logistics / Rail Manufacturing | incumbent | 1901 | val ~$0.1K | 2026-08-31 | |
| Gravis Robotics ↗ | emerging | Four-year-old Zurich autonomy company that spun out of Marco Hutter's ETH Robotic Systems Lab (the HEAP walking excavator, the In-Situ Fabricator) and, on August 17, 2026, announced a $200M all-SoftBank Series A at a reported $1B post-money — the largest Series A in construction-robotics history — to sell a machine-agnostic retrofit kit (Gravis Rack) and operator co-pilot (Gravis Copilot) that turn Caterpillar, Volvo, Develon, Hitachi, JCB and John Deere excavators into autonomous or semi-autonomous machines. | Construction / Robotics | emerging | 2022 | val ~$1B | 2026-08-31 | |
| Hike Medical ↗ | emerging | San Francisco healthtech that raised $22.5M in combined seed + Series A on August 25, 2026 to turn orthotics, prosthetics and DME — a category still routed by fax, foam boxes and phone calls — into a single referral-to-dispense platform, with an in-house 3D-printing farm in Peoria to make the devices. | Supply Chain / Medical DME | emerging | 2022 | val ~$0.1K | 2026-08-31 | |
| Leslie's, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The 63-year-old US pool-supplies retailer — 900+ stores, a chlorine-and-water-testing chain built by Phil Leslie in 1963 that L Catterton and GIC took private in 2017 and IPO'd at a $3.2B EV in 2020 — is now a penny stock closing 80-90 stores, carrying ~$757M of debt against ~$61M of EBITDA, and openly weighing Chapter 11. | Retail | incumbent | 1963 | val ~$4B | 2026-08-31 | |
| Selective Insurance Group ↗ | at risk | The Branchville, NJ super-regional commercial P&C carrier that turned 99 years old in 2025 and now has to prove the middle-market book its 1,600 independent agencies write can outrun the social-inflation trend that already forced $311M of casualty reserve strengthening in 2024. | Insurance | incumbent | 1926 | val ~$5.5B | 2026-08-31 | |
| Universal Logistics Holdings ↗ | at risk | Warren, Michigan trucking, intermodal drayage and auto-plant contract-logistics holding controlled ~72% by the Moroun family of Ambassador Bridge fame — a $1.5B-revenue mixed-asset carrier whose 2025 was capped by an $81M intermodal impairment, a Q3 restatement, and a Q2 2026 trucking-segment margin compressed to 4.5%. | Logistics | incumbent | 1932 | val ~$0K | 2026-08-31 | |
| Voya Energy ↗ | emerging | A one-year-old California startup that raised $35M Series A in August 2026 (on top of a $13M November 2025 seed) to convert low-grade scrap aluminum into onsite 2 MW backup power for data centers via a metal-air electrochemical generator — reviving a category, aluminum-fuel electricity, that has been publicly promised and publicly missed for the better part of half a century. | Energy | emerging | 2025 | val Undisclosed. Neither roun… | 2026-08-31 | |
| Lennar Corporation ↗ | at risk | The second-largest US homebuilder — a 72-year-old Miami public company that in the twelve months after spinning off its land bank to Millrose Properties in February 2025 has watched incentives climb to 12.9% of ASP, home-sales revenue slip 2% year over year in Q2 fiscal 2026 to a $7.9B miss, gross margin collapse from 22.1% to 17.7% and full-year fiscal 2026 delivery guidance cut to 82,000-83,000 homes. | Construction | incumbent | 1954 | val ~$0K | 2026-08-28 | |
| Accelerant Holdings ↗ | well positioned | The specialty-insurance marketplace that Thoma Bravo is taking private for over $4B one year after its IPO — $20.25 a share, below the July 2025 IPO price of $21 — despite Q2 2026 revenue of $356.9M and 62.9% YoY growth. | Insurance | incumbent | 2018 | val ~$4B | 2026-08-28 | |
| Breedr ↗ | emerging | The Texas-by-way-of-London livestock software company that raised a $27M Series B on August 27, 2026 led by Partech's impact fund to stitch a mobile-first cattle-management app, an AI-verified marketplace and an embedded cattle-finance fund into a single closed-loop system for a US beef supply chain where four packers control 85% of slaughter capacity and the herd just hit its smallest level since 1951. | Supply Chain / Beef Supply Chain Software | emerging | 2018 | val Undisclosed. | 2026-08-28 | |
| Buzz Solutions ↗ | emerging | Palo Alto AI grid-inspection platform that closed a $20M Series A in August 2026 led by S3 Ventures — PowerAI ingests drone, helicopter, ground and fixed-camera imagery from transmission lines, distribution networks, substations and utility-scale solar and returns georeferenced defect lists in about 0.6 seconds per image, versus the 1-2 minutes utility field engineers still spend on manual review. | Energy / Grid Inspection Software | emerging | 2017 | val Undisclosed as of August … | 2026-08-28 | |
| CivilGrid ↗ | emerging | Six-year-old San Francisco startup that raised a $26M Series A on August 27, 2026 to turn the messy patchwork of buried-utility maps, easements, environmental overlays and land-ownership records into a single map layer that civil engineers, developers and utility owners plan against — a workflow that today runs on phone calls, PDFs and 811 tickets. | Construction / Infrastructure Software | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed. Series A clo… | 2026-08-28 | |
| FedEx Freight ↗ | at risk | The largest US less-than-truckload carrier by revenue — spun out of FedEx Corp on June 1, 2026 and now trading as NYSE:FDXF at roughly $22.6B of equity, ~$26.7B of enterprise value, and a structural operating-ratio gap of ~15-20 points to Old Dominion that the standalone company has to close on its own. | Logistics | incumbent | 2001 | val ~$22.6B | 2026-08-28 | |
| Walmart ↗ | well positioned | The $700B-revenue Bentonville incumbent whose Aug 20 2026 Q2 print — US comps of 2.6% versus 3.5% expected, Q3 and FY27 EPS guidance below the Street, and a ~6% share drop — put the market's newest question about the company on the tape: with Walmart Connect ads compounding 40%+ and Walmart+ past 30M members, is the core US supercenter comp finally being nibbled away by Costco, Aldi, Amazon, Temu, Shein and TikTok Shop simultaneously? | Retail | incumbent | 1962 | val ~$830B | 2026-08-28 | |
| Yardstik ↗ | emerging | The Minneapolis workforce-trust platform betting that a single point-in-time background check is a broken model — a six-year-old company that raised a $30M Series B on August 27, 2026 led by Harbert Growth Partners to sell gig marketplaces, staffing firms, and logistics operators continuous post-hire monitoring of criminal records, driving records, license and insurance expirations, and OIG exclusion lists. | Logistics / Workforce Trust Software | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed. The Series B… | 2026-08-28 | |
| Emerald AI ↗ | emerging | The Washington DC unicorn — a 22-month-old software company that raised $150M Series A at a $1.05B valuation on August 25, 2026 to sell hyperscalers, colocation operators and utilities a workload-scheduling layer that lets AI data centers cut power 25% for hours on grid-stress days while keeping training and inference online, unlocking capacity that would otherwise sit stuck behind seven-year interconnection queues. | Energy / Data-Center Grid Flexibility Software | emerging | 2024 | val ~$1.1B | 2026-08-27 | |
| ArcBest ↗ | at risk | The unionized 103-year-old Fort Smith LTL that missed its own once-in-a-generation windfall — Old Dominion, Saia and XPO took most of Yellow's capacity, ABF Freight took a 97.3% operating ratio into Q1 2026 and a 44% year-over-year profit collapse. | Logistics / Less-Than-Truckload + Asset-Light Brokerage | incumbent | 1923 | val ~$0K | 2026-08-27 | |
| Fluxco ↗ | emerging | The Austin-based digital transformer broker Brian Tochman started after leaving Trust Ventures, promising to compress 100-plus-week transformer lead times by matching utility specs against 150+ global OEMs — and to run the full EPC job from spec parse to concrete pad — freshly seed-funded with $26M co-led by 8VC and Congruent Ventures in a market where a single 300 MVA unit sitting in the queue can hold up a hyperscaler campus for three years. | Construction / Grid Infrastructure Procurement | emerging | 2025 | val Undisclosed. The August 2… | 2026-08-27 | |
| InRisk Labs ↗ | emerging | The Ahmedabad-based climate insurtech that combined a state-owned agricultural-insurance CRO, a former AIC of India chairman and a data-science founder to build EarthRe, the first locally incorporated reinsurer in India's GIFT City, and raised a $27M Series A at ~$70M post co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Northpoint Capital to underwrite parametric extreme-heat, cyclone, monsoon, crop, marine cargo and motor risk across India and the broader Global South. | Insurance / Climate Reinsurance | emerging | 2024 | val ~$70M | 2026-08-27 | |
| Malachyte ↗ | emerging | Ex-Spotify recommendations team building 'Vector AI' — a real-time behavioral personalization engine for ecommerce that reads hovers, clicks, scrolls and search refinements to predict shopper intent without cookies or logins, live on Shopify since June 2026 with a $10M Bessemer/Gradient seed. | Ecommerce / Retail | emerging | 2024 | val Undisclosed. The August 6… | 2026-08-27 | |
| Owens Corning ↗ | at risk | The pink-insulation and asphalt-shingle powerhouse that just spent 2024-2026 pivoting from a diversified industrial into a pure branded-building-products bet — right as roofing volume softened, the Masonite doors deal took a $1.2B impairment, and net earnings from continuing operations fell 85% year-over-year in Q1 2026. | Construction | incumbent | 1938 | val ~$11.9B | 2026-08-27 | |
| The Southern Company ↗ | well positioned | The Atlanta-based Southeast utility holding — Georgia Power, Alabama Power and Mississippi Power on the electric side, Southern Company Gas across four states — that just finished the only newly-built US nuclear reactors in a generation (Vogtle 3 and 4) and is now converting a 17 GW contracted hyperscaler pipeline, including a 3.2 GW 25-year OpenAI deal, into regulated rate base under a Georgia PSC that lets it earn up to 11.9% ROE. | Energy / Regulated Electric & Gas Utility | incumbent | 1945 | val ~$95B market cap | 2026-08-27 | |
| Whirlpool Corporation ↗ | at risk | The 115-year-old name that defined US appliances — squeezed by LG and Samsung at the top, Midea and Hisense at the bottom, softer housing turnover in the middle, and $2B of new secured debt tightening the neck. | Retail | incumbent | 1911 | val ~$3B | 2026-08-27 | |
| Old Dominion Freight Line ↗ | well positioned | The Congdon family's 92-year-old less-than-truckload carrier that turned service quality into an industry-best 70.1% operating ratio, a wide moat, and a ~$41B market cap — and just watched Yellow's collapse permanently remove a tenth of LTL capacity. | Logistics / Less-Than-Truckload | incumbent | 1934 | val ~$41.8B market cap | 2026-08-26 | |
| Digs ↗ | emerging | AI-powered platform for residential builders — pre-construction estimates, blueprint collaboration, homeowner handoff and warranty — now Builders FirstSource's default AI stack across a 140,000-builder distribution book. | Construction / Homebuilder Software | emerging | 2022 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-26 | |
| Exelon Corporation ↗ | well positioned | The nation's largest pure-play regulated transmission and distribution utility — six state-franchised electric and gas companies (ComEd, PECO, BGE, Pepco, Delmarva, ACE) serving 10.7M customers across IL/PA/MD/DC/DE/NJ — with a $41.7B 2026-2029 capital plan pointed at PJM data-center load, a 25 GW data-center interconnection pipeline (Q2 2026), and 5-7% EPS CAGR guidance through 2029; the tail is affordability (PECO's April 2026 $510M rate-case withdrawal) and the ComEd bribery DPA hangover. | Energy / Regulated Utility | incumbent | 2000 | val ~$46B market cap | 2026-08-26 | |
| GameStop ↗ | at risk | The 1984 Babbage's-lineage US mall video-game retailer — down to 1,598 US stores as of January 31, 2026 after closing 727 in FY2025 alone, FY2025 revenue $3.63B (-5% YoY) with hardware still 50.7% of a shrinking mix, but sitting on $8.7B of cash, marketable securities and 4,710 bitcoins (~$528.6M) as of Q2 FY2026 after Ryan Cohen used the meme-stock windfall to reinvent GME as a hybrid collectibles-retailer/bitcoin-treasury-and-warrant machine. | Retail / Consumer Electronics | incumbent | 1984 | val ~$8.1B | 2026-08-26 | |
| Nauta ↗ | emerging | AI-native logistics orchestration platform sold to importers — a control tower that unifies ERP, carrier, customs and warehouse data so import operators run one dashboard instead of thirty email threads per container. | Logistics / Supply Chain Orchestration | emerging | 2024 | val undisclosed | 2026-08-26 | |
| RockRose Risk ↗ | emerging | The Napa wildfire brokerage Andrew Engler founded after handing Kettle to a new CEO, now raising $12.5M to buy tree trimmers and roofers and become the vertically integrated middleman that turns mitigation work into admitted-market insurance in California, Colorado and Nevada. | Insurance / Wildfire Brokerage | emerging | 2024 | val Undisclosed. Neither the … | 2026-08-26 | |
| Rundoo ↗ | emerging | An AI-first system of record for 500+ independent paint, hardware, lawn & garden and farm & feed stores — betting a vertical SaaS wedge can migrate the mom-and-pop supply base off Epicor and ECI before the incumbents ship agents of their own. | Retail / Building Supply POS | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed on the Aug 20… | 2026-08-26 | |
| Zywave ↗ | at risk | The Milwaukee-born PE roll-up of front-office insurance broker tools — nine acquisitions in five years, a stack that ends everywhere except the agency management system Applied Systems owns, and a wall of AI-native attackers moving up the workflow. | Insurance / Broker Software | incumbent | 1995 | val ~$0.8K | 2026-08-26 | |
| Bilt Rewards ↗ | emerging | The rent-payment loyalty program that talked itself into a $10.75B mark by convincing Wells Fargo to underwrite ~$120M of annual losses — and now has to reprice the whole model without them. | Retail / Consumer Loyalty & Payments | emerging | 2021 | val $3.25B | 2026-08-25 | |
| CarMax ↗ | at risk | The largest US used-car retailer — 256 superstores, 780,684 retail used units and ~$26B revenue in the fiscal year ended February 28, 2026, only ~3.6% share of the 0-10-year vehicle market, a $16.4B captive auto-finance book showing rising loss provisions on 2022-23 vintages, and a brand-new outsider CEO (Keith Barr, ex-IHG, started March 16, 2026) inheriting a share-losing incumbent whose stock nonetheless ripped ~50% in 2026 on hopes his four-pillar cost-and-pricing reset can defend the franchise against Carvana's ~43% unit growth. | Retail / Used Cars | incumbent | 1993 | val ~$8.9B | 2026-08-25 | |
| Cover Genius ↗ | emerging | Sydney-founded embedded insurance platform whose XCover API and >60-country licence stack quietly underwrite protection inside Booking.com, Uber, Klarna, Ryanair, eBay and dozens more marketplaces — the largest pure-play distribution engine in a category BCG says grows from $13B to $70B+ GWP by 2030, now scaling on Vista Credit Partners debt at a $1.9B mark. | Insurance / Embedded | emerging | 2014 | val $1.9B | 2026-08-25 | |
| Enter ↗ | emerging | The São Paulo legal-AI company running mass litigation for Brazil's biggest banks and airlines — Latin America's first AI unicorn, 32 months after founding. | Legal / Litigation AI (Brazil) | emerging | 2023 | val ~$1.2B | 2026-08-25 | |
| Handle ↗ | emerging | Payment compliance and credit-ops software for construction's back office — preliminary notices, lien waivers, statutory tracking, and integrated payments, sold to the credit teams at the largest material suppliers in the US. | Construction / Fintech | emerging | 2018 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-25 | |
| Odeko ↗ | emerging | The overnight-delivery, one-portal supply chain for 16,000 independent coffee shops — betting SMB cafe wholesale is defensible before Sysco or US Foods notices the density. | Retail / SMB Wholesale & Supply | emerging | 2019 | val Not officially disclosed | 2026-08-25 | |
| The Sherwin-Williams Company ↗ | well positioned | The 1866 Cleveland paint pioneer that is the only major architectural coatings player to own its distribution — ~4,900 company-operated stores in North America selling under a single Pro-first franchise, 46 straight years of dividend hikes, 14-of-15 quarters of gross-margin expansion, and share continuing to move its way even as the Home Depot/Behr Pro push and PPG's price cuts crank up in 2025-2026. | Construction / Paint & Coatings | incumbent | 1866 | val ~$0.1K | 2026-08-25 | |
| Wesco International, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The 1922 Westinghouse distribution arm that PE flipped twice, IPO'd in 1999, and used a $4.5B all-in 2020 Anixter merger to bulk up to a $23.5B electrical, data-comm and utility distributor — now riding a data-center backlog that camouflages how exposed the rest of the middle is to Amazon Business, procurement-platform disintermediation, and manufacturer-direct programs. | Logistics / Distribution | incumbent | 1922 | val ~$14B | 2026-08-25 | |
| Xcel Energy ↗ | well positioned | A Minneapolis-based four-state regulated utility (~3.9M electric, ~2.1M gas customers) whose $60-70B 2026-2030 capex plan and ~$56B → ~$94B rate-base ramp position it as one of the cleanest AI-power beneficiaries — while the $640M Marshall Fire settlement, the Texas AG's Smokehouse Creek suit, and the MISO/SPP interconnection queue backlog remind investors the moat is regulated, not automatic. | Energy / Regulated Utility | incumbent | 1909 | val ~$50.4B market cap | 2026-08-25 | |
| Attentive ↗ | emerging | The SMS-marketing platform that made 90-character texts the highest-ROI channel in ecommerce — and priced itself, at $7B, as if that channel would compound forever. | Ecommerce / Text Message Marketing SaaS | emerging | 2016 | val $7B | 2026-08-21 | |
| Aurora Solar ↗ | emerging | San Francisco solar design and sales SaaS — ~$523.5M raised across four rounds through a Feb 2022 Series D at $4B, market-share leader inside the 80% of top-75 US residential installers, and now three layoffs and a founder-CEO change in two years as the 30% residential ITC dies Dec 31, 2025 under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. | Energy / Residential Solar SaaS | emerging | 2013 | val $4B | 2026-08-21 | |
| Fluor Corporation ↗ | well positioned | The 114-year-old Swiss-immigrant California carpenter's oil-and-gas EPC that walked itself into a 2019-2022 fixed-price near-death, sold the NuScale SMR stake for ~$2B in 2025-2026, took an A$1.07B Santos judgment in August 2025, and rebuilt an $26.9B backlog that is now 85% reimbursable and pointed at semiconductor fabs, LNG trains, gas-fired power for data centers, and Department of Energy nuclear cleanup. | Construction / Global Engineering & Construction (EPC) | incumbent | 1912 | val ~$7B market cap | 2026-08-21 | |
| Halliburton ↗ | at risk | The 107-year-old Duncan-Oklahoma cementer that Jeff Miller has been re-tilting toward international and offshore since 2019, still the #2 US pressure pumper by fleet count, now shipping ZEUS all-electric frac spreads outside North America for the first time (YPF / Vaca Muerta, Q4 2026) — and running a 14% consolidated operating margin at $5.71B Q2 2026 revenue while SLB pulls ahead on digital ARR and Baker Hughes pivots to LNG. | Energy / Oilfield Services | incumbent | 1919 | val ~$0K | 2026-08-21 | |
| Kettle ↗ | emerging | The 2020 San Francisco insurtech that built a 140-million-parameter deep-learning wildfire model, launched parametric reinsurance on California brush before the Palisades and Eaton fires, replaced its own co-founder-CEO with a Root reinsurance veteran in late 2024, and now bets a ~23-person MGA can convert a modeling edge into durable capacity from PartnerRe and RLI before Munich Re, Swiss Re or a state-sponsored public model out-Kettles Kettle. | Insurance / Parametric Wildfire Reinsurance & MGA | emerging | 2020 | val ~$30M | 2026-08-21 | |
| Kodiak AI (Kodiak Robotics) ↗ | emerging | Mountain View autonomous-trucking company hauling proppant driverless for Atlas Energy in the Permian and chasing highway long-haul — now public via a September 2025 SPAC at a $2.5B enterprise value, but sitting on ~$185M of pro forma cash against $160-170M of 2026 free cash burn and racing Aurora, Waabi, and Torc/Daimler to defensible unit economics. | Logistics / Autonomous Trucking | emerging | 2018 | val ~$2.5B | 2026-08-21 | |
| US Foods Holding Corp. ↗ | at risk | The #2 US broadline foodservice distributor — ~$39.4B FY2025 revenue, ~30,000 employees, 70+ distribution centers, 90+ CHEF'STORE cash-and-carry units — a KKR/CD&R post-LBO IPO whose sales growth has trailed Sysco for a decade, whose 4.9% adjusted EBITDA margin still lags peers, and whose September 2025 attempt to merge with Performance Food Group collapsed under antitrust and activist crossfire from Sachem Head. | Retail / Foodservice Distribution | incumbent | 1989 | val ~$22B | 2026-08-21 | |
| Willis Towers Watson (WTW) ↗ | at risk | The #3 global insurance broker — a 1828 London commodities-brokerage that merged its way into a 46,900-person, 140-country consultancy-and-broker hybrid, still trailing Marsh McLennan and Aon on organic growth, margin and M&A firepower five years after the DOJ blew up its Aon merger and cost it Willis Re. | Insurance / Global Insurance Broker & Advisory | incumbent | 1828 | val ~$31.7B market cap . | 2026-08-21 | |
| Cintas Corporation ↗ | well positioned | The 97-year-old Cincinnati rag-cleaner that Doc Farmer's grandson turned into a ~$80B NASDAQ compounder — 490 facilities, ~22,900 route trucks, a 42-year dividend growth streak, and a pending $5.5B UniFirst deal that would leave one true national uniform-rental competitor standing. | Supply Chain / Uniform Rental & Facility Services | incumbent | 1929 | val ~$80B market cap | 2026-08-20 | |
| Genuine Parts Company ↗ | at risk | The 97-year-old Atlanta distributor of NAPA Auto Parts and Motion Industries — a Dividend King with 69 straight annual dividend hikes through 2026 whose auto business has been comping several points behind O'Reilly for two straight years, drew a $1B+ Elliott stake in September 2025, an unsolicited $10B O'Reilly bid for NAPA in July 2026, and is now separating NAPA and Motion into two public companies by early 2027. | Retail / Auto Aftermarket and Industrial MRO Distribution | incumbent | 1928 | val ~$18.6B | 2026-08-20 | |
| Kinsale Capital Group ↗ | well positioned | The Richmond, VA excess & surplus specialist Michael Kehoe founded in 2009 with Moelis Capital backing — IPO'd 2016 at $16, ran seven straight years of 30%+ premium growth on an in-house tech stack, and now has to prove a mid-70s combined ratio and 25%+ ROE can survive a softening E&S property cycle. | Insurance | incumbent | 2009 | val ~$7.5-8.1B market cap | 2026-08-20 | |
| Nuvocargo ↗ | emerging | AI-forward US-Mexico cross-border freight forwarder and customs broker with an owned Mexican customs license — ~$75M raised through a $250M Series B (June 2023, QED-led), nearshoring tailwind, and a 2025 Trump tariff regime that is either a moat or a moat-breaker. | Logistics / Cross-Border Freight & Customs Brokerage | emerging | 2018 | val $250M post-money | 2026-08-20 | |
| Occidental Petroleum ↗ | well positioned | The 1920 California oil company Vicki Hollub bet the balance sheet on to steal Anadarko from Chevron in 2019, sold to Berkshire Hathaway a chunk of itself twice over — first as $10B of 8% preferred and 80M warrants, then as the entire OxyChem chlor-alkali business for $9.7B cash on 2 Jan 2026 — and is now a Permian pure-play E&P with ~26.5% Berkshire common ownership and a $1.3B direct air capture plant nobody else has the CO2-injection reservoirs to run economically. | Energy / Oil and Gas Exploration and Production | incumbent | 1920 | val ~$0.1K | 2026-08-20 | |
| Overhaul ↗ | emerging | Austin- and Dundalk-based supply chain risk management platform for high-value in-transit freight — GPS-plus-humans intervention model, $215M raised through Jan 2025 plus a $105M Springcoast-led Series C in Aug 2025, and a January 2024 SensiGuard bolt-on that gave it the largest cargo-security ops footprint in the category. | Supply chain / cargo security & in-transit visibility | emerging | 2016 | val Not publicly disclosed. S… | 2026-08-20 | |
| Palmetto ↗ | emerging | Charlotte-based residential-solar marketplace and financing platform — $500M+ equity through 2023, $1.2B in project capital plus $706M of 2025 ABS to fund the LightReach solar-as-a-service book, betting the challenger channel model survives the Dec 31, 2025 residential ITC cliff that the One Big Beautiful Bill wrote into law. | Energy / Residential Solar & Clean Energy Platform | emerging | 2010 | val >$1B | 2026-08-20 | |
| Vouch ↗ | emerging | San Francisco startup insurance broker for high-growth technology companies — full-stack MGA-plus-carrier from 2018 through 2025, then sold its Corix MGA and Vouch Insurance Company to Hiscox in Aug 2025 and pivoted to an AI-forward digital broker under a multi-year Hiscox distribution deal. | Insurance / startup and technology commercial P&C | emerging | 2018 | val ~$550M | 2026-08-20 | |
| Chubb ↗ | well positioned | The 1985 Bermuda-startup ACE Limited that bought the historic Chubb name in a $28.3B 2016 merger, now a ~$135B market-cap global P&C insurer that Warren Buffett's Berkshire has quietly built into an ~$11B position — running an 81.2% Q4 2025 combined ratio while eating a $1.47B California wildfire loss in Q1 2025. | Insurance | incumbent | 1985 | val ~$135B market cap | 2026-08-19 | |
| Coterie Insurance ↗ | emerging | Cincinnati-based API-first MGA for small-commercial P&C — instant quote-and-bind for BOP, general and professional liability at sub-$50K premium accounts, distributed through independent agents, wholesalers and embedded partners. | Insurance | emerging | 2018 | val Undisclosed at the Series… | 2026-08-19 | |
| Hadrian Automation ↗ | emerging | Software-defined precision-parts factories for aerospace and defense — Torrance, Mesa and a 2.2M-sq-ft Navy submarine plant in Alabama — now valued at $7.87B on a Series D that only prices well if the factories-as-a-service model actually runs at prime scale. | Construction / Aerospace Manufacturing | emerging | 2020 | val $7.87B post-money | 2026-08-19 | |
| Matson, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The 144-year-old US-flag Pacific ocean carrier whose Jones Act franchise on the Hawaii, Alaska and Guam lanes prints reliable cash while a premium China Expedited service catches every rate spike the international container market throws off — including the one Red Sea diversions have been throwing off since late 2023. | Logistics / Ocean Shipping | incumbent | 1882 | val ~$4-5B market cap | 2026-08-19 | |
| Ross Stores, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The perennial No. 2 in American off-price — 2,328 stores across Ross Dress for Less and dd's DISCOUNTS, an $81B market cap, and a first quarter fiscal 2026 that printed the largest comp of its 40-year history days after a new CEO from Boot Barn took the seat Barbara Rentler held for eleven years. | Retail / Off-Price Apparel | incumbent | 1982 | val ~$81.7B | 2026-08-19 | |
| Slope ↗ | emerging | AI-underwritten B2B net terms and financing embedded into merchant checkout and invoicing — $77M equity plus $175M debt raised, JP Morgan Payments as lead investor and lender, now powering credit for Amazon sellers and Fiserv's SnapPay. | Ecommerce / B2B Payments | emerging | 2021 | val Not publicly disclosed | 2026-08-19 | |
| Trane Technologies ↗ | well positioned | The Ingersoll Rand climate carve-out that emerged in 2020 as a pure-play HVAC company and is now the American winner of the AI data center cooling build-out — $21.3B FY2025 revenue, a $12.1B record backlog up 70%, applied bookings up 130%, an NVIDIA reference design for gigawatt AI factories, and a ~$100B market cap to defend. | Construction / Energy (HVAC) | incumbent | 1885 | val ~$0.1K | 2026-08-19 | |
| Zeitview ↗ | emerging | The rebranded DroneBase — an 11-year-old Santa Monica marketplace that pivoted from real-estate imagery to AI inspection software for solar, wind, transmission and property, now with a 70,000-pilot network in 80+ countries and $170–174M raised, betting a mid-scale services-plus-SaaS model can hold the operating layer as OEMs and drone-in-a-box vendors close in. | Energy / Infrastructure Inspection | emerging | 2014 | val Undisclosed. No post-mone… | 2026-08-19 | |
| Artificial Labs ↗ | emerging | London-market insurtech building the algorithmic rails for Lloyd's — a broker Contract Builder, an underwriter workbench and a Blueprint Two-compliant data layer for specialty and commercial risk. | Insurance | emerging | 2013 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-17 | |
| Cincinnati Financial ↗ | at risk | The 1950 agent-sponsored P&C carrier that just posted a 100.8 Q2 2026 combined ratio and a 104.1 commercial line on catastrophe and casualty pressure — while running a ~$12.5B equity-heavy investment book that no peer of similar size dares carry. | Insurance | incumbent | 1950 | val ~$29B market cap | 2026-08-17 | |
| ClearJet ↗ | emerging | A carrier-agnostic 'SuperCarrier' that stuffs ecommerce parcels into unused belly cargo on scheduled flights, then hands them to regional final-mile carriers — 30M+ packages a year, 95 airports, and a deep graveyard behind anyone who has tried this before. | Logistics | emerging | 2022 | val undisclosed | 2026-08-17 | |
| Dominion Energy, Inc. ↗ | at risk | A Richmond-based investor-owned utility ($21.8B FY2025 revenue) whose Virginia service territory now sits on top of the largest data-center concentration on earth — an unearned tailwind the Virginia SCC keeps trying to price back to hyperscalers instead of shareholders, at the same time a $11.65B, six-months-late offshore wind build absorbs another tariff-driven overrun and a 2020 pure-play restructuring is still delivering a smaller company than the one investors bought. | Energy / Electric utilities | incumbent | 1909 | val ~$58B market cap | 2026-08-17 | |
| Moment Energy ↗ | emerging | A Coquitlam-based, four-founder SFU spinout building the world's largest second-life battery factory — repurposing retired EV packs from Mercedes and Nissan into containerized BESS while new-cell LFP prices race downward beneath it. | Energy | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-17 | |
| SubBase ↗ | emerging | Trade-specific materials procurement platform for subcontractors and self-performing GCs — RFQ to PO to delivery to invoice reconciliation on one system, wired into the construction ERP. | Construction | emerging | 2022 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-17 | |
| Ulta Beauty ↗ | at risk | The category-defining US beauty retailer — 1,540 stores, 47 million loyalty members, and margins compressing under Sephora-at-Kohl's, Amazon Premium Beauty, and a Target partnership ending in August 2026. | Retail | incumbent | 1990 | val ~$23.2B | 2026-08-17 | |
| Allstate ↗ | at risk | The 1931 Sears spin-off that dropped from #2 to #4 US private-auto insurer, is running an NAIC complaint index near 2.7 (2.7× the market), and just posted the best quarter of Tom Wilson's 19-year tenure while UBS and KBW cut price targets on the argument that loss ratios can only get worse from here. | Insurance | incumbent | 1931 | val ~$52-55B market cap | 2026-08-14 | |
| Arrakis ↗ | emerging | London- and Paris-based industrial-AI deployment platform from ex-Accel investor Rafael Quintanilla and three Palantir/Delivery Hero alumni — $38M raised in six months, $140M post-money at a July 2026 Series A, and a pitch to embed forward-deployed engineers inside aerospace, energy and manufacturing customers before Palantir, Cognite-inside-Schneider or SAP Joule Studio absorbs the category. | Construction | emerging | 2026 | val ~$140M | 2026-08-14 | |
| FirstEnergy Corp. ↗ | at risk | A ~6M-customer investor-owned utility across Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York ($15.1B FY2025 revenue) still trying to outrun the HB6 bribery scandal ($230M federal DPA, 2021; $250.7M Ohio PUCO order, Nov 2025) while its Northeast Ohio grid keeps failing — a July 2026 Lakewood outage complaint drew a proposed $3M PUCO fine and blocked the company's own bid to loosen reliability standards. | Energy / Electric utilities | incumbent | 1997 | val ~$26B market cap | 2026-08-14 | |
| The Home Depot ↗ | well positioned | The $164.7B big-box category king turned itself into a specialty-trade distributor in eighteen months — $18.25B for SRS in 2024, $5.5B for GMS in 2025, an AI takeoff tool that quotes an entire single-family house in two days — and reports Q2 fiscal 2026 on August 18 into the worst existing-home-sales year in three decades. | Retail / Home improvement | incumbent | 1978 | val ~$0.3K | 2026-08-14 | |
| Indigo ↗ | emerging | An AI-driven medical malpractice startup writing out of a South Carolina risk retention group — Vertical AI on top of physician risk data, with barely two years of loss experience underneath it. | Insurance | emerging | 2023 | val Not disclosed | 2026-08-14 | |
| Norfolk Southern ↗ | at risk | The eastern Class I that fired its CEO for a workplace affair in September 2024, absorbed a $1.7B+ East Palestine bill, and is now betting its independence on an $85B stock-and-cash sale to Union Pacific — held in abeyance at the STB while a 65%-operating-ratio franchise waits to find out whether it becomes half a transcontinental or a wounded standalone. | Logistics / Rail | incumbent | 1982 | val Market cap ~$75-77B | 2026-08-14 | |
| Sereact ↗ | emerging | A Stuttgart spin-out selling a vision-language-action 'brain' — Cortex, plus its PickGPT lineage — that runs on any warehouse or manufacturing robot arm, pitched as the software layer under BMW, PepsiCo and Zalando picking cells rather than yet another custom cell. | Supply chain / Warehouse robotics | emerging | 2021 | val Not disclosed | 2026-08-14 | |
| Valar Atomics ↗ | emerging | Three-year-old El Segundo microreactor startup that hit criticality faster than anyone else in the DOE pilot, powered an Nvidia chip off it, and turned that footage into a $1B Sequoia-led Series B at a $6B valuation — while suing the regulator it says can't license it in time. | Energy / Nuclear | emerging | 2023 | val ~$6B | 2026-08-14 | |
| CoverForce ↗ | emerging | The independent quote-and-bind API for US commercial insurance — one integration to 20+ carriers and MGAs including AmTrust, Chubb, Liberty Mutual and Travelers, sold to 10,000+ agencies through the wholesaler channel. | Insurance | emerging | 2020 | val Not disclosed | 2026-08-13 | |
| ev.energy ↗ | emerging | A London-Brooklyn managed-charging platform turning consumer EVs into utility grid assets — 200,000+ vehicles orchestrated daily across 55+ utility programs in North America and Europe, built by two ex-BCG consultants who saw National Grid staring at a load problem it could not solve alone. | Energy / EV managed charging & VPP orchestration | emerging | 2018 | raised $33M Series B July 2023 | 2026-08-13 | |
| Fastenal Company ↗ | well positioned | The Winona, Minnesota fastener shop that Bob Kierlin opened with $31,000 in 1967 is now a $56B-market-cap, ~20% operating margin industrial distributor bolted inside its customers' factories — 1,950 Onsite locations and ~137,000 FMI vending devices — so deeply that FMI alone drove 44.9% of revenue by Q1 2026. | Construction / Industrial distribution | incumbent | 1967 | val ~$56B | 2026-08-13 | |
| Foot Locker ↗ | at risk | The 50-year-old mall sneaker chain that spent three years trying to fix itself under Mary Dillon, then sold to Dick's Sporting Goods for $2.4B in September 2025 rather than finish the turnaround alone. | Retail | incumbent | 1974 | val ~$9.2B | 2026-08-13 | |
| Hub Group ↗ | at risk | The 54-year-old intermodal marketing company that built the industry — and is now finishing a $77M accounting restatement, its second CFO and COO exit of the year, and a distant #2 slot behind J.B. Hunt in the only segment that defines it. | Logistics | incumbent | 1971 | val ~$2.47B market cap | 2026-08-13 | |
| Loop Returns ↗ | emerging | The Columbus, Ohio Shopify-native returns platform that turned exchanges into a revenue-retention product — $125M+ raised through a $65M CRV-led Series B at $340M post, a 2024 CEO handoff and 20% RIF, and an April 2026 AI relaunch aimed at the Shopify mid-market its native Return APIs increasingly threaten. | Retail / Ecommerce SaaS | emerging | 2016 | val ~$340M | 2026-08-13 | |
| State Farm ↗ | at risk | The 1922 Bloomington mutual that has been the largest US private auto insurer since 1942 — just lost the crown to Progressive on a trailing-12-month basis at 31 March 2026, is fighting a market-conduct action in California and a 27% homeowners rate fight in Illinois, and is cutting the take-home of 19,000 captive agents to fund a bet on AI. | Insurance | incumbent | 1922 | val ~$170B | 2026-08-13 | |
| Xpanner ↗ | emerging | A Korean-founded, LA-headquartered retrofit-and-subscription company selling task-specific autonomy — solar piling, panel lift, material handling — to the utility-scale solar EPC oligopoly, and by Q1 2026 doing it profitably at a $21M ARR run-rate. | Construction | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed at all rounds | 2026-08-13 | |
| Beam AI (by Attentive.ai) ↗ | emerging | Human-vetted AI takeoff for construction — upload site plans, get quantity takeoffs back in minutes to days, with an in-house QA team signing off before delivery. | Construction | emerging | 2017 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-11 | |
| Gap Inc ↗ | at risk | The house that Don and Doris Fisher built in 1969 is now four aging brands and a $7-8B market cap — a Barbie-Movie CEO, a Zac Posen creative director, and an Old Navy that just missed the dress cycle it was hired to catch. | Retail / Apparel | incumbent | 1969 | val ~$7.7B | 2026-08-11 | |
| Gather AI ↗ | emerging | A CMU-spinout physical-AI platform that flies commodity drones through warehouses, reads pallet imagery with computer vision, and reconciles the picture against the WMS — pitched as a hardware-agnostic 'curious' AI for the 90% of DCs that never automated. | Supply chain / Warehouse robotics | emerging | 2019 | val Not officially disclosed | 2026-08-11 | |
| Honeycomb Insurance ↗ | emerging | The habitational-property MGA that never sends an inspector — aerial imagery and computer vision underwrite condo, HOA and small-multifamily buildings the admitted market keeps mispricing. | Insurance | emerging | 2019 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-11 | |
| Lennox International ↗ | at risk | The 130-year-old Texas furnace company that IPO'd out of a family trust in 1999, exited Europe and refrigeration to bet the house on North American residential HVAC — now $5.2B revenue, running a direct-to-dealer model against Carrier's Viessmann-fueled catalog and a Chinese-Korean flanking maneuver, with the residential segment down 7% while commercial roars 24% and the stock has round-tripped from $689 to below $500. | Construction / Energy (HVACR) | incumbent | 1895 | val ~$0K | 2026-08-11 | |
| Progressive Corporation ↗ | at risk | The auto-insurance share-taker that just tripped — June 2026 NWP grew only 3% Y/Y, commercial premiums turned negative for the first time since 2017, and Wells Fargo pulled the stock to Underweight. | Insurance | incumbent | 1937 | val ~$120.9B market cap | 2026-08-11 | |
| RADAR ↗ | emerging | Ceiling-mounted RFID-plus-vision sensors that give apparel chains 99% item-level inventory accuracy — 1,400+ storefronts, American Eagle and Old Navy as anchor accounts, and a $170M May 2026 Series B at $1B that has to answer whether hardware-led retail intelligence can scale past the wardrobe of specialty apparel. | Retail / Commerce | emerging | 2013 | val $1.0B post-money | 2026-08-11 | |
| W.W. Grainger, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The 1927 Chicago electric-motor mail-order shop that became the largest and most profitable MRO distributor in North America, now compounding a 39% ROIC across a high-touch branch network and an Endless Assortment web arm (Zoro + MonotaRO) while Amazon Business, Fastenal onsite, and Home Depot's pro push nibble at the flanks. | Supply chain / MRO distribution | incumbent | 1927 | val ~$64.7B | 2026-08-11 | |
| AutoZone ↗ | well positioned | The largest US auto-parts retailer — ~7,850 stores, $18.9B in FY2025 sales, DIY-native and now one-third DIFM — whose real product is not parts but availability: a 156-mega-hub network that puts any of ~110,000 SKUs in a mechanic's bay in under 30 minutes across most metros, funded by one of the most aggressive share-buyback machines on the market ($42B+ authorised, share count down ~89% since 1998). | Retail | incumbent | 1979 | val Market cap ~$59.0B | 2026-08-10 | |
| Dili ↗ | emerging | An AI compliance platform for federally funded infrastructure — parsing certified payrolls and reading Davis-Bacon rules so contractors don't lose their IRA tax credit at audit. | Construction / Infrastructure | emerging | 2023 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-10 | |
| Duke Energy ↗ | well positioned | A regulated Carolinas-Florida-Midwest electric monopoly (~8.6M electric customers, ~$33B revenue) betting an industry-record $103B five-year capex plan on the data-center demand wave — turning 7.8 GW of signed hyperscaler ESAs and a 15.4 GW pipeline into rate base at a 9.8% NC-settled ROE, while behind-the-meter bypass, a $10B equity overhang, and unhealed coal-ash scars test whether the regulated compounding machine keeps working. | Energy / Electric & gas utilities | incumbent | 1904 | val ~$97.3B market cap | 2026-08-10 | |
| RobCo ↗ | emerging | Munich TUM spinout selling snap-together modular robot arms to Europe's Mittelstand and America's SMB manufacturers — a robots-as-a-service pitch that just took $100M from Lightspeed to prove RaaS can beat Universal Robots on the factory floor. | Supply Chain / Manufacturing | emerging | 2020 | val ~$500M+ | 2026-08-10 | |
| Sysco ↗ | at risk | The largest US foodservice distributor — ~$84.6B revenue, ~72,000 employees, ~333 distribution facilities and ~14,000 tractors moving cases from warehouse to restaurant back door — whose share of US broadline foodservice has slid from a peak near 75% in the 1990s to about 32% today as US Foods, Performance Food Group and a wave of ordering-app disruptors quietly rewire the way independent restaurants buy. | Supply Chain / Foodservice Distribution | incumbent | 1969 | val ~$38B market cap | 2026-08-10 | |
| Werner Enterprises ↗ | at risk | A 70-year-old Omaha truckload carrier — 13,000+ tractors across dedicated, one-way, intermodal and logistics — whose Q2 2026 GAAP operating margin collapsed to 1.8% from 8.8% while an autonomous-truck cohort led by Aurora and Kodiak began commercially hauling freight in Texas over the same 600-mile lanes Werner uses to move Walmart, Dollar General and Home Depot pallets. | Logistics | incumbent | 1956 | val Enterprise value ~$3.1B | 2026-08-10 | |
| ZyG ↗ | emerging | Ex-ironSource founders and Israeli Unit 81 AI operators betting that 60+ specialised agents on a unified data layer can do — cheaper and without buying the brand — what Thrasio raised $3B to try. | Ecommerce | emerging | 2025 | val $500M | 2026-08-10 | |
| Belk, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The 137-year-old Southeastern department-store chain William Henry Belk started in Monroe, N.C. in 1888 with $750 and a no-haggle price tag — now a ~290-store, ~$3B-revenue regional incumbent that Sycamore Partners took private in a $3B LBO in 2015, ran through the fastest Chapter 11 in U.S. history in 2021, and lost control of in 2024 when creditors KKR and Hein Park seized the keys. | Retail | incumbent | 1888 | val ~$3B | 2026-08-09 | |
| Flock Freight ↗ | emerging | The company that turned a truck into a bus — algorithmically pooling LTL-sized shipments into one direct multi-stop truckload, a mode it named 'shared truckload' and now has to prove survives a freight upturn. | Logistics | emerging | 2015 | val $1.3B peak | 2026-08-09 | |
| Mytra ↗ | emerging | An ex-Tesla robotics team rebuilding warehouse storage from scratch — a 3D cube-climbing ASRS that moves 3,000-lb pallets in any direction, sold as programmable material-flow infrastructure. | Supply Chain | emerging | 2022 | val Not officially disclosed | 2026-08-09 | |
| Ore Energy ↗ | emerging | A TU Delft spinout building iron-air 'rust batteries' for multi-day storage — Europe's answer to Form Energy, betting that 100-hour storage at a tenth of lithium's cost can retire the gas peaker. | Energy | emerging | 2023 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-09 | |
| Phia ↗ | emerging | The 'Should I buy this?' button — a Gen-Z AI shopping agent from Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni that price-checks any item against 40,000 new and resale sites, monetized on affiliate commissions and dogged by cookie-stuffing and data-harvesting scandals. | E-commerce | emerging | 2024 | val $185.5M post-money | 2026-08-09 | |
| SolarEdge Technologies ↗ | at risk | The Israeli inverter maker that built the DC-optimized rooftop solar architecture into a $3B+ category leader, then watched revenue collapse from $2.98B (2023) to $901M (2024) amid a European inventory glut and $1.8B in losses — now clawing back share and margin against a resurgent Enphase and a fast-rising Tesla. | Energy | incumbent | 2006 | val ~$0K | 2026-08-09 | |
| Vertafore ↗ | at risk | The number-two agency management platform for U.S. property-and-casualty insurance — the software the back office of ~20,000 independent agencies runs on, spun through four private-equity owners in a decade before Roper paid $5.35B for its ~49% EBITDA margins and its switching-cost lock-in. | Insurance | incumbent | 1969 | val ~$5.3B | 2026-08-09 | |
| Vulcan Materials Company ↗ | well positioned | The largest US producer of construction aggregates — crushed stone, sand and gravel dug from ~425 quarries near America's fastest-growing metros — whose real product is not rock but freight economics: aggregates are too heavy and too cheap to ship far, so each quarry is a local near-monopoly with the pricing power to raise prices per ton almost every single year. | Construction | incumbent | 1956 | val ~$36.9B | 2026-08-09 | |
| Albertsons Companies ↗ | at risk | The No. 2 traditional U.S. supermarket operator — 2,240-odd stores across 22 banners (Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco, Acme, Shaw's) doing ~$83B in FY2025 sales — still ~30% owned and board-controlled by Cerberus, wearing ~$15B of net debt out of a collapsed $24.6B Kroger merger and into a price war it is structurally losing to Walmart and Aldi. | Retail / Grocery | incumbent | 1939 | val ~$6.8B | 2026-08-08 | |
| Calpine Corporation ↗ | well positioned | The largest independent power producer in the United States — a ~27 GW fleet of natural-gas combined-cycle plants, the world's biggest geothermal complex at The Geysers, and a retail electricity arm — that went bankrupt in 2005, was taken private by Energy Capital Partners in 2018, and was bought by Constellation Energy in a ~$26.6B deal that closed January 2026, handing ECP one of the most profitable private-equity exits in history. | Energy | incumbent | 1984 | val ~$26.6B | 2026-08-08 | |
| Dusty Robotics ↗ | emerging | Construction layout automation — the FieldPrinter, an autonomous robot that prints the BIM model directly onto the concrete slab to 1/16-inch accuracy, replacing the two-person chalk-line crew that has laid out buildings by hand for a century. | Construction | emerging | 2018 | val ~$250M | 2026-08-08 | |
| EMCOR Group ↗ | well positioned | The $17B-revenue mechanical and electrical contractor assembled from the wreckage of JWP Inc.'s 1994 bankruptcy — a roll-up of specialty trade firms that installs and services the HVAC, power, plumbing, and fire-protection guts of America's buildings, now riding a record $13B backlog and the data-center/electrification build-out into one of the best-performing industrial stocks of the decade. | Construction | incumbent | 1994 | val ~$0K | 2026-08-08 | |
| Flexe ↗ | emerging | On-demand warehousing as a software network — a marketplace and WMS layer that lets brands rent short-term space and fulfillment across 3,000+ third-party warehouses without signing a lease or building a DC. | Logistics / Supply chain | emerging | 2013 | val $1B | 2026-08-08 | |
| Group14 Technologies ↗ | emerging | Silicon-carbon battery material (SCC55) engineered as a drop-in replacement for graphite — a porous carbon scaffold that packs in silicon to lift lithium-ion energy density up to 50%, made at factory scale in Washington State and South Korea. | Energy / Battery materials | emerging | 2015 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-08 | |
| Marshmallow ↗ | emerging | UK motor insurer that prices the drivers legacy carriers misprice — newly arrived migrants and thin-file drivers — using alternative data instead of a UK credit and claims history most incumbents demand. | Insurance / Insurtech | emerging | 2017 | val ~$1.25B at Series B | 2026-08-08 | |
| Rithum ↗ | at risk | The channel-management incumbent stitched together from CommerceHub and ChannelAdvisor — the plumbing that syndicates 40,000+ brands' and retailers' product data, dropship orders, marketplace listings and retail-media feeds across 400+ channels like Amazon, Walmart and Target, moving $50B+ in annual GMV — now a twice-flipped, Insight Partners-controlled roll-up defending a commoditizing layer against Amazon, Shopify and BigCommerce pulling the same functions in-house. | Ecommerce | incumbent | 1997 | val ~$1.9B | 2026-08-08 | |
| Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. ↗ | well positioned | The third-generation family firm that turned a 1927 Chicago insurance agency into the world's third-largest brokerage by never stopping the acquisition machine — 48 tuck-ins in 2024 alone, then the $13.45B AssuredPartners mega-deal in 2025 — funded by commissions, contingent kickers, a giant claims-administration arm (Gallagher Bassett), and, for two decades, an oddly lucrative side business harvesting U.S. clean-energy tax credits that is now winding down. | Insurance brokerage / Risk management | incumbent | 1927 | val ~$0.1K | 2026-08-07 | |
| At-Bay ↗ | emerging | The 2016 'InsurSec' startup founded by ex-Unit 8200 operators that fused cyber insurance with active attack-surface monitoring, rode the ransomware hard market to a $1.35B unicorn valuation in July 2021, bought its own licensed carrier in 2023, and now bets that pairing policies with a CrowdStrike-powered MDR product produces a loss-ratio edge durable enough to survive competitors copying it and reinsurers repricing cyber. | Insurance / Cyber insurance (InsurTech) | emerging | 2016 | val ~$1.4B | 2026-08-07 | |
| NextEra Energy ↗ | well positioned | A 1925 Florida electric utility that became the largest power company in the world by market cap — pairing Florida Power & Light, a ~5.9M-account regulated monopoly earning a state-blessed ~10.95% return, with NextEra Energy Resources, the planet's biggest wind-and-solar developer — now riding the AI/data-center demand boom while a suspended yieldco (XPLR), a Florida dark-money scandal, and the political fragility of IRA tax credits test whether the compounding machine keeps running. | Energy / Electric utilities & renewables | incumbent | 1925 | val ~$185.8B | 2026-08-07 | |
| Quanta Services ↗ | well positioned | The 1997 roll-up of four small electrical contractors that John Colson welded into the largest specialty-infrastructure contractor in North America — 68,000 workers, ~52,000 of them craft-skilled, self-performing ~85% of the transmission lines, substations, pipelines and utility-scale solar and wind farms that the electrification and AI-data-center boom now depends on, riding a record ~$48-50B backlog to a ~$100B market cap while skeptics warn the grid story is already in the price. | Energy / Infrastructure construction | incumbent | 1997 | val ~$0.1K | 2026-08-07 | |
| Qube Holdings ↗ | well positioned | The 2006 roll-up that former Patrick raiders Chris Corrigan and Sam Kaplan spun out of the wreckage of Toll's Patrick takeover, listed as a fund in 2007, corporatised into ASX:QUB in 2011, then bought half of Australia's biggest container network in the 2016 Asciano break-up — and in February 2026 agreed to be taken private by a Macquarie Asset Management-led consortium for A$11.7B (~US$8.3B) at A$5.20 a share, a 28% premium that quietly retires one of the country's few integrated ports-and-rail platforms from public markets. | Logistics / Ports & infrastructure | incumbent | 2006 | val ~$11.7B | 2026-08-07 | |
| Sila Nanotechnologies ↗ | emerging | The 2011 spinout of a Georgia Tech materials lab and a Tesla battery engineer, betting that a nano-engineered silicon powder called Titan Silicon can drop into existing lithium-ion cell lines and replace graphite — now, after $1.35B+ raised and a $3.3B peak mark, staking everything on whether its 160-acre Moses Lake, WA plant can turn Mercedes-Benz and Panasonic design wins into cost-competitive volume before the silicon-anode field consolidates around it. | Energy / Battery materials | emerging | 2011 | val ~$3.3B | 2026-08-07 | |
| Versatile ↗ | emerging | The 2016 Israeli-founded contech startup that bolts a camera-and-sensor pod under a crane hook, turns every lift into structured productivity data, and raised ~$109M (Bosch, Insight Partners, Tiger Global) betting that the crane — the one machine that touches nearly every material on a jobsite — is the cheapest place to install a system of record for how buildings actually get built. | Construction technology / Jobsite intelligence | emerging | 2016 | val Not officially disclosed | 2026-08-07 | |
| Warp ↗ | emerging | The AxleHire founder's second act: a 2021-founded, asset-light middle-mile freight network that blends LTL and truckload across ~50 cross-docks and 10,000+ carrier vehicles, now betting a $10M 2025 Series A on the industry's first fully robotic cross-dock — a capital-intensive automation gambit layered on top of a thin-margin brokerage in the shadow of Convoy's collapse. | Logistics / Middle-mile freight | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-07 | |
| Assurant, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The 130-year-old La Crosse mutual that Fortis rebuilt and spun out in 2004 — now a capital-light specialty insurer protecting 300M+ phones for the carriers and force-placing insurance on delinquent mortgages, riding fee income while hurricanes test the housing book. | Insurance | incumbent | 1892 | val ~$14.9B market cap | 2026-08-06 | |
| Briq ↗ | emerging | A construction-finance automation platform that pointed AI agents at the back office CFOs still run on Excel — WIP reports, cash forecasting and AP — and is now rebranding around an 'orchestration layer' for 20+ agents, after a 2023 that saw it cut headcount 45% and raise a flat-valuation extension rather than a Series C. | Construction | emerging | 2018 | val $150M | 2026-08-06 | |
| Burlington Stores, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The perennial No. 3 in American off-price — a 1972 New Jersey coat wholesaler that Bain Capital bought, broke and rebuilt, now shrinking its own stores to a third of their old size while comps keep compounding under an ex-Ross operator. | Retail / Off-price | incumbent | 1972 | val Roughly $17B market cap | 2026-08-06 | |
| Cargado ↗ | emerging | An invite-only, vetted load board turned integrated marketplace for US–Mexico (and now Canada) cross-border freight — a founder-market-fit bet that the nearshoring boom needs neutral matching infrastructure, wagering that trust and liquidity in the most fraud-prone corner of trucking can be productized before Uber Freight or an incumbent broker replicates it. | Logistics / Supply chain | emerging | 2023 | val Not disclosed | 2026-08-06 | |
| Coupang, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The 'Amazon of Korea' that spent a decade and billions building an end-to-end owned logistics network to put next-morning 'Rocket Delivery' within 10 minutes of most of the country — and, in 2023, finally turned its first profit, only to have a 34-million-customer data breach detonate its 2025. | Ecommerce | incumbent | 2010 | val ~$50B | 2026-08-06 | |
| Electric Hydrogen ↗ | emerging | The green-hydrogen industry's first unicorn — a First Solar alumni team building 100MW turnkey PEM electrolyzer plants ('HYPRPlant') at a 1.2GW Massachusetts gigafactory, betting that halving the installed cost of green hydrogen can outrun a demand collapse that has already gutted the sector. | Energy / Green hydrogen | emerging | 2019 | val $1B+ | 2026-08-06 | |
| Kalepa ↗ | emerging | An AI underwriting workbench that reads messy commercial-insurance submissions — broker emails, SOVs, loss runs, supplemental apps — and surfaces the hidden exposures underwriters miss, betting that a human-in-the-loop 'Copilot' that keeps the underwriter deciding can out-compete both the autonomous-agent insurtechs raising four times its capital and the carriers building ingestion in-house. | Insurance / Insurtech | emerging | 2018 | val Not officially disclosed | 2026-08-06 | |
| Landstar System, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The asset-light truckload giant that owns no trucks and employs almost no drivers — a $4.7B-revenue freight network run by ~1,200 independent agents and ~9,500 owner-operators, built to bleed cash even through the worst freight recession in a generation, now facing the question of whether AI-native brokers can undo its edge. | Logistics / Freight transportation | incumbent | 1968 | val ~$7.4B market cap | 2026-08-06 | |
| Acrisure ↗ | at risk | A Michigan insurance brokerage that used roughly 1,000 acquisitions to vault into the global top ten in a decade, now repositioning as an AI-driven fintech platform — a debt-heavy roll-up whose leverage, margins and integration lawsuits are testing the machine that built it. | Insurance | incumbent | 2005 | val $32B | 2026-08-05 | |
| Brown & Brown, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The lean, decentralized Daytona Beach roll-up that grew from a 1939 two-man agency into the fifth-largest U.S. insurance broker — now digesting the $9.825B Accession deal, the biggest bet in its history, while organic growth stalls. | Insurance / Brokerage | incumbent | 1939 | val ~$22.9B market cap | 2026-08-05 | |
| Constructor ↗ | emerging | An AI product-discovery platform that reranks ecommerce search, browse and recommendations to maximize revenue-per-visitor rather than text relevance — a capital-efficient challenger to Algolia and Bloomreach now betting its behavioral data moat can survive LLM shopping agents that route around on-site search entirely. | Ecommerce / Retail tech | emerging | 2015 | val $550M | 2026-08-05 | |
| Constellation Energy ↗ | well positioned | America's largest producer of carbon-free power — 21 reactors, a nation-leading nuclear fleet, and, after swallowing Calpine for $26.6B, the biggest merchant generator in the country, now selling electrons straight to the hyperscalers building AI. | Energy / Power generation | incumbent | 2022 | val ~$97.6B market cap | 2026-08-05 | |
| Counterpart ↗ | emerging | An AI-native managing general agent for management and professional liability, selling D&O, EPLI and E&O to small businesses through brokers — betting a proprietary risk score beats a legacy underwriting market that still runs on questionnaires, while renting the balance sheets it needs to grow. | Insurance | emerging | 2019 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-05 | |
| First Solar ↗ | well positioned | The last American solar manufacturer at scale — a $25B+ maker of cadmium-telluride thin-film panels that skipped the crystalline-silicon race China won, and now rides tariffs and IRA credits to fat margins while a $13.6B backlog quietly shrinks. | Energy | incumbent | 1999 | val ~$25-29B market cap | 2026-08-05 | |
| FleetWorks ↗ | emerging | AI voice-and-text agents that automate the phone calls, emails and rate haggling that keep freight moving — a YC-born 'always-on dispatcher' turning a broker-side tool into a two-sided carrier marketplace, up against a rival worth eight times as much. | Logistics / Freight tech | emerging | 2023 | raised $17M raised to date | 2026-08-05 | |
| Gatik ↗ | emerging | The autonomous-trucking company that skipped the glamorous robotaxi race and the long-haul highway war to master the boring, repeatable middle mile — driver-out box trucks looping between Walmart and Kroger depots — betting that a constrained problem is the only one that pays. | Logistics / Autonomous trucking | emerging | 2017 | val ~$700M | 2026-08-05 | |
| Herc Holdings ↗ | at risk | The #3 North American equipment-rental house — spun out of Hertz in 2016 — that just outbid United Rentals to buy H&E for $5.3B, betting a debt-funded land grab into data-center and megaproject demand can close the gap on United and Sunbelt. | Construction / Equipment rental | incumbent | 1965 | val ~$4.7B market cap | 2026-08-05 | |
| Knight-Swift Transportation Holdings ↗ | well positioned | North America's largest truckload carrier — a 2017 merger of two Phoenix rivals now rolling up LTL, digesting the U.S. Xpress turnaround, and grinding through a three-year freight recession from ~26,000 tractors. | Logistics / Trucking | incumbent | 2017 | val ~$12.5B market cap | 2026-08-05 | |
| Lunar Energy ↗ | emerging | A former Tesla Energy chief's home-battery-plus-VPP-software play — the sleek Lunar System battery sold through installers, and Gridshare, the AI dispatch platform already orchestrating ~130,000 mostly-rival home batteries for Sunrun and across Japan. | Energy / Residential storage & VPP | emerging | 2020 | raised $232M announced Feb 2026 | 2026-08-05 | |
| Schneider National ↗ | well positioned | The 90-year-old Green Bay trucking dynasty that went public in 2017 but kept family voting control — a scaled truckload, intermodal and logistics carrier grinding through a multi-year freight recession by buying its way into stickier dedicated contracts. | Logistics | incumbent | 1935 | val ~$6.5B market cap | 2026-08-05 | |
| Terabase Energy ↗ | emerging | A solar-construction software and robotics company betting that utility-scale solar farms should be built the way factories build cars — with a digital twin, an on-site assembly line and autonomous rovers snapping panels onto trackers 24/7, instead of thousands of workers hand-bolting glass in the desert heat. | Energy / Solar construction tech | emerging | 2019 | val Not disclosed | 2026-08-05 | |
| Tive ↗ | emerging | Boston-built, cellular-and-5G IoT trackers plus a cloud platform for real-time in-transit shipment visibility — a hardware-led challenger betting that owning the sensor on the pallet beats the software-only control towers of project44 and FourKites. | Supply chain / Visibility | emerging | 2015 | val ~$545M | 2026-08-05 | |
| Vori ↗ | emerging | A 'self-driving operating system' for independent grocers — POS, inventory, ordering, pricing, loyalty and payments in one stack — built by a third-generation grocer betting AI agents can run the back office the other 75% of the grocery market still runs on paper. | Retail / Grocery software | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-05 | |
| Dollar Tree ↗ | well positioned | The everything-for-a-dollar chain that torched $7.5B buying Family Dollar in 2015 and sold it for $1B in 2025, broke its own buck twice ($1.25 in 2021, up to $7 by 2025) — and emerged a focused 9,282-store treasure-hunt machine posting the best comps in discount retail, while traffic slips, tariffs hang over a China-heavy import pipeline, and its poorest customers grumble about price stickers they no longer trust. | Retail / Discount | incumbent | 1986 | val Market cap ~$24.2B | 2026-08-03 | |
| Expeditors International ↗ | well positioned | A Seattle freight forwarder that owns no planes and no ships, pays branch managers a quarter of their branch's operating income, refuses to make acquisitions, and has out-earned every rival per shipment for four decades — now defending that model against DSV's post-Schenker scale, tariff whiplash, and a generation of digital forwarders that promised to make it obsolete. | Logistics / Freight forwarding | incumbent | 1979 | val ~$22B | 2026-08-03 | |
| FERMÀT ↗ | emerging | AI-native commerce experience platform that spins up a bespoke post-click shop for every ad, email and creator link — $74M raised, ARR up 5x into a $45M VMG-led Series B, and a positioning that has already changed three times in four years. | Ecommerce software | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-03 | |
| Forto ↗ | emerging | Berlin digital freight forwarder — founded 2016 as FreightHub, ~$610M raised, $2.1B SoftBank-era valuation — that cut a third of its staff, swapped its founder-CEO for its ex-J.P. Morgan CFO, shopped itself via Moelis, and is now pivoting to selling its AI stack to the industry it set out to disrupt. | Logistics / freight forwarding | emerging | 2016 | val $2.1B | 2026-08-03 | |
| Majesco ↗ | well positioned | The insurance core-systems vendor Thoma Bravo took private for $729M in 2020 has used six years of PE ownership to buy seven companies, triple revenue to roughly $500M, bolt a GenAI copilot onto thirty-year-old policy-admin DNA, and swallow Vitech to expand into pensions — a quiet roll-up assembling the #2 seat behind Guidewire while Duck Creek and Sapiens change owners around it. | Insurance / Core-systems software | incumbent | 1992 | val ~$729M | 2026-08-03 | |
| NRG Energy ↗ | well positioned | The twice-restructured Texas power-and-retail giant that Elliott has raided twice, that bought a door-to-door alarm company for $2.8B and got its CEO fired over it — and that just doubled its gas fleet with a $12B LS Power deal to chase an AI power-demand supercycle it has yet to sign a single definitive hyperscaler contract for. | Energy / Competitive power & retail electricity | incumbent | 1989 | val Market cap ~$29.1B | 2026-08-03 | |
| Rebar ↗ | emerging | AI takeoff and quoting software for commercial HVAC manufacturer reps and distributors — computer vision that reads a plan set, counts the equipment and drafts the quote in minutes — fresh off a $14M Series A led by Prudence. | Construction software | emerging | 2024 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-03 | |
| Zip ↗ | emerging | Procurement orchestration for the enterprise — a single intake front door that routes every purchase request across finance, legal, IT, security and the ERP stack underneath — now valued at $2.2B and racing to convert an approvals wedge into an agentic AI suite before the suites it sits on bundle it away. | Supply chain / procurement software | emerging | 2020 | val $2.2B | 2026-08-03 | |
| Alliant Insurance Services ↗ | well positioned | The specialty brokerage that grows by hiring your best team on a Tuesday morning — a 1925 San Diego agency turned $5.7B-revenue, majority-employee-owned lift-out machine that has out-litigated Aon twice, outrun four private equity owners, and climbed to No. 4 in America without ever going public. | Insurance / Brokerage | incumbent | 1925 | val ~$5.7B | 2026-08-02 | |
| Comulate ↗ | emerging | AI accounting automation for large insurance brokerages — carrier statement ingestion, direct-bill reconciliation and commission recovery — that hit 8-figure revenue in under three years, then collided head-on with Applied Systems in court. | Insurance software | emerging | 2022 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-02 | |
| Fleetio ↗ | emerging | Per-vehicle fleet-maintenance SaaS out of Birmingham that bootstrapped for four years, raised $624M, and bought Auto Integrate to own the authorization rail behind 13 million repair orders a year. | Logistics / Fleet software | emerging | 2012 | val >$1.5B | 2026-08-02 | |
| Kroger ↗ | at risk | America's biggest pure-play grocer spent two years and $1B+ trying to buy Albertsons, lost, lost its CEO to an ethics probe, wrote off $2.6B of robot warehouses — and is now betting a Walmart veteran, a $1.65B Giant Eagle deal, and a $1.5B retail-media profit stream can stop a slow bleed of market share to Walmart, Costco, and Aldi. | Retail / Grocery | incumbent | 1883 | val ~$37B | 2026-08-02 | |
| Radiant ↗ | emerging | Portable 1 MW nuclear microreactors off a production line — TRISO-fueled, helium-cooled, shipped fueled in a container, aimed squarely at the diesel generator. | Energy / Nuclear | emerging | 2020 | val $1.8B | 2026-08-02 | |
| ShopMy ↗ | emerging | The creator-commerce platform premium brands actually pay for — creator storefronts, SKU-level affiliate links, automated gifting and paid campaigns in one system, now adding a consumer shopping app called Circles. | Ecommerce / Creator commerce | emerging | 2020 | val $1.5B | 2026-08-02 | |
| Talen Energy ↗ | well positioned | The PJM power producer that hedge funds pulled out of bankruptcy in 2023, sold a data-center campus to Amazon, and turned one Pennsylvania nuclear plant into an ~$18B, 17-year AWS contract — then levered up on $7B of gas plants while regulators, county commissioners, and its own valuation multiple pushed back. | Energy / Power | incumbent | 2015 | val ~$18.4B | 2026-08-02 | |
| US LBM ↗ | at risk | A roll-up of 400+ small-town lumberyards that rode lumber inflation to $11.5B in revenue, took on single-B LBO debt under Bain and Platinum, and is now refinancing at 9.5% coupons while revenue slides toward $6.8B and Home Depot, QXO, and Builders FirstSource consolidate the industry around it. | Construction / Building materials distribution | incumbent | 2009 | val ~$7B | 2026-08-02 | |
| Alvys ↗ | emerging | An all-in-one cloud TMS for trucking carriers, freight brokers and hybrid operations — dispatch, EDI, compliance and accounting in one system, priced per load, now wrapped in an AI-automation layer. | Logistics / Supply chain | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-01 | |
| Lowe's ↗ | well positioned | The perennial number two in home improvement spent $10B in 2025 buying its way into the Pro market Home Depot already owns — a debt-funded bet by Marvin Ellison that distribution, not DIY foot traffic, is where the next decade of growth lives. | Retail / Home improvement | incumbent | 1946 | val Market cap ~$121.8B | 2026-08-01 | |
| Quince ↗ | emerging | The factory-direct 'affordable luxury' retailer that ships a $50 Mongolian cashmere sweater straight from the mill to your door — and rode dupe culture to a $10.1B valuation and ~$2B in annualized revenue by early 2026. | Ecommerce / Retail | emerging | 2018 | val $10.1B | 2026-08-01 | |
| Relation Insurance Services ↗ | well positioned | The quiet 100-acquisition roll-up: a de novo brokerage built by three PE firms in 2007, sold to Aquiline in 2019, tripled to $315M of revenue, and flipped to BayPine in February 2026 — with a 2.9-star Glassdoor along the way. | Insurance / Brokerage | incumbent | 2007 | val Undisclosed at the Februa… | 2026-08-01 | |
| TerraFirma ↗ | emerging | Two ex-SpaceX engineers building a vertically integrated robotic earthworks contractor — retrofitted semi-autonomous excavators run from a mission-control room, sold to customers as ordinary construction bids, not as robots. | Construction | emerging | 2024 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-01 | |
| Union Pacific ↗ | well positioned | The 1862 land-grant railroad wants to finish the job: Jim Vena's 59%-operating-ratio machine is betting $85B on Norfolk Southern to build America's first true transcontinental — while shippers, unions, BNSF and half of Washington line up at the STB to stop it. | Logistics / Rail | incumbent | 1862 | val Market cap ~$178B | 2026-08-01 | |
| Vistra ↗ | well positioned | The reborn corpse of history's largest LBO bust is now a $50B, ~50 GW Texas power machine signing 20-year nuclear deals with Meta and AWS — repriced by Wall Street as AI infrastructure while its batteries burned in California and PJM politicians reached for price caps. | Energy / Power | incumbent | 2016 | val ~$50.1B | 2026-08-01 | |
| WithCoverage ↗ | emerging | A flat-fee, AI-assisted commercial insurance brokerage from Opendoor co-founder JD Ross that audits a company's policies for gaps and overspend, makes carriers quote net of commission, and wraps placement, COIs, claims and captives into one platform. | Insurance | emerging | 2023 | val Undisclosed | 2026-08-01 | |
| Aptean ↗ | well positioned | Vista's 2012 lab experiment in software roll-ups is now a $3.55B, 56-acquisition vertical ERP machine owned by TA, Insight and Charlesbank — running food plants, fleets and factories on products its customers complain they can't afford to leave. | Supply chain / Enterprise software | incumbent | 2012 | val ~$3.5B | 2026-07-31 | |
| AtoB ↗ | emerging | Modern fleet and fuel cards for trucking — Mastercard-rails payments with telematics-linked fraud controls, per-driver spend limits, instant driver payouts and factoring integrations, sold against the closed-loop fuel-card duopoly of WEX and Corpay. | Logistics / Fintech | emerging | 2019 | val $800M at the Series B | 2026-07-31 | |
| Dick's Sporting Goods ↗ | well positioned | The bait-and-tackle shop that became America's sporting-goods monopoly-in-waiting — a $13B core business comping 6%, a family with 78% voting control, and a $2.4B bet that it can fix the mall retailer everyone else left for dead. | Retail / Ecommerce | incumbent | 1948 | val ~$18.4B | 2026-07-31 | |
| Mirakl ↗ | emerging | The enterprise marketplace operating system — SaaS that lets Best Buy, Macy's, Kroger and Airbus run their own third-party marketplaces, dropship programs and retail media, now repositioning as the neutral infrastructure for AI-agent commerce. | Ecommerce / Retail | emerging | 2012 | val ~$3.5B | 2026-07-31 | |
| Newfront ↗ | emerging | The tech-enabled commercial insurance brokerage that recruited veteran producers with better splits and an AI back office, reached a $2.2B valuation with a16z-adjacent Silicon Valley backing and Goldman money — then sold to WTW in January 2026 for $1.05B upfront, roughly the multiple a traditional brokerage fetches. | Insurance | emerging | 2017 | val ~$2.2B | 2026-07-31 | |
| Procore Technologies ↗ | well positioned | The construction industry's system of record — a founder's home-renovation side project that nearly died for a decade, IPO'd at $9.6B, stumbled on a sales reorg, and is now betting a new CEO and an AI layer can restart growth. | Construction / Software | incumbent | 2002 | val ~$0K | 2026-07-31 | |
| Rondo Energy ↗ | emerging | Heat batteries for industry: insulated stacks of refractory brick charged with cheap wind and solar electricity through toaster-style resistance heaters, storing heat at up to 1,500°C and discharging continuous 1,000°C+ air and steam to ethanol plants, cement kilns, chemical sites and breweries — a direct electric replacement for the gas-fired boiler. | Energy | emerging | 2020 | val ~$1.6B | 2026-07-31 | |
| Saia ↗ | well positioned | The 101-year-old Louisiana freight line that bought Yellow's corpse at auction, crashed 30% in a day in April 2025, and just posted the rebound quarter the bulls were waiting for. | Logistics / Supply Chain | incumbent | 1924 | val ~$11.4B | 2026-07-31 | |
| Carvana ↗ | well positioned | The car-vending-machine company that went from a $376 stock to $3.72 and back — record Q2 2026 profits, a $73B valuation, and a father-son ownership story short sellers still circle. | Retail / Ecommerce | incumbent | 2012 | val ~$73B | 2026-07-30 | |
| Core & Main ↗ | well positioned | The St. Louis waterworks distributor that passed through Vivendi, Home Depot, and an $8.5B LBO before Clayton, Dubilier & Rice carved it out of HD Supply for $2.5B in 2017 — now the largest US pure-play seller of pipe, valves, hydrants, and water meters, a ~10-deals-a-year consolidation machine riding IIJA water money while its stock derates and Ferguson bids the same trenches. | Construction | incumbent | 2017 | val ~$8.5B | 2026-07-30 | |
| Fleek ↗ | emerging | A London-run, Karachi-and-Delhi-powered B2B marketplace that puts the world's secondhand-clothing bale trade online — 2,000+ verified wholesalers selling graded vintage to 50,000+ retailers in 100+ countries — now betting a $25M Series B that its Fleek Sort vision model becomes the grading and pricing standard for the 24 billion used garments sorted by hand every year. | Ecommerce | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed at the Jul 20… | 2026-07-30 | |
| Freehand ↗ | emerging | Autonomous AI agents that run supply-chain spend for Fortune 500 enterprises — auditing freight and supplier invoices, negotiating billing disputes, enforcing contracts and processing payments inside ERP systems, replacing the outsourced back-office teams that have done this work for decades. | Supply chain | emerging | 2024 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-30 | |
| Gritt ↗ | emerging | San Francisco physical-AI startup that bolts Kawasaki arms onto rented skid steers to place utility-scale solar panels — an eight-person crew goes from 800 to 3,000-4,000 panels a day — out of stealth July 2026 with a $26M Series A and 2.8 GW under contract. | Energy / Construction robotics | emerging | 2022 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-30 | |
| Ominimo Insurance ↗ | emerging | A profitable Hungarian-Serbian MGA that sells AI-priced car insurance on other insurers' balance sheets — 7% of Hungary's motor market in year one, a €1.4B valuation two years after launch, and a plan to take its own licence and cross the Atlantic. | Insurance | emerging | 2024 | val €1.4B / $1.6B | 2026-07-30 | |
| Ryder System ↗ | well positioned | The company that invented truck leasing in 1938 spent a decade quietly swapping residual-value roulette for boring contractual revenue — and just posted its seventh straight earnings gain in the middle of a freight depression. | Logistics | incumbent | 1933 | val ~$10.3B market cap | 2026-07-30 | |
| USI Insurance Services ↗ | at risk | The 1994 roll-up that Bernard Mizel built and three PE giants passed down the line — Goldman to Onex to KKR/CDPQ at $4.3B in 2017 — now a $2.78B-revenue middle-market broker betting on a proprietary knowledge engine while faster-moving rivals shove it out of the top ten. | Insurance | incumbent | 1994 | val ~$4.3B | 2026-07-30 | |
| CCC Intelligent Solutions ↗ | well positioned | The 46-year-old toll booth of the American fender bender — a three-sided network wiring 300+ insurers to 31,000 repair shops that crossed $1B revenue in 2025, monetized AI before its attackers could, and is now in a Morgan Stanley-run sale process with Elliott's private equity arm circling a stock the public market cut in half. | Insurance | incumbent | 1980 | val ~$3.4B | 2026-07-29 | |
| Comfort Systems USA ↗ | well positioned | The 1997 Houston HVAC roll-up that survived its own consolidation hangover, quietly compounded for two decades, and then became the purest picks-and-shovels trade of the AI buildout — $3.3B of quarterly revenue, a $14.1B backlog, 58% of sales from hyperscaler data centers, and a stock up 60x in ten years. | Construction | incumbent | 1996 | val ~$60B market cap | 2026-07-29 | |
| FedEx Corporation ↗ | at risk | The company that invented overnight delivery is spending its 55th year dismantling itself — spinning off Freight, merging Express and Ground into one network, cutting $6B of structural cost — while Amazon, which delivered nearly twice FedEx's US parcel volume in 2025, starts selling its logistics machine to everyone else. | Logistics | incumbent | 1971 | val ~$74B | 2026-07-29 | |
| Keychain ↗ | emerging | New York AI manufacturing platform for packaged goods from Handy founders Oisin Hanrahan and Umang Dua — free for brands and retailers, paid by manufacturers — that indexed 30,000+ North American manufacturers, reached $1B+ in monthly project volume by August 2025, signed 8 of the top 10 US retailers, and is now selling KeychainOS as an AI-era ERP to the plants themselves, with roughly $78M raised through the November 2025 W23 Global round. | Supply chain | emerging | 2023 | val ~$260M | 2026-07-29 | |
| Nordstrom ↗ | well positioned | The 125-year-old Seattle department store that a fourth-generation family finally wrestled off the public market — at $24.25 a share with Mexico's El Puerto de Liverpool holding 49.9% — less than half the $50 the same family offered in 2018, and just in time to watch rival Saks Global collapse into Chapter 11. | Retail | incumbent | 1901 | val ~$6.3B | 2026-07-29 | |
| Tractable ↗ | emerging | London-born computer-vision company whose AI reads photos of crashed cars and damaged homes and writes the repair estimate — the world's first computer-vision unicorn in financial services (June 2021), ~$185M raised from Insight, Georgian and SoftBank, $7B in claims processed annually through its platform, customers including GEICO, The Hartford, Aviva, Admiral and all four of Japan's largest insurers — now three years past its last round, past a founder-CEO handoff, and past a seven-year legal war with CCC that ended in a quiet January 2025 settlement. | Insurance | emerging | 2014 | val ~$1B | 2026-07-29 | |
| Triple Whale ↗ | emerging | Columbus-and-Jerusalem ecommerce analytics platform born from the iOS 14.5 attribution crisis — founders who ran their own Shopify brands built the Triple Pixel first-party tracking layer, raised ~$55M through a Shopify-backed 2023 Series B, grew to 60,000+ brands and a reported $21.6M ARR, and are now betting the company on Moby, AI agents that don't just measure ad spend but move it. | Ecommerce | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed at Series B | 2026-07-29 | |
| AES Corporation ↗ | well positioned | The 45-year-old global power company that nearly died with Enron, reinvented itself as the world's biggest seller of clean energy to hyperscalers — and is now being carried off the public market by BlackRock's GIP and EQT at $33.4B enterprise value, a 40% premium to a share price the equity market had left for dead. | Energy | incumbent | 1981 | val ~$33.4B enterprise value | 2026-07-28 | |
| Augment ↗ | emerging | San Francisco AI startup from Deliverr co-founder Harish Abbott whose freight-native 'AI teammate,' Augie, reads email, makes phone calls, logs into TMS platforms and carrier portals to run broker and carrier workflows from order to cash — $110M raised in five months of 2025, $35B in freight under management by September 2025, Penske Logistics deployed in January 2026, and an April 2026 acquisition pushing it into $8T wholesale distribution. | Logistics | emerging | 2024 | val Undisclosed at both rounds | 2026-07-28 | |
| Macy's, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The 168-year-old department store trying to shrink its way to relevance — a $21.8B, three-banner retailer whose real estate may be worth more than its $6B market cap, now four activist campaigns deep, one year past a rejected $6.9B take-private bid and a $151M accounting scandal, and finally printing its best comps in four years under Bloomingdale's-lifer CEO Tony Spring. | Retail | incumbent | 1858 | val ~$6.2B | 2026-07-28 | |
| OpenSpace ↗ | emerging | 360° reality capture for construction — a camera on a hardhat, a walk someone was doing anyway, and Spatial AI that pins every frame to the floor plan; 275,000+ users and 43B+ square feet captured, now pushing from documentation into progress tracking (Disperse, acquired Nov 2025) and field task management (OpenSpace Field, Feb 2026). | Construction | emerging | 2017 | val ~$902M | 2026-07-28 | |
| Portless ↗ | emerging | The Toronto-born 3PL that puts Western brands' inventory in fulfillment centers next to their factories in Shenzhen and Vietnam and air-ships each order direct to the customer's door in 5-8 days — the Shein playbook sold as a service, $18M Series A from Commerce Ventures in May 2025, and a business that got 'buried in inbound' the day de minimis died. | Ecommerce | emerging | 2022 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-28 | |
| Redwood Materials ↗ | emerging | JB Straubel's Carson City battery company: North America's dominant lithium-ion recycler (~70% share), builder of a domestic cathode and copper-foil supply chain, and — since June 2025 — an energy-storage developer that turns used EV packs into microgrids for AI data centers, closing a $425M Series E at a $6B+ valuation with Nvidia and Google in January 2026 and then cutting 10% of staff to chase storage. | Energy | emerging | 2017 | val ~$6B | 2026-07-28 | |
| Sapiens ↗ | at risk | The 43-year-old Israeli insurance core-systems vendor — 600+ carrier customers, $542M of 2024 revenue, and a growth rate that sagged from 8.4% to low single digits — sold itself to Advent International for $2.5B at a 64% premium, and within weeks the new owner had cut ~700 jobs, replaced the entire management team, and moved headquarters from Holon to London. | Insurance | incumbent | 1982 | val ~$2.5B | 2026-07-28 | |
| Symbotic ↗ | at risk | The Wilmington, Massachusetts warehouse-automation company a grocery billionaire built in secret inside C&S Wholesale Grocers, took public through a $5.5B SoftBank SPAC in June 2022, and scaled to a $22.5B backlog automating all 42 of Walmart's regional distribution centers — before a November 2024 restatement, a second accounting error in February 2025, a delayed 10-K revealing an SEC investigation into whistleblower interference, an adverse auditor opinion on internal controls, and a newly disclosed cap on what Walmart will pay turned the robot story into an accounting story. | Supply chain | incumbent | 2007 | val ~$0K | 2026-07-28 | |
| Buildots ↗ | emerging | AI construction-progress tracking — 360° cameras on hardhats capture the whole site, computer vision aligns every element to the BIM model and schedule, and the platform forecasts delays weeks before they land. | Construction | emerging | 2018 | val ~$300M | 2026-07-27 | |
| Fervo Energy ↗ | emerging | Houston-based enhanced geothermal developer that ported shale drilling — horizontal wells, multistage fracs, fiber-optic sensing — to hot granite, contracted 500 MW of 24/7 power at Cape Station in Utah to Southern California Edison, Google, and Shell, and went public on Nasdaq (FRVO) in May 2026 at a $7.7B valuation on $138K of trailing revenue. | Energy | emerging | 2017 | val ~$7.7B | 2026-07-27 | |
| Sedgwick ↗ | well positioned | The world's largest third-party claims administrator — 33,000 colleagues in 80 countries handling 8M+ claims a year and moving $33B in other people's claim payments — passed through five private equity hands on its way to a $13.2B valuation, while injured workers and regulators call its claim handling something much darker. | Insurance | incumbent | 1969 | val ~$13.2B enterprise value | 2026-07-27 | |
| Swap ↗ | emerging | The London/New York 'commerce operating system' that started in returns, rode the death of de minimis into DDP cross-border shipping, and is now sprinting into tax, inventory planning, payments, and AI agentic storefronts — $149M raised through a January 2026 Series C co-led by DST Global and ICONIQ. | Ecommerce / Logistics | emerging | 2022 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-27 | |
| Target ↗ | at risk | The $104.8B 'cheap chic' mass merchant that turned its 1,980 stores into America's best same-day fulfillment network, then spent four years going sideways — squeezed by Walmart's scale, Costco's value, and TJX's treasure hunt, self-wounded by a DEI-rollback boycott, and now betting a 22-year insider CEO and 1,800 corporate job cuts can restart traffic that finally inflected in May 2026. | Retail | incumbent | 1902 | val ~$0.1K | 2026-07-27 | |
| Waabi ↗ | emerging | Toronto- and Texas-based autonomous trucking company betting that a neural simulator — Waabi World — can train and prove a driverless truck safe with a fraction of the road miles rivals burn, now expanding the same 'Waabi Driver' into Uber robotaxis after a $750M January 2026 Series C. | Logistics | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-27 | |
| White Cap ↗ | well positioned | CD&R paid HD Supply $2.9B in 2020 for a concrete-accessories distributor, bolted on Construction Supply Group, and built a ~500-branch, $6B+ jobsite supply machine — carrying 6x-plus leverage into a nonresidential cycle held up almost entirely by data centers. | Construction | incumbent | 1976 | val ~$4B | 2026-07-27 | |
| WiseTech Global ↗ | at risk | The Sydney logistics-software empire whose CargoWise platform runs 14 of the world's top 25 freight forwarders on 99% recurring revenue — built by a guitar-repairer-turned-refrigeration-mechanic who founded it as an EDI shop in 1994, took it public at A$3.35 in 2016, and whose misconduct scandal, board exodus, ASIC/AFP raid and A$30 share price (down ~75% from the October 2024 peak) have turned a compounding machine into a governance case study. | Logistics | incumbent | 1994 | val ~$0K | 2026-07-27 | |
| Enphase Energy ↗ | at risk | The Fremont company that invented the solar microinverter, nearly died in 2017, staged one of tech's great turnarounds under Badri Kothandaraman to a $45B peak valuation — and is now defending a shrinking, Tesla-invaded US residential solar market after the One Big Beautiful Bill killed the 25D homeowner tax credit with no phase-down. | Energy | incumbent | 2006 | val ~$7.5B | 2026-07-26 | |
| Infios ↗ | at risk | The Körber/KKR supply-chain-software joint venture — a decade-long roll-up of HighJump, inconso, enVista's OMS, and MercuryGate rebranded as Infios in March 2025 — now a ~$500M-1B-revenue, 5,000-customer WMS/TMS incumbent that is a Gartner Leader for the eighth straight year while its own employees describe layoffs, three rebrands, and an exodus of tenured domain knowledge. | Supply chain software | incumbent | 2025 | val ~$1.7B | 2026-07-26 | |
| Pallet ↗ | emerging | AI workforce for logistics back offices — CoPallet agents that log into brokers', 3PLs' and forwarders' existing TMS/WMS systems and execute order entry, quoting, and track-and-trace end-to-end, priced against headcount rather than software seats. | Logistics / Supply chain software | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed at every round | 2026-07-26 | |
| PermitFlow ↗ | emerging | TurboTax for construction permits — an AI-plus-expediter platform that researches, prepares, files, and chases building permits across 7,000+ US jurisdictions for contractors, developers, and enterprise chains. | Construction | emerging | 2021 | val Reportedly ~$500M | 2026-07-26 | |
| Slide Insurance ↗ | at risk | The Tampa 'insurtech' Bruce Lucas built in four years by buying the books of dead Florida insurers and taking 150,000+ policies out of Citizens — $1.80B of 2025 gross premium, a 52.1% combined ratio, a $444M profit, and a June 2025 Nasdaq IPO — now facing the end of the dislocation that made it: a softening Florida market, falling rates, and a hurricane tail that never goes away. | Insurance | incumbent | 2021 | val ~$2.3B | 2026-07-26 | |
| Syrup Tech ↗ | emerging | AI demand forecasting and inventory planning for apparel and footwear brands — a neural-network engine that turns ERP, PLM, and real-time sales signals into SKU-level buying, allocation, and markdown recommendations. Acquired by Thoma Bravo-owned Anaplan in September 2025. | Retail / Ecommerce | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed at every round | 2026-07-26 | |
| Torus ↗ | emerging | Flywheel-plus-battery hybrid storage from Lehi, Utah — modular power plants that pair a spinning steel rotor's millisecond response with LFP battery duration, sold to utilities, data centers, and industry and aggregated into Rocky Mountain Power's Wattsmart virtual power plant. | Energy | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed at every round | 2026-07-26 | |
| Williams-Sonoma, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The San Francisco multi-brand home retailer — Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn, West Elm, Rejuvenation, Mark & Graham — that Chuck Williams started as a Sonoma cookware shop in 1956 and Howard Lester built into a catalog-then-ecommerce machine, now a $7.81B-revenue (FY2025), debt-free operator with an 18.1% operating margin that is the envy of retail — earned by refusing to promote, running its own ecommerce stack, and quietly building a $1B+ B2B business — while the housing market it ultimately depends on stays frozen and furniture tariffs eat at merchandise margins. | Retail | incumbent | 1956 | val ~$25.8B | 2026-07-26 | |
| Coupa Software ↗ | well positioned | The 2006 ex-Oracle rebellion that turned corporate purchasing into an Amazon-like shopping experience, rode 'business spend management' to a 2016 IPO and a $1.5B Llamasoft supply-chain-design deal, then sold to Thoma Bravo for $8.0B in February 2023 — now a PE-owned, ~$1B-plus-revenue incumbent racing to bolt agentic AI onto an $8T spend-data moat before AI-native attackers like Zip unbundle it. | Supply chain / Procurement software | incumbent | 2006 | val ~$8B | 2026-07-25 | |
| Monumental ↗ | emerging | Amsterdam-built fleets of small electric bricklaying robots sold as a subcontractor — contractors pay per brick laid, not for robots — now scaling from Dutch housing sites into the UK and US. | Construction | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed at all rounds | 2026-07-25 | |
| Novella ↗ | emerging | An AI-native wholesale E&S brokerage — human producers on top, vertical AI agents underneath — going after the complex-property placements Amwins and Ryan Specialty broker by hand. | Insurance | emerging | 2024 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-25 | |
| Petco Health and Wellness ↗ | at risk | The 1965 San Diego mail-order vet-supply house that became a ~1,400-store pet retailer, went through five ownership flips including a $4.6B CVC/CPP Investments LBO, re-IPO'd at $18 in January 2021, collapsed to ~$2.60, and is now running a three-phase turnaround under ex-Five Below CEO Joel Anderson — ~$6.0B of sales, ~$408M EBITDA, ~$1.5B of debt, and roughly 300 in-store vet hospitals as the differentiator Chewy and Amazon can't ship. | Retail | incumbent | 1965 | val ~$0.7K | 2026-07-25 | |
| Quaise Energy ↗ | emerging | Superhot-rock geothermal via millimeter-wave drilling — an MIT fusion-lab spinout using gyrotrons to vaporize basement rock, aiming to make 300-500°C geothermal a baseload power source almost anywhere on Earth. | Energy | emerging | 2018 | val Undisclosed at every round | 2026-07-25 | |
| Ryan Specialty ↗ | well positioned | The wholesale specialty-insurance distributor Pat Ryan — Aon's founder — built from scratch at age 73, now the No. 2 U.S. wholesaler placing roughly $32B of premium into the excess-and-surplus market, grown to $3.05B of FY2025 revenue by riding the E&S boom and a debt-funded acquisition spree — and now the cleanest public proxy for an E&S cycle that has visibly turned. | Insurance | incumbent | 2010 | val ~$0K | 2026-07-25 | |
| RXO ↗ | at risk | The tech-forward truck brokerage Brad Jacobs carved out of XPO in November 2022 and handed to 41-year-old Drew Wilkerson — now North America's third-largest freight broker after the all-equity $1.025B Coyote Logistics purchase from UPS, running ~$5.7B of 2025 gross revenue through the RXO Connect platform on razor-thin, cycle-crushed margins (adjusted EBITDA of just $6M in Q1 2026) while betting everything on operating leverage into a freight recovery. | Logistics | incumbent | 2022 | val ~$0K | 2026-07-25 | |
| ShipBob ↗ | emerging | An asset-light network of 60+ fulfillment centers stitched together by proprietary warehouse software — Amazon-grade 2-day shipping sold by the order to the SMB and mid-market DTC brands Amazon doesn't own. | Ecommerce / Logistics | emerging | 2014 | val ~$1.1B at Series E | 2026-07-25 | |
| Best Buy ↗ | at risk | The last big-box electronics chain standing — $41.7B of revenue that has gone sideways for three straight years while Amazon took the category crown, now betting a relaunched third-party marketplace, a retail-media network, and an AI-PC upgrade cycle can outrun tariffs, a $475M health-care write-off, and its fourth CEO handoff. | Retail | incumbent | 1966 | val ~$18.3B | 2026-07-24 | |
| EnerVenue ↗ | emerging | Fremont startup commercializing the nickel-hydrogen battery NASA flew on the ISS and Hubble — a fireproof, 30,000-cycle pressure vessel pitched as infrastructure-grade grid storage — now on its fourth cell design, its second CEO and its second continent after abandoning a Kentucky gigafactory to manufacture in China. | Energy | emerging | 2017 | val Undisclosed at every round | 2026-07-24 | |
| FYLD ↗ | emerging | AI frontline-intelligence platform for infrastructure fieldwork — crews film short videos at the point of work, FYLD's AI converts them into risk assessments and live job visibility, replacing paper forms and windshield-time supervision. | Construction / Infrastructure software | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-24 | |
| Harper ↗ | emerging | AI-native commercial insurance brokerage for middle America — a licensed retail agency where AI reads applications, routes submissions across 165+ carriers, wholesalers and MGAs, and chases underwriters, selling workers' comp, GL and professional liability to daycares, truckers, bars and manufacturers in 24-48 hours instead of a week. | Insurance | emerging | 2024 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-24 | |
| Instacart ↗ | at risk | The grocery marketplace that survived Amazon, rode the pandemic to a $39B private valuation, IPO'd at $10B — and now defends a shrinking delivery share against DoorDash with an ads engine, smart carts, and enterprise software. | Ecommerce | incumbent | 2012 | val ~$10B | 2026-07-24 | |
| Kinaxis ↗ | well positioned | The Ottawa supply chain planner that spent 40 years building one idea — every planning function computing concurrently on one in-memory model — survived a 2024 activist letter demanding its sale and a 16-month CEO vacuum, and re-emerged under ex-Blue Yonder executive Razat Gaurav with ARR growth reaccelerated to 20% and an agentic-AI story it must now prove is a moat rather than a eulogy. | Supply chain | incumbent | 1984 | val ~$4.2B | 2026-07-24 | |
| UPS (United Parcel Service) ↗ | at risk | The 119-year-old parcel giant deliberately firing its largest customer — walking away from more than half its Amazon volume by mid-2026, closing dozens of buildings and cutting 30,000-plus jobs to rebuild itself as a smaller, denser, healthcare-heavy network before Amazon and the regional insurgents finish eating the commodity end of the market. | Logistics | incumbent | 1907 | val ~$97B | 2026-07-24 | |
| Veho ↗ | emerging | Crowdsourced last-mile parcel delivery for e-commerce brands — gig drivers claiming app-based routes out of Veho-run sortation hubs, next-day delivery with doorstep returns pickup, sold to brands like Macy's, Sephora and HelloFresh as a customer-experience upgrade over UPS and FedEx at a lower price. | Logistics | emerging | 2016 | val ~$1.5B | 2026-07-24 | |
| Archive ↗ | emerging | Resale-as-a-service for brands — the software and logistics layer behind The North Face Renewed, Oscar de la Renta Encore and lululemon Like New, letting brands run their own secondhand businesses across peer-to-peer listings, trade-ins, returns and warehouse inventory. | Ecommerce / Retail | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed at every round | 2026-07-23 | |
| Dollar General ↗ | well positioned | The 20,893-store rural small-box machine that KKR rebuilt and re-listed — fined $21M+ for blocked fire exits, humbled by a 2023 profit collapse, then hauled back to 3% comps and 34% EPS growth by returning CEO Todd Vasos, who now hands a mid-repair turnaround to an outsider grocer in January 2027. | Retail | incumbent | 1939 | val ~$26.2B | 2026-07-23 | |
| Epicor Software ↗ | well positioned | The 50-year-old vertical ERP consolidator — Triad, Platinum, DataWorks, Activant stitched into one company — that four private equity owners have passed along at ever-higher prices ($2B in 2011, $3.3B in 2016, $4.7B in 2020) and that crossed $1B ARR in 2024, now betting the franchise on forcing its on-premises manufacturing and distribution base to the cloud by 2028. | Supply chain / ERP software | incumbent | 1972 | val ~$4.7B | 2026-07-23 | |
| Ferguson Enterprises ↗ | well positioned | The 1953 Virginia plumbing wholesaler that a British sheep-shearing conglomerate bought in 1982, then became — after a Nelson Peltz-prodded NYSE listing in 2022 and full US domestication in 2024 — North America's largest trade distributor of plumbing, HVAC, and waterworks products, now riding data-center megaprojects through a housing slump while QXO and Home Depot's SRS arm build rival empires next door. | Construction | incumbent | 1953 | val ~$43.9B | 2026-07-23 | |
| Loop ↗ | emerging | AI-native freight audit and payments — a platform that ingests every invoice, bill of lading and contract in any format, audits 99% of freight bills without human touch, pays carriers through J.P. Morgan rails, and is now repositioning as the 'intelligence layer' for enterprise supply chain spend. | Logistics | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed at every round | 2026-07-23 | |
| Mainspring Energy ↗ | emerging | Menlo Park maker of the linear generator — a flameless, fuel-flexible onsite power machine that reacts natural gas, hydrogen or ammonia at low temperature to shuttle magnets through copper coils — selling firm, fast-to-deploy power to data centers, utilities and industrial sites while gas turbines are sold out through 2030. | Energy | emerging | 2010 | val Undisclosed at every round | 2026-07-23 | |
| Shepherd ↗ | emerging | AI-native managing general underwriter for commercial construction and the AI-infrastructure buildout — casualty, excess and builder's risk coverage priced off live jobsite telemetry from Procore, Autodesk, OpenSpace and Samsara, underwriting the data centers, chip fabs and energy projects behind the AI boom on other carriers' paper. | Insurance | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed at every round | 2026-07-23 | |
| Sunrun ↗ | at risk | America's largest residential solar and battery company — 1M+ subscribers on 25-year power contracts, financed by a $14B+ tower of tax equity and non-recourse debt — now the last scaled survivor of a sector in which nearly every major rival has gone bankrupt, and the chief beneficiary of a tax-code loophole (48E third-party ownership) that Congress has already scheduled for demolition. | Energy | incumbent | 2007 | val ~$4B | 2026-07-23 | |
| Exowatt ↗ | emerging | A Miami-born, Atomic-incubated energy startup selling the P3 — a 40-foot containerized module that concentrates sunlight through Fresnel lenses into a thermal battery and dispatches electricity through a Stirling engine — pitched as near-free, 24-hour dispatchable solar for AI data centers in the sun-soaked US Southwest. | Energy | emerging | 2023 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-22 | |
| Forward Air ↗ | at risk | The Tennessee expedited-LTL specialist that spent 30 years as the trucking network airfreight forwarders trusted — until a ~$3.2B Omni Logistics merger, rammed through in 2023 without a shareholder vote, buried it under $1.65B of net debt at 5.4x leverage, triggered three credit downgrades and an activist revolt, and ended in a failed year-long auction that left the equity a stub. | Logistics | incumbent | 1990 | val ~$400M | 2026-07-22 | |
| Ledgebrook ↗ | emerging | A tech-enabled excess-and-surplus-lines MGA that wins wholesale brokers by being the first quote back — automated submission ingestion, third-party data enrichment and AI-assisted underwriting compress E&S casualty quoting from days to hours, on rented carrier paper from MS Transverse and Obsidian. | Insurance | emerging | 2022 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-22 | |
| Manhattan Associates ↗ | well positioned | The warehouse-software incumbent that has held a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader position in WMS for 18 straight reports — founded in 1990 by a Kurt Salmon consultant and four ex-Infosys engineers, rebuilt from scratch as the cloud-native Manhattan Active platform, debt-free with $2.35B of RPO growing 24% — and still digesting a January 2025 services-guidance cut that erased a quarter of its market value in a day. | Supply chain | incumbent | 1990 | val ~$0K | 2026-07-22 | |
| QXO ↗ | well positioned | Brad Jacobs' fifth roll-up: a $1B shell turned $18B-revenue building-products distributor in 25 months — #1 in insulation and waterproofing, #2 in roofing — built on serial equity raises, a hostile-takeover machine, and a bet that AI-driven pricing can double distribution margins. | Construction | incumbent | 2024 | val ~$15.9B | 2026-07-22 | |
| Vooma ↗ | emerging | AI agents for freight brokers and carriers — software co-workers that read broker inboxes, quote freight, key loads into the TMS, call carriers, and schedule appointments, aiming to become the quote-to-cash orchestration layer for the roughly $1T US trucking industry. | Logistics | emerging | 2023 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-22 | |
| Walgreens Boots Alliance ↗ | at risk | The 124-year-old pharmacy chain that fell from a $100B+ market cap in 2015 to an $11.45-a-share take-under — bought by Sycamore Partners in August 2025 with 83% debt financing, chopped into five companies on day one, and now being run by the Staples playbook while PBM reimbursement grinds the core business toward zero. | Retail / pharmacy | incumbent | 1901 | val ~$10B | 2026-07-22 | |
| Whop ↗ | emerging | A marketplace and monetization stack for 'internet businesses' — Discord trading groups, sports-pick cappers, course sellers, software renters and a pay-per-view clipping economy — that pays out roughly $3B a year to sellers in 144 countries and, with Tether's $200M investment, is bolting a stablecoin bank on top. | Ecommerce | emerging | 2021 | val $1.6B | 2026-07-22 | |
| Bedrock Robotics ↗ | emerging | A San Francisco startup founded by ex-Waymo autonomy leaders that bolts a brand-agnostic sensor-and-compute kit onto existing 20-to-80-ton excavators, turning contractors' own machines into supervised-autonomous, 24/7 earthmovers rather than selling them new hardware. | Construction | emerging | 2024 | val ~$1.8B | 2026-07-21 | |
| Big Lots ↗ | at risk | The 57-year-old closeout retailer that drifted from its treasure-hunt roots into national-brand furniture, got gutted when inflation-squeezed low-income shoppers stopped buying discretionary home goods, and collapsed into a September 2024 Chapter 11 — then watched a $620M Nexus Capital rescue fall through, liquidate through going-out-of-business sales, and convert to Chapter 7 in November 2025, leaving only ~220 stores reborn under Variety Wholesalers. | Retail | incumbent | 1967 | val ~$2B | 2026-07-21 | |
| J.B. Hunt Transport Services ↗ | well positioned | The Arkansas trucking family business that a 1989 handshake with the Santa Fe Railway turned into North America's #1 intermodal franchise — a $12B surface-transportation giant whose rail-plus-truck moat is real but whose EPS has fallen every year since the 2022 peak as a multi-year freight recession grinds intermodal yields, brokerage losses, and margins. | Logistics | incumbent | 1961 | val ~$0K | 2026-07-21 | |
| NineDot Energy ↗ | emerging | A New York City developer and operator squeezing utility-scale battery storage onto the city's leftover parcels — parking lots, industrial edges, transit-adjacent scraps — and stacking Con Edison grid programs, capacity and energy arbitrage into a distributed virtual power plant that props up a congested urban grid. | Energy | emerging | 2015 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-21 | |
| project44 ↗ | emerging | The Chicago freight-visibility platform that ingests carrier telematics, EDI and API feeds to track shipments across ocean, air, rail, truck and parcel in real time — now recast as an agentic 'Movement' decision-intelligence layer, after a $2.7B peak, two rounds of layoffs and a bruising rivalry with FourKites. | Supply chain | emerging | 2014 | val ~$2.7B | 2026-07-21 | |
| QVC Group ↗ | at risk | The 40-year-old television-shopping empire — QVC, HSN, and the Cornerstone catalog brands — that John Malone's Liberty complex built into a $14B business, watched shrink to $9.2B as cable audiences aged out and cord-cutting bit, and then steered into a prepackaged Chapter 11 in April 2026 that wipes out shareholders and cuts $6.6B of debt to $1.3B, all while betting its survival on a 24/7 pivot to TikTok Shop. | Ecommerce | incumbent | 1986 | val ~$6.6B | 2026-07-21 | |
| Reserv ↗ | emerging | An AI-native third-party administrator for property-and-casualty insurance — it takes over carriers' and MGAs' claims files, runs them on its own Glance platform, and uses generative AI to let a smaller bench of human adjusters close claims faster and cheaper than legacy TPAs like Sedgwick and Crawford. | Insurance | emerging | 2022 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-21 | |
| Verisk Analytics ↗ | well positioned | The insurer-owned ratings bureau founded in 1971 that became a for-profit near-monopoly on U.S. property-casualty data — ISO standardized policy forms, industry loss costs, catastrophe models, and the Xactimate claims-estimating platform that sits inside nearly every U.S. property claim — now a ~$3.1B-revenue, ~56%-EBITDA-margin pure-play after shedding energy and financial-services units, but wearing a rich multiple into an AI-disruption debate. | Insurance | incumbent | 1971 | val ~$25B | 2026-07-21 | |
| Advance Auto Parts ↗ | at risk | The 1932 Roanoke parts chain that became the third-largest U.S. auto-parts retailer, then spent a decade botching the integration that was supposed to make it a leader — an operating margin near 2.5% against O'Reilly's ~20%, an 83% dividend cut, a $587M loss, ~700 stores marked for closure, and a $1.5B Worldpac fire-sale to fund a turnaround it has not yet proven. | Retail | incumbent | 1932 | val ~$2.4B | 2026-07-20 | |
| Cleveland-Cliffs ↗ | at risk | The 178-year-old iron-ore miner that Lourenco Goncalves turned into North America's largest flat-rolled steelmaker through $5B of debt-funded acquisitions — and that then posted a $708M loss in 2024 and a $1.4B loss in 2025 as its carbon-heavy blast-furnace model met soft auto demand, idled mills, and a leverage problem. | Steel / Materials | incumbent | 1847 | val ~$6.3B | 2026-07-20 | |
| The Descartes Systems Group ↗ | well positioned | The Waterloo logistics-software company that nearly died in the dot-com bust, cut a third of its staff to survive, and then — under a disciplined 50-plus-deal acquisition machine — compounded into a ~$650M-revenue, 45%-EBITDA-margin operator of the Global Logistics Network trading at a premium to almost every software peer. | Supply chain | incumbent | 1981 | val ~$0K | 2026-07-20 | |
| Einride ↗ | emerging | A Swedish freight platform selling electric and cab-less autonomous trucking as a turnkey subscription — the trucks, the Saga operating system, the charging, and the remote operators — to blue-chip shippers, now public on Nasdaq via a 2026 SPAC. | Logistics | emerging | 2016 | val ~$1.4B | 2026-07-20 | |
| Electra ↗ | emerging | A Boulder startup refining low-grade iron ore into 99%-pure iron with electricity at the temperature of a hot coffee — aiming to decarbonize the dirtiest step in steelmaking without charging a green premium. | Energy / Green iron | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-20 | |
| Etsy ↗ | at risk | The handmade marketplace that Josh Silverman turned into a $30B pandemic darling — and that has spent the years since unwinding: a stalling core GMS, an eroding buyer base, a dismantled 'house of brands,' and a stock down ~80% from its 2021 peak. | Ecommerce | incumbent | 2005 | val ~$0K | 2026-07-20 | |
| Sixfold ↗ | emerging | A generative-AI 'AI Underwriter' that learns a carrier's book and appetite, ingests each submission, and returns an auditable risk summary, recommendation, and — increasingly — a straight-through path to quote and bind, sitting inside the underwriter's existing workflow. | Insurance / Insurtech | emerging | 2023 | val Not disclosed | 2026-07-20 | |
| Sublime Systems ↗ | emerging | An MIT spinout replacing the cement kiln with an ambient-temperature electrochemical cell — no limestone calcination, no fossil heat, and therefore no process CO2 — trying to make 'true-zero' cement that meets standard building specs. | Construction / Cement | emerging | 2020 | val Not disclosed | 2026-07-20 | |
| Altana ↗ | emerging | A federated AI map of the global supply chain — enterprises and governments pool proprietary trade data without exposing it, and Altana sells the resulting value-chain 'source of truth' as compliance, risk, and tariff intelligence. | Supply chain | emerging | 2018 | val $1B | 2026-07-18 | |
| Coalition ↗ | emerging | The $5B Series F cyber-insurance MGA that turned continuous vulnerability scanning into an underwriting weapon and just absorbed Allianz's global commercial cyber book — now with Chubb, Travelers (via Corvus) and Beazley shipping their own native scanners at renewal and Munich Re owning At-Bay, the AI-native wedge is racing commoditisation. | Insurance / Cyber MGA + active insurance platform | emerging | 2017 | val ~$5B | 2026-07-18 | |
| e2open ↗ | at risk | The $10B supply-chain roll-up that a consortium of tech giants started in 2000, Insight Partners rebuilt through acquisitions, and a SPAC took public in 2021 — before stalled organic growth, a debt load, and six straight quarters of decline ended with a $3.30-a-share fire sale to Australia's WiseTech Global. | Supply chain | incumbent | 2000 | val ~$0K | 2026-07-18 | |
| eBay Inc. ↗ | at risk | The original C2C marketplace, thirty years on: a cash-gushing collectibles-and-parts machine that spun off PayPal, StubHub and Classifieds to become a leaner but slower-growing platform — now monetizing a shrinking buyer base harder through ads and fees while zero-fee Vinted and live-shopping Whatnot attack the C2C core it invented. | Ecommerce | incumbent | 1995 | val ~$47B | 2026-07-18 | |
| ICON ↗ | emerging | Austin's 3D-printing homebuilder — a gantry robot extrudes concrete walls in layers, sold as the fix for a construction industry that hasn't gotten cheaper in decades, now pivoting from building homes itself to selling printers and software to builders. | Construction | emerging | 2017 | val ~$2B peak | 2026-07-18 | |
| Tractor Supply Company ↗ | well positioned | The largest US rural-lifestyle retailer, built on the boring genius of selling chicken feed, propane, and horse dewormer to exurban America — a consumables-driven traffic machine that grew straight through the pandemic, then torched its own DEI and climate commitments in 72 hours to keep its conservative base. | Retail | incumbent | 1938 | val ~$23.7B | 2026-07-18 | |
| Federato ↗ | emerging | RiskOps for insurance underwriting — an AI-native workbench that sits on top of the policy-admin core and steers underwriters toward the risks a carrier actually wants to write. | Insurance / Insurtech | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-16 | |
| Fluence Energy, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The Western world's answer to Chinese battery giants — a Siemens-and-AES joint venture turned public integrator that assembles grid-scale storage from other people's cells, now caught between a record backlog and a margin structure the commoditization wave and the China tariff war are both squeezing. | Energy / Grid storage | incumbent | 2018 | val ~$3.5B | 2026-07-16 | |
| GE Vernova Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The energy company that fell out of the GE breakup — heavy-duty gas turbines sold out through the decade, a grid-equipment franchise riding the transformer shortage, and an offshore-wind wound that keeps the story honest — now a $270B beneficiary of the electricity supercycle. | Energy / Grid equipment | incumbent | 2024 | val ~$270B | 2026-07-16 | |
| GenLogs ↗ | emerging | A nationwide roadside-sensor grid built by ex-CIA operators that photographs and fingerprints every commercial truck in America — turning physical 'ground truth' into fraud, underwriting, and carrier-vetting intelligence. | Logistics / Supply chain | emerging | 2023 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-16 | |
| Guidewire Software ↗ | well positioned | The COBOL-killer that became the P&C insurance industry's operating system — 500-plus carriers running policy, billing and claims on its stack — now mid-cloud-transition, ARR finally past $1B, and freshly cheap after a ~50% stock round-trip that reset the multiple even as growth decelerates and AI-workflow layers circle the core. | Insurance | incumbent | 2001 | val ~$10B | 2026-07-16 | |
| GXO Logistics, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The world's largest pure-play contract-logistics operator — spun out of XPO to run other companies' warehouses at industrial scale, betting that automation and a secular outsourcing wave outrun the thin margins and cyclicality that come with renting out labor and floor space. | Logistics / Supply chain | incumbent | 2021 | val ~$6B | 2026-07-16 | |
| Heron Power ↗ | emerging | Solid-state transformers for the AI-era grid — a Tesla powertrain veteran betting that silicon carbide power electronics can replace the century-old iron-core transformer that data centers and renewables are now waiting years to get. | Energy / Grid infrastructure | emerging | 2024 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-16 | |
| HUB International Limited ↗ | well positioned | A merger of eleven Canadian brokerages that Hellman & Friedman turned into the most relentless roll-up machine in insurance distribution — 800-plus acquisitions since 2013, ~$4.8B of revenue, and a $29B private valuation now queued for a $3B IPO, all riding on leverage that never quite comes down. | Insurance | incumbent | 1998 | val ~$29B enterprise value | 2026-07-16 | |
| Kojo ↗ | emerging | Materials procurement and inventory software for trade contractors — takeoff to PO to delivery to invoice on one platform, now with a distributor, Wesco, as both investor and supplier. | Construction | emerging | 2018 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-16 | |
| Peak Energy ↗ | emerging | Sodium-ion, passively cooled grid-storage systems for utilities and IPPs — a lithium-free BESS built by Tesla, Enovix and Northvolt veterans betting that salt plus a factory in Sacramento beats cheap Chinese LFP. | Energy / Grid storage | emerging | 2023 | val ~$475M | 2026-07-16 | |
| PetSmart ↗ | at risk | The largest US pet-specialty retailer — ~1,600 stores, grooming salons, in-store Banfield vets and PetSmart Charities — bought by a BC Partners consortium in the era's biggest retail LBO, then famous for creating its own disruptor: it acquired Chewy in 2017, fought creditors over the collateral, and spun it out for a fortune while the stores it kept absorb the ecommerce blow. | Retail | incumbent | 1986 | val ~$8.7B | 2026-07-16 | |
| SPS Commerce, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The dominant retail-supply-chain EDI network — 100 straight quarters of revenue growth, 96% recurring, 55,000 trading partners — now growing at a third of its old rate, its stock down ~60%, with an activist pushing it into Morgan Stanley's hands just as API-native rivals argue its whole managed-service moat is a tax on complexity that no longer needs to exist. | Supply chain / Retail SaaS | incumbent | 1987 | val ~$2.1B | 2026-07-16 | |
| Staples, Inc. ↗ | at risk | The superstore that invented the office-supply category, now a Sycamore Partners LBO stripped to its US retail-and-B2B core — a shrinking store fleet bolted to a durable contract-delivery franchise, carrying a wall of high-coupon debt into a market in secular decline. | Retail | incumbent | 1986 | val ~$6.9B | 2026-07-16 | |
| Stord ↗ | emerging | Owned-plus-partner fulfillment network wrapped in in-house OMS/WMS/parcel software — selling independent brands Amazon-grade shipping speed as a 'cloud supply chain,' now rebranded a 'physical intelligence layer for commerce.' | Logistics / Supply chain | emerging | 2015 | val ~$3B | 2026-07-16 | |
| Taktile ↗ | emerging | A no-code decision engine that lets banks, lenders and insurers build, backtest and run automated risk decisions — credit, fraud, KYC and underwriting — then rebrands the whole thing as an 'agentic' decision platform. | Insurance / Fintech | emerging | 2020 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-16 | |
| Trunk Tools ↗ | emerging | AI agents for the built environment — ingest a project's drawings, specs, RFIs, submittals and schedules, then let field and office teams query them by text and hand tedious document work to agents. | Construction | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-16 | |
| Adaptive ↗ | emerging | AI-native accounting and AP automation for construction — coding every subcontractor invoice to a job and cost code, then trying to run the whole back office with agents. | Construction / Fintech | emerging | 2021 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-15 | |
| At Home Group ↗ | at risk | The self-styled 'home décor superstore' that Hellman & Friedman bought for $2.8B in 2021 and lenders repossessed in bankruptcy four years later — a warehouse-box chain whose LBO debt and 90%-imported inventory met a 145% China tariff. | Retail | incumbent | 1979 | val ~$2.8B | 2026-07-15 | |
| Builders FirstSource ↗ | well positioned | The roll-up that became the pro homebuilder's default supplier — #1 in a fragmented market, value-added mix over half of sales, and a share count cut nearly in half by buybacks — now riding out the deepest housing-starts trough since 2020. | Construction | incumbent | 1998 | val ~$12.2B | 2026-07-15 | |
| Duck Creek Technologies ↗ | well positioned | The cloud-native number two in P&C insurance core software — a Gartner-anointed Leader with sticky policy, billing and claims systems, taken private by Vista for $2.6B and now running dark behind Guidewire's widening lead. | Insurance | incumbent | 2000 | val ~$2.6B | 2026-07-15 | |
| Flexport ↗ | emerging | The software-first freight forwarder that raised $2.5B to disrupt a century-old spread business — then spent 2023-2025 learning that ocean rates, not code, still set the price. | Logistics / Supply Chain | emerging | 2013 | val ~$3.8B | 2026-07-15 | |
| Form Energy ↗ | emerging | The iron-rusting battery betting that 100-hour grid storage at $20/kWh beats lithium on cost — if utilities can live with sub-50% round-trip efficiency. | Energy / Grid storage | emerging | 2017 | val ~$3.4-3.5B | 2026-07-15 | |
| Openly ↗ | emerging | A premium home-insurance MGA that sells only through independent agents — a 15-second quote, guaranteed replacement cost to $5M, and a reinsurance panel carrying the risk it doesn't. | Insurance / Insurtech | emerging | 2017 | val Not disclosed | 2026-07-15 | |
| XPO, Inc. ↗ | well positioned | The Brad Jacobs roll-up that spun off everything else to become a pure-play LTL carrier — now the industry's fastest margin-improver, gaining share on real estate it bought out of Yellow's corpse, and trading at a nosebleed multiple that dares it to keep executing. | Logistics | incumbent | 2011 | val ~$24B | 2026-07-15 | |
| Applied Systems ↗ | well positioned | The agency management system half of the P&C insurance software duopoly — PE-owned since 2004, on its fourth sponsor, and quietly the toll booth between 38,000 independent agencies and their carriers. | Insurance | incumbent | 1983 | val ~$1.8B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Auger ↗ | emerging | Dave Clark's post-Amazon act: an AI operating layer that sits on top of every supply chain system a company already owns and makes the boring decisions for them. | Supply chain | emerging | 2024 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-14 | |
| Bob's Discount Furniture ↗ | at risk | A waterbed salesman's no-gimmick furniture chain became a $2B NYSE listing in February 2026 — and then comps fell to +1.2% and the stock slipped under its IPO price. | Retail | incumbent | 1991 | val ~$2B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Bloom Energy ↗ | well positioned | Twenty-five years of unprofitable fuel-cell R&D collided with an AI power shortage — and Bloom went from science project to the fastest way to put a gigawatt on a greenfield site. | Energy | incumbent | 2001 | val ~$79B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Blue Yonder ↗ | at risk | The 40-year-old supply chain planning incumbent Panasonic paid ~$8.5B for — $1.42B of revenue, 3,000 customers, a Gartner Leader badge in 18 straight WMS reports, and the ransomware attack that shut down Starbucks' payroll. | Supply chain | incumbent | 1985 | val ~$8.5B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Bolt ↗ | emerging | The 'universal' one-click checkout that bet an 80-million-shopper network would out-convert Shop Pay — then, after an $11B peak and a founder implosion, pivoted to a crypto SuperApp. | Ecommerce / Retail | emerging | 2014 | val $11B peak | 2026-07-14 | |
| Cart.com ↗ | emerging | The commerce roll-up that bought its way to a unified stack — storefront software, an order/warehouse OS, and ~14 owned fulfillment centers, sold as one bill. | Ecommerce / Retail | emerging | 2020 | val ~$1.6B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Chewy ↗ | well positioned | Ryan Cohen's Autoship machine sold to PetSmart for $3.35B in 2017, IPO'd in 2019, and now does $12.6B a year — yet the stock trades below its 2019 debut as BC Partners still holds the votes. | Ecommerce / Retail | incumbent | 2011 | val ~$8.5B | 2026-07-14 | |
| C.H. Robinson ↗ | well positioned | The 120-year-old produce broker that became America's largest freight middleman — and is now cutting a quarter of its people while gaining share, betting that AI agents make the broker stronger, not obsolete. | Logistics | incumbent | 1905 | val ~$18.3B market cap | 2026-07-14 | |
| Corgi ↗ | emerging | An AI-native insurer for startups that quotes in 30 seconds and books premium like software revenue — with the risk sitting in an unrated, member-owned risk retention group it also controls. | Insurance | emerging | 2024 | val $2.6B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Crusoe ↗ | emerging | Started by burning stranded gas to mine bitcoin at the wellhead. Now builds the gigawatt campuses OpenAI, Oracle and Microsoft run on — and is reportedly being priced at $30B. | Energy | emerging | 2018 | val Over $10B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Daydream ↗ | emerging | Julie Bornstein's second attempt at the same idea — an AI fashion shopping agent that reads plain-English or an uploaded photo and finds the outfit across 8,000-plus brands, three years after Pinterest bought her last one. | Ecommerce / Retail | emerging | 2023 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-14 | |
| EquipmentShare ↗ | at risk | A construction equipment rental roll-up that sells itself as a software company — now trading at half its first-day price while a short seller picks apart who owns the fleet. | Construction | incumbent | 2015 | val ~$4.7B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Faire ↗ | emerging | The wholesale marketplace that underwrote the independent retailer — net-60 terms, free returns, and a commission brands increasingly call a tax. | Ecommerce / Retail | emerging | 2017 | val ~$5.2B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Higharc ↗ | emerging | The homebuilding cloud that treats a house as a database, not a drawing — and is now trying to push that database into the lumber yard. | Construction | emerging | 2018 | val Undisclosed | 2026-07-14 | |
| Kohl's ↗ | at risk | The off-mall department-store chain that outlived the mall — now on its fourth CEO in four years, its dividend gutted, and a July 2025 meme-stock squeeze standing in for a turnaround. | Retail | incumbent | 1962 | val ~$1.9B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Michaels ↗ | at risk | Apollo's arts-and-crafts LBO traded at 34 cents on the dollar in May 2025 and refinanced near par in February 2026 — a specialty retailer that survived the retail apocalypse mostly by outliving the people it was competing with. | Retail | incumbent | 1973 | val ~$3.7B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Nirvana Insurance ↗ | emerging | A telematics-native MGA underwriting commercial trucking off 30 billion miles of driving data — pricing forward off behavior while the incumbent market prices backward off loss runs. | Insurance | emerging | 2021 | val $1.5B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Rokt ↗ | emerging | The AI company that turned the ecommerce 'thank you' page into a multi-billion-dollar ad network — profitable, cash-generative, and circling a 2026 IPO. | Ecommerce / Retail | emerging | 2012 | val US$3.5B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Saks Global ↗ | at risk | Richard Baker's real-estate playbook met the luxury downturn head-on: a debt-funded merger of Saks and Neiman Marcus that starved its own shelves, collapsed its bonds, and landed in Chapter 11 thirteen months later — now reborn as Exemplar Luxury Group. | Retail | incumbent | 2024 | val ~$2.7B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Wayfair ↗ | well positioned | The asset-light online home-goods pureplay that hit $14B in the pandemic, gave most of it back, cut a third of its people — and in 2026 is back to growth, share capture and a short-squeezing stock near $90. | Ecommerce / Retail | incumbent | 2002 | val ~$11B | 2026-07-14 | |
| Base Power ↗ | emerging | A three-year-old Texas company that raised $1.3B to become an electric utility built out of home batteries — and is now reportedly being priced at $12B. | Energy | emerging | 2023 | val $4B | 2026-07-13 | |
| BuildOps ↗ | emerging | The operating system for commercial HVAC, electrical and plumbing contractors — a unicorn built in the unglamorous middle of the trades, in ServiceTitan's blind spot. | Construction | emerging | 2018 | val $1B post-money | 2026-07-13 | |
| Copeland ↗ | at risk | The century-old compressor giant Blackstone carved out of Emerson at a $14B valuation — now levered ~6x, filed for an IPO, and cutting shifts into an air-conditioning slump. | Construction / Energy (HVACR) | incumbent | 1921 | val ~$14B | 2026-07-13 | |
| HappyRobot ↗ | emerging | AI voice and workflow agents that answer the phone for freight — 70+ enterprise customers, ~10x revenue growth between rounds, and an unresolved moat question. | Logistics / Supply chain | emerging | 2022 | val ~$500M | 2026-07-13 | |
| Kin Insurance ↗ | emerging | The direct-to-consumer home insurer that runs toward the catastrophe markets everyone else is fleeing — and books fees, not risk. | Insurance | emerging | 2016 | val $2B pre-money | 2026-07-13 | |
| Whatnot ↗ | emerging | The live-shopping marketplace that turned collectibles auctions into an $8B GMV machine — and America's best evidence that live commerce works outside China. | Ecommerce / Retail | emerging | 2019 | val $11.5B | 2026-07-13 |