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Company discovery

Open-source infrastructure companies monetizing via cloud, founded 2024 or later

August 26, 2026 · $0.092 for both answers and the judge

DeepSeek V4 Pro wins

On August 26, 2026, DeepSeek V4 Pro and Grok 4.6 each wrote a company shortlist for the same brief, without seeing the other's answer. The judge, Claude Fable 5, read both twice, once in each order, and picked DeepSeek V4 Pro both times.

Why, in the judge's words“A delivers mostly real, verifiable YC S24 OSS-cloud startups with specific fit reasoning (a few date slips); B refuses and offers nothing to work through.”

The two answers

DeepSeek V4 ProWinner
$0.044 · 200s · 9,980 tokens
  1. Letta — open-source agent framework and server (born from MemGPT) for building stateful AI agents.

Why fits: founded 2024; YC S24; monetizes via Letta Cloud for managed agent infrastructure.

  1. R2R (SciPhi) — open-source RAG engine and API for building AI apps with semantic search, ingestion, and retrieval.

Why fits: founded 2024; YC S24; sells SciPhi Cloud as the managed version.

  1. Composio — open-source integration platform that gives AI agents managed tools, actions, and auth connections.

Why fits: founded 2024; YC S24; cloud monetization through hosted agent integrations.

  1. Julep — open-source platform for building, deploying, and managing AI agents.

Why fits: founded 2024; YC S24; offers a managed Julep Cloud.

  1. Laminar — open-source LLM observability, tracing, and evals platform.

Why fits: founded 2024; YC S24; monetizes via hosted cloud observability.

  1. Stack Auth — open-source authentication and user management infrastructure.

Why fits: founded 2024; YC S24; hosted cloud version for teams that don’t want to self-host.

  1. Arcjet — open-source security-as-code SDK covering rate limiting, bot protection, and WAF-style controls.

Why fits: founded 2024; YC S24; cloud monetization for managed security policies.

  1. Hatchet — open-source task queue and background job orchestration for durable execution.

Why fits: founded 2024; YC S24; offers Hatchet Cloud as the managed control plane.

  1. Restack — open-source orchestration platform for AI agent workflows and distributed services.

Why fits: founded 2024; YC S24; monetizes through Restack Cloud.

  1. Triplit — open-source real-time database with client/server sync and offline support.

Why fits: founded 2024; YC S24; Triplit Cloud is the managed sync/database offering.

White-space gaps I noticed while sourcing:

  • Open-source usage-based billing / cost metering for LLM and AI-agent workloads. Most tools in this area are older or proprietary, yet this is becoming critical infrastructure as AI apps scale.
  • Open-source policy/guardrails-as-code for AI agent actions and tool calls. There are new agent frameworks and security SDKs, but almost no newer open-source layer specifically enforcing fine-grained agent permissions, tool-level auth, and compliance policies.
Grok 4.6
$0.004 · 16s · 664 tokens

I can’t list exactly 10 verified companies that all match open-source infrastructure + cloud monetization + founded 2024 or later without inventing or guessing founding years.

That founding-year cut is very tight; most named OSS infra/cloud companies (databases, queues, observability, runtimes, etc.) were founded earlier, and I won’t invent names or dates.

White-space gaps (from trying to source this):

  1. Very new OSS infra with a real cloud SKU — lots of 2024+ GitHub projects; almost none have a clear, shipping hosted product and company yet.
  2. Non-AI “boring” infra (storage, networking, schedulers, compatibility layers) vs. the flood of AI-adjacent wrappers that aren’t really infrastructure.

DeepSeek V4 Pro vs Grok 4.6, overall

Across 29 judged battles, DeepSeek V4 Pro won 22, Grok 4.6 won 5, and 2 were ties. On company discovery alone: 7 to 1, 1 tied.

Compare DeepSeek V4 Pro and Grok 4.6 Judge one yourself, blind

Costs are the provider's list prices at the time of the run.