Real markets, real unit economics, real launch budgets. No “AI changes everything,” no unicorn theater. Just ideas you could pressure-test over a weekend.
Cents: how one founder raised $140M turning laundromats into a subscription business
While everyone chased AI unicorns, Alex Jekowski dropped out of college and bet on coin-op laundry — a $60B industry still running on quarters and paper logs. He wasn't wrong.
Cents built an operating system for the $60B laundry industry — a sector so analog it barely registered on Silicon Valley's radar. With 99% retention, $1B in annual payment volume, and a $140M Series C, Cents is the blueprint for what happens when you take vertical SaaS seriously in a market nobody wanted.
US Market$60B
Budget—
DifficultyHigh
2026-05-108 min
AI-агентыИнфраструктураB2A
Monid: the marketplace where the buyer is an AI agent, not a human
B2B assumes a human on the other end. B2A doesn't. Monid is betting that the next layer of internet infrastructure gets built for machines — and that whoever controls the tool catalog controls the market.
B2B purchases via agents by 2028$15T
Budget—
DifficultyMedium
2026-05-098 min
SaaS / B2B
Torch Dental: AI-powered procurement for a $13B market that still runs on phone calls and PDF catalogs
Dental practices spend 6–8% of revenue on supplies and almost never know if they're overpaying. Torch built an AI layer on top of the supply chain chaos — and now works with 3,000+ clinics.
Market—
Budget—
DifficultyMedium
2026-05-088 min
Samsara: how putting a $30 IoT device in every truck became a $25B business
A truck without connectivity is a black box: you don't know where it is, what the engine is doing, or how the driver is behaving. Samsara plugged a sensor into every vehicle and sells the data as a subscription. $1.1B ARR, 21,000+ customers, NYSE.
Market—
Budget—
DifficultyMedium
2026-05-078 min
TypingMind: $1.5M/year selling a UI layer on top of other people's AI
Tony Dinh didn't train a single model. Didn't raise a dollar. Didn't hire anyone. He just built a better interface to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini than the companies that made them — and 20,000+ businesses pay him for it.
