This weekly update highlights a major milestone in the AI agent startup ecosystem as OpenAI announced Frontier, a new platform designed for companies to build and manage artificial intelligence agents. The launch comes at a time when the AI startup world is booming, with over 100 active AI agent companies being tracked by industry watchers. OpenAI Frontier works with agents built by other companies too, making it an open platform that helps enterprises treat AI agents like human employees.

The AI startup funding boom continues to break records. In 2025 alone, top AI startups raised nearly $150 billion, making up more than 40 percent of all venture capital invested worldwide. Major companies like Anthropic, xAI, and Databricks are dominating the space with billions in valuations. However, the real action is happening in vertical AI—specialized AI agents built for specific industries like healthcare, legal, and marketing. These startups captured $15 billion in funding in 2025 because they can do one job much better than general tools.

Startups are building AI agents for almost everything: coding, customer support, recruitment, insurance claims, and even clinical trials. Companies like Cognition AI (known for the Devin coding agent) grew from just $1 million in revenue to $73 million in less than a year, showing that AI agents can solve real problems that people will pay for. With OpenAI's new enterprise focus and competition from Salesforce, LangChain, and CrewAI, the market for agent management platforms is becoming as important as the agents themselves. For startup builders, this is a pivotal moment: the question is no longer "Should we build AI agents?" but rather "Which problems will our AI agent solve best?"