stealth founders · updated Sep 18, 2026
founders building in stealth, by where they came from
frontrun has flagged 2,478 people building in stealth and rates 896 of them strong, meaning the building claim held up against a verified career history.
a founder in stealth leaves almost no public footprint, so company databases miss them by construction. the other sources infer stealth from a static artifact - a linkedin title, a registry filing, a domain, a github spike. frontrun infers it from investor attention and career movement, and timestamps the flag. counts are public here; the judged rows and the evidence behind each verdict are in the product.
where they came from
| previous company | founders in stealth | rated strong | first flagged |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meta | 69 | 43 | Jul 17, 2026 |
| 68 | 39 | Jul 15, 2026 | |
| Microsoft | 65 | 40 | Jul 14, 2026 |
| Amazon | 47 | 25 | Jul 15, 2026 |
| Apple | 41 | 28 | Jul 14, 2026 |
| OpenAI | 26 | 11 | Jul 15, 2026 |
| Uber | 19 | 10 | Jul 24, 2026 |
| Tesla | 18 | 12 | Jul 22, 2026 |
| Google DeepMind | 18 | 8 | Jul 25, 2026 |
| McKinsey & Company | 17 | 7 | Jul 14, 2026 |
| Coinbase | 17 | 8 | Jul 31, 2026 |
| NVIDIA | 16 | 8 | Jul 21, 2026 |
| SpaceX | 14 | 11 | Jul 31, 2026 |
| Ramp | 13 | 6 | Jul 23, 2026 |
| Salesforce | 13 | 3 | Jul 25, 2026 |
| Palantir Technologies | 13 | 9 | Jul 15, 2026 |
| Goldman Sachs | 11 | 3 | Jul 25, 2026 |
| Scale AI | 11 | 5 | Jul 27, 2026 |
| PwC | 10 | 4 | Jul 27, 2026 |
| Amazon Web Services | 10 | 4 | Jul 14, 2026 |
| 10 | 3 | Jul 24, 2026 | |
| AWS | 10 | 5 | Jul 25, 2026 |
| Stripe | 9 | 5 | Jul 25, 2026 |
| Accenture | 9 | 2 | Jul 25, 2026 |
| Capital One | 9 | 5 | Jul 31, 2026 |
| Morgan Stanley | 8 | 4 | Aug 12, 2026 |
| Deloitte | 7 | 2 | Jul 24, 2026 |
| IBM | 7 | 2 | Aug 5, 2026 |
| TikTok | 7 | 2 | Jul 31, 2026 |
| Amazon Web Services (AWS) | 7 | 1 | Jul 25, 2026 |
| MIT CSAIL | 7 | 2 | Jul 15, 2026 |
| Anduril Industries | 7 | 5 | Sep 5, 2026 |
| Snap Inc. | 7 | 2 | Jul 31, 2026 |
| xAI | 7 | 6 | Jul 19, 2026 |
| Airbnb | 6 | 1 | Jul 30, 2026 |
| 6 | 4 | Aug 18, 2026 | |
| 6 | 3 | Jul 31, 2026 | |
| Visa | 6 | 1 | Jul 31, 2026 |
| Cisco | 6 | 3 | Jul 27, 2026 |
| J.P. Morgan | 6 | 0 | Aug 1, 2026 |
| Andreessen Horowitz | 6 | 1 | Aug 13, 2026 |
| DoorDash | 6 | 4 | Jul 27, 2026 |
| Meta (FAIR) | 6 | 5 | Aug 14, 2026 |
| Cloudflare | 6 | 4 | Jul 15, 2026 |
| ByteDance | 5 | 1 | Jul 27, 2026 |
| Citi | 5 | 1 | Jul 27, 2026 |
| Bank of America | 5 | 0 | Aug 25, 2026 |
| Vercel | 5 | 4 | Aug 20, 2026 |
| Antler | 5 | 4 | Aug 2, 2026 |
| 5 | 2 | Aug 12, 2026 | |
| EY | 5 | 1 | Jul 31, 2026 |
| PayPal | 5 | 3 | Jul 15, 2026 |
| Mercor | 5 | 1 | Aug 11, 2026 |
| Robinhood | 5 | 2 | Jul 17, 2026 |
| Microsoft Research | 5 | 3 | Jul 30, 2026 |
| Dropbox | 5 | 3 | Jul 15, 2026 |
| Citadel | 5 | 2 | Aug 12, 2026 |
| Rippling | 5 | 3 | Aug 1, 2026 |
| Anthropic | 5 | 1 | Aug 7, 2026 |
| Roblox | 5 | 3 | Sep 7, 2026 |
| Bain & Company | 5 | 3 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| Intel | 5 | 1 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| Meta Reality Labs | 4 | 3 | Sep 3, 2026 |
| McKinsey | 4 | 3 | Jul 24, 2026 |
| Yahoo | 4 | 2 | Jul 24, 2026 |
| Deloitte Digital | 4 | 1 | Aug 7, 2026 |
| Palantir | 4 | 1 | Aug 2, 2026 |
| ServiceNow | 4 | 4 | Sep 12, 2026 |
| Northrop Grumman | 4 | 2 | Aug 6, 2026 |
| NASA | 4 | 2 | Jul 15, 2026 |
| Jane Street | 4 | 1 | Aug 14, 2026 |
| Shopify | 4 | 0 | Aug 1, 2026 |
| Deutsche Bank | 4 | 1 | Jul 31, 2026 |
| Polychain Capital | 4 | 1 | Jul 23, 2026 |
| Atlassian | 4 | 2 | Aug 5, 2026 |
| Barclays | 4 | 0 | Jul 29, 2026 |
| Oracle | 4 | 1 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| Adobe | 4 | 2 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| Bloomberg | 4 | 2 | Jul 24, 2026 |
| IonQ | 3 | 2 | Jul 15, 2026 |
| Etsy | 3 | 3 | Aug 7, 2026 |
| Google Cloud | 3 | 2 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| Wayfair | 3 | 2 | Jul 17, 2026 |
| Gusto | 3 | 2 | Aug 25, 2026 |
| ShiftOS | 3 | 2 | Aug 19, 2026 |
| Amazon AWS | 3 | 0 | Sep 10, 2026 |
| U.S. Army | 3 | 1 | Jul 24, 2026 |
| Bridgewater Associates | 3 | 1 | Aug 12, 2026 |
| Point72 | 3 | 1 | Jul 27, 2026 |
| Cresta | 3 | 3 | Aug 16, 2026 |
| Okta | 3 | 2 | Aug 2, 2026 |
| Cloudera | 3 | 0 | Jul 31, 2026 |
| Ironclad | 3 | 2 | Aug 15, 2026 |
| Dataiku | 3 | 0 | Jul 31, 2026 |
| Notion | 3 | 1 | Aug 18, 2026 |
| Collate | 3 | 3 | Aug 2, 2026 |
| Oaktree Capital | 3 | 2 | Sep 8, 2026 |
| Plaid | 3 | 1 | Jul 15, 2026 |
| Pika | 3 | 0 | Jul 22, 2026 |
| South Park Commons | 3 | 2 | Jul 31, 2026 |
| 8VC | 3 | 2 | Aug 13, 2026 |
| Ford Motor Company | 3 | 1 | Sep 8, 2026 |
| Dune | 3 | 1 | Jul 14, 2026 |
| Citadel Securities | 3 | 3 | Aug 2, 2026 |
| Parity Technologies | 3 | 0 | Jul 17, 2026 |
| Nethermind | 3 | 1 | Aug 28, 2026 |
| Uniswap Labs | 3 | 1 | Jul 13, 2026 |
| Cruise | 3 | 1 | Aug 5, 2026 |
| Bloomberg LP | 3 | 1 | Aug 31, 2026 |
| Messari | 3 | 0 | Jul 14, 2026 |
| Browser Use | 3 | 2 | Aug 9, 2026 |
| Lockheed Martin | 3 | 2 | Aug 9, 2026 |
| Lyft | 3 | 2 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| AMD | 3 | 1 | Aug 3, 2026 |
| Meta (Facebook) | 3 | 3 | Aug 20, 2026 |
| Deel | 3 | 2 | Aug 13, 2026 |
| GitHub | 3 | 0 | Jul 27, 2026 |
| Mistral AI | 3 | 1 | Aug 22, 2026 |
| Slack | 3 | 0 | Aug 10, 2026 |
| GSR | 3 | 0 | Aug 23, 2026 |
| Intel Corporation | 3 | 2 | Aug 3, 2026 |
| Tely AI | 3 | 3 | Sep 2, 2026 |
| Zoox | 3 | 1 | Aug 27, 2026 |
| Palo Alto Networks | 3 | 3 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| NBCUniversal | 3 | 1 | Jul 27, 2026 |
| Lovable | 3 | 1 | Aug 15, 2026 |
| Brex | 3 | 1 | Jul 15, 2026 |
| Walmart | 3 | 2 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| Rubrik | 3 | 1 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| Arm | 3 | 1 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| Datadog | 3 | 1 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| Delve | 3 | 0 | Aug 21, 2026 |
| Augment Code | 3 | 3 | Jul 14, 2026 |
| Intuit | 3 | 1 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| C3 AI | 3 | 1 | Jul 30, 2026 |
| Dell Technologies | 3 | 1 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| UBS | 3 | 0 | Sep 12, 2026 |
| VMware | 3 | 2 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| Traba | 3 | 0 | Jul 25, 2026 |
| Zscaler | 3 | 1 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| SYNK | 3 | 0 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| Fundamental Research Labs | 3 | 1 | Sep 11, 2026 |
| ADP | 3 | 1 | Sep 11, 2026 |
how a person gets counted here
three detectors run over the investor follow graph: an x bio changing into founder language, a linkedin move into a stealth or unnamed role, and tracked investors converging on a person who has no company yet. every hit is then judged against verified career evidence, linkedin history, a personal site, publications, and returned as strong, worth a look, or weak.
2,478 people have been flagged and 896 rate strong. the gap between those two numbers is the work, and it is roughly the false-positive rate you should assume for any stealth list that has not been filtered.
why this is not a registry filing
every other source in this category infers stealth from an artifact: a linkedin title, a trade-registry filing, a domain registration, a github spike. an artifact proves an entity exists, it is public, and anyone running the same crawler finds it at the same time. investor attention is a behaviour, not a record. it shows who the market already believes in, and it cannot be backfilled by anyone who was not recording on the day it happened, including us.
the receipt
jacob zietek was published on a public stealth lineup on august 19 2026. twenty-one days later ixian robotics announced a pre-seed from a16z and accel. the flag predates the company announcement, both dates are public, and neither can be edited after the fact. the full timeline.
why we publish counts and not names
the people in this set are private on purpose, and most of them will eventually build something worth backing. publishing every name we hold would work against exactly the people the lane exists to serve. so these pages carry the counts and the method; individual founders are named only in posts reviewed one at a time, and the judged rows with the evidence behind each verdict stay in the product.