Sample data only — quarterly brief on what HBS founders are building, who's getting attention, and what's next.
Rock Center for Entrepreneurship Issue № 01  ·  Q1 2026

The Rock Center
Quarterly

What HBS founders are building, who's getting attention,
and what to watch for next.

From the Director

A note to start: we wanted a way to tell the real story of what HBS founders are doing — not the one that gets repeated at cocktail parties. So we built one.

This is the first edition of a quarterly brief drawn entirely from public data and the anonymized intake of our programs. Every figure here can be reproduced from the same sources every ninety days, so over time the picture will sharpen rather than drift.

The headline this quarter is simple. Of the forty-seven HBS-tagged companies founded in the last twelve months, two are dating or travel apps. Forty-five are not.

— The Director, Rock Center for Entrepreneurship

The Quarter in Numbers
§ 01  ·  The Sector View

What founders are actually building

The dating-and-travel-apps narrative does not survive contact with the data. Here's the share of HBS-tagged companies founded in the last twelve months, by sector — with movement against the same period a year ago.

Sector Share YoY
Enterprise software / SaaS 30% ▲ +6 pp
Healthcare & life sciences 19% ▲ +4 pp
Financial services / fintech 13% ▼ −2 pp
Climate / energy / sustainability 11% ▲ +3 pp
Industrial & robotics 9% ▲ +2 pp
Consumer products & retail 6% ▼ −3 pp
Consumer lifestyle (travel, dating, social) 4% ▼ −8 pp
Education 4% ▼ −1 pp
Other 4% ▼ −1 pp
AI as a Theme

Nearly half of new companies are AI-native.

A year ago, fewer than one in three new HBS-tagged companies had AI at their product core. Today it is nearly one in two — and the share of non-AI companies has fallen by twenty-four percentage points.

AI-NATIVE · 47%
AI-APPLIED · 30%
NON-AI · 23%
+18 pp YoY +6 pp −24 pp
Where the AI-native work is happening
Vertical enterprise agents
8 companies · legal, accounting, insurance ops
Clinical workflow automation
5 companies · documentation, prior auth, triage
Industrial & manufacturing AI
4 companies · vision, scheduling, quality
Developer infrastructure
3 companies · evals, observability, agents
Climate & carbon analytics
2 companies · disclosures, transition finance
§ 02  ·  The Quarter's Movements

Notable companies & coverage

Disclosed Fundraises
Lattice Health
Autonomous nursing documentation. Founder, MBA '19.
$42M
Series B
Atria Robotics
Computer vision for the factory floor. Founder, MBA '18.
$35M
Series A
Veridian
Carbon accounting for mid-market manufacturers. Founder, MBA '21.
$28M
Series A
Quill
Vertical AI for in-house legal teams. Founder, MBA '24.
$14M
Seed
Linden Logistics
Mid-market freight orchestration. Founder, MBA '23.
$9M
Seed
In the Press
TechCrunch · Mar 18
Inside Lattice Health's bet on autonomous nursing documentation — the case for letting AI write the chart.
The Wall Street Journal · Feb 27
Why HBS founders are flocking to climate tech — quotes Veridian's CEO and three other recent alumni.
Bloomberg · Feb 11
Atria Robotics raises $35M to put AI on the factory floor — General Catalyst leads the round.
Forbes · Jan 30
Quill's $14M seed bet on legal-vertical AI — the cohort of in-house legal AI startups, ranked.
Exits & Outcomes
Acquired → Cordon Capital by Stripe. Reported terms: ~$180M. Founders, MBA '17 and '18.
Listed → Orchard AI on NYSE at a $1.4B opening valuation. Founder, MBA '15.
Wound down → Sunrise Social after Series A. A consumer-lifestyle outlier in this quarter's data.
§ 03  ·  Looking Forward

Three themes to watch

i.
Vertical AI moves down-market.
Eight new HBS-tagged companies are building AI agents for narrow professional verticals — legal, accounting, insurance ops. Application intake suggests at least double that number is in stealth.
ii.
Climate tech rotates to fintech.
The climate-software companies founded this quarter look more like fintech than like cleantech: carbon markets, transition finance, climate-disclosure infrastructure. Hardware-heavy plays are flat.
iii.
Industrial AI exits the pilot phase.
Atria's Series A is one signal. Three more industrial-AI companies in the alumni pool are now reporting paid pilots converting to multi-year contracts — a step we have not seen in the previous four quarters.
On the calendar

Summer Venture Program intake closes May 12.  New Venture Competition finals, May 30.  The next quarterly will land mid-July.

About this report

Every figure in this newsletter is built from public commercial databases (PitchBook, Crunchbase, LinkedIn), AI-assisted research on publicly available company information, and the Rock Center's own anonymized program intake. No personal data about any student, applicant, or alumnus leaves the Center.

Methodology, definitions, and known data gaps are documented at rockcenter.hbs.edu/quarterly.

Rock Center for Entrepreneurship
Harvard Business School  ·  Boston, MA 		View in browser  ·  Unsubscribe

SAMPLE DATA — ILLUSTRATIVE ONLY. All companies, founder class years, fundraises, headlines, and figures shown above are fictional and intended to demonstrate the format of the quarterly report.