From AI agents hiring humans to browsers built for bots, this year’s crop of local AI startups is genuinely strange, and genuinely worth watching.
RentAHuman: The marketplace where AI agents hire people
The name is not a joke. RentAHuman is a marketplace where AI agents post task bounties or hire humans directly for real-world jobs they cannot complete on their own. The platform launched on February 1, 2026, and woke up to 130 applicants offering their services. The next day it had 1,000 registered workers. A day after that, 145,000. Since then, more than 700,000 people have signed up to get a job from AI, with international press coverage from Forbes and Business Insider. Tasks range from last-mile deliveries to holding signs in Shibuya Crossing. Whether it scales into something serious or stays delightfully weird, it is the most on-the-nose startup of the AI agent era.
Korso: The back office for manufacturers
Manufacturing still runs on spreadsheets, phone calls, and tribal knowledge. Korso wants to change that. The company is an AI-powered operations platform that automates the full quote-to-order workflow for manufacturers, processing incoming requests for quotation, extracting line items, generating professional quotes, and tracking purchase orders through production. Its agents plug into existing ERP and CRM systems, triage incoming requests, chase delayed orders, notify customers, and escalate only when human judgment is genuinely needed. The three-person team includes founders with backgrounds at Penn and General Motors.
Gikl, Inc: Crowdsourcing scientific discovery
Gikl operates under the brand ScienceSwarm, a platform that lets anyone point AI at unsolved problems in math, science, and engineering, submitting approaches and hypotheses and verifying the work with a community of AI-powered contributors. The founding team brings serious credentials: co-founder Peter Vajda spent 11 years as Director of Media Generation at Meta, leading development of text-to-image and text-to-video foundation models including Emu and Movie Gen. The pitch is that coding assistants democratised software development, and science should be next.
Modern: IT tickets, handled
Nobody loves submitting an IT ticket and waiting three days for a password reset. Modern builds AI agents for IT, HR, and finance teams, designed to automatically resolve more than 80 percent of high-volume requests. Teams define workflows in plain language, set approval rules, and Modern handles the rest: password resets, access provisioning, expense approvals, onboarding checklists, with full audit trails and enterprise-grade security built in. It is designed to work alongside existing IT service management tools with no rip-and-replace required, and most teams are reportedly live within a day.
StableBrowse: A browser built for bots, not humans
Most browser infrastructure assumes a human is on the other end. StableBrowse does not. The company is building what it calls the world’s fastest and lightest browser for AI agents, stripping out the visual rendering stack that humans need but agents do not, and replacing it with a semantic understanding of the web. The result turns the web into a native protocol for large language models, enabling agents to perform deep research, large-scale scraping, and complex automation more efficiently. As agentic AI matures from demo to infrastructure, the plumbing underneath it matters more than most people realize. StableBrowse is betting it will matter a lot.
