The conventional wisdom about AI-native businesses — that inference costs would permanently suppress gross margins relative to traditional SaaS — is being dismantled by the actual performance of the cohort that has reached scale. The combination of falling model costs, architectural efficiency gains, and the premium pricing power that genuine AI differentiation commands has produced a set of unit economics that investors describe, with the particular enthusiasm of those who had priced in a worse outcome, as surprisingly compelling.
Startups
Y Combinator's Summer Cohort: Sixty Per Cent AI-Native Marks a Watershed
Of 214 companies in the S26 batch, 128 are built on foundational model infrastructure — a proportion…