Revealing Winter 2026 Batch

Here it is, folks: our Winter 2026 batch! We deliberately kept this one under wraps until Demo Day, and we're excited to finally reveal it.

Admittedly, something feels different about this batch. For one, it's one of our smallest since we launched in 2020. I'll probably write a separate post about this, but as AI continues to drive massive change in how we work, operate, and think, we're seeing a huge shift in how founders build companies too.

With that said, Iterative's Winter 2026 batch, our 12th since 2020, is one we're really proud of. Out of 1,000+ applications and hundreds of hours of interviews, we picked eight companies we just couldn't say no to. From AI-powered credit infrastructure to the future of AI filmmaking to robotics data at scale, this batch is tackling some of the biggest problems we've seen founders go after. Here they are:

1. Moneta (Indonesia) - AI credit analyst for corporate lenders
2. Paypers (Thailand) - Automates finance operations and tax filing for mom-and-pop shops
3. Pixo (Singapore) - AI agent for long-form video creation
4. Taama (Thailand) - Automating regulatory compliance for food, supplement and beauty brands & retailers
5. SobelAI (Singapore) - Helping property agents turn dead leads into deals
6. Synscribe (Singapore) - AI-native SEO and GEO agency for B2B companies
7. Udifine (Singapore) - Turning AI-generated designs into high-quality physical products
8. Robotics AI Company* - Making industrial automation accessible to small manufacturers

If you'd like to get to know these companies, please visit our Demo Day page where you can rewatch their pitches and connect with them here.

*This company's name is hidden as they're in stealth mode. For this reason, we omitted them from this article.

Moneta

Company Description: AI credit analyst for corporate lenders

Founders: Sergei Kouzmin, Denis Anoshin, Danila Ivanchenko

Why we're excited: There is a massive SME credit gap in Southeast Asia ($300B+), and it exists because banks simply cannot process applications fast enough. On average, one underwriter handles about 40 borrowers per month. A 10-person underwriting team at $700/head can process roughly 400 applications a month at $7,000 in salary costs. That's the ceiling.

Moneta's AI underwriting engine processes 400+ borrowers per month on its own, at a fraction of the cost. Banks love it: within its first month of launch, Moneta saw 200%+ month-on-month growth and 100% retention. The company is starting in Indonesia and expanding to the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand. We've backed founder Sergei before, and we're excited to back him again.

Paypers

Company Description: Automates finance operations and tax filing for mom-and-pop shops

Founders: Anunya Sahussarungsi, Wasin Watthanasrisong

Why we're excited: Most SME finance tools fail on adoption because they demand behavioural change from business owners who have no interest in learning new software. Not Paypers. The founders of Paypers strongly believe that finance software doesn't need more features, it needs to meet where their customers are. So instead of asking business owners to learn new tools, Paypers uses a chat-first interface built on LINE and WhatsApp, apps that Thai SME owners already use every day, to track expenses and manage finances.

The founders are the kind we look for: they hustle, move fast, and experiment relentlessly. All early revenue was organic, driven in part by co-founder Ploy's TikTok presence (5.8M likes and counting). We believe Paypers is becoming the invisible financial backbone for Thailand's millions of underserved business owners, and we're excited to be early backers.

Pixo

Company Description: AI agent for long-form video creation

Founders: Yanfei Dong, Yang Zhang

Why we're excited: You've probably seen the flood of micro-dramas on your social feed. Behind that trend is a massive demand for production tools that can deliver quality at volume.

Pensieve is building Pixo, an AI-powered short film production studio, and their insight is that creators don’t want to delegate it to a single prompt, they want precise control over the entire creative process, from scripting to rendering. Led by a team with deep computer vision, diffusion, and multimodal expertise, with real film and content collaborators working alongside them, Pensieve is well-positioned to capture this growing market.

Taama

‍

Company Description: Automating regulatory compliance for food, supplement and beauty brands & retailers

Founders: Krystle Law, Violette Henot, Adrien Matea-Adan

Why we're excited: Any CPG brand owner will tell you this: bringing a product to a new market is painfully complex. Regulations constantly change, compliance mistakes can rack up seven-figure costs and months in delays. And the current solution major retailers rely on? Spreadsheets, PDFs, and a whole lot of hours.:

Co-founder Krystle has decades of CPG experience and knows firsthand how painful this is. Alongside Violette (ex-IBM) and Adrien (ex-Le Groupe La Poste), Taama lets brand owners and retailers upload product data, validate requirements instantly, and get tailored guidance to launch. The results are concrete: brands using Taama launch up to 5x faster on Amazon and Walmart with 80% fewer compliance errors.

SobelAI

Company Description: Helping property agents turn dead leads into deals

Founders: Shailesh Gupta, Wang Runding

Why we're excited: We invested in Shailesh and Runding because they were thoughtful, strategic founders with strong conviction around solving operational workflow problems with AI. Midway through the batch, repeated customer discovery led them to uncover a much stronger and valuable pain point in real estate sales, and they made the challenging but pragmatic decision to pivot fully into the space. What has stood out since is the speed at which they’ve developed market understanding, secured early paid pilots and sharpened both product and positioning through relentless customer conversations and iteration. Startups pivot all of the time, and we’re excited to see where they go from here.

‍

Synscribe

Company Description: AI-native SEO and GEO agency for B2B companies

Founders: Raymond Yeh

Why we're excited: AI has fundamentally changed how people search online, and Synscribe is building for where it's heading. Its AI-powered platform handles the entire organic growth cycle: content research, production, and distribution, all at a scale that traditional agencies simply cannot match.

With a one (small!) pizza team, founder Raymond signed 7 customers and hit five-figure MRR in less than 3 months. Raymond also has serious technical velocity, running dozens of experiments throughout the batch. We're confident Synscribe will be the platform that growth-stage companies reach for.

P/S If you happen to follow Raymond Yeh on LinkedIn, you'll know that he wrote a blog post on his experience applying to Iterative. We recommend reading it!

Udifine

Company Description: Turning AI-generated designs into high-quality physical products

Founders: Sky He, Tan Joo Hong

Why we're excited: AI is creating a rapid rise in personalised physical goods (think ceramics, toys, custom objects, etc), but manufacturing has not kept up. Producing personalised items reliably and affordably at low volumes remains a bottleneck that off-the-shelf factories are not equipped to solve. Udifine is closing this gap, starting with ceramics, and has processed hundreds of orders since launching in December last year.

The founders are the right team for this: Sky has a solid enterprise background (Hujiang Group), while Joo Hong has manufacturing domain expertise (IDA Singapore), and we're excited to see them bridge AI-generated creativity with physical manufacturing at scale.