Open Future Forum released the first edition of the YC Founder AI Report this week. It is a companion to the CFO, CMO, CISO, and CEO AI Leverage Reports, the Executive AI Leverage Report, and the AI Transformation Report. Edition 1 is now live. It is independent research from our founder rooms, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Y Combinator.
I built this report because every other edition in this series reads the buyer, and the buyer kept describing a seller nobody had measured. The finance room told us who signs. The security room told us what the sellers leave behind. The founders themselves, though, are the supply side of this whole market, and they answer two questions in our application flow that nobody else asks them at scale: who do you believe owns the buying decision inside the companies you sell to, and how do you charge today. This report is those two questions, read across two 2026 founder events on the largest first-party bases in our network.
What the Report Covers
The YC Founder AI Report reads the sellers, not the buyers, and it does two things.
One. It maps the buyer the founders have chosen. Asked who owns the buying decision inside the companies they sell to, founders name the business-unit leader first at 39 percent and the CIO or CTO at 36 percent, with finance at 28 percent and bottom-up users at 11 percent (base 148, any-mention). Not one of the 148 named security. That is not a gap in the founders; it is a seat the market has not started selling to yet, and reading it against our security rooms is where the report gets its edge.
Two. It reads how the founders charge, which is the flagship. The Founder AI Pricing Index is the share of charging founders whose pricing includes usage-based or outcome-based models, and Edition 1 reads 68 percent (base 136). Per-seat, the default of the SaaS era, is the least used model in the room at 21 percent. Pricing that meters value only works when the product completes work, so the Index doubles as a transformation signal: these founders are betting their revenue on AI doing whole units of work.
Why This Report, Now
Gartner expects at least 40 percent of enterprise software spend to shift to usage, agent, or outcome pricing by 2030. That is the forecast. In this room it is already the norm: 68 percent of charging founders are there today. The analysts are describing 2030; the founders are living in it, and the gap between those two facts is the reason to read the supply side directly rather than wait for it to show up in aggregate spend.
The buyer map matters for the same reason. Founders are the earliest, sharpest signal of where AI enters a company, because they are the ones choosing the door. When 148 of them point at the business unit and the technology office and none point at security, that is the shape of how new AI actually arrives, several quarters before it shows up in a buyer-side survey.
How the Data Was Built
The figures come from application records and instrument questions embedded in the application flow for two Open Future Forum YC founder events in 2026. Invitation outreach that did not become an application is excluded from every count, and application is not attendance. Demand figures are rounded floors of distinct applicants; opinion figures come from the instrument questions, with the base on the face of every figure. Nothing here is a probability sample of all founders: the room self-selected into AI-founder events and skews early-stage and Bay Area, and the report says so on every figure. No participant, company, or sponsor is named, and the findings are the community aggregate.
Open Future Forum is a private executive community founded in 2019 with more than 100 events to date. The YC founder rooms behind this edition are open-application gatherings, screened at the door rather than at the invitation, which is why they carry the largest first-party bases in the network.
A Few Numbers from Edition 1
The room is current. Across the two events, 340+ distinct applicants applied, and among the 207 with a parseable YC batch year, 77 percent come from 2024 through 2026 batches. This is not an alumni reunion; it is the current cohort of AI companies, read while they are still choosing their buyer and their pricing.
The room is post-revenue. Of the 148 founders who answered the pricing question, 136 are charging today, a 92 percent monetization rate that is itself a finding. Among those charging, usage-based pricing leads at 46 percent, outcome-based and flat subscription tie at 26 percent, and per-seat trails at 21 percent.
And the seat gap holds from both sides. Read against our finance rooms, the CEO is the most named internal signer of a new AI purchase at 47 percent (base 87), while the founders selling in aim at the business unit and the technology office. The seat that signs is not the seat being pitched, and the seat that will eventually govern these tools is on nobody's buyer list yet.
Read the full YC Founder AI Report →
What Comes Next
This is Edition 1, and it is candid about what it is: a selective read of one community, cleared above the program's 40-response floor on its flagship metric at first publication. The Founder AI Pricing Index and the buyer map are the lines we will track edition over edition. A rotating deeper set enters the application flow at the next founder events: whether the company has passed a customer's security review, average sales cycle, the share of revenue on usage or outcome pricing, and whether an enterprise deal has died in procurement and at which seat. The test this series applies before trusting any number is whether the direction survives a bigger room. Between the two 2026 pulls the bases grew 61 percent and every headline direction held. If you are a founder building and selling AI and want a seat at the next founder gathering, reach out through Open Future Forum.
Read the full YC Founder AI Report →