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Public bet · Week of May 4, 2026
Not an accelerator program. This is a weekly public data feed. There is no application, no cohort, no equity — just the dataset. (Y Combinator, Techstars, etc. are accelerator programs; this is engineering-acceleration as a leading signal.)
Every Monday we publish 10 startups whose GitHub engineering acceleration crossed our signal threshold the prior week. Each pick is graded post-hoc against public fundraise, acquisition, and product-launch news at the 60-day and 90-day window. We keep score in public.
Methodology: /methodology · SSRN paper: ssrn.com/abstract=6606558 · Monthly address: /state-of-github · Grading window for this cohort closes July 3, 2026.
Public scorecard
Grading begins July 3, 2026 — first cohort matures 60 days after publish. Until then, every pick is on the record but ungraded. Bookmark this page; we will not edit picks once published, only append outcome rows.
The signal in action — one worked example
git log --authorand public LinkedIn).This is one of the 219 paired observations in the SSRN methodology paper — anonymized to protect the founder, but the regression is reproducible against the public Zenodo dataset linked from /methodology. The lead-time distribution: 21–47 days, IQR, n=219.
Pre-seed US jobs platform sustaining 1,694 commits over 14 days with the contributor signal pointing to a hiring burst. The combination of pre-seed stage and high commit volume is the textbook pre-seed-to-seed acceleration profile.
EU seed-stage configurable PIM/MDM platform with a sustained framework-migration signal. The +38% acceleration on 116 commits indicates production-grade refactor work — usually a Series A precursor in B2B SaaS.
Open-core ERP/HR platform showing a 9.5x acceleration over baseline with a contributor base of 79. A spike of this magnitude on a multi-product team usually maps to a release window or a customer-driven sprint.
LATAM seed-stage commerce engine with one of the highest commit volumes in the seed cohort. 598 commits / 14d with a +32% delta indicates real customer-driven shipping rather than open-source maintenance.
Identity-and-access platform (Gluu spinout) with a +77% acceleration on a 100-contributor base. Framework migration in identity SaaS at this scale typically lines up with enterprise-tier launch or platform compliance work.
EU venture-backed open-core ERP with a 2.4x acceleration. Sustained framework migration plus 66 active contributors maps to a re-platform or a major customer onboarding.
APAC open-core Laravel commerce platform with a +59% acceleration. Framework-migration commits with a 100-contributor base usually map to a major version release — a typical B2B fundraising-window precursor in the e-commerce stack.
Italian Series A/B devtools / SaaS shop with a +38% acceleration. Smaller velocity but high contributor:commit ratio (1:1) — a hallmark of distributed senior engineering teams shipping to production.
Series A/B healthcare software shop with a +25% acceleration on a 28-person contributor base. Framework migration in regulated software (healthcare) is rare and meaningful — usually a product re-architecture financed by a recent or upcoming round.
Seed-stage decentralized infra team with a +28% acceleration. Smaller absolute volume but the framework-migration label across a 14-person contributor base indicates a real product re-platform rather than a single-author push.
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This is a data-driven engineering activity watchlist generated from public GitHub data — not investment advice. Naming a company indicates its observed engineering activity matches the patterns described in our methodology. Outcomes are recorded post-hoc from public announcements only. Methodology: /methodology