A 3-D map of who built, backed, and taught the startup ecosystem — — spanning tier-one venture firms, their portfolios, the founders behind them, the angels between them, and the schools underneath them.
Hexagons are venture firms, rounded squares are companies, circles are people (violet = founders, magenta = investors & angels, gold = operators), and diamonds are universities. A node's size is its number of connections. Every line is a typed relationship — invested in, founded, worked at, board seat, partner, studied at, acquired.
Open any node and press Route from here, then pick a target and press Route to here (or use Path finder + search). The map lights up the shortest chain of relationships between them and lists the alternate routes, with each hop's relationship spelled out — the closest thing to an X-ray of a warm introduction.
Hand-curated in August 2026 from public reporting — company and investor announcements, TechCrunch, CNBC, Bloomberg, Forbes and Wikipedia. It spans three eras: the PayPal-mafia old guard, the YC/mobile unicorns, and the 2023–26 breakout cohort (Lovable, Cognition & Windsurf, Harvey, Sierra, Glean, Decagon, Mercor, ElevenLabs, Suno, Groq, Together, LangChain, Figure, Physical Intelligence, World Labs, Isomorphic, Abridge, OpenEvidence, Clay, Runway…). It is a curated sample, not a census: rounds are simplified, titles compressed, many co-investors omitted. When the page is viewed online, company, firm and university nodes load their live logos, and people with public Wikipedia portraits load their photo (fetched at view time from Wikipedia's API); anyone without one keeps a monogram — LinkedIn photos can't be used, as LinkedIn doesn't permit automated access. The hosted claude.ai artifact runs in a sandbox that blocks all outside images, so that copy always shows monograms; open the downloaded file for the full visual version.
CNBC — OpenAI's $852B round · Anthropic — Series H · TechCrunch — Google closes Wiz · CNBC — Cursor at $29.3B · SiliconANGLE — Lovable at $13.3B · CNBC — Cognition & Windsurf · TechCrunch — Harvey at $11B · TechCrunch — Sierra at $15.8B · TechCrunch — Mercor at $10B · ElevenLabs — Series D at $11B · Figure — Series C at $39B · CNBC — OpenEvidence at $12B · CNBC — Glean at $7.2B · TechCrunch — Together at $8.3B · TechCrunch — Groq's pivot · TechCrunch — Ramp at $44B