01 · BUD
Budget depth
How much money sits behind the buying decision, and how urgently it must be spent.
Working research record · 15 markets · 22 companies · Updated 29 August 2026
The buyers have money
They do not have people
Fifteen markets where someone stands in the middle, assembles a supply nobody else can reach, and keeps the difference. This is the market-by-market working record: what the mechanism is, who is already there, how the money splits, and — kept deliberately visible — what we have not been able to establish.
01
Six questions decide everything
Every vertical page answers the same six questions in the same order, so the answers sit side by side. Four of them do most of the work.
02 · SUP
Supply difficulty
How hard the seller side is to assemble. Hard is good: it is the only thing a competitor cannot copy in a weekend.
03 · SPR
Spread
What fraction of the money passing through you, you actually keep.
04 · HLD
Holdability
Whether buyer and seller can cut you out once they have met, and whether one buyer can end you.
05 · AI
AI direction
Whether capable models grow this budget or delete it.
06 · SPD
Speed to first dollar
How long from a standing start to a real invoice.
The rubric, and the argument for why these six and not others, is in the framework. The name for the mechanism — and why it is not a marketplace, a staffing firm or an agency, though it is sold as all three — is in what the model is.
02
Where the spread actually survives
Ranked by the six scores. The sum is a blunt instrument and the ranking is a judgement, not a measurement — but the order is where the argument starts.
01
Adversarial evals and red-team crowds
A brand-new budget line with no salary to be benchmarked against, supply that cannot be recruited by job ad, and a middleman that monetises the crowd's output as software rather than reselling its hours.
26/30
build
build
02
Forward-deployed engineering
Deployment is the acknowledged bottleneck and the budget is real; the open question is whether any of these companies converts field work into a renewing licence before the 58x mark has to be justified.
22/30
watch
watch
03
Robotics teleoperation and physical-world data
The only human-data vertical where physical capital blocks the laptop-marketplace playbook — which is why quality teleop still holds a 40–65% margin while egocentric video went to free in eighteen months.
21/30
build
build
04
Expert data for frontier labs
The budget is real, urgent and growing. The margin is a staffing margin, the buyers are two companies wearing five names, and every seat at the top table is taken.
20/30
crowded
crowded
05
Expert networks
A 70–80% take that survived forty years, three compliance scandals and every disintermediation attempt — because the product was never the expert, it was recruitment speed plus indemnity. Whether the incumbents sell to AI labs is the single most valuable unanswered question in this atlas.
20/30
open
open
06
Data-centre labour and site brokerage
The only capacity vertical where the unit is not fungible and not indexed, so a real spread can still live there — but the incumbents are ordinary staffing firms at 30–40% markups and nobody has built the AI-native version.
20/30
watch
watch
07
Contingency recruiting marketplaces
The supply-side wedge is real and the AI tailwind is real; the TAM is a tenth of what the pitch says and there is no independent evidence any of it works.
18/30
watch
watch
08
Outbound and GTM-as-a-service
The spread is genuine at 55–75% and the sale closes in weeks, but every retainer is priced against a salary the buyer can look up, and the supply scarcity that made Clay agencies expensive in 2024 was gone by 2026.
18/30
crowded
crowded
03
The arguments that cut across every vertical
14 topic pages on the mechanism itself: what a rake can be, why gross revenue is not revenue, what actually stops a buyer and a seller cutting you out, and what the law does to a crowd in December.
4 pages
Where the money goes
Rake, gross versus net, multiples, and what the buyer pool is really worth.
→ What a rake can actually be→ GMV is not revenue→ What the public market pays for labour→ How much money is actually in the buyer pool
5 pages
What holds the business together
Leakage, cold start, concentration, and the difference between a marketplace and an agency.
→ Getting cut out→ Which side you build first→ One customer is a binary event→ You pay weekly, they pay in sixty days→ Marketplace, staffing firm, BPO or agency
5 pages
What moves underneath it
Models, law, geography and fraud.
→ What better models do to each layer→ The law is about to arrive→ Who is actually on the other end→ Selling through the investor→ Where the supply can legally live
04
What this is, and what it is not
63 pages, roughly 97,000 words, built in one pass and meant to be added to.
It is
A working record with its seams showing
Every page carries a confidence mark and every number that comes from a leak, a press claim or a company's own blog is marked as such. The open questions page lists what we could not establish, and it is long on purpose.
It is not
Diligence, and not advice
Almost every company here is private and discloses nothing it is not forced to. Take rates are inferred, revenue figures conflict between reputable outlets by factors of two, and the single most important number in the sector — what a frontier lab actually pays for human data — has never been disclosed by anyone.
How this was built and where it is weak · the evidence register