Last week I wanted to know what the AI credits offered to startups in 2026 actually look like, as opposed to what the landing pages advertise. So I downloaded the machine readable catalogue from the open registry that keeps this data with its sources (https://sourcey.com/catalog.json) and counted every offer in one category.
The file says what it is. Its release stamp is sha256:4e675f7d6f399cf3f6bd9e53f7b2fea001fb258c800b0af0e33e4bc9c0ae6e85, its policy snapshot is dated 5 October 2026, and the pages that publish it carry the same digest (https://sourcey.com/statistics). Everything below is computed from that file on 16 October 2026. No number in this piece comes from a summary, a press release or another article.
The category
The registry groups 557 companies into categories. The second largest is ai-ml, with 72 companies, which is 12.9 per cent of the whole set. Those 72 companies publish 81 offers between them, so a few of them stack several offers, usually a smaller launch tier and a larger growth tier.
What the offers are worth, where a figure exists
52 of the 81 offers put a dollar figure in the title or the summary. That is 64 per cent, so roughly a third of the category tells you what you get without ever naming a number. The largest figures belong to Deepgram, up to $100,000 in API credits over twelve months (https://sourcey.com/c/deepgram), and Runpod, whose growth tier totals $75,000 in compute (https://sourcey.com/c/runpod). Read Runpod's terms before you get excited: that tier asks for a $50,000 upfront commitment and releases a $25,000 bonus on top of it, which is a purchasing incentive, not a grant. The largest figure in the category that asks for nothing of that kind is Runware's, up to $30,000 in API credits (https://sourcey.com/c/runware). The most familiar name sits at the other end: Anthropic's Claude Startups programme gives a one time $1,000 API credit, and the file records that its current cohort is full and it is not accepting new applications (https://sourcey.com/c/anthropic).
A number in a title is not a commitment, and the file does not pretend otherwise. What it does record, per offer, is what the offer asks in return. In this category that field reads: nothing for 51 of 81 offers, not established by the source for 16, variable for 13, and fixed for exactly one. So the honest summary of the money column is narrower than the titles suggest: 51 offers record nothing being asked in return, 16 leave consideration unestablished by the source, 13 are variable, and one states a fixed price.
The gate, which is where the real story is
Every offer carries an eligibility rule. I counted the kinds of rule across the whole registry, all 619 offers, not just this category: 276 are manual, 270 are all, 32 are predicate, 31 are constant and 10 are any. In plain terms, the largest single group cannot be evaluated by a machine at all, and in this category the reasons are recorded as not-machine-evaluable for 19 offers, vendor-discretion for 11 and external-verification for 4.
It gets more concrete. 43 of the 81 offers in this category mention a funding stage in the eligibility text or the summary, which means the thing you must prove is that somebody else already put money in. That is not a form field. It is a conversation with a person who has discretion, and the file is honest enough to say so.
The door, and the one offer standing behind it
Then I counted how each offer is actually obtained. In this category: 73 of 81 go through a form, four start with a contact request, three are classed as other, and exactly one is automatic. Across the entire registry the pattern is starker: 516 offers are form gated, 48 begin with contact, 46 are other, five are settled by a code, and four are automatic.
Four offers out of 619. That is the number I did not expect to find, and it is the interesting one, because the same registry publishes report cards grading whether an agent can sign up, pay and operate a service on its own (https://sourcey.com/agent-readiness). The credits that fund AI companies in 2026 are, as a class, still behind a form that a human fills in and a person on the other side approves. If you are building agents that provision their own infrastructure, the catalogue is a map of where they will get stuck.
What the data does not claim
Freshness is recorded per offer, and in this category it splits 28 fresh, 25 stale and 28 unknown, so treat any single figure as a snapshot with a date on it rather than a standing promise. The registry marks the difference between a fact it read from a vendor page and a fact it inferred, and a piece that quotes these numbers without quoting the date is doing the reader a disservice.
What to do with it
If you are an AI founder applying for credits this week, the file is worth twenty minutes. Filter the category, sort by the figures, and read the eligibility statements first, because the ones that name a funding round will cost you a conversation and a wait rather than a form. Then check the offers that ask nothing in return, which in this category is the majority, and apply to those first.
Check the stamp before quoting any number, since the catalogue is rebuilt as vendors change their pages, and the digest above is what mine said today.
