Builder Radar
May 2026
If April was the month of everything, May narrowed to one thing: AI video and image generators poured in, the single largest category by a wide margin and far ahead of anything else. Almost all of them wrap the same few models. Underneath the noise, a handful of genuine infrastructure products shipped, and April's sudden finance-and-trading wave quietly disappeared.
147
Products spotted
AI video and image generation
Top trend
AI image and video generation swallowed the month
It was by far the largest category, more submissions than any other by a wide margin and a clear jump from its April share. The catch is sameness: most are thin landing pages over the same handful of models. Wan 2.6 and 2.7, Veo 4, Seedance, Vidu Q3, Z-Image, and music models like Lyria 3 show up again and again under different brand names. When the model is the product and anyone can call it, the landing page is the only thing that differs.
The finance and trading wave was a one-month blip
April had a sudden cluster of prop-firm comparators, trading-signal tools, and crypto/prediction-market projects. In May it collapsed to a few stray submissions. A reminder that a single month of a category showing up is a coincidence, not a trend, the pattern only means something if it persists.
Cheaper unified API gateways keep appearing
Another OpenAI-compatible aggregator shipped this month (Our Token), routing across multiple LLM providers on a cost pitch. This is now a recurring shape: take the major models, expose one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, compete on price and routing. OpenRouter has company, and the field keeps getting more crowded.
Inference is starting to be sold as 'not GPUs'
General Compute pitches an ASIC-powered inference cloud built for AI agents, explicitly positioned against GPUs on latency and per-user throughput. Alongside the usual GPU clouds (Packet.ai shipped a Blackwell cloud this month), the alternative-silicon angle is becoming a deliberate differentiator rather than a footnote.
Worth a look
New AI products and tools that caught our eye in May 2026
Packet.ai โ
On-demand NVIDIA Blackwell GPU cloud with per-second billing and an OpenAI-compatible API
SSH and CLI access plus an OpenAI-compatible inference endpoint on current Blackwell hardware. Added to Infrabase.
General Compute โ
ASIC-powered inference cloud built for AI agents, OpenAI-compatible
Runs inference on purpose-built silicon rather than GPUs, pitched on latency and per-user throughput for agentic and real-time apps. Added to Infrabase.
Samtal โ
Swedish-hosted voice AI API: TTS, ASR, voice cloning, and conversational agents
ElevenLabs-compatible and EU-hosted, bundling the full voice stack (TTS, ASR, RAG, MCP, agents). Part of the continuing EU-sovereign infra thread. Added to Infrabase.
Our Token โ
Unified OpenAI-compatible API gateway routing across multiple LLM providers
The latest entry in the cheaper-unified-gateway pattern, competing with OpenRouter on cost and routing. Added to Infrabase.
Prompt Optimizer โ
Prompt engineering IDE with quality scoring, automated tuning, and model comparison
Treats prompts as version-controlled assets with native execution and side-by-side model comparison, prompt engineering as real tooling rather than a text box. Added to Infrabase.
Geodd โ
Managed AI inference endpoints and GPU infrastructure with MLOps services
Managed endpoints plus model deployment and MLOps, OpenAI-compatible. Another option for teams that want inference infra without running it themselves. Added to Infrabase.
What people are building
Based on ~147 AI products spotted across directories and launch platforms in May 2026
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