The artificial intelligence market is growing fast, with new AI companies springing up like mushrooms. While the technology has undergone development for years, the release of ChatGPT in November 2022 took AI hype to new heights.
Out of many companies developing AI solutions, we’ve picked the 50 best AI startups that are likely to blow up in 2024. We based our list on their past performance and how the generative AI and LLMs market is growing.
Key Takeaways
- Generative AI startups and other companies developing AI solutions raised almost $50 billion in 2023, according to Crunchbase, including top AI startups like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Inflection AI.
- The key industries where artificial intelligence startups capture investors’ interest and demonstrate numerous practical use cases include insurance, healthcare, banking, retail, and marketing.
How Many AI Startups Are There?
According to the global startup data platform Tracxn, there were 67,199 AI and machine learning startups and more mature AI companies on the market as of 10 January 2024.
The platform captures top AI startups developing technologies, infrastructure, software solutions, and apps “that enable machines to exhibit human-like intelligence.”
50 Best AI Startups That Will Blow Up This Year
1. OpenAI
Open AI develops large language models (LLMs) for consumers and enterprises. This top AI startup is primarily known for ChatGPT, an online chatbot that uses technologies like natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) to answer user questions and generate content. Also known for developing the popular text-to-image model DALL-E 3.
Year founded: Founded on December 11, 2015
Location: San Francisco, California
Company size: 770 employees
Funding: Raised $11.3 billion
2. Anthropic
Anthropic is one of the top language model providers in the world, gaining traction for the creation of Claude 2.1, a chatbot and virtual personal assistant designed to generate ethically-aligned natural language output. It also supports input of up to 200,000 tokens so that users can input more information in a single prompt.
Year founded: Founded in 2021
Location: San Francisco, California
Company size: 267 employees
Funding: $4.1 billion
3. Stability AI
Stability AI created the open-source text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, which is known for developing highly detailed and realistic-looking images. This generative AI startup also offers other models such as Stable Audio, for generating high-quality music and sound effects; Stable Video, for building AI video models with Stable Diffusion; and Stable Zero123, for rendering 3D objects from images.
Year founded: 2019
Location: London, United Kingdom / San Francisco, California
Company size: 190+ employees
Funding: $1 billion
4. Perplexity AI
Perplexity AI offers users an AI-powered search engine, which will respond with natural language text complete with sources and translations. The company also offers a paid version – the Perplexity Pro plan for $20 per month, which enables users to choose between models including Google Gemini, Mistral 7B, Claude 2.1, and GPT-4.
Year founded: 2022
Location: San Francisco, California
Company size: 38 employees
Funding: $520 million
5. DeepL
DeepL has developed quite a following by developing an AI-driven, translation-as-a-service solution for consumers and enterprises. This AI startup offers support for 31 languages and AI edits, has the translation capabilities to keep up with Google Translate, and even surpasses it in some areas.
6. Jasper
Jasper is an AI content platform that offers users a copilot, which they can use to create content specifically for marketing use cases. One of the unique capabilities offered by Jasper is the ability to scan existing tone of voice and style guide documents to absorb your brand’s tone of voice.
7. Grammarly
Grammarly is a writing assistant that uses AI to help spell-check and proofread user content. Grammarly also incorporates generative AI so that users can enter a prompt to generate text on demand, understanding the overall content to generate original content.
Year founded: 2009
Location: San Francisco, California
Company Size: 1,400+ employees
Funding: $13 billion
8. AI21 labs
AI21 Labs has grown considerably due to its flagship solution, AI21 Studio. With AI21 Studio, developers pay for access to infrastructure to create custom business apps powered by the organization’s proprietary generative AI models, such as the Jurassic-2 model.
9. Inflection AI
Inflection AI is an AI studio developing a customizable AI personal assistant Pi. Users can ask questions to and interact with Pi via iOS or Android apps, or pi.ai, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.
Year founded: 2022
Location: San Francisco, United States
Company size: 30+ employees
Funding: $4 billion
10. Databricks
Databricks is a data intelligence platform that enables users to analyze their data for insights with natural language. The platform gives organizations the option to create, run, or deploy their own AI models.
Location: San Francisco, California
Company Size: 5,500 employees
Funding: $43 billion
11. Scale AI
ScaleAI’s data engine provides enterprises with a solution to collect, curate, and annotate data with labels. This high-quality data can then be used to train models and get better results. Scale AI partners with third-party AI models from providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google PaLM, and Cohere.
Year founded: 2016
Location: San Francisco, California
Company Size: 600 employees
Funding: $7.3 billion
12. Cohere
Cohere provides proprietary large language models to build conversational apps with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities. RAG increases the reliability of generative AI models with facts fetched from external sources, for example, your enterprise data. This means LLMs can search text, answer questions, and complete tasks more accurately.
13. Inworld AI
Inworld AI provides a character engine for developers to create AI-driven non-playable characters (NPCs). It uses multimodal AI to mimic human conversations, voices, movements, and emotions, to provide high-quality and immersive interactions with the characters that populate virtual worlds.
Year founded: 2021
Location: Mountain View, California
Company Size: 75 employees
Funding: $500 million
14. Mosaic ML
Mosaic ML provides organizations with the infrastructure to train their own multi-billion parameter ML models. The service includes access to NVIDIA A100s and H100s under a scalable pay-as-you-consume model. Models created with Mosaic’s solutions are fully owned by the creator. The company was acquired by DataBricks in June 2023.
Year founded: 2021
Location: San Francisco, California
Company Size: 60 employees
Funding: $1.3 billion
15. Mistral AI
Mistral AI is known primarily for creating open-weight models – including Mistral 7B and Mistral 8x7B, the latter of which has outperformed Llama 2 on many performance benchmarks. The organization also offers a mix of pay-as-you-go access to its models and open-source models available under the Apache 2.0 License.
16. Pika
Pika is an AI video platform with over 500,000 users that can be used to generate video content from captions and images. With Pika 1.0 users can use AI to generate and edit videos in a range of styles, including 3D animation, anime, cinematic, and more.
17. Dataiku
Dataiku is a platform that developers can use to build generative AI and data analytics applications for the enterprise. As part of this focus, it offers a range of solutions for testing and deploying AI applications. This includes generative AI-powered data preparation, AutoML feature engineering, and a smart assistant.
Year founded: 2013
Location: New York City, United States
Company Size: 1,000+ employees
Funding: $3.7 billion
18. Metropolis
Metropolis uses AI and computer vision to provide checkout-free payment options for drivers. Users can drive into a parking space and be charged until they drive out automatically, and they can receive an electronic receipt without the need for a ticket machine.
Year founded: 2017
Location: Santa Monica, United States
Company size: 90+ employees
Funding: $1.7 billion
19. Abnormal Security
Abnormal Security is a cloud-native email security platform that uses AI to automatically duct email threats such as social engineering attacks, while identifying whether user accounts have been compromised and logging them out.
20. Waymo
Waymo is a self-driving autonomous vehicle startup owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet. The organization’s electric-powered vehicles can travel in San Francisco and Phoenix and will soon be able to function in Los Angeles and Austin, Texas.
Year founded: 2009
Location: Mountain View, California
Company Size: 2,500 employees
Funding: $2.5 billion
21. Coreweave
Coreweave is a cloud service provider backed by NVIDIA that enables users to train and fine-tune AI and ML models at scale, providing access to a range of NVIDIA GPUs with support from proprietary auto-scaling technology to help manage models as efficiently as possible.
22. Runway ML
Runway ML is a generative AI startup most known for creating Gen-2, a model that generates videos from text, images, and video clips. The model also offers a feature called Motion Brush, which allows users to use a brush to add movement to still images. Users also have the option to remix the style and composition of existing images.
23. Synthesia
Synthesia provides a solution for creating AI-generated avatars and voiceovers in over 120 languages. Users have the option to write their own scripts or can generate these with AI prompts.
24. Adept AI
Adept is a startup known for developing Action Transformer (ACT-1), an AI model that comprehends and executes high-level user requests. Human users can enter natural language instructions, and the model takes the necessary actions on a computer. So far, the organization has taught ACT-1 how to use a web browser and carry out specific tasks on Salesforce.
Year founded: April 2022
Location: San Francisco, California
Company Size: 25+ employees
Funding: $1 billion
25. Harvey.ai
Harvey builds custom LLMs for law firms to help them confront legal challenges. This includes answering legal questions, conducting research, and editing legal documents. Harvy also anonymizes user data and deletes it periodically or upon request.
26. Shield AI
Shield has created an AI pilot called Hivemind, which can operate drones and aircraft autonomously without GPS. Hivemind is deployed as a digital copilot for the U.S. Air Force, including the F-16 fighter jet, UAVs like the V-BAT, and indoor drones like Nova 2.
27. AlphaSense
AlphaSense is an AI-driven market intelligence platform using AI and NLP to gather insights from a content library of over 300 million external documents, broker research, and proprietary data to help financial service institutions and enterprises improve their decision-making.
28. Tempus
Tempus combines AI with one of the world’s largest libraries of clinical and molecular data to help physicians personalize patient care while streamlining the discovery of treatment options.
Year founded: 2015
Location: Chicago, United States
Company Size: 2,200+ employees
Funding: $1.3 billion
29. DataRobot
DataRobot is an augmented intelligence platform that uses generative AI and predictive AI to help users create, deploy, and manage generative apps. This also includes monitoring model performance at scale, controlling model access, and managing risk.
30. Drata
Drata is a compliance and automation platform designed to automate organizations’ compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 regulatory standards.
31. BigPanda
BigPanda is an AIOps platform developed to help human users identify critical alerts faster. The company claims to be able to help users identify critical alerts in 30 seconds and save up to 20 hours per incident.
Year founded: 2012
Location: Mountain View, California
Company Size: 300+ employees
Funding: $1.2 billion
32. Dataminr
Dataminr is a real-time information discovery platform that uses deep learning to detect events and alert human users so they can respond. Predictive AI and generative AI then add context to the alerts with geospatial data so that organizations can more effectively follow up.
Year founded: 2009
Location: New York, United States
Company Size: 900+ employees
Funding: $4.1 billion
33. People.AI
People.AI is a revenue intelligence solution designed to collect data and give sales, marketing, and customer success teams insights to discover new revenue opportunities.
Year founded: 2016
Location: San Francisco, United States
Company Size: 200+ employees
Funding: $1.1 billion
34. H2O.ai
H20.ai is an AI startup that uses generative AI to assist knowledge workers. h2oGPT can retrieve proprietary data, answer questions about various internal documents, and privately host LLMs.
Year founded: 2012
Location: Mountain View, United States
Company Size: 300+ employees
Funding: $1.7 billion
35. Nfinite
Nfinite is a platform that uses AI, CGI, and 3D technology to allow the user to create product visuals automatically. Users can upload a product catalog for 3D modeling, modify the style of visuals, and then export to measure performance.
36. Palantir Technologies
Palantir Technologies is a big data analytics platform that continuously improves AI and machine learning models based on user decisions and feedback. Organizations also can customize and deploy homemade, open-source, and third-party algorithms.
37. Checkr
Checkr is an HR company that uses AI to run background checks on potential employees. The platform allows users to customize workflows, generate reports, and monitor candidates while integrating with over 100 third-party systems.
Year founded: 2014
Location: San Francisco, United States
Company Size: 1,250+
Funding: $4.6 billion
38. Mashgin
Mashgin offers an AI-powered self-checkout service, combining a camera and AI to scan items placed on a tray automatically. This is done without needing to scan a barcode. Mashgin is in over 3,500 locations across the U.S.
Year founded: 2013
Location: Palo Alto, United States
Company Size: 75+ employees
Funding: $1.5 billion
39. Standard Cognition
Standard Cognition is known for offering a checkout-free shopping service. For instance, Standard Checkout allows shoppers to checkout via an app, while the Vision OS retail optimization solution uses AI, cameras, and the cloud to offer insights into shopper behavior.
40. Observe AI
Observe AI uses a contact center LLM to gather insights from customer interactions, which enterprises can use to enhance sales and other outcomes. An AI engine with conversational intelligence enables the solution to process customer interactions and understand conversations. The solution comes with speech recognition to transcribe calls.
Year founded: 2017
Location: San Francisco, United States
Company Size: 250+ employees
Funding: $213 million
41. Assembly AI
Assembly AI is a vendor creating speech AI models that can process human speech. Assembly AI’s Conformer-2 model is trained on 1.1 million hours of voice data and has achieved high accuracy on speech-to-text and speaker identification tasks. Notable customers include Fireflies.ai.
Year founded: 2017
Location: San Francisco, United States
Company Size: 115+ employees
Funding: $115 million
42. Jerry
Jerry’s AllCar app leverages AI and machine learning to offer a car insurance comparison service. With AllCar, users can find insurance rates from over 50 companies, refinance car loans, estimate repair and maintenance on an owned vehicle, and monitor their driving score.
Year founded: 2017
Location: Palo Alto, United States
Company Size: 300+ employees
Funding: $450 million
43. X.AI
Elon Musk’s AI startup X.AI is the team behind the humorous generative AI-driven chatbot Grok, which is modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and has real-time knowledge of current events on the X platform. Grok is upheld by the Grok-1 LLM, which has reportedly achieved 63.2% on HumanEval coding tasks and 73% on Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU).
Year founded: 2023
Location: New York, United States
Company Size: 12+ employees
Funding: N/A, discussing valuation from $15 to $20 billion
44. Captions
Captions offers an AI-powered creative studio for users to edit and enhance their video content. Captions can automatically generate subtitles in another language, edit the background, remove audible filler words and background noise, correct mistakes, and edit lip movements in post-production.
Year founded: 2021
Location: New York, United States
Company Size: 45+ employees
Funding: $40 million
45. Character.ai
Character.ai is a chatbot that allows users to create characters and ask them questions via text. Character.ai uses neural language models to estimate what words could be used to respond to a user’s input. The company also recently announced the launch of Character Voice, a feature enabling users to choose from various pre-made voices.
46. Leena AI
Leena AI is a vendor that recently launched WorkLM, a proprietary LLM built with over 2TB of training data to generate insights into employee experience. Users can ask WorkLM questions or even execute tasks in real-time.
Year founded: 2015
Location: New York City, United States
Company Size: 300+ employees
Funding: $40 million
47. Luma AI
Luma AI is most notable for producing the generative 3D foundational model, Genie. Genie enables users to create 3D objects via text input. Genie can be accessed via a smartphone app or Discord.
Year founded: 2021
Location: Palo Alto, United States
Company Size: 20+ employees
Funding: $70 million
48. Magic.Dev
Magic.Dev is creating a code-generation assistant to help developers write, review, and debug code in natural language. The end goal is to make creating code easier and more cost-efficient.
49. MindsDb
MindsDb has built a solution that enables developers to build AI applications with SQL. It does this by abstracting LLMs, time series, regression, and classification models as virtual tables while using SQL to manipulate and fine-tune the data in the database.
Year founded: 2017
Location: San Jose, United States
Company Size: 30+ employees
Funding: $46.5 million
50. Pinecone
Pinecone offers a serverless vector database that can be used to build high-performance and low-cost generative AI applications. Pinecone provides a range of interactions with third-party providers, including AWS, Azure, Cohere, Confluent, Databricks, Datadog, Google Cloud Platform, LangChain, OpenAI, and Snowflake.
Year founded: 2021
Location: New York, United States
Company Size: 100+ employees
Funding: $750 million
The Bottom Line
The AI market has plenty of prospects that are in a position to grow fast. All the top AI startups on the list have demonstrated a promising ability to leverage AI in the consumer and enterprise markets. How these companies and their solutions will evolve over the next 12 months remains to be seen.
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References
- Artificial Buildup: AI Startups Were Hot In 2023, But This Year May Be Slightly Different (Сrunchbase)
- Top 67.2K+ companies in Artificial Intelligence – (Tracxn)
- AI developers, led by OpenAI, raise over $50B (CFO Dive)
- OpenAI rival Anthropic in talks to raise $750 million funding round (CNBC)/li>
- Stability AI explores a sale as investors pressure CEO to resign (Fortune)
- Search startup Perplexity AI valued at $520 mln in funding from Bezos, Nvidia (Reuters)
- DeepL, the AI-based language translator, raises over $100M at a $1B+ valuation (TechCrunch)
- Jasper Announces $125M Series A Funding Round, Bringing Total Valuation to $1.5B and Launches New Browser Extension (Jasper)
- Grammarly raises $200M at a $13B valuation to make you an even better writer using AI (TechCrunch)
- Generative AI startup AI21 Labs lands $155M at a $1.4B valuation (TechCrunch)
- Microsoft-backed AI startup Inflection raises $1.3 billion from Nvidia and others (Reuters)
- Databricks raises over $500 mln at $43 bln valuation (Reuters)
- Scale AI: 2023 CNBC Disruptor 50 (CNBC)
- AI startup Cohere, now valued at over $2.1B, raises $270M (TechCrunch)
- Inworld Adds Another $50 Million For AI Character Engine (Forbes)
- Databricks strikes $1.3 billion deal for generative AI startup MosaicML (Reuters)
- Mistral, French A.I. Start-Up, Is Valued at $2 Billion in Funding Round (The New York Times)
- AI Company Pika Raises $55M to Redesign Video Making and Editing (Finance Yahoo)
- AI and analytics platform Dataiku raises $200M at a reduced valuation (TechCrunch)
- Metropolis Raises $1.7 Billion to Aid Its Growth (Los Angeles Business Journal)
- Abnormal Raises $200M+ To Protect The Modern Enterprise (Abnormal)
- Alphabet’s Waymo raises $2.5 billion in new investment round (CNBC)
- CoreWeave raises $2.3 billion in debt collateralized by Nvidia chips (Reuters)
- AI company Runway valued at $1.5 billion in latest funding (Reuters)
- Synthesia secures $90M for AI that generates custom avatars (TechCrunch)
- Adept Raises $350 Million To Build AI That Learns How To Use Software For You (Forbes)
- Legal Tech Harvey.ai Valued at $715 Million in Latest Funding (Bloomberg Law)
- Shield AI Raises $200M, Reaching $2.7B Valuation (Shield AI)
- Announcing a $150M Series E at $2.5B Valuation Led by BOND (AlphaSense)
- Tempus Announces $275 Million in Funding (Tempus)
- DataRobot Unveils Major Milestones, Including $300M Series G Funding Investment (DataRobot AI Platform)
- Drata’s Valuation Rises to $2 Billion with $200 Million Series C Funding (PR Newswire)
- BigPanda Raises $190 Million in Funding at $1.2 Billion Valuation (BigPanda)
- Dataminr Announces $475M Financing Round, Raising its Valuation to $4.1B (Dataminr)
- People.ai Raises $100M to Fuel Global Adoption of Revenue Intelligence Platform; Company Reaches $1.1B Valuation (People.ai)
- H2O.ai raises $100M at a $1.6B pre-money valuation for tools to make AI usable by any kind of enterprise (TechCrunch)
- Nfinite team shifts into a higher gear with our Series B fundraising (Nfinite Blog)
- Palantir Stock Price, Funding, Valuation, Revenue & Financial Statements (CBINSIGHTS)
- Checkr Raises $250 Million at $4.6 Billion Valuation (Checkr Blog)
- Mashgin Raises $62.5M Series B Funding at a $1.5 Billion Valuation, Led by NEA (PR Newswire)
- Standard Cognition hits $1B valuation with $150M investment (Grocery Dive)
- Observe.AI raises $125M Series C to Usher in AI-Empowered Era for Contact Centers (Observe.AI)
- Announcing our $50M Series C to build superhuman Speech AI models (Assembly AI)
- AI-based Car Ownership Super App Jerry Secures $75 Million Series C Financing at $450 Million Valuation ( PR Newswire)
- Musk denies report his AI company secures $500 million toward $1 billion funding goal (Reuters)
- Captions, a New York-based AI-powered creative studio, raised $25M in Series B funding (Finsmes)
- Character.AI, the a16z-backed chatbot startup, tops 1.7M installs in first week (TechCrunch)
- Leena AI: Revenue, Competitors, Alternatives (Growjo)
- Luma raises $43M to build AI that crafts 3D models (TechCrunch)
- Bay Area Inno – Magic.Dev raises $23 million to create an AI software engineer (The Business Journals
- MindsDB Secures Funding from NVIDIA to Make AI More Accessible to All Businesses (Mindsdb)
- Announcing Our $100M Series B Funding to Build Long-Term Memory for AI (Pinecone)