Top 50 AI Startups to Blow Up In 2024

Why Trust Techopedia

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

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.

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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.

Year founded: 2009

Location: Cologne, Germany

Company size: N/A

Funding: $1 billion

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.

Year founded: 2017

Location: Austin Texas

Company size: 150 employees

Funding: $1.5 billion

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.

Year founded: November 2017

Location: Tel Aviv, Israel

Company Size: N/A

Funding: $1.4 billion

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.

Year founded: 2013

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.

Year founded: 2019

Location: Canada

Company Size: 180+ employees

Funding: $2.1 billion

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.

Year founded: 2023

Location: Paris, France

Company Size: 20+ employees

Funding: $2 billion

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.

Year founded: 2023

Location: Silicon Valley, California

Company Size: N/A

Funding: $55 million

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.

Year founded: 2018

Location: San Francisco, California

Company Size: N/A

Funding: $4 billion

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.

Year founded: 2017

Location: Roseland, New Jersey

Company Size: N/A

Funding: $2.3 billion

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.

Year founded: 2018

Location: New York City

Company Size: N/A

Funding: $1.5 billion

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.

Year founded: 2017

Location: London, England

Company Size: 250+ employees

Funding: $1 billion

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.

Year founded: 2022

Location: San Francisco, California

Company Size: N/A

Funding: $715 million

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.

Year founded: 2015

Location: San Diego, California

Company Size: 500+

Funding: $2.7 billion

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.

Year founded: 2011

Location: New York, United States

Company Size: 1,000+

Funding: $2.5 billion

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.

Year founded: 2012

Location: Boston, United States

Company Size: N/A

Funding: $6.3 billion

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.

Year founded: 2020

Location: San Diego, California

Company Size: 300+ employees

Funding: $2 billion 

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.

Year founded: 2017

Location: Bordeaux, France

Company Size: N/A

Funding: $130 million

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.

Year founded: 2003

Location: Denver, United States

Company Size: 3,800+

Funding: $2.4 billion

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.

Year founded: 2017

Location: San Francisco, United States

Company Size: 190+

Funding: $1 billion

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.

Year founded: 2021

Location: California, United States

Company Size: 35+

Funding: $1 billion 

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.

Year founded: 2022

Location: San Francisco, United States

Company Size: 10+

Funding: $28 million 

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

  1. Artificial Buildup: AI Startups Were Hot In 2023, But This Year May Be Slightly Different (Сrunchbase)
  2. Top 67.2K+ companies in Artificial Intelligence – (Tracxn)
  3. AI developers, led by OpenAI, raise over $50B (CFO Dive)
  4. OpenAI rival Anthropic in talks to raise $750 million funding round (CNBC)/li>
  5. Stability AI explores a sale as investors pressure CEO to resign (Fortune)
  6. Search startup Perplexity AI valued at $520 mln in funding from Bezos, Nvidia (Reuters)
  7. DeepL, the AI-based language translator, raises over $100M at a $1B+ valuation (TechCrunch)
  8. Jasper Announces $125M Series A Funding Round, Bringing Total Valuation to $1.5B and Launches New Browser Extension (Jasper)
  9. Grammarly raises $200M at a $13B valuation to make you an even better writer using AI (TechCrunch)
  10. Generative AI startup AI21 Labs lands $155M at a $1.4B valuation (TechCrunch)
  11. Microsoft-backed AI startup Inflection raises $1.3 billion from Nvidia and others (Reuters)
  12. Databricks raises over $500 mln at $43 bln valuation (Reuters)
  13. Scale AI: 2023 CNBC Disruptor 50 (CNBC)
  14. AI startup Cohere, now valued at over $2.1B, raises $270M (TechCrunch)
  15. Inworld Adds Another $50 Million For AI Character Engine (Forbes)
  16. Databricks strikes $1.3 billion deal for generative AI startup MosaicML (Reuters)
  17. Mistral, French A.I. Start-Up, Is Valued at $2 Billion in Funding Round (The New York Times)
  18. AI Company Pika Raises $55M to Redesign Video Making and Editing (Finance Yahoo)
  19. AI and analytics platform Dataiku raises $200M at a reduced valuation (TechCrunch)
  20. Metropolis Raises $1.7 Billion to Aid Its Growth (Los Angeles Business Journal)
  21. Abnormal Raises $200M+ To Protect The Modern Enterprise (Abnormal)
  22. Alphabet’s Waymo raises $2.5 billion in new investment round (CNBC)
  23. CoreWeave raises $2.3 billion in debt collateralized by Nvidia chips (Reuters)
  24. AI company Runway valued at $1.5 billion in latest funding (Reuters)
  25. Synthesia secures $90M for AI that generates custom avatars (TechCrunch)
  26. Adept Raises $350 Million To Build AI That Learns How To Use Software For You (Forbes)
  27. Legal Tech Harvey.ai Valued at $715 Million in Latest Funding (Bloomberg Law)
  28. Shield AI Raises $200M, Reaching $2.7B Valuation (Shield AI)
  29. Announcing a $150M Series E at $2.5B Valuation Led by BOND (AlphaSense)
  30. Tempus Announces $275 Million in Funding (Tempus)
  31. DataRobot Unveils Major Milestones, Including $300M Series G Funding Investment (DataRobot AI Platform)
  32. Drata’s Valuation Rises to $2 Billion with $200 Million Series C Funding (PR Newswire)
  33. BigPanda Raises $190 Million in Funding at $1.2 Billion Valuation (BigPanda)
  34. Dataminr Announces $475M Financing Round, Raising its Valuation to $4.1B (Dataminr)
  35. People.ai Raises $100M to Fuel Global Adoption of Revenue Intelligence Platform; Company Reaches $1.1B Valuation (People.ai)
  36. H2O.ai raises $100M at a $1.6B pre-money valuation for tools to make AI usable by any kind of enterprise (TechCrunch)
  37. Nfinite team shifts into a higher gear with our Series B fundraising (Nfinite Blog)
  38. Palantir Stock Price, Funding, Valuation, Revenue & Financial Statements (CBINSIGHTS)
  39. Checkr Raises $250 Million at $4.6 Billion Valuation (Checkr Blog)
  40. Mashgin Raises $62.5M Series B Funding at a $1.5 Billion Valuation, Led by NEA (PR Newswire)
  41. Standard Cognition hits $1B valuation with $150M investment (Grocery Dive)
  42. Observe.AI raises $125M Series C to Usher in AI-Empowered Era for Contact Centers (Observe.AI)
  43. Announcing our $50M Series C to build superhuman Speech AI models (Assembly AI)
  44. AI-based Car Ownership Super App Jerry Secures $75 Million Series C Financing at $450 Million Valuation ( PR Newswire)
  45. Musk denies report his AI company secures $500 million toward $1 billion funding goal (Reuters)
  46. Captions, a New York-based AI-powered creative studio, raised $25M in Series B funding (Finsmes)
  47. Character.AI, the a16z-backed chatbot startup, tops 1.7M installs in first week (TechCrunch)
  48. Leena AI: Revenue, Competitors, Alternatives (Growjo)
  49. Luma raises $43M to build AI that crafts 3D models (TechCrunch)
  50. Bay Area Inno – Magic.Dev raises $23 million to create an AI software engineer (The Business Journals
  51. MindsDB Secures Funding from NVIDIA to Make AI More Accessible to All Businesses (Mindsdb)
  52. Announcing Our $100M Series B Funding to Build Long-Term Memory for AI (Pinecone)
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Tim Keary
Technology Specialist
Tim Keary
Technology Specialist

Tim Keary is a freelance technology writer and reporter covering AI, cybersecurity, and enterprise technology. Before joining Techopedia full-time in 2023, his work appeared on VentureBeat, Forbes Advisor, and other notable technology platforms, where he covered the latest trends and innovations in technology.