Top 25 AI Startups of 2024: Key Players Shaping AI’s Future

2024 was a big year for AI startups. Despite a slowdown in VC investment, research from WriterBuddy found that the top 50 AI startups collectively raised $52.8 billion in funding as of October 2024.

The study estimated that the top three sectors dominating AI funding were AI infrastructure and models at $35.5 billion, data and analytics at $5.9 billion, and defense and security at $3.8 billion.

Below, we look at the top 25 AI startups of 2024 with the highest valuations, breaking down what they do, how much they raised, and their key products.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. Top 25 AI Startups
3. The Bottom Line
4. FAQs
5. References

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. Top 25 AI Startups
3. The Bottom Line
Show Full Guide
4. FAQs
5. References

Top 25 AI Startups

WriterBuddy’s study analyzed funding, valuation, and influence trends among the top AI companies on the 2024 Forbes AI list, featuring data sourced from Crunchbase, PitchBook, and third-party news articles.

1. OpenAI

OpenAI is the undisputed king of AI startups, having raised $21.9 billion during the study period. This accounts for 41.5% of total funding among the top 50. OpenAI has attracted significant funding attention following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, which ignited the generative AI arms race.

ChatGPT started out as a free chatbot that could answer user questions, generate content, perform translations, and produce code.

Since its release, it has evolved into a multimodal juggernaut, with powerful models like GPT-4o giving users the ability to interact with the model through voice inputs. Other models available with the assistant include GPT-4, GPT-4o Mini, and GPT-o1.

The chatbot is also integrated with the text-to-image model DALL-E 3, which allows it to generate highly detailed images on demand.

OpenAI has also launched the GPT Store, where users can create and share their own custom GPTs or custom versions of ChatGPT.

2. Databricks

Databricks is a data intelligence platform and data lake storage provider that supplies enterprises with the infrastructure needed to collect and process data.

The company raised $4.0 billion during the study period and offers a platform powered by a data intelligence engine that uses generative AI to understand data in an organization’s environment.

Users can ask the intelligence engine questions to search and discover data throughout their organization. The engine also offers insights into optimizing performance, managing data, fixing errors, and writing code.

Databricks has been adopted by a number of high-profile companies since it was founded in 2013, with notable customers including AT&T, Warner Bros, Toyota, Burberry, Walgreens, and Comcast.

3. Anthropic

Anthropic, the company behind the AI chatbot Claude, also makes the top 3, having raised $9.7 billion in funding. Claude quickly caught user interest in the AI race due to its ability to write content, summarize text, translate language, and analyze images to a high level.

At the time of writing, Anthropic uses several powerful multimodal AI models to power Claude, including Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3 Opus, which are available via the chatbot interface and API.

One of Anthropic’s key differentiators has been its emphasis on AI safety and implementing content moderation to prevent the chatbot from producing harmful outputs.

The company has also been quick to point out limitations within its own systems, releasing a report in December 2024 noting that Claude tends to fake alignment during training.

4. Anduril Industries

Anduril Industries is a defense and security AI startup that made the list with $3.7 billion in funding. Anduril Industries stands out in the top 10, as it is using AI to help produce and manufacture tens of thousands of autonomous weapon systems for the US government.

The company claims that 90% of its products can be developed at hyper-scale with commercially available components and materials.

One of its most notable products, Arsenal, is a software-defined manufacturing platform optimized to mass-produce autonomous systems and weapons with minimal materials.

The company is also in the process of building a new facility known as Arsenal-1, which will enable the company to manufacture autonomous systems at scale.

Anduril Industries is still evaluating potential sites but has confirmed the facility will be located in the US.

5. Scale AI

Scale AI also makes the top 5 on account of having achieved funding of $1.6 billion in the study period. Scale AI’s flagship solution, the Scale AI Platform, powered by the company’s proprietary data engine, is designed to collect, curate, and annotate enterprise data.

The platform uses machine learning models to help label large volumes of data. This enables customers to process high volumes of unstructured, internal data so they can begin to extract insights from it.

The vendor also offers Generative AI Data Engine, a service where subject matter experts curate high-quality datasets to serve as a foundation for training advanced machine learning models. Organizations can use this service to collect training data to build their own proprietary models.

So far, Scale AI has landed several high-profile customers, including the US Department of Defence, OpenAI, Microsoft, Toyota, GM, Nvidia, Cohere, and Meta.

6 Midjourney

Midjourney is one of the most popular text-to-image tools on the market. It reached sixth place on the list due to its impressive $10.5 billion valuation. With Midjourney, users can create images by entering a natural-language prompt.

Users can enter a written prompt describing the image they want to create and the model will provide them four different variations to choose from. Users also have the option to choose between the size, orientation, and aesthetic style of images created.

Midjourney used to offer a free trial up until April 2023, when CEO David Holz paused the package due to an influx of new users. Paid plans start at $10 per month for the basic Plan, which supports three concurrent jobs and 10 jobs waiting in the queue.

It’s worth noting that Midjourney is a self-funded company and hasn’t received any external funding.

Despite this, it has still become one of the most valuable AI startups in the world, presenting stiff competition to vendors like Stable Diffusion and Runway.

7. Notion

Notion is a digital workspace and productivity tool that has raised over $343 million in funding and achieved a $10 billion valuation. Notion provides a space for workers to collaborate on documents and projects remotely.

Many companies use Notion because it centralizes knowledge bases and documents. Generative AI can also generate summaries of documents and draft content such as articles and blog posts.

This startup also offers a range of project management tools as part of its product, enabling users to manage their workloads with features like to-do lists, content calendars, and automation of repetitive tasks.

Since it launched in 2013, Notion has attracted a base of over 100 million users, with notable customers including 1Password, Codecademy, Sigma, MatchGroup, Curology, and Mixpanel.

8. Perplexity

Perplexity is a free AI search tool that made the list on account of raising $915 million in funding, and an $8 billion valuation.

Through the use of generative AI models like GPT 3.5 and GPT-4o, Perplexity AI can answer questions on almost any topic, providing citations taken from various sources across the web. The inclusion of sources makes it easy for users to fact-check.

In 2024, Perplexity announced plans to implement online shopping capabilities as part of its core experience, enabling customers to use the assistant to search for shopping recommendations via the platform. The feature also offers the ability to buy third-party products with a single click.

While Perplexity is available for free, the vendor also offers a paid plan known as Perplexity Pro, which offers the ability to search with more powerful models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3 Sonnet, Claude 3 Haiku, and Sonar Large 32K. It also offers the ability to upload files, such as PDFs, CSVs, and images.

Perplexity’s simple but effective approach to AI search has helped it acquire 10 million monthly active users. It has also attracted a significant following among tech A-listers like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos.

9. Mistral AI

Mistral AI is a Paris-based AI startup that’s made the top 10 due to its $1.2 billion in funding and $6.2 billion valuation. It has attracted lots of interest due to its mix of powerful proprietary and open-weight models like Mistral Large 2 and Mistral Nemo.

Mistral Large 2, which launched in July 2024, is adept at code generation, mathematics, and reasoning tasks. The model has 123 billion parameters, supports dozens of languages, and has over 80+ coding languages, including Python, Java, C, C++, JavaScript, and Bash. It also performs on par with leading competitors like GPT-4o and Claude 3 Opus.

Mistral Nemo is a 12B parameter model with a 128,000 context length that was released under the Apache 2.0 license in partnership with Nvidia.

Mistral claims that Nemo offers state-of-the-art reasoning, coding, and world knowledge and outperforms other open-source models like Gemma 2 9B and Llama 3 8B on certain benchmarks.

Notable customers using Mistral AI’s models include AXA, Cloudflare, IBM, MongoDB, Orange, Quora, SAP, and Snowflake. According to Hugging Face, the Mistral Nemo base model alone had 2,958,395 million downloads last month (as of December 25, 2024).

10. Cohere

Cohere is a generative AI startup founded by ex-Google researchers, which received $943 million in funding and a valuation of $5.5 billion.

With Cohere, enterprises can host a third-party language model in-house or in the cloud for tasks like content generation, text summarization, and workflow automation.

One of the company’s core offerings is Cohere Command, a family of scalable language models including Command R7B and Command R. Command R7B is the smallest, fastest model, with a context length of 128K, which is highly efficient at performing math, code, and reasoning tasks on low-end GPUs or CPUs.

Command R is a model designed to perform retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with citations and supports over 10 languages. It can also automate complex business workflows with minimal human intervention.

Cohere’s focus on the enterprise market has attracted a range of notable customers, including Loom, OpenPhone, Ramp, Canix, Podium, Cuboh, and GrowSurf.

The company has also reportedly scaled to generate $35 million in annual revenue as of March 2024.

11. Glean

Glean is an AI-powered work assistant that provides a centralized platform for employees to search for enterprise data using natural language queries.

12. Hugging Face

Hugging Face is an open-source platform that hosts third-party machine learning models and datasets to help AI researchers build their own solutions.

It also has an open LLM leaderboard where users can view the top-ranked generative AI models.

13. Cerebras Systems

Cerebras Systems is a startup that manufactures high-performance AI chips, or wafer-scale engines (WSEs), which are designed to be faster and more energy efficient than Nvidia GPUs.

14. Sierra

Sierra is a conversational AI platform that supports an enterprise’s customer service operations. The vendor offers AI agents that can automatically respond to customer problems without human intervention.

15. Figure AI

Figure AI is a robotics startup that has produced Figure 02, a general-purpose humanoid robot. The Figure-02 robot stands 5’6″ tall, weighs 70kg, and is designed to work alongside human workers.

16. Abridge

Abridge is a clinical conversation platform that provides an AI assistant for clinical conversations. This assistant can record notes and reduce the time needed to create medical documentation.

17. Character AI

Character AI is a chatbot platform that allows you to chat with millions of AI characters. It also enables users to create their own characters with customer voices, conversation starters, and tone.

18. Insitro

Insitro has a machine learning platform that uses in vitro cellular data produced in automated labs alongside human clinical data to help discover new medicines to cure a wide range of diseases.

19. DeepL

DeepL is an online translation tool that uses AI to translate text, Word, and PowerPoint documents in over 30+ languages. DeepL also supports audio inputs and offers a dictionary feature to look up words.

20. Writer

Writer is a full-stack generative AI platform that enables users to build AI apps and workflows. Writer also offers a family of LLMS called Palmyra that offers question-answering and image analysis capabilities in 30 languages.

21. Cresta

Cresta is a generative AI platform for contact centers that offers real-time agent assistance and coaching. Cresta can also present answers to customer questions and support articles.

22. Runway

Runway is a generative AI startup that offers a range of text-to-video, image-to-video, and text-to-image tools. Runway Gen-3 is one of Runway’s main products and allows users to generate videos on demand.

23. Harvey

Harvey provides organizations with a natural language legal assistant that they can use to ask questions across up to 50 documents and draft long-form content.

24. Together AI

Together AI is a cloud platform that enables enterprises to run over 200 open-source models like Llama 3 at lower prices than cloud vendors like Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.

25. Codeium

Codeium is an AI startup that offers an IDE known as the Windsurf Editor, which provides developers with an AI assistant they can use to receive coding suggestions, debugging guidance, and automatic reasoning.

The Bottom Line

If WriterBuddy’s research on the top AI startups of 2024 reveals anything, it’s that investors are still all-in on AI. Infrastructure and model providers are in high demand and likely will be well into 2025 and beyond.

After all, organizations will always need tools to extract insights from their data and automate complex processes. Whether or not OpenAI can hold the top spot remains to be seen.

FAQs