Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What are AI startups?
Companies built from the ground up using artificial intelligence technologies to solve specific problems, create new business models, or offer innovative AI-powered products and services.
Why are AI startups important?
They drive innovation by applying AI to solve industry problems, create new business models, and improve efficiency across sectors like healthcare, finance, retail, and manufacturing.
How do AI startups get funded?
They typically raise capital through venture funding, angel investors, accelerators, or corporate partnerships, often in multiple rounds such as Seed, Series A, and Series B.
How We Selected these 20 AI Startups
The data in this report comes from StartUs Insights’ Discovery Platform, covering over 9 million startups, scaleups, and tech companies globally. In order to select twenty outstanding AI startups and scaleups, we applied filters such as location, founding year, technology readiness, and employee count.
1. OpenAI – Advanced Generative Models
- Founding Year: 2015
- Location: San Francisco, California, USA
- In 2024, revenue of USD 3.7 billion OpenAI
A company based in the United States, creates advanced AI models for a wide range of uses, including text and image generation and natural language understanding. After the startup released its AI conversational interface based on generative pretrained transformers (GPT), ChatGPT, the AI ecosystem spotlighted the innovation.
It processes natural language inputs to generate coherent and context-aware responses. To comprehend intent, deduce meaning, and produce human-like dialogue across a variety of domains, the GPTs rely on extensive machine learning models that have been trained on a variety of datasets.
OpenAI generated USD 3.7 billion in annual revenue last year and is projected to bring in USD 12.7 billion this year in revenue.
OpenAI is expanding its capabilities by collaborating with Oracle and Softbank to construct five brand-new data centers in the United States in response to the substantial demands for data processing. This is part of its Stargate initiative set up in January 2025 with the purpose of investing USD 500 billion over four years in AI infrastructure, primarily in the US.
OpenAI’s ultimate goal is to advance artificial general intelligence (AGI) responsibly while ensuring that conversational AI delivers practical value, improves human-AI collaboration, and benefits society at large.
2. Anthropic – Interpretable AI Models
- Founding Year: 2021
- Location: San Francisco, California, USA
- Funding: USD 13 billion of Series F funding in August 2025
Anthropic is a USA-based AI safety and research startup that develops AI systems that focus on reliability, interpretability, and control. Anthropic’s family of AI models under the name Claude includes an AI conversational system that answers questions, generates content, assists with reasoning, and more.
Its approach focuses on building models that respond to human feedback and adhere to clear reasoning processes, which reduces the risks of unwanted outputs. The AI models follow a constitutional AI framework. The model evaluates its output against a set of principles that guide the AI’s behavior.
Anthropic completed a Series F funding round with USD 13 billion. This financing values Anthropic at USD 183 billion post-money.
Recently, Microsoft included Claude models in its 365 Copilot. This brings Claude to millions of enterprise users through Microsoft’s productivity platform.
3. Perplexity – AI-Powered Search Engine
- Founding Year: 2022
- Location: San Francisco, California, USA
- Funding: USD 100 million of Series D funding
USA-based startup Perplexity develops an AI-powered search engine that takes questions in natural language and returns answers synthesized from web sources, with citations. It combines natural language processing (NLP) with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to search trusted online sources and synthesize concise answers.
The engine continuously updates results to reflect current information and enhances reliability by prioritizing evidence-based data. It reduces the time spent on manual research while ensuring that outputs remain transparent and verifiable.
Perplexity released its Comet browser that combines its AI search engine with the highly familiar browsing experience offered by Google’s Chrome browser. Comet’s Chromium framework supports popular extensions and bookmarks while introducing intelligent tools to enhance productivity, research, and multitasking.
Perplexity’s valuation reached USD 18 billion after the latest funding round that raised USD 100 million.
4. Mistral AI – Open-Source LLMs
- Founding Year: 2023
- Location: Paris, France
- Funding: EUR 1.7 billion of Series C funding
French startup Mistral AI develops open-source language models that integrate generative AI capabilities into business workflows. The startup focuses on frontier intelligence by offering models and infrastructure that are customizable, deployable across environments, and more open than proprietary alternatives.
It trains its models on diverse datasets and incorporates private data along with user feedback to improve accuracy and relevance. The startup designs its systems to prioritize speed, security, and portability. This allows organizations to deploy AI tools across various environments without vendor lock-in.
In their latest Series C funding, Mistral raised EUR 1.7 billion at EUR 11.7 billion post-money valuation. This funding round was also marked by the entry of Dutch Semiconductor giant ASML as a lead investor.
The Paris-based startup has also emerged as Europe’s answer to OpenAI. The expansion of Mistral’s Le Chat business platform directly challenges the established enterprise AI providers by offering advanced memory capabilities. Le Chat also enables extensive third-party integrations at no cost to users.
5. Synthesia – Text to Video Conversion
- Founding Year: 2017
- Location: London, UK
- Funding: USD 180 million of Series D funding
UK-based startup Synthesia offers an AI-powered video generation platform. It uses machine learning models to convert text into video by combining AI-generated avatars with synthetic voiceovers, supporting narration in more than 140 languages.
The platform integrates NLP to map scripts into synchronized visual and audio outputs, which allows users to rapidly create localized or personalized video content. It provides a scalable alternative to conventional filming by reducing production time and costs while ensuring consistent video quality.
The startup serves over 50,000 companies, including large enterprises such as Zoom and Amazon. The solution streamlines video creation to make global communication more efficient and accessible.
Synthesia closed its Series D funding round of USD 180 million, which raised the company’s valuation to USD 2.1 billion.
Adobe’s venture capital arm has also invested in Synthesia towards a strategic partnership focusing on AI clones for corporate videos.
6. Figure – Autonomous Humanoid Robots
- Founding Year: 2022
- Location: Sunnyvale, California, USA
- Funding: USD 1 billion of Series C funding
USA-based robotics startup Figure develops autonomous humanoid robots that integrate advanced artificial intelligence with robotic hardware to perform labor-intensive tasks. Helix is Figure’s generalist humanoid vision-language-action model that reasons like a human.
The startup uses deep learning models, computer vision, and motion control systems to enable robots to perceive environments, understand instructions, and execute complex physical actions with precision. Figure’s robots come with adaptive learning capabilities. This allows them to improve performance over time while ensuring safe collaboration with human workers.
The humanoid robotic workers that augment human labor reduce reliance on scarce labor resources and create safer and more efficient workplaces.
Figure secured over USD 1 billion in capital investments as part of its Series C financing round, reaching a valuation of USD 39 billion.
7. Nektar – Revenue Efficiency Platform
- Founding Year: 2020
- Location: Singapore
- Funding: USD 8.1 million of Seed funding
Singaporean startup Nektar develops a revenue efficiency platform that captures, unifies, and structures customer interaction data across frontline teams to improve sales operations.
Daisy is the startup’s AI agent that tracks signals across the various customer interactions like emails, meetings, and calls. It then utilizes them to generate revenue, driving insights.
It works by connecting to Salesforce and embedding a revenue operations (RevOps)-focused AI layer that identifies gaps in data and enriches records. Daisy thus automates updates, effectively changing the CRM into a self-healing system.
Nektar closed its Seed round with a total funding of USD 8.1 million, making it one of the biggest Seed rounds for a B2B sales company in the US-Asia corridor.
8. Simbian – AI Cybersecurity Agents
- Founding Year: 2023
- Location: Mountain View, California, USA
- Funding: USD 10 million in Seed funding
USA-based startup Simbian develops AI agents for security that integrate into enterprise security programs to automate cybersecurity workflows and decision-making. The technology uses machine learning models to analyze threat data and optimize routine security operations. It supports teams in identifying risks faster.
The integration of these agents into security processes improves response speed, reduces manual workload, and enhances operational efficiency. Simbian maintains context across every interaction to enable real-time, accurate, and personalized responses. Its intelligent retrieval guarantees that data will be available for precise and prompt investigation and triage.
Wipro added the AI agent from Simbian to its managed security services. The startup’s AI SOC Agent is now part of Wipro’s Cybershield portfolio of AI-powered security solutions.
Simbian received USD 10 million in their recent Seed round that included notable investors like Icon Ventures, Firebolt, and Rain Capital.
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