30 Top AI Startups to Watch in 2023

Every year, new startups pull to the forefront of their industry through exciting innovation, tech, and industry-disrupting business models. We’ve rounded up the top AI startups of 2023 that startup-lovers, investors, and aspiring entrepreneurs should follow.

Disclaimer: With so many promising artificial intelligence startups launching and growing worldwide, we aren’t able to cover them all. Furthermore, the startups that are listed below are not officially ranked and are listed in no particular order.

• Location: Santa Clara, California
• Founders: James Hom, Keyvan Mohajer, Majid Emami
  
• Founded In: 2005
• Funding: Post-IPO Equity, $326 Million
• Investors Include: Cota Capital, Qatar First Bank

SoundHound uses innovative AI technologies to allow developers and business owners to maintain control over their brand image from anywhere using voice-enabled AI. The startup offers several products, including Houndify, an AI platform boasting the world’s fastest speech recognition and a voice search and assistant app, Hound, that incorporates their trademarked “Speech-to-Meaning” and “Deep Meaning Understanding” technologies.

Discover more Silicon Valley startups to watch.

• Location: Mountain View, California
• Founders: Bhavin Shah, Jiang Chen, Vaibhav Nivargi, Varun Singh
• Founded In: 2016
• Funding: Series C, $305 Million
• Investors Include: Sapphire Ventures, Bain Capital

Moveworks is an AI platform that works to improve a company's relationship with its staff by providing a better way to support employees. Using their deep learning and AI technology, Moveworks provides staff with everything from IT support to HR help.

• Location: San Francisco, California
• Founders: Rolan Reichel, Pablo Munoz De Cote
• Founded In: 2018
• Funding: Seed, $500,000
• Investors Include: ARCADIAN Fund, Cosmos Global Holdings

Arrow is an AI-powered B2B SaaS platform that automates social media content creation and management for businesses. With features like ready-to-use posts, custom content channels, and dedicated user success managers, Arrow helps busy professionals seamlessly post engaging content, grow their following, and build credibility.

• Location: San Francisco, California
• Founders: Oleg Rogynskyy
• Founded In: 2016
• Funding: Series C, $100 Million
• Investors Include: Sandhill Angels, Lightspeed Venture Partners
  

People.ai leverages the power of AI technology to create an enterprise revenue platform that helps sales, marketing, and customer service teams provide the best customer experience through the analysis of revenue opportunities. By documenting customer contacts, activity, and engagement, People.ai provides companies with insights that are actionable and effective.

• Location: Singapore
• Founders: Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, Aravind Ravi-Sulekha
• Founded In: 2020
  
• Funding: Seed, $10.3 Million
• Investors Include: Nexus Venture Partners, 3one4 Capital

Nektar.ai is a business-to-business (B2B) startup that offers an AI-powered virtual assistant and connected revenue enablement platform for sales teams to improve productivity, boost sales, and streamline growth.

• Location: San Francisco, California
• Founders: Evan Reiser, Sanjay Jeyakumar
• Founded In: 2018
• Funding: Series B, $74 Million
• Investors Include: Greylock, Insight Partners
  

Abnormal Security is an email security company that leverages the power of AI to protect companies from targeted email attacks. Using behavioral profiling, the software can effectively predict and detect illegitimate emails.

• Location: Dublin, California
• Founders: Barry Behnken, Jordan Greene, Luis Dussan, Ransom Wuller
• Founded In: 2013
• Funding: Debt Financing, $89.1 Million
• Investors Include: GM Ventures, Intel Capital, Hella Ventures
  

AEye creates LiDar technologies, a laser-based sensor system that can accurately detect surroundings for self-driving cars. Additionally, the company leverages the power of AI to help manufacturers create smart autonomous vehicles using their intelligent detection and ranging (iDar) technology to provide surrounding senses that mimic that of a human.

Feeling inspired? Learn how to launch your company with our guide on how to start a startup.

• Location: Berkeley, California
• Founders: Aparna Dhinakaran, Jason Lopatecki
• Founded In: 2019
  
• Funding: Series Unknown, $4 Million
• Investors Include: Trinity Ventures, The House Fund

Arize AI is an AI company for AI production. Using their platform, users can understand and troubleshoot AI production to result in better, harder-working AI and empowered engineers.

• Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
• Founders: Florian van Schreven, Henrik Haugbølle, Ioannis Sintos, Tony Beltramelli
• Founded In: 2018
  
• Funding: Series A, $18.6 Million
• Investors Include: Insight Partners, AV8 Ventures

Uizard is an AI design assistant that helps entrepreneurs, marketing teams, engineers, and everyone in between to create mobile and web mockup apps. By creating an easy-to-use design tool, Uizard makes creating digital products simple regardless of the design or technical background of the user.

• Location: New York, New York
• Founders: Assaf Feldman, Eido Gal
• Founded In: 2012
• Funding: Series E, $228.7 Million
• Investors Include: Winslow Capital, Poalim Equity

Using an AI-powered platform, Riskified creates the optimal user experience for ecommerce sites by streamlining the checkout process and identifying real shoppers. This coupled with machine learning models that pull from over 1 billion transactions to stop fraud attacks in their tracks make Riskified a game-changing platform for ecommerce.

Explore more ecommerce startups.

• Location: Santa Monica, California
• Founders: Jeremy Barnett
• Founded In: 2018
• Funding: Seed, $4
• Investors Include: Undisclosed

Rad AI is a martech startup offering top-tier marketing and branding services empowered by artifical intelligence. Through their empathy-first approach, Rad AI is able to deploy effective, human-centered marketing campaigns using AI to validate concepts, create concepts, manage and guide campaign activation, and provide valuable feedback loops.

• Location: Palo Alto, California
• Founders: Dylan Keil
• Founded In: 2019
• Funding: Seed, $3 Million
• Investors Include: AI Fund

Bearing uses the power of AI to aid in tracking ocean-bound cargo shipments — a historically difficult task. The startup provides more accurate vessel performance predictions to help shippers track and manage fleets more effectively.

• Location: San Francisco, California
• Founders: Devaki Raj, Nicolas Borensztein, Pablo Garcia
• Founded In: 2016
• Funding: Series A, $8.4 Million
• Investors Include: Threshold, SV Angel, Y Combinator

CrowdAI provides organizations with a platform to create custom models for visual AI code-free, empowering non-technical founders and leaders to utilize the power of AI in an accessible, easy-to-use method.

• Location: New York, New York
• Founders: Albert Saniger
• Founded In: 2018
• Funding: Series A, $47.3 Million
• Investors Include: Canaan Partners, Renegade Partners

AI-powered app nate serves as a marketplace for a range of products. Users compile lists of items they wish to purchase and, with a click of a button, the nate app completes all checkout and shipping using AI capabilities. Better yet, nate offers users the option to pay in four installments, making buying the things users need more convenient and accessible.

Explore more top startups in NYC.

• Location: Chicago, Illinois
• Founders: Eric Lefkofsky
• Founded In: 2015
• Funding: Debt Financing, $1.1 Billion
• Investors Include: Franklin Templeton Investments, Google

The future of healthcare could be changed by the data-driven company Tempus. It uses AI and deep research data to complete higher-quality testing and clinical trials. It does this by gathering a huge network of some of the most prestigious institutions in the world including Academic Medical Centers, oncologists, oncology pharma companies, and biopharma companies. It hopes to use the data to provide better treatment decisions, drug developments, and patient therapy.

Discover more Chicago startups to watch.

• Location: New York, New York
• Founders: Armenak Mayalian, Jan Szilagyi
• Founded In: 2019
• Funding: Series A, $12.8 Million
• Investors Include: Flucas Ventures, Greycroft

It doesn’t take a wall street shark to make good investments anymore. Now, any individual who is looking to invest in upcoming companies can do so with the help of Toggle AI. Toggle is an artificial intelligence startup that uses data and machine learning in order to provide users with information on upcoming startups that are likely to succeed. Investors can get better access to financial problems and market insights using Toggle AI.

• Location: San Francisco, California
• Founders: S. Zayd Enam, Sebastian Thrun, Tim Shi
• Founded In: 2017
• Funding: Series C, $151 Million
• Investors Include: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz

Companies that employ large call centers as part of their customer service strategy will have even more support, thanks to Cresta. The business uses AI tech to help real-time agents make every interaction with a customer count. The tool integrates directly into chat conversations your agents are having with customers and offers real-time advice on responses they should give, like showing empathy or recognizing when a customer is upset or frustrated.

• Location: San Francisco, Calfornia
• Founders: Chris Mansi, David Golan, Manoj Ramachandran
• Founded In: 2016
• Funding: Series D, $251.6 Million
• Investors Include: Susa Ventures, Scale Venture Partners

Patients who feel they aren't getting the care they need will welcome Viz.ai and its AI-powered approach. The platform will allow multi-disciplinary teams to coordinate and connect health professionals with specialists in order to bring patients the help they need. Hosting everything in one platform will save health teams time, reduce leakage, and improve the lives of the patients they are serving.

• Location: Boston, Massachusetts
• Founders: Neal Kaiser, Rachel Cossar
• Founded In: 2020
• Funding: Pre-Seed/Angel Round in Progress
• Investors Include: MassChallenge, VitalizeVC

Virtual Sapiens is an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) startup that designed a platform in order to help professionals improve their virtual communication skills. The startup provides in-call coaching and insights after your conference call or meeting in order to help you improve your confidence and communication on video. The Virtual Sapiens AI joins the meeting with you and monitors your facial expressions during a call in order to determine performance. The innovation of the idea presented by Virtual Sapiens has the potential to transform speech coaching since it can easily be used with just a webcam and the Virtual Sapiens software.

Check out our interview with the founder of Virtual Sapiens!

See also our list of the top Boston startups to watch.

• Location: New York, New York
• Founders: John Guerci, Peter Bobley, Sam Bobley, Victoria Meakin
• Founded In: 2014
• Funding: Series C, $127 Million
• Investors Include: Stage 2 Capital, QED Investors

Instead of banks and lending institutions looking through mountains of documents to determine if a candidate deserves a loan, Ocrolus can do everything for them. The company uses AI to automate the underwriting process for loans by analyzing documents and data to provide financial institutions with the information they need about a candidate. This way, Ocrolus can help speed up the loan process and make it more accurate and unbiased for everyone involved.

• Location: New York, New York
• Founders: Clément Stenac, Florian Douetteau, Marc Batty, Thomas Cabrol
• Founded In: 2013
• Funding: Series E, $646.8 Million
• Investors Include: Insight Partners, Snowflake Ventures

Dataiku believes that every company, no matter the size, has a right to organized data in order to empower solutions. The AI business has been a leader in democratized data since 2013 and works with hundreds of companies in a variety of industries. They've developed their Everyday AI solution for companies, and it's becoming the future of how those companies are conducting business. In 2021, Dataiku was able to raise $400 million from investors to enable Everyday AI for enterprises across the globe.

• Location: San Francisco, California
• Founders: Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Sam Altman, Wojciech Zaremba
• Founded In: 2015
• Funding: Corporate Round, $1 Billion
• Investors Include: Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator

OpenAI isn't hoping to make billions of dollars or become the next biggest company in the world. Instead, their mission is to make sure artificial general intelligence is able to benefit all of humanity. If they can't build safe and beneficial AGI for everyone, they are satisfied if their work at least aids the help other groups achieve a similar mission. They've developed an API that can be applied to language tasks that serve millions of production requests every day.

• Location: London, United Kingdom
• Founders: Daniel Stofan, Lukas Hruby
• Founded In: 2017
• Funding: Seed, $1.03 Million
• Investors Include: Credo Ventures, NEO Ventures

It's hard enough for local transport planners or city integrators to get their hands on the data they need to make better decisions. GoodVision has created an all-in-one platform that traffic surveyors and others can use to minimize the effort of researching data. Using GoodVision, cities should be able to improve urban mobility, increase road safety, and reduce any vehicle congestion, ultimately lowering CO2 emissions worldwide.

• Location: Paris, France
• Founders: Arnaud Guerin, Renaud Allioux
• Founded In: 2016
• Funding: Series A, $28.3 Million
• Investors Include: Ace Capital Partners, Bpifrance

Intelligence professionals have had a problem since pushing to develop more sensors that capture more data: how to sift through the noise and make sense of it all. Preligens has developed an AI-based solution that fuses all that data to provide context and analysis so intelligence professionals can focus on what matters most. The company hopes to tackle major international security challenges using the new technology.

• Location: Palo Alto, California
• Founders: Bryan McCann, Richard Socher
• Founded In: 2020
• Funding: Series A, $45 Million
• Investors Include: Norwest Venture Partners, Breyer Capital

Looking to become the next great search engine, You.com allows users to search for anything they need with greater security from tracking cookies and ads. The layouts are also unique in that users can scroll both horizontally and vertically in search results so they can access more results in less time. Users can even prioritize certain sources of information they trust over others.

• Location: San Francisco, California
• Founders: Dylan Fox
• Founded In: 2017
• Funding: Series B, $63.1 Million
• Investors Include: Insight Partners, Y Combinator

Simple and to the point, AssemblyAI is a transcription product that uses an AI API to convert audio and video files to text. The company works closely with developers who can integrate the API into several use cases like summarization, content moderation, topic detection, and more. Developers are able to access in-depth tutorials, detailed changelogs, and comprehensive documentation that make it easy to get started with the product.

• Location: Miami, Florida
• Founders: Alexander Lashkov, Eugene Godov, Vitaly Kukharenko
• Founded In: 2018
• Funding: Pre-Seed, $1 Million
• Investors Include: Flyer One Ventures, Nitrx Capital

Grammarly changed the writing world with its AI-powered spellchecking and grammar suggestions, and Linguix is looking to make a better mousetrap. The company has created an AI platform that provides real-time suggestions to improve clarity, conciseness, engagement, and style in writing. It's available as a browser extension, mobile app, or web editor so that users can choose the best way to integrate it into their writing workflow.

Explore more Miami startups.

• Location: San Francisco, California
• Founders: Andy Atwal, Benjamin Beadle-Ryby, Malinka Walaliyadde, Varun Ganapathi
• Founded In: 2018
• Funding: Series B, $85 Million
• Investors Include: Costanoa Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz

Medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US, and Akasa is looking to change that. Using an AI-powered approach to healthcare, the company is able to tackle administrative waste that ends up costing patients, providers, and payers. Akasa applies AI to repetitive tasks and processes in order to solve pain points within the healthcare industry to reduce operating costs so they can allocate the resources where they matter most.

Discover more startups transforming healthcare with AI.

• Location: Dublin, Ireland
• Founders: Cormac O'Neill, Paul Sweeney
• Founded In: 2016
• Funding: Series A, $5.2 Million
• Investors Include: Finch Capital, Blackbox

Webio is at the center of conversational AI and uses it to empower businesses to automate customer interactions at scale. The company provides ways for customers to interact with businesses in the way they choose and even makes suggestions on creating new channels of communication. Webio claims to be able to increase your customer engagement by up to 48% by managing the inbound and outbound customer messages.

• Location: San Francisco, California
• Founders: Akash Singh, Sharath Keshava Narayana, Swapnil Jain
• Founded In: 2017
• Funding: Series C, $214 Million
• Investors Include: Softbank Vision Fund, Emergent Ventures

Observe.ai is another company that is transforming the way contact centers interact with customers. The intelligent workforce platform uses AI in 100% of customer conversations and helps to optimize the performance of all call agents. It also helps automate repeatable workflows in order to drive more revenue and retention for any business. The feedback that loop agents get should help improve interactions across all customer touch points.

Recommended: Check out our full list of the top startups to watch in 2023!

• Top Generative AI Startups to Watch
• Top Machine Learning Startups to Follow
• Best Tech Startups to Watch
• Top Startups Transforming Healthcare With AI
• How AI Is Accelerating Business Growth and Innovation