Silicon Valley and the wider San Francisco Bay Area remain one of the world's most active startup ecosystems. The region continues to produce ambitious young companies taking on difficult problems, challenging established markets, and turning new technologies into real businesses.
Below, we highlight 22 Silicon Valley startups worth watching in 2026, along with their founders, funding, latest rounds, and notable investors.
Best Startups in Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley's startup scene has long been shaped by companies willing to rethink how things are done. The startups below stand out for what they're building, the problems they're tackling, and the markets they're helping reshape.
Disclaimer: This list is not ranked or exhaustive. Funding figures reflect disclosed equity financing as of August 2026, where publicly available.
1. Vanta
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Industry: Cybersecurity, Compliance
- Founders: Christina Cacioppo, Erik Goldman
- Founded In: 2018
- Total Funding: $504 Million
- Latest Round: Series D, $150 Million
- Investors Include: Sequoia Capital, Wellington Management, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Craft Ventures
Vanta helps businesses manage security, compliance, and risk. Its platform automates tasks like monitoring security controls, preparing for audits, managing vendors, and completing security reviews, helping companies maintain compliance as their operations grow.
2. Glean
- Location: Palo Alto, California
- Industry: AI, Enterprise Search
- Founders: Arvind Jain, T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka, Tony Gentilcore
- Founded In: 2019
- Total Funding: $765 Million+
- Latest Round: Series F, $150 Million
- Investors Include: Wellington Management, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Built around the challenge of finding information scattered across workplace tools, Glean offers AI-powered search and assistant features that connect with a company's internal knowledge. Employees can use it to find information across different apps, get answers based on company data, and automate repeatable workflows.
3. Cellares
- Location: South San Francisco, California
- Industry: Biotech, Cell Therapy
- Founders: Fabian Gerlinghaus, Omar Kurdi
- Founded In: 2019
- Total Funding: $680 Million+
- Latest Round: Series D, $327 Million
- Investors Include: BlackRock, Eclipse, ARK Invest, T. Rowe Price Investment Management
Cellares develops technology designed to automate and scale cell therapy manufacturing. Its Cell Shuttle platform automates traditionally manual manufacturing processes, while its facilities provide infrastructure for producing cell therapies at a larger scale.
4. Parafin
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Industry: Fintech, Embedded Finance
- Founders: Sahill Poddar, Vineet Goel, Ralph Furman
- Founded In: 2020
- Total Funding: $194 Million+
- Latest Round: Series C, $100 Million
- Investors Include: Notable Capital, Redpoint Ventures, GIC, Ribbit Capital
Small businesses often access financial products through the platforms they already use. Parafin provides the infrastructure behind those offerings, allowing online platforms and marketplaces to embed working capital and other financing products directly into their services.
5. Daffy
- Location: Los Altos, California
- Industry: Fintech, Philanthropy
- Founders: Adam Nash, Alejandro Crosa
- Founded In: 2020
- Total Funding: $21.9 Million
- Latest Round: Series A, $17.1 Million
- Investors Include: Ribbit Capital, XYZ Venture Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Reid Hoffman
Daffy is a donor-advised fund platform designed to make charitable giving more accessible. Members can set money aside for future donations, invest those funds, and contribute to eligible charities through one account.
6. Heirloom
- Location: Brisbane, California
- Industry: Climate Tech, Carbon Removal
- Founders: Shashank Samala, Noah McQueen
- Founded In: 2020
- Total Funding: $200 Million+
- Latest Round: Strategic Investments, Undisclosed
- Investors Include: Lowercarbon Capital, Future Positive, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund
Using limestone as the foundation of its direct air capture process, Heirloom is developing technology designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Its approach accelerates a naturally occurring process to capture and permanently store CO2.
7. Harvey
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Industry: AI, Legal Tech
- Founders: Winston Weinberg, Gabe Pereyra
- Founded In: 2022
- Total Funding: $1 Billion+
- Latest Round: Growth Round, $200 Million
- Investors Include: GIC, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue
Harvey develops generative AI software for law firms and corporate legal teams. Its tools can assist with legal research, document analysis, drafting, and other workflows while allowing organizations to work with their own data and processes.
8. Figure AI
- Location: San Jose, California
- Industry: Robotics, AI
- Founders: Brett Adcock
- Founded In: 2022
- Total Funding: Nearly $2 Billion
- Latest Round: Series C, $1 Billion+
- Investors Include: Parkway Venture Capital, NVIDIA, Brookfield, Intel Capital
Humanoid robots capable of working alongside people are the focus at Figure AI. The company combines robotics hardware and AI to build machines capable of understanding instructions, interacting with their surroundings, and completing a range of everyday and workplace tasks.
9. Together AI
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Industry: AI, AI Infrastructure
- Founders: Vipul Ved Prakash, Ce Zhang, Chris Ré, Tri Dao, Percy Liang
- Founded In: 2022
- Total Funding: $1.3 Billion+
- Latest Round: Series C, $800 Million
- Investors Include: Aramco Ventures, NVIDIA, Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst
Together AI provides cloud infrastructure for companies building and running AI models. Its platform supports model training, fine-tuning, and inference, giving developers tools for developing and deploying AI applications at scale.
10. Hippocratic AI
- Location: Palo Alto, California
- Industry: AI, Healthtech
- Founders: Munjal Shah, Meenesh Bhimani, Vishal Parikh, Subho Mukherjee, Saad Godil, Alex Miller, Kim Parikh
- Founded In: 2023
- Total Funding: $404 Million
- Latest Round: Series C, $126 Million
- Investors Include: Avenir Growth, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, CapitalG
Rather than using generative AI for diagnosis, Hippocratic AI focuses on patient-facing healthcare tasks. Its AI agents are designed to support areas such as patient outreach, education, scheduling, and care coordination.
11. Sierra
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Industry: AI, Customer Experience
- Founders: Bret Taylor, Clay Bavor
- Founded In: 2023
- Total Funding: ~$1.6 Billion
- Latest Round: Funding Round, $950 Million
- Investors Include: Tiger Global, GV, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital
Sierra helps businesses build AI agents that interact directly with customers. Its agents can answer questions, complete tasks, and connect with company systems to support customer-facing workflows across a range of industries.
12. Decagon
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Industry: AI, Customer Experience
- Founders: Jesse Zhang, Ashwin Sreenivas
- Founded In: 2023
- Total Funding: $481 Million
- Latest Round: Series D, $250 Million
- Investors Include: Coatue, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel
Customer support is the primary use case behind Decagon, which develops AI agents for customer service and customer experience teams. Its technology can manage conversations across multiple channels, connect with business systems, and carry context between interactions to handle more complex customer requests.
13. Physical Intelligence
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Industry: AI, Robotics
- Founders: Karol Hausman, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Brian Ichter, Lachy Groom, Adnan Esmail, Quan Vuong
- Founded In: 2024
- Total Funding: $1 Billion+
- Latest Round: Series B, $600 Million
- Investors Include: CapitalG, Lux Capital, Thrive Capital, Bond
Physical Intelligence develops general-purpose AI models for robots. Its research focuses on creating systems that can learn across different robots and tasks rather than requiring a separate model for every machine or activity.
14. World Labs
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Industry: AI, Spatial Computing
- Founders: Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, Ben Mildenhall
- Founded In: 2024
- Total Funding: $1.2 Billion+
- Latest Round: Funding Round, $1 Billion
- Investors Include: AMD, NVIDIA, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Emerson Collective
Creating AI that can understand and generate three-dimensional environments is the focus of World Labs. Its technology can create interactive 3D worlds from inputs such as text and images, with potential applications in design, entertainment, simulation, and robotics.
15. Lyrid
- Location: San Jose, California
- Industry: SaaS, Cloud Computing
- Founders: Handoyo Sutanto, Simon Loo
- Founded In: 2019
- Total Funding: $1.1 Million+
- Latest Round: Seed, $1.1 Million
- Investors Include: Plug and Play Ventures, GoAhead Ventures, Titan Angels, ExpertDojo
Lyrid develops cloud infrastructure tools that help engineering teams deploy and manage applications across different environments. Its platform includes tools for Kubernetes, containers, databases, hosting, and application deployment.
16. Datasaur
- Location: Sunnyvale, California
- Industry: AI, Machine Learning
- Founders: Ivan Lee
- Founded In: 2019
- Total Funding: $8 Million
- Latest Round: Seed, $4 Million
- Investors Include: Initialized Capital, HNVR, Gold House Ventures, TenOneTen Ventures
Originally built around data labeling for natural language processing, Datasaur has expanded into tools for companies working with AI models, language data, and machine learning workflows. Its platform helps organizations build and manage AI systems while maintaining control over sensitive data.
17. Cribl
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Industry: Data Infrastructure, Cybersecurity
- Founders: Clint Sharp, Dritan Bitincka, Ledion Bitincka
- Founded In: 2018
- Total Funding: $600 Million+
- Latest Round: Series E, $319 Million
- Investors Include: GV, GIC, CapitalG, IVP
Cribl builds data infrastructure for IT and security teams. Its products help organizations collect, process, route, and manage telemetry data while giving teams greater control over where that data goes and how it is stored.
18. Fiddler
- Location: Palo Alto, California
- Industry: AI, AI Observability
- Founders: Krishna Gade, Amit Paka
- Founded In: 2018
- Total Funding: $100 Million
- Latest Round: Series C, $30 Million
- Investors Include: RPS Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lux Capital, Insight Partners
Fiddler builds software for monitoring and managing AI systems after they are deployed. Its platform helps companies track model performance, evaluate AI outputs, investigate unexpected behavior, and manage risk across their AI applications.
19. Brightline
- Location: San Mateo, California
- Industry: Healthtech, Mental Health
- Founders: Naomi Allen, Giovanni Colella
- Founded In: 2019
- Total Funding: ~$205 Million
- Latest Round: Series C Extension, $10 Million
- Investors Include: KKR, GV, Oak HC/FT, Northwell Health
Brightline provides mental health care for children, teens, and families. Its services include therapy, psychiatry, psychological testing, and support for concerns such as anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD, and trauma.
20. Dusty Robotics
- Location: Mountain View, California
- Industry: Construction Tech, Robotics
- Founders: Tessa Lau, Philipp Herget
- Founded In: 2018
- Total Funding: $68.7 Million
- Latest Round: Series B, $45 Million
- Investors Include: Scale Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, Baseline Ventures, Root Ventures
Transferring digital building plans onto a physical jobsite is where Dusty Robotics comes in. Its FieldPrinter prints full-scale layouts directly onto floors, helping construction crews work from the same information while reducing manual measuring and marking.
21. Humans&
- Location: Redwood City, California
- Industry: AI
- Founders: Eric Zelikman, Andi Peng, Georges Harik, Noah D. Goodman, Yuchen He
- Founded In: 2025
- Total Funding: $480 Million
- Latest Round: Seed, $480 Million
- Investors Include: SV Angel, NVIDIA, GV, Jeff Bezos
Humans& is an AI research company focused on building systems designed to work more naturally with people and groups. Its research explores areas such as collaboration, memory, and long-term interaction to improve how people and AI work together.
22. Etched
- Location: San Jose, California
- Industry: AI Hardware, Semiconductors
- Founders: Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu, Robert Wachen
- Founded In: 2022
- Total Funding: $1 Billion+
- Latest Round: Series C, $300 Million
- Investors Include: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, SK hynix
Instead of competing with general-purpose processors, Etched is developing chips and infrastructure specifically for AI inference. Its hardware is designed around transformer-based AI models and the computing demands of running them at scale.
FAQs
Why is Silicon Valley good for startups?
Silicon Valley has a well-established startup ecosystem that brings founders, investors, engineers, universities, and large technology companies into the same region. This concentration can give startups greater access to experienced employees, advisors, potential partners, and venture capital.
Funding remains a major part of the ecosystem. The 2026 Silicon Valley Index reported $92 billion in regional venture capital investment and more than 23,000 patent registrations.
How many startups are there in Silicon Valley?
There isn't a single authoritative count of how many startups are currently operating in Silicon Valley. The number changes continuously and depends on how a startup is defined and which parts of the Bay Area are included.
Regional research organizations instead track indicators such as venture capital investment, patents, company formation, employment, and privately held companies to measure the health of the area's innovation economy.
What companies started in Silicon Valley?
A number of major technology companies got their start in Silicon Valley and the surrounding Bay Area. Well-known examples include Apple, Google, Nvidia, Cisco, HP, and eBay.
The region continues to produce new companies building products and technologies across a wide range of markets.
How many startups fail in Silicon Valley?
There isn't a reliable Silicon Valley-specific startup failure rate. Survival rates vary depending on a company's age, industry, funding model, and how researchers define a business failure.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes survival data for private-sector establishments, but those statistics cover businesses broadly and shouldn't be treated as a failure rate specifically for venture-backed Silicon Valley startups.
