Discover the 20 Hottest AI Startups and Companies to Watch [2026]

At a Glance: List of 20 Hottest AI Startups to Watch [2026]

1. OpenAI (USA): Advanced Generative Models
2. Anthropic (USA): Interpretable AI Models
3. Perplexity (USA): AI-Powered Search Engine
4. Mistral AI (France): Open-Source LLMs
5. Synthesia (UK): Text to Video Conversion
6. Figure (USA): Autonomous Humanoid Robots
7. Nektar (Singapore): Revenue Efficiency Platform
8. Simbian (USA): AI Cybersecurity Agents
9. Helport (USA): AI-Powered Call & Sales Support
10. Neysa (India): AI Acceleration Cloud System
11. KIP Protocol (Hong Kong): AI-Enabled Digital Property Rights
12. Aim Security (Israel): Runtime Protection for AI Agents & Apps
13. Enthalpic (France): GenAI Platform for Chemistry & Materials R&D
14. Xensam (Sweden): Software Asset Management
15. Forward Earth (Germany): Automated Carbon Management
16. ProRata (USA): AI-Powered Search, Advertising & Attribution
17. Tako (Brazil): Payroll Automation
18. Light (Denmark): Automated Accounting Platform
19. SurrealDB (UK): Multi-Model AI Deployments
20. Zuzzuu (Turkey): Digital Sales & Marketing Platform

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 4.7 million startups, scaleups, and tech companies globally. We applied filters such as location, founding year, technology readiness, and employee count to select 20 standout AI startups and scaleups.

Additionally, we used funding information and a proprietary popularity metric called Signal Strength – it measures the extent of a company’s influence within the global innovation ecosystem. We also cross-checked this information with external sources for accuracy.

Hottest AI Startups & Companies [2026 & Beyond]

1. OpenAI – Advanced Generative Models

• Founding Year: 2015
• Location: San Francisco, California, USA
• Funding: USD 40 billion of series F funding in March 2025

USA-based startup OpenAI develops advanced AI models for a variety of applications, from natural language understanding to text and image generation. The startup received the innovation spotlight in the AI ecosystem after releasing its AI conversational interface, ChatGPT, built on generative pretrained transformers (GPT).

It processes natural language inputs to generate coherent and context-aware responses. The GPTs rely on large-scale machine learning models trained on diverse datasets to understand intent, infer meaning, and produce human-like dialogue across different domains.

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.

With the large data processing requirements, OpenAI is expanding its capabilities by teaming up with Oracle and Softbank to build five new data centers in the US. 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 smart retrieval ensures data availability for precise and timely 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.

9. Helport – AI-Powered Call & Sales Support

• Founding Year: 2020
• Location: San Diego, California, USA

Helport is a USA-based startup that develops an AI-powered platform designed for call centers, business process outsourcing (BPO), and telesales operations. It enables organizations to enhance phone-based customer service by integrating AI tools with human agents and remote monitoring technologies.

The platform features an AI agent that transcribes voice calls in real time, suggests responses based on standard operating procedures (SOPs), and historical data. It generates automatic call summaries and ensures compliance through built-in checks and approved language usage.

Helport provides remote monitoring capabilities, including real-time screen recording, productivity tracking, and instant payroll calculations. It integrates with leading CRM and VoIP platforms and provides audit-ready compliance support for regulated industries. The startup streamlines support operations, minimizes deployment time, and offers transparent, fixed pricing to deliver scalable, efficient, and compliant customer engagement solutions.

Last year, Helport reported a 13.1% increase in year-over-year revenue. The same period also saw a 29.1% increase in the number of subscribed seats.

10. Neysa – AI Acceleration Cloud System

• Founding Year: 2023
• Location: Mumbai, India
• Funding: USD 30 million in series A funding

Indian startup Neysa provides an AI Acceleration Cloud System that enables businesses to build, deploy, and scale AI-native applications efficiently.

The startup’s proprietary platforms enhance AI workflows. The Neysa Velocis accelerates AI deployment, and the Neysa Overwatch optimizes network and infrastructure performance. Further, Neysa Aegis secures the AI and ML environments.

The startup packs all these capabilities into a unified cloud ecosystem, which reduces complexity, improves resource utilization, and ensures compliance in AI adoption. This offers a scalable, secure, and cost-effective infrastructure that supports enterprises in driving AI-led innovation across industries.

The startup raised USD 30 million in series A funding co-led by investors NTTVC, Z47, and Nexus Partners.

11. KIP Protocol – AI-Enabled Digital Property Rights

• Founding Year: 2023
• Location: Hong Kong

KIP Protocol is a Hong Kong-based startup that builds a decentralized AI framework that establishes digital property rights for knowledge assets in Web3. The startup provides a base layer where AI models, applications, and data owners register, transact, and monetize their assets using blockchain-enabled verification.

The framework includes decentralized identity, access control, and transparent ownership records to ensure secure interactions across stakeholders. Moreover, it integrates mechanisms that align with institutional standards, making it suitable for adoption by enterprises, governments, and NGOs.

This approach enables AI creators and organizations to capture fair economic value from their contributions while ensuring trust and accountability in the AI-powered future.

KIP Protocol collaborates with Open Campus to build Open Campus U (OCU), an AI-driven educational platform targeting at least 1 million learners. Backed by a USD 10 million DAO fund, OCU aims to impact 250 million students across 23,000 universities globally.

12. Aim Security – Runtime Protection for AI Agents & Apps

• Founding Year: 2022
• Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
• Funding: USD 18 million in series A funding

Aim Security is an Israeli startup that provides runtime protection for AI applications and agents. The startup’s Aim Firewall analyzes AI interactions in production environments to identify both known and novel threats and enforce compliance guardrails.

Aim Security’s engine utilizes trained models to detect various classes of AI attacks and compliance violations. The startup’s integration modes allow deployment on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge with support for model-agnostic gateways and detection APIs. It ensures enterprise-grade security by aligning with regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act, NIST RMF, and OWASP for large language models. This provides mechanisms to prevent or flag violations in real time.

The system offers low latency, high throughput, and a minimal false positive rate, without impacting production workflows, and enables centralized governance, observability, and customizable policy controls for organizations.

The Aim Firewall supports agentic AI environments and allows enterprises to accelerate safe AI adoption, mitigate data leakage risks, and monitor shadow AI while maintaining the integrity and compliance of their AI deployments.

Aim Security closed its USD 18 million series A round to secure generative AI enterprise adoption. This brings Aim Security’s total funding to USD 28 million.

13. Enthalpic – GenAI Platform for Chemistry & Materials R&D

• Founding Year: 2024
• Location: Paris, France
• Funding: EUR 8.5 million in seed funding

French startup Enthalpic develops a generative AI platform that discovers new catalysts to optimize chemical reactions in industrial processes. The platform analyzes reaction pathways while integrating physicochemical properties and manufacturing constraints to propose viable catalyst candidates. It offers data-driven simulations to ensure performance accuracy and scalability across different process conditions.

Enthalpic combines reaction optimization with sustainability considerations and reduces trial-and-error experimentation in catalyst research. This allows industries to accelerate materials discovery, lower development costs, and transition toward greener and more efficient chemical manufacturing.

Enthalpic has raised EUR 8.5 million in seed funding, led by investors like Breega and Cathay Innovation & Felicis.

14. Xensam – Software Asset Management

• Founding Year: 2016
• Location: Stockholm, Sweden
• Funding: EUR 37 million in growth funding

Xensam is a Swedish startup that develops an AI-powered, cloud-based software asset management platform that monitors and analyzes enterprise software environments. It uses machine learning models to track license usage, detect security risks, and benchmark performance across diverse applications in real time.

The platform integrates automated compliance reporting with detailed insights into software utilization. This enables IT teams to streamline costs while reducing risk exposure. It also provides visibility into underutilized applications, which allows organizations to eliminate wasteful spending and improve security posture.

Xensam combines automation with actionable intelligence to support IT executives in optimizing resource allocation, strengthening governance, and driving measurable cost efficiency across digital operations.

The Stockholm-based startup raised EUR 37 million in growth funding from Expedition Growth Capital, with plans to expand to the US.

15. Forward Earth – Automated Carbon Management

• Founding Year: 2023
• Location: Berlin, Germany
• Funding: EUR 4.5 million in seed funding

German startup Forward Earth develops automated carbon management software that uses AI to help businesses calculate and track emissions across company and product levels. The platform applies standardized frameworks on operational and supply chain data to generate compliant carbon accounting outputs in line with national and international regulations.

Forward Earth used rule-based engines to enhance reporting and provide white-label integration options for partners. It ensures accuracy by continuously updating datasets against changing standards.

The startup enables organizations to meet compliance requirements, embed sustainability into operations, and accelerate progress toward decarbonization goals.

Forward Earth secured EUR 4.5 million in a seed funding round led by Mosaic Ventures. Other existing investment partners include Speedinvest and European impact VC Revent.

16. ProRata – AI-Powered Search, Advertising & Attribution

• Founding Year: 2024
• Location: Pasadena, California, USA
• Funding: USD 40 million in series B funding

USA-based startup ProRata develops AI-powered search, advertising, and attribution solutions that rely on licensed content and transparent revenue-sharing practices.

The Gist modules integrate a custom AI search engine called Gist Answers that generates responses from a licensed pool of over 700 trusted publications. It reduces reliance on unauthorized scraping.

Through Gist Ads, the startup embeds native ads directly into AI-generated answers. This allows advertisers to engage users at the moment of content discovery.

Gist Attribution traces and discloses which content sources contribute to AI outputs, ensuring that publishers and creators receive proportional recognition and compensation.

ProRata combines licensed content use, attribution transparency, and a 50% revenue-sharing model with partners. This provides an infrastructure that restores value to original content owners, strengthens trust in AI-driven experiences, and creates a sustainable ecosystem for publishers and advertisers.

The startup closed its series B funding with a total of USD 40 million led by Toring Capital. The investment is set to accelerate the rollout of Gist Answers.

17. Tako – Payroll Automation

• Founding Year: 2022
• Location: São Paulo, Brazil
• Funding: USD 13.2 million in seed funding

Tako is a Brazilian startup that automates payroll by integrating employee management workflows into a single platform. The startup’s AI agents consolidate information across onboarding, vacation requests, data change processes, and offboarding. This ensures that all updates synchronize directly with payroll.

The system eliminates the need for separate tools and outsourced providers by centralizing data in one place, which reduces administrative delays and errors.

Tako’s native synchronization enables HR teams to process updates in real time without manual adjustments. This connects the entire employee lifecycle to payroll, which provides organizations with a structure that improves compliance, reduces bureaucracy, and accelerates operational efficiency.

Tako raised USD 13.2 million in their seed round that was co-led by Ribbit Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, alongside ONEVC and the founders of Ramp.

18. Light – Automated Accounting Platform

• Founding Year: 2022
• Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
• Funding: USD 30 million in series A funding

Light is a Danish startup that provides an AI-powered accounting platform to automate accounts receivable, accounts payable, and financial reporting for multinational companies. It uses machine learning models to process large volumes of transactional data, reconcile entries across currencies, and generate real-time financial insights.

The platform integrates with existing enterprise systems and supports multilingual and multicurrency operations. It also adapts to regulatory requirements across regions.

Light simplifies complex financial workflows and reduces manual intervention. The platform improves accuracy, compliance, and decision-making speed.

The startup raised USD 30 million in series A funding, bringing its total funding to USD 43 million. The platform experiences 30 times growth as hypergrowth companies abandon traditional tools for unified AI-powered finance operations.

19. SurrealDB – Multi-Model AI Deployments

• Founding Year: 2022
• Location: London, UK
• Funding: EUR 24 million in total funding

UK-based startup SurrealDB offers a multi-model, cloud-native database that supports modern and traditional applications. It manages structured, unstructured, and real-time data in a unified environment. The startup uses a distributed architecture that allows deployment across cloud, on-premise, embedded, and edge environments while maintaining scalability and consistency.

SurrealDB allows machine learning model execution within the database. This provides real-time inference and classification while minimizing latency and infrastructure costs through reduced data movement.

Real-time subscriptions facilitate instant context updates for collaborative AI assistants and streaming analytics, and their time-travel queries enable effective model retraining, drift detection, and auditability.

The startup consolidates diverse data models, which accelerates AI workflow integration and offers a secure and consistent infrastructure. This simplifies the deployment and operation of scalable, real-time AI applications.

SurrealDB secures over EUR 18.6 million in its latest funding round, which brings its total funding to EUR 24 million.

20. Zuzzuu – Digital Sales & Marketing Platform

• Founding Year: 2023
• Location: Istanbul, Turkiye
• Funding: USD 10 million in growth funding

Zuzzuu is a Turkish startup offering an AI-driven digital sales and marketing platform that integrates revenue growth features into a unified hub. The platform centralizes customer journey management, campaign tracking, goal alignment, and engagement strategies within a single interface. It uses real-time data to adapt interactions.

The platform provides dynamic data tracking, customizable engagement tools, and interactive reward elements that align with business objectives. The startup helps organizations to increase customer participation and streamline sales processes. This drives sustainable revenue growth by turning engagement into measurable outcomes.

Zuzzuu raised USD 10 million from Maxis Venture to support its growth process and contribute to its revenue growth, and access to different markets with its artificial intelligence platform.

Explore the Latest AI Startups to Stay Ahead

With billions of dollars in funding and widespread usage across enterprise, creative, and operational processes, the startups featured in this report serve as examples of how AI is being monetized at scale. Looking ahead, neuromorphic computing, which imitates the structure of the human brain, is moving closer to models that are continuously learning and using less energy.

With the maturation of hardware, quantum machine learning holds promise for advances in medication discovery and optimization. Multimodal AI agents will advance human-AI cooperation into new domains like autonomous research and real-time policy simulation because of their ability to seamlessly integrate vision, language, and action.

With thousands of emerging technologies and business innovations, navigating the right investment and partnership opportunities that bring returns quickly is challenging. With access to over 7 million emerging companies and 20K+ technologies & trends globally, our AI and Big Data-powered Discovery Platform equips you with the actionable insights you need to stay ahead of the curve in your market. Leverage this powerful tool to spot the next big thing before it goes mainstream. Stay relevant, resilient, and ready for what is next.