Top 10 Hottest AI Startups So Far This Year
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Top 10 Hottest AI Startups So Far This Year
These 10 AI startups are paving the way for the future of global generative AI and agentic AI.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Mark Haranas, CRN
Translated by Felix, PANews
In 2025, AI startups remain the hottest investment market for private and VC investors, with billions of dollars continuing to flow into AI startups.
Many startups have become mainstream AI providers in areas such as large language models (LLMs), customer service agents, and code generation.
Other AI startups—such as AI Squared, Morphos AI, and Writer—are focused on innovation, directly integrating AI into business applications, offering AI cost optimization products, or building platforms for agents.
IT research firm Gartner forecasts that global generative AI spending will reach $644 billion in 2025, a 75% year-on-year increase.
In addition, Gartner predicts that by 2028, global AI services revenue will reach $609 billion, driven by innovations around new generative AI capabilities and traditional AI technologies that are creating superior predictive analytics and decision-making solutions.
CRN has selected the 10 hottest AI startups of 2025 so far, which are delivering some of the most compelling AI innovations in AI agents, automation, knowledge graphs, accelerated AI applications, and solving complex business challenges.
AI Squared
Executive: Darren Kimura, CEO
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
AI Squared facilitates AI adoption by simplifying the integration of AI models with customers’ business applications, enabling teams to quickly deploy, experiment with, and scale AI solutions.
Through its SaaS and on-premises platforms, AI Squared integrates AI by combining data sources with AI capabilities, embedding intelligent insights directly into business applications.
Last year, the startup acquired reverse ETL platform Multiwoven to enhance its ability to streamline data and AI migration into applications, and also raised $14 million in funding.
Anthropic
Executive: Dario Amodei, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Anthropic is one of the world’s largest AI startups, currently valued at over $61 billion.
This unicorn startup owns the popular language model Claude, capable of integrating documents, tools, data, and web knowledge to solve complex problems and write code.
The AI startup raised $3.5 billion in a Series E round in March and plans to use the funds to advance the development of AI systems, expand computing capacity, deepen research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate international expansion.
Anysphere
Executive: Michael Truell, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Anysphere is a leader in automated coding, home to the widely popular AI coding tool Cursor.
The startup has won over major clients such as OpenAI, NVIDIA, Major League Baseball, and Uber, who use Cursor to analyze programmer behavior and suggest code improvements.
Fueled by new investments from Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, the AI unicorn recently surpassed $500 million in annual revenue, with a valuation of approximately $10 billion. In June, the company launched a new subscription plan for Cursor at $200 per month.
Cohere
Executive: Aidan Gomez, CEO
Headquarters: Toronto and San Francisco
Cohere offers innovative multilingual AI foundation models, retrieval, and end-to-end AI products designed to solve real-world business problems.
Cohere’s AI platform provides customers with security, data privacy, and deployment flexibility across all major cloud providers, private clouds, or on-premises environments.
Last year, the startup raised $500 million from investors including tech giants Cisco Systems and AMD, bringing its total funding close to $1 billion.
Decagon
Executive: Jesse Zhang, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Decagon offers AI-powered customer support agents designed to elevate customer support through large-scale automation and issue resolution.
The startup’s agents, powered by its Agent Operating Procedures technology, enable customers to build, manage, and scale AI agents for chat, email, and phone interactions, automating repetitive tasks, boosting productivity, and empowering support teams.
The startup secured $65 million in funding in 2024 led by Bain Capital and plans to raise an additional $100 million later this year.
DevRev
Executive: Dheeraj Pandey, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, California
DevRev offers an AI-native platform that unifies customer support and product development.
The startup enables customers to generate interconnected knowledge graphs to power AI agents. Its AI products, Airdrop and Knowledge Graph, aim to help customers go beyond automation by unifying data across all systems, transforming complex processes into intuitive conversations to drive outcomes.
In 2024, the startup raised $100 million at an $1.1 billion valuation. Pandey was formerly co-founder and CEO of Nutanix.
Morphos AI
Executive: Aram Chavez, Chairman
Headquarters: Tempe, Arizona
Morphos AI focuses on helping generative AI (GenAI) developers optimize their large language model (LLM) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) vector databases to improve search accuracy and reduce storage and energy costs.
One of the smallest startups on the CRN list, Morphos AI offers a SaaS service designed to enhance the scalability and cost-efficiency of AI deployments by improving how AI systems store and process information through its Green Vectors technology.
The company says it reduces computational resources and costs associated with AI operations through seamless integration with existing systems.
Perplexity
Executive: Aravind Srinivas, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Perplexity uses AI models like GPT-4 and Claude to understand user queries, search the internet in real time, and summarize information. The company offers a free AI-powered search engine and information discovery platform.
Recently, Perplexity launched Perplexity Labs, which can generate reports and spreadsheets for dashboards and simple web applications using a suite of tools centered on deep web browsing, code execution, and chart and image creation.
The startup recently partnered with Nidia to offer localized and autonomous AI models for European customers.
Thinking Machine Labs
Executive: Mira Murati, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
The youngest startup on the CRN list, Thinking Machine Labs, is founded and led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati.
The startup says it is developing broad-capability AI systems, focusing on AI programming and building multimodal AI models with advanced reasoning abilities.
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman serves as chief scientist, while CTO Barret Zoph played a key role in OpenAI’s breakthrough innovations. Despite not yet generating any revenue, the startup is seeking $1 billion in funding.
Writer
Executive: May Habib, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
AI startup Writer offers an end-to-end agent-building platform with collaboration tools that enable companies to build, activate, and oversee AI agents based on their own data and Writer’s large language model.
From faster product launches to deeper financial research and improved trials, enterprises are using Writer to transform their business processes.
The startup has won hundreds of customers over the past few years, including Accenture, Intuit, and Marriott, and attracted investors such as Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, and IBM.
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