Unicorns in the AI Startup Boom: The 10 Most Noteworthy AI Companies This Year

Author: Mark Haranas, CRN

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

Original title: A look at the 10 hottest AI startups so far this year

These 10 AI startups are paving the way for the future of generative AI and agent-based AI globally.

In 2025, AI startups will still be the hottest investment market for private equity and VC investors, with billions of dollars continuously flowing into AI startups.

Many startups have become mainstream AI providers in the fields of large language models (LLMs), customer service agents, and code generation.

Other AI startups, such as AI Squared, Morphos AI, and Writer, focus on driving innovation by integrating AI directly into business applications, providing AI cost optimization products or building platforms for agents.

IT research firm Gartner expects that by 2025, global spending on generative AI will reach $644 billion, an increase of 75% year-on-year.

In addition, Gartner predicts that by 2028, global AI service sales will reach $609 billion, driven by innovations around new generative AI capabilities and traditional AI technologies that are creating better predictive analytics and decision-making solutions.

CRN has selected the top 10 AI startups of 2025 so far, which have created some of the most compelling AI innovations in AI agents, automation, knowledge graphs, accelerating AI applications, and solving complex business challenges.

AI Squared

Executive: Darren Kimura, Chief Executive Officer

Headquarters: Washington, D.C.

AI Squared simplifies the integration of AI models with customer business applications, facilitating the adoption of AI and enabling teams to quickly deploy, experiment with, and scale AI solutions.

AI Squared integrates AI with data sources through its SaaS and on-premise platforms, embedding intelligent insights directly into business applications.

This startup acquired the reverse ETL platform Multiwoven last year to enhance its ability to simplify data and AI migration to applications, while also raising $14 million in funding.

Anthropic

Executive: Dario Amodei, Chief Executive Officer

Headquarters: San Francisco

Anthropic is one of the largest AI startups in the world, currently valued at over $61 billion.

This startup unicorn company is the owner of the popular language model Claude, which is capable of integrating documents, tools, data, and web knowledge to solve complex problems and write code.

This AI startup raised $3.5 billion in a Series E funding round in March, with plans to use the funds to advance the development of AI systems, expand computing capabilities, deepen research on mechanism interpretability and consistency, and accelerate its international expansion.

Anysphere

Executive: Michael Truell, Chief Executive Officer

Headquarters: San Francisco

Anysphere is a leading company in the automated coding industry, known for its popular AI coding tool Cursor.

This startup has already won the favor of major clients such as OpenAI, NVIDIA, Major League Baseball, and Uber, who use Cursor to analyze programmers' actions and provide code suggestions.

Thanks to new investments from Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, this AI unicorn company recently surpassed an annual revenue of $500 million, with a valuation of approximately $10 billion. In June of this year, the company launched a new subscription plan for Cursor at $200 per month.

Cohere

Executive: Aidan Gomez, Chief Executive Officer

Headquarters: Toronto and San Francisco

Cohere provides innovative multilingual AI foundational models, retrieval, and end-to-end AI products aimed at solving real business problems.

Cohere's AI platform provides customers with security, data privacy, and the flexibility to operate across all major cloud providers, private cloud environments, or on-premises deployments.

Last year, this startup raised $500 million from investors including tech giants Cisco Systems and AMD, bringing its total funding to nearly $1 billion.

Decagon

Executive: Jesse Zhang, Chief Executive Officer

Headquarters: San Francisco

Decagon provides AI-driven customer support agents aimed at enhancing customer support levels through large-scale automation and resolution of inquiries.

The agent of this startup enables customers to build, manage, and scale AI agents for chat, email, and phone through its Agent Operating Procedures technology, thereby automating repetitive tasks, increasing productivity, and enhancing the capabilities of support teams.

This startup company received $65 million in funding in 2024, led by Bain Capital, and plans to complete $100 million in funding later this year.

DevRev

Executive: Dheeraj Pandey, Chief Executive Officer

Headquarters: Palo Alto, California

DevRev provides an AI-native platform that integrates customer support and product development.

This startup allows customers to generate interconnected knowledge graphs to drive AI agents. Its AI products Airdrop and Knowledge Graph aim to help customers go beyond automation by unifying data from all systems, transforming complex processes into intuitive conversations, thereby driving the achievement of outcomes.

In 2024, this startup raised $100 million at a valuation of $1.1 billion. Pandey was the co-founder and CEO of Nutanix.

Morphos AI

Executive: Aram Chavez, Chairman

Headquarters: Tempe, Arizona

The startup Morphos AI focuses on helping general 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.

As one of the smallest startups on the CRN list, Morphos AI offers SaaS services aimed at enhancing the way AI systems store and process information through its Green Vectors technology, thereby improving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of AI's scalable deployment.

The company stated that by seamlessly integrating with existing systems, it can reduce the computational resources and costs associated with AI operations.

Perplexity

Executive: Aravind Srinivas, Chief Executive Officer

Headquarters: San Francisco

Perplexity uses AI models such as GPT-4 and Claude to understand user queries, search the internet in real-time, and summarize information. The company offers a free AI search engine and information discovery platform.

Perplexity recently launched Perplexity Labs, which can create reports and spreadsheets for dashboards and simple web applications through a suite of tools focused on deep network browsing, code execution, and chart and image creation.

This startup has recently partnered with Nidia to provide localized and autonomous AI models for European clients.

Thinking Machine Labs

Executive: Mira Murati, Chief Executive Officer

Headquarters: San Francisco

The youngest startup on the CRN list is Thinking Machine Labs, founded and led by former OpenAI CTO Mirati.

The startup stated that it is developing a comprehensive AI system focused on AI programming and building multimodal AI models with advanced reasoning capabilities.

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the chief scientist of this startup, while CTO Barret Zoph has played a key role in OpenAI's groundbreaking innovations. Even without any revenue yet, the startup is seeking $1 billion in funding.

Writer

Executive: May Habib, Chief Executive Officer

Headquarters: San Francisco

The AI startup Writer offers an end-to-end agent-building platform that includes collaborative tools to build, activate, and supervise AI agents based on a company's data and utilizing Writer's large language model.

From faster product launches to deeper financial research and more refined experimentation, major companies are transforming their business processes with Writer.

This startup has won hundreds of clients over the past few years, including Accenture, Intuit, and Marriott, while also attracting investors such as Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, and IBM.