57 Growing AI Companies & Startups (2026)
Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform industries ranging from medicine to sales to software development. And this potential is finally being realized.
As of last year, the AI industry was worth an estimated at $390 billion. And the AI industry is expected to grow to almost $3.5 trillion by 2033.
Already, in 2026, AI has become essential for an increasing number of businesses.
Here are our picks for some of the most promising AI startups with a broad range of use cases across different industries.
1. Ominimo
5-year search growth: 99X+
Monthly visitors: 150,000 (83,000 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2024
Location: Budapest, Hungary
Funding: $11.7 million (Series A)
What they do: Ominimo uses AI-powered risk models to offer competitive consumer car insurance deals. Founded by a former McKinsey consultant, it sold 300,000 policies in its first year of operation, turning a profit in the process.
Having started in the Hungarian market, Ominimo raised initial funding at a value of approximately $220 million, with investment coming from Zurich Insurance Group. The startup has already begun expansion into Poland, and plans to extend into more new markets and product categories in the near future.
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2. DeepL
5-year search growth: 50%
Monthly visitors: 158.2 million (39.7 million unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2009
Location: Cologne, Germany
Funding: $415M (Series C)
What they do: DeepL is a neural machine translation platform that uses advanced algorithms to translate text from one language to another with exceptional accuracy and fluency. With support for over 100 languages in 2026, DeepL's technology combines neural network models, deep learning techniques, and natural language processing (NLP) to provide high-quality translations for a wide range of content types, including websites, documents, and emails.
With its intuitive interface and powerful API, DeepL enables businesses and individuals to communicate and collaborate across different languages and cultures with ease. In May 2024, DeepL raised $300 million at a $2 billion valuation.
3. Uizard
5-year search growth: 1,950%
Monthly visitors: 0.79 million (0.55 million unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2018
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Funding: $18.6M (Series A)
What they do: Uizard is an AI-powered platform that helps users create professional-looking designs for websites and mobile apps with minimal coding or design experience. Uizard's proprietary technology uses machine learning algorithms to translate sketches and wireframes into functional code and designs, reducing the time and effort required to create a prototype.
Users can also create responsive and customizable designs that can be shared and tested with stakeholders.
4. Databricks
5-year search growth: 1,000%
Monthly visitors: 3.2 million (1.2 million unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2013
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $19.3B (Series K + unattributed round in December 2025)
What they do: Databricks is a data and AI company offering a unified analytics platform for integrating AI and machine learning. Customers can use the platform to analyze large-scale data, generate real-time analytics, build and deploy ML applications, and more. In December 2025, Databricks raised $4 billion in unatttributed post-Series-K funding at a valuation of $134 billion, with annualized revenue of over $4 billion.
5. Tripo
5-year search growth: 99X+
Monthly visitors: 2.2 million (1.1 million unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2023
Location: Beijing, China
Funding: "Tens of millions" (Pre-A)
What they do: Tripo is a 3D model generator. It uses AI to create workable 3D models from 2D images or plain text prompts, for purposes like printing or animation.
The startup has already amassed more than 3 million users, and has signed with more than 40,000 studios and corporate partners. Annual revenue exceeds $12 million.
6. Synthesia
5-year search growth: 254%
Monthly visitors: 3.4 million (2.2 million unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2017
Location: London, England
Funding: $536 million (Series D)
What they do: Synthesia is an AI-powered platform that enables businesses to create and personalize video content at scale. The platform can generate realistic and engaging videos with human-like avatars, making it ideal for various applications, from e-learning and marketing to news reporting and virtual events.
Synthesia's customization options include language support, voiceover selection, and scene creation. They enable users to create and deploy video content quickly and efficiently.
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7. Cohere
5-year search growth: 460%
Monthly visitors: 319,000 (178,500 unique)
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2019
Location: Toronto, Canada
Funding: $1.6 billion (Series D)
What they do: Cohere develops advanced AI and large language models for businesses to understand and generate human-like text. The company's three primary models are Command (generative AI text generation), Embed (text embeddings for analysis), and Rerank (improving search relevance). Cohere achieved a $7 billion valuation in its Series D extension in September 2025.
8. Suno
5-year search growth: 7,800%
Monthly visitors: 83 million (22.6 million unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2017
Location: New York, New York
Funding: $375 million (Series C)
What they do: Suno is an AI music creation platform where users can generate complete songs, including music, lyrics, and vocals, from text prompts. The startup combines its proprietary music generation model with OpenAI's ChatGPT for lyric generation. In November 2025, the company raised $250 million in Series C funding at a $2.45 billion valuation, with annual revenue of $200 million.
However, Suno is defending lawsuits from Sony, Universal and Warner Music. Copyright in this developing area of AI is still a gray area.
9. Soundful
5-year search growth: 1,400%
Monthly visitors: 171,500 (126,900 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2019
Location: San Diego, California
Funding: $3.8M (Seed)
What they do: Soundful is an AI-powered platform that enables businesses to create and customize high-quality soundtracks for their digital content, such as videos, podcasts, and advertisements. Soundful's technology uses deep learning algorithms to analyze the emotions, tone, and context of the content and generate soundtracks that complement and enhance the viewer's experience.
The platform allows users to easily adjust the mood, tempo, and style of the soundtracks to align with their brand identity and message.
10. Dialpad
5-year search growth: 229%
Monthly visitors: 4.6 million (2.1 million unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2011
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $450M (Series F)
What they do: Dialpad is a customer intelligence platform that offers various AI tools for customer engagement, sales intelligence, and team collaboration. The platform provides a central communications hub for businesses that includes video meetings, contact syncing, call recording, automated speech recognition, conversational chatbots, instant call summaries, and more. Dialpad has over 30,000 customers, including big brands like WeWork and Xero.
11. PlayHT
5-year search growth: 2,600%
Monthly visitors: 0.9 million (706,500 unique)
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2019
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $21.5M (Acquired)
What they do: PlayHT is an AI text-to-speech platform that turns written text into human-like speech. It's commonly used for video voiceovers, podcasts, e-learning materials, and more. The startup's AI model can generate realistic voice clones from just 10-15 seconds of speech. PlayHT was acquired by Meta in July 2025.
12. MindsDB
5-year search growth: 4,200%
Monthly visitors: 24,800 (12,200 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2017
Location: Berkeley, California
Funding: $54.4M (Seed)
What they do: MindsDB is an open-source, automated machine learning (AutoML) platform that helps businesses of all sizes to develop and deploy predictive models with ease. MindsDB empowers users to easily train and auto-deploy ML models, even without prior coding experience.
Additionally, MindsDB's technology uses advanced algorithms to analyze large datasets and generate predictive models, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions and achieve better outcomes.
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13. Shield AI
5-year search growth: 1,000%
Monthly visitors: 62,300 (48,900 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2015
Location: San Diego, CA
Funding: $1.17B (Series F)
What they do: Shield AI is a defense technology company that develops autonomous systems for military applications. Their proprietary technology uses advanced algorithms and sensors to enable unmanned systems to navigate and operate in complex environments, providing real-time situational awareness and decision-making capabilities.
Shield AI's products include autonomous drones, which are used for reconnaissance, surveillance, and other mission-critical tasks, and an AI-powered command and control software platform, which enables operators to control and manage multiple unmanned systems simultaneously. It hit a $5.3 billion valuation at its latest funding round.
14. Eightfold
5-year search growth: 750%
Monthly visitors: 8 million (4.9 million unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2016
Location: Santa Clara, California
Funding: $410M (Series E)
What they do: Eightfold uses AI to power a suite of HR-related products aimed at retaining, training, and finding the best talent in the marketplace.
Used by corporate clientele like Postmates, Capital One, and Hulu, Eightfold has carved out a niche by being one of the few HR software providers to harness artificial intelligence.
15. Plaud AI
5-year search growth: 7,800%
Monthly visitors: 2.7 million (1.1 million unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2013
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: Bootstrapped
What they do: Plaud AI offers a range of wearable voice recorders. Its devices use AI to transcribe meeting notes. The NotePin is designed to be attached to clothing, while the Note is a flatter, wider recorder that's designed to be used with a smartphone or held in the hand.
Plaud AI has already sold 1 million+ devices, mainly to professionals like doctors and lawyers. Boasting margins of around 25% per product, the startup is profitable.
16. Deepgram
5-year search growth: 2,300%
Monthly visitors: 507,700 (348,300 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2015
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: $85.9M (Series B)
What they do: Deepgram is an AI-powered speech recognition platform that helps businesses transcribe and analyze large volumes of audio and video content with high accuracy and speed. Using advanced neural network models, Deepgram's technology can transcribe and understand speech in multiple languages and dialects, even in noisy and low-quality audio environments.
Deepgram also enables businesses to extract valuable insights and automate their workflows, from call center analytics and compliance monitoring to media transcription and content creation.
17. Rosebud AI
5-year search growth: 7,700%
Monthly visitors: 241,700 (188,800 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2019
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: $15 million (Series A)
What they do: Rosebud AI is a vibe coding platform for the gaming industry. It's a gateway to game design for people with limited technical expertise, as well as a time-saving tool for established industry professionals.
A Y Combinator 2019 graduate, Rosebud was named after a cheat code from The Sims that gave unlimited resources in build mode.
18. OpenAI
5-year search growth: 1,400%
Monthly visitors: 573.5 million (236.6 million unique)
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2015
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: $58 billion
What they do: OpenAI is an AI research company with a mission of creating artificial general intelligence (AI) to benefit humanity. To date, the team’s research areas have ranged from artificial neural networks to natural language processing. However, they're best known for their ChatGPT application.
OpenAI's rapid growth also extends to its presence on the web. It consistently ranks in our list of the world's top websites. The ChatGPT website ranks in the top 10 most visited sites with 5.2 billion visits per month.
When we conducted our own research into AI usage at home and work, we found that ChatGPT is the most popular AI tool overall. When we analyzed respondents who use AI tools at home, we found that 83.27% use ChatGPT.
19. Capacity
5-year search growth: 39%
Monthly visitors: 44,300 (24,500 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2017
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
Funding: $155 million (Equity and debt)
What they do: Capacity has built the first fully AI-powered Helpdesk, which continuously learns from interactions between employees and customers while automating processes and decisions in real time.
The result is improved customer satisfaction while freeing employees from mundane tasks so they can focus on higher-level strategic thinking and decision-making.
20. Read AI
5-year search growth: 1,900%
Monthly visitors: 3.2 million (1.9 million unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2020
Location: Seattle, Washington
Funding: $81M (Series B)
What they do: Read AI is a digital tool that measures the engagement of online meeting attendees with AI, NLP, and computer vision technology. It functions as a real-time dashboard with detailed insights like attendee engagement scores, talk-time of each participant, and live sentiment analysis.
The suite of tools continues to grow and now integrates an AI-powered smart scheduler, meeting reports, and an AI project manager.
21. Dataiku
5-year search growth: 39%
Monthly visitors: 148,200 (91,100 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2013
Location: Paris, France
Funding: $1.04 billion (Series F)
What they do: Dataiku is a large-scale, enterprise AI platform that allows data analysts or tech-savvy developers to develop their own AI solutions and applications that uniquely suit their business.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, Dataiku provides a workbench for customized AI solutions. With training, toolboxes, and sandboxes built into its platform, Dataiku is one of Gartner’s leaders in the data science and machine learning space.
22. PhotoRoom
5-year search growth: 1,600%
Monthly visitors: 22.8 million (8.4 million unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2019
Location: Paris, France
Funding: $64M (Series B)
What they do: PhotoRoom is an AI photo editing app and API that lets businesses automate photo-editing workflows. The startup offers a suite of free AI photo editing tools, including background removal, image resizing, background blurring, and more. In February 2024, the startup announced $43 million in Series B funding at a $500 million valuation. It has since acquired GenerateBanners, supporting its Visual Ads Automation launch.
23. DNSFilter
5-year search growth: 141%
Monthly visitors: 75,700 (51,100 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2015
Location: Washington, DC
Funding: $62.1M (Series Unknown)
What they do: DNSFilter is an AI cybersecurity platform. Users are protected from phishing, ransomware, and malware attacks using real-time AI analysis. According to the company, they identify 58% more threats than Cisco and 75% more threats identified by Webtitan. This partly explains why over 15K brands worldwide use DNSFilter.
24. Spot AI
5-year search growth: 2,900%
Monthly visitors: 47,200 (17,700 unique)
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2018
Location: Los Altos, CA
Funding: $91M (Series C)
What they do: Spot AI is an AI surveillance company. Its smart cameras monitor business environments, acting as security guards and/or operations assistants.
When deployed in operations, Spot cameras can automate quality inspections and reduce downtime on machines. In guard mode, it can smartly detect loitering and activate strobe lights, floodlights, and audio warnings. It can cut on-site security spend by 50%.
25. Interactions
5-year search growth: 45%
Monthly visitors: 6,100 (4,600 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2013
Location: Franklin, MA
Funding: $167M (Series E)
What they do: Interactions is a virtual assistant platform that helps enterprises improve customer experience and cut costs. The platform is used across all customer care channels, allowing for a consistent user experience. Used by many Fortune 500 companies, the startup handles more than 2B annual conversation transactions.
26. Fireflies.ai
5-year search growth: 5,000%
Monthly visitors: 4.4 million (2.3 million unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2016
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $19M (Series A)
What they do: Fireflies is an AI meeting assistant that can record, transcribe, summarize, and analyze meetings. The tool integrates with various platforms, including Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and more. It also includes powerful search capabilities for users to find specific conversation snippets, action items, and key metrics within transcripts.
Today, Fireflies is used by more than 300,000 organizations, including Expedia, Nike, and Delta.
27. Otter AI
5-year search growth: 2,050%
Monthly visitors: 7.5 million (3.5 million unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2016
Location: Mountain View, California
Funding: $63M (Series B)
What they do: Otter is a speech-to-text transcription startup. Users can record and transcribe audio and video into text in meetings, virtual events, and webinars. The AI Meeting Assistant creates automated meeting notes, captures shared slides, extracts action items, and more. Last year, the company surpassed 25 million registered users, breaking $100 million ARR too.
28. AssemblyAI
5-year search growth: 4,700%
Monthly visitors: 778,400 (327,700 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2017
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding $158.1M (Series C)
What they do: AssemblyAI is an AI-powered platform that offers cutting-edge speech-to-text and natural language processing (NLP) solutions for businesses of all sizes. AssemblyAI can accurately transcribe and analyze audio and video content in real-time, making it ideal for various applications, from call center analytics and media transcription to closed captioning and voice-enabled applications.
AssemblyAI also provides a range of customization options, including language support, speaker identification, and data security, to meet the unique needs of different industries and use cases.
29. LogicMonitor
5-year search growth: 145%
Monthly visitors: 305,300 (81,200 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2008
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Funding: $142.9M (Private Equity)
What they do: LogicMonitor is a SaaS collaboration platform for IT enterprises. With over 2,000 preconfigured integrations, clients can easily integrate with their own devices, technologies, and services. The startup offers 24/7 live support with technical engineers and has been rated #1 in Customer Satisfaction on G2.
30. Groq
5-year search growth: 3,000%
Monthly visitors: 1.1 million (579,700 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2016
Location: Mountain View, California
Funding: $1B (Series D)
What they do: Groq develops high-performance hardware and software for AI inference. The company's primary product is the Language Processing Unit (LPU), a proprietary chip developed for LLMs and other AI applications due to their high speed and memory demands. Users can also access GroqChat, a ChatGPT-like chatbot that runs on Groq's technology to deliver fast responses and real-time information.
(Note that "Groq" is not to be confused with "Grok", the LLM that's integrated into X.)
31. HighSpot
5-year search growth: 30%
Monthly visitors: 1.6 million (506,900 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2012
Location: Seattle, WA
Funding: $644.9M (Secondary Market)
What they do: HighSpot is an AI-based sales enablement platform, leveraging artificial intelligence to guide sales professionals through the day with actionable information. From organizing marketing content to coaching reps, all the way to actively offering data-driven suggestions for reps, HighSpot aims to be the one-stop-shop sales enablement platform.
32. Grammarly
5-year search growth: 26%
Monthly visitors: 63.1 million (34.4 million unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2009
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: $400M (Private Equity)
What they do: Grammarly is a writing assistant, grammar checker, and AI-powered SEO tool. Available as a desktop app and browser extension, Grammarly is used by over 30K professional and enterprise teams, and about 30M people each day.
33. AlphaSense
5-year search growth: 2,867%
Monthly visitors: 406,300 (182,100 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2011
Location: New York, NY
Funding: $1.4B (Series F)
What they do: AlphaSense conducts market intelligence research using AI. The company has over 2,000 clients, including most of the S&P 500, and 70% of the top asset management firms. Clients can find pertinent market information by searching through millions of files across 10K+ business data sources.
In October 2023, AlphaSense added generative AI to its suite of market intelligence tools. These new features let users quickly identify macro and micro insights, track industry trends, and scan company transcripts to identify sentiment instantly.
34. YoDayo
5-year search growth: 2,500%
Monthly visitors: 3.8 million (556,600 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2021
Location: New York, New York
Funding: $2.4M (Seed)
What they do: Built for anime and VTuber fans, YoDayo is a generative AI platform with various AI tools, including an art generator and chatbot. Users can create their own anime-style drawings and share them with the community. The platform offers image generation models, including Stable Diffusion 1.5 and SDXL.
35. Labelbox
5-year search growth: 438%
Monthly visitors: 566,600 (145,400 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2018
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: $188.9M (Series D)
What they do: Labelbox is a collaborative platform that helps businesses develop and manage high-quality training data for machine learning models. Labelbox enables teams to efficiently annotate and label large datasets, including images, videos, text, and audio. Labelbox's technology uses algorithms to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of the annotation process, providing real-time feedback and quality control to ensure high-quality training data for machine learning models.
36. One
5-year search growth: 1,257%
Monthly visitors: 14,900 (13,300 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2021
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Funding: $8M (Seed)
What they do: One AI is a platform that offers AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants to businesses of all sizes. Their proprietary AI technology uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand and respond to customer inquiries, provide support, and automate repetitive tasks, freeing up human resources for more complex and strategic work.
One AI's chatbots and virtual assistants can be deployed across multiple channels, including websites, messaging apps, and social media, to enhance the customer experience and improve operational efficiency. One AI also provides analytics and reporting tools to help businesses track and optimize their performance.
37. Abnormal Security
5-year search growth: 786%
Monthly visitors: 56,600 (15,900 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2018
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: $284M (Series C)
What they do: Abnormal Security is a B2B security company that protects clients from email attacks. Using its proprietary Abnormal Behavior Technology (ABX), the data science model maps out the content of emails sent internally and externally. It analyzes the relationship between senders to prevent account takeovers and financial damage. This platform is 10x more effective than the traditional secure email gateway and takes 1 minute to fully deploy using its API.
38. Snipfeed
5-year search growth: 600%
Monthly visitors: 711,400 (642,900 unique)
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2018
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Funding: $8.4M (Seed)
What they do: Snipfeed is a link-in-bio monetization platform for content creators. The newest Snipfeed feature is the AI Desk, a GPT-powered suite of digital tools, chatbots, and assistants for content creation.
The Snipfeed assistant bots and generators allow users to create content, develop a social selling strategy, and generate product ideas.
39. Deepnote
5-year search growth: 244%
Monthly visitors: 210,000 (111,100 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2018
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: $23.8M (Series A)
What they do: Deepnote is a cloud-based digital notebook and collaboration platform for data science teams. Inside the Deepnote notebooks, users can connect their data, make real-time collaborative edits, and share their notes with others.
The startup has also introduced Deepnote AI, a feature that integrates generative AI with the platform. This feature gives users an AI assistant to automatically generate new notebooks, code suggestions, and code explanations. Deepnote has over 100,000 customers, including top companies like Webflow, Gusto, and Coca-Cola.
40. Luxonis
5-year search growth: 4,400%
Monthly visitors: 55,500 (27,100 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2019
Location: Littleton, CO
Funding: $4.8M (Seed)
What they do: Luxonis is a technology company that builds spatial AI and advanced computer vision hardware and software. This startup focuses on three product lines: OAK Cameras, OAK Modules, and RobotHub. One of the startup's top-selling products is the Oak-D Robotics Camera.
The RobotHub is where users integrate their cameras, remotely monitor their status, install or remove new applications, live stream, and access the integrated IDE. Luxonis has over 25,000 customers and 1 million global downloads.
41. Tabnine
5-year search growth: 675%
Monthly visitors: 381,500 (297,100 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2013
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Funding: $57.1M (Series B)
What they do: Tabnine is a generative AI-powered code completion and software developer assistant. This AI tool uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to predict the next line of code based on the previous syntax.
Tabnine estimates it has created more than 1% of the world’s code since its 2018 launch.
42. FeedHive
5-year search growth: 4,800%
Monthly visitors: 66,100 (46,400 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2021
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
Funding: Bootstrapped
What they do: FeedHive is an AI-powered social media marketing and management startup. The AI technology FeedHive uses can suggest content ideas and improvements and predict how a piece of content will perform. Users can also access advanced analytics and over 3,000 AI-generated social media post templates.
Just nine months after launching, FeedHive exceeded $65,000 in revenue and had more than 3,000 and 600 paid plan users.
43. Roboflow
5-year search growth: 6,700%
Monthly visitors: 1.2 million (542,800 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2018
Location: Des Moines, IA
Funding: $22.2M (Series A)
What they do: Roboflow is a startup specializing in making computer vision accessible and usable for developers of all skill levels. Their platform simplifies the process of building and deploying computer vision models. They provide tools for annotating, training, and improving datasets and integrating them into computer vision applications.
Roboflow aims to "democratize access to computer vision." Today, Roboflow has over 250,000 users, including many Fortune 100 companies.
44. PhotoPrism
5-year search growth: 1,575%
Monthly visitors: 71,200 (48,100 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2022
Location: Berlin, Germany
Funding: Bootstrapped
What they do: PhotoPrism is a privacy-friendly, AI-powered photo management app for the decentralized web. This application leverages AI for features like facial recognition, object detection, and scene recognition. The tool's AI algorithm will automatically tag and find photos based on their content, location, and time.
PhotoPrism is 100% self-funded and currently has more than 35,000 active installations.
45. Edge Impulse
5-year search growth: 550%
Monthly visitors: 103,700 (53,600 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2019
Location: San Jose, CA
Funding: $54.4M (Series B)
What they do: Edge Impulse is a development platform for machine learning on edge devices. The startup provides low-code and automation capabilities, giving developers the tools to train, deploy, and optimize deep learning models in the TensorFlow ecosystem.
46. Docsumo
5-year search growth: 5,200%
Monthly visitors: 33,400 (25,900 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2018
Location: Singapore
Funding: $3.5M (Seed Round)
What they do: Docsumo is an AI-based document processing and data extraction platform that automates data entry. It uses Intelligent Document Processing technology to automatically read, analyze, and interpret structured and unstructured data from invoices, receipts, contracts, etc.
Docsumo also integrates with other tools like QuickBooks and Xero to speed up accounting and financial tracking. Docsumo’s technology reads non-standardized documents with a 98% accuracy rate.
47. Perplexity AI
5-year search growth: 8,100%
Monthly visitors: 194.4 million (51.2 million unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2022
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: $165M (Series Unknown)
What they do: Perplexity is an artificial intelligence-based search engine and chatbot. The platform leverages advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to generate answers to search queries and follow-up questions.
Perplexity offers different LLMs through one platform and offers an alternative to ChatGPT Search.
48. HitPaw
5-year search growth: 8,200%
Monthly visitors: 2.8 million (2.5 million unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2019
Location: Hong Kong
Funding: Bootstrapped
What they do: HitPaw is a 3-in-1 AI-powered editing software suite with video, photo, and audio AI editing tools. This tool allows users to convert, download, and edit videos from 1,000 different video and audio formats. Hitpaw is available for IOS and Android devices. It currently supports 3 million users in 160+ different countries.
49. Briefly AI
5-year search growth: 8,600%
Monthly visitors: 4,100 million (3,100 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2022
Location: Larkspur, CA
Funding: Bootstrapped
What they do: BrieflyAI is an AI-powered writing assistant tool that transcribes meetings and generates comprehensive summaries. This unobtrusive note-taking tool is currently available as a Chrome Extension and integrates with Google Meet only.
Beyond just transcribing meeting notes and summarizing them, users can also generate AI follow-up emails and pre-meeting briefs, build customer profiles, and neatly organize meeting notes. This startup has over 4,000 users and a 4.5 rating on the Chrome Extension store.
50. Elicit AI
5-year search growth: 99x+
Monthly visitors: 1.7 million (764,500 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2023
Location: Oakland, CA
Funding: $9M (Seed Round)
What they do: Elicit is an AI research tool that automates workflows and acts like an assistant. Users type in a search query or research question, and Elicit provides a list of relevant academic papers covering the topic. Not only does this tool find relevant papers, but the AI can summarize takeaways and extract critical information.
51. AMP
5-year search growth: 18%
Monthly visitors: 251 (251 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2014
Location: Louisville, Colorado
Funding: $528M (Series C)
What they do: AMP aims to create a circular economy by revolutionizing waste management through advanced robotics and AI technology. The startup uses its robotics system, AMP Cortex, to sort recyclables from waste streams and improve recycling rates.
AMP’s AI component, AMP Neuron, uses computer vision and machine learning to identify and categorize different waste materials. This system streamlines recycling, improves the recovery rate of recyclables reclaimed as raw materials, and cuts costs. AMP Robotics even secured an investment from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund in its latest Series C funding round.
52. Mem AI
5-year search growth: 900%
Monthly visitors: 71,600 (48,300 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2021
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: $29.1M (Series A)
What they do: Mem is an AI-based note-taking app. Their key feature, Mem Chat, integrates AI assistance to make note-taking easier and more efficient. Users can interact with the AI conversationally, making organizing thoughts, capturing ideas, and retrieving information easier.
OpenAI led the latest funding round for Mem in 2022, valuing the company at $110 million post-money. Since then, Mem has faced strong competition from established tech giants.
53. Observe AI
5-year search growth: 183%
Monthly visitors: 74,000 (41,400 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2017
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: $222M (Series C)
What they do: Observe is an AI-powered contact center conversational intelligence platform. This startup uses AI algorithms to analyze customer interactions to provide real-time insights and feedback on customer calls. Observe’s suite of AI tools can use historical agent performance analysis to develop and personalize live on-call guidance and coaching.
Observe AI is backed by many top investors, including Y-Combinator, Menlo Ventures, and Steadview Capital. It currently supports over 150 customers, including Tripadvisor and Assurance IQ.
54. Copyleaks
5-year search growth: 2,400%
Monthly visitors: 3 million (1.6 million unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2014
Location: Stamford, CT
Funding: $7.3M (Series A)
What they do: Copyleaks is a digital plagiarism detection tool. It uses machine learning algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) to compare text to a database of websites, articles, documents, and previous submissions. Copyleaks also has an AI content detector feature due to the rise of AI content.
55. Anthropic
5-year search growth: 2,200%
Monthly visitors: 9.6 million (5.2 million unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2021
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: $27.3 billion (Secondary Market)
What they do: Anthropic is an AI safety and research company building general AI systems and large language models. This startup aims to play a crucial role in shaping the future of AI development and "to ensure transformative AI helps people and society flourish.”
Anthropic's primary product is Claude, a ChatGPT alternative that can read larger blocks of text and is trained on more up-to-date information. In March 2025, Anthropic was valued at $61.5 billion.
The web version of Claude gets 178.3 million monthly visits, dwarfing the visits to its parent company's site.
In January 2026, reports surfaced that Anthropic could be eyeing a $10 billion funding round at a $350 billion valuation.
56. Peak AI
5-year search growth: 1,600%
Monthly visitors: 10,600 (8,700 unique)
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2014
Location: Manchester, United Kingdom
Funding: Acquired
What they do: Peak is an AI platform with a suite of applications across customer, inventory, and pricing to connect technical and commercial teams. The Decision Intelligence system applies AI and machine learning techniques to analyze data, predict outcomes, and automate decision-making processes.
Peak was acquired by UiPath in March 2025, but continues to operate under its own name.
57. Scale AI
5-year search growth: 2,300%
Monthly visitors: 365,500 (276,000 unique)
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2016
Location: San Francisco, CA
Funding: $15.9B (Meta acquired 49% stake)
What they do: Scale AI provides training data for AI applications and models using a generative AI platform. It helps organizations develop and deploy AI models for self-driving vehicles, LLMs, AR/VR hardware, and robotics.
In June 2025, Meta invested $14.3 billion into Scale for a 49% stake.
Key Takeaways
Artificial Intelligence is undoubtedly one of the most exciting frontiers of technology, and these start-ups are all applying AI in different and fascinating ways.
From maximizing the value of real estate and building design to improving the way cancer scans are done, AI is certainly well on its way to fulfilling its long-prophesized promise.
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Exploding Topics is owned by Semrush. Our mission is to provide accurate data and expert insights on emerging trends. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.
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Josh is the Co-Founder and CTO of Exploding Topics. Josh has led Exploding Topics product development from the first line of co... Read more