17 Booming Generative AI Companies & Startups (2023)
Generative AI is already changing how people create content. From audio to video and written content, startups in this space are still young, but the early results are impressive.
These algorithms are trained on large existing datasets and use generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create new content. Last year, the generative AI market was only worth $1.2 billion. By 2032, it is expected to grow to $20.9 billion globally.
We’ve identified some of the big names in this niche space below. Keep an eye on these growing generative AI startups moving forward.
1. Midjourney
5-year search growth: 99x+
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2022
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: Bootstrapped
What they do: Midjourney is a generative AI image generator. Users must join the Discord channel to generate images and access the platform. There are over 15 million users creating art with Midjourney today. The newest 5.1 update has improved image quality and multiple new AI art features.
2. Hugging Face
5-year search growth: 4,900%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2016
Location: New York, New York
Funding: $160.2M (Series C)
What they do: Hugging Face is a collaborative AI community that creates tools for developers. There are over 61,000 pre-trained models and 7,000 datasets. These open-source tools are helping innovators build generative AI and machine learning models faster. Hugging Face partnered with ServiceNow Research to launch StarCoder, a free code-generating LLM, to compete with GitHub, Amazon, OpenAI, and DeepMind.
3. Tabnine
5-year search growth: 99x+
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2013
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Funding: $32.1M (Venture - Series Unknown)
What they do: Tabnine is an AI assistant for software developers. This tool uses generative AI to predict or suggest the next lines of code based on previously used syntax. In February 2023, Tabnine reached 1 million monthly active users.
4. Soundraw
5-year search growth: 99x+
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2020
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Funding: $1.4M (Series A)
What they do: Soundraw is a royalty-free AI music generator. Creators can use this tool to make original songs for content projects. And creators have full ownership and licensing of their music. The Tokyo-based startup raised $1.4 million in funding in July 2022.
5. Tome App
5-year search growth: 9,400%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2020
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $75.3M (Series B)
What they do: Tome is a new AI-powered storytelling platform. It allows users to create powerful presentations using generative AI to create new slides, format, and add visuals automatically. The drag-and-drop interface makes it much easier for less design-savvy customers too.
6. AssemblyAI
5-year search growth: 2,500%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2017
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $63.1M (Series B)
What they do: AssemblyAI is an AI-as-a-service startup. They have APIs in 80 different languages for automated speech transcription, topic detection, and more advanced content moderation. Developers can spend as little as $0.00025 per audio second while using the AssemblyAI platform.
7. Promptbase
5-year search growth: 4,700%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2022
Location: London, England
Funding: Bootstrapped
What they do: Promptbase is eBay for generative AI. This marketplace allows customers to buy and sell prompts to generate predictive results while using top AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. Promptbase earns a 20% commission on all platform sales.
8. Perplexity AI
5-year search growth: 99x+
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2022
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $28.7M (Series A)
What they do: Perplexity is an AI chatbot and artificial intelligence-based search engine. Users perform searches in a conversational manner, and the startup uses language learning models to answer follow-up questions by the searcher. After only one year, Perplexity is already drawing 10 million monthly visits and 2 million unique monthly visitors.
9. ChatPDF
5-year search growth: 99x+
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2023
Location: Berlin, Germany
Funding: Bootstrapped
What they do: ChatPDF is bringing generative AI to the world of PDFs. The tool works like an AI chatbot. Users can upload an existing PDF and ask the chatbot questions to get real-time answers about the PDF. In the first week, 100,000 PDFs were uploaded to the ChatPDF platform.
10. Synthesia AI
5-year search growth: 99x+
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2017
Location: London, England
Funding: $66.6M (Series B)
What they do: Synthesia AI is a generative AI video maker. Users only need to upload text, and in just a few short minutes, an AI-generated video is made. Synthesia currently supports 120 different languages and 125 different AI avatars for video creation.
11. Humata AI
5-year search growth: 99x+
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2022
Location: Austin, Texas
Funding: Bootstrapped
What they do: Humata AI is like ChatGPT for your computer files. The software integrates with your desktop and allows users to ask questions and get instant answers about specific documents. Humata can summarize long pages and write new content too.
12. Chatbase
5-year search growth: 1,800%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2023
Location: Toronto, Canada
Funding: Bootstrapped
What they do: Chatbase is an integrated ChatGPT-like chatbot for a website. It can be added to any website like a traditional widget for customers to ask questions and get instant answers. This bootstrapped startup reached 1,800 paying customers in 3 months.
13. Stability AI
5-year search growth: 99x+
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2019
Location: London, England
Funding: $101M (Seed)
What they do: Stability AI is the creator of Stable Diffusion, the deep learning text-to-image AI model. They develop open-source models and easy-to-integrate APIs to empower developers. Stability AI is essentially the image-generating version of OpenAI. They monetize their platform by selling access to the DreamStudio APIs. The $101 million seed round valued the company at $1 billion.
14. Anyword
5-year search growth: 1,900%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2013
Location: New York, New York
Funding: $30.1M (Series B)
What they do: Anyword is a generative AI content generation platform. The startup uses natural language processing to write copy for blogs, ads, emails, etc. Anyword also claims that its platform can be trained to match any company’s brand voice. They reached 1 million users in April 2023.
15. Rephrase AI
5-year search growth: 99x+
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2019
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $12.2M (Series A)
What they do: Rephrase AI is a text-to-video generation platform. Customers can select a video avatar, choose a background, pick the avatar’s voice, and enter a text prompt about the video. Rephrase also lets users export videos to use in sales presentations or marketing campaigns.
16. Inworld AI
5-year search growth: 4,100%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2021
Location: Mountain View, California
Funding: $69.7M (Series A)
What they do: Inworld AI is a startup implementing AI-powered character generation into video games. The platform uses natural language processing to create generative characters that can mimic human behaviors. The startup raised $50 million in August 2022 and joined Disney’s startup incubator, Disney Accelerator.
17. Runway AI
5-year search growth: 8,800%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2018
Location: New York, New York
Funding: $195.5M (Series D)
What they do: Runway is a generative AI video editing platform. Users can submit a text prompt and Runway produces short video clips based on the request in the prompt. In April 2023, Runaway launched an IOS app to allow users faster access to submit prompts or upload new video requests.
Conclusion
Generative AI is one of the fastest-growing sub-sectors in Artificial Intelligence today.
These startups are finding new ways to leverage large language models for better copywriting, image generation, and video creation. It will be interesting to see where more powerful generative language models take us moving forward.