These 10 AI startups are paving the way for the future of generative AI and agent-based AI globally.
Written by: Mark Haranas, CRN
Translated by: Felix, PANews
By 2025, AI startups will remain one of the hottest investment markets 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 (LLM), customer service agents, and code generation.
Other AI startups, such as AI Squared, Morphos AI, and Writer, focus on driving innovation by directly integrating AI into business applications, providing AI cost optimization products, or building platforms for agents.
IT research firm Gartner predicts that by 2025, global spending on generative AI will reach $644 billion, a 75% increase year-over-year.
Additionally, Gartner forecasts 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 10 hottest AI startups of 2025 so far, which are creating 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, CEO
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
AI Squared facilitates the adoption of AI by simplifying the integration of AI models with customer business applications, enabling teams to quickly deploy, experiment, and scale AI solutions.
AI Squared integrates AI through its SaaS and on-premises platforms, combining data sources with AI capabilities to embed intelligent insights directly into business applications.
The startup acquired the reverse ETL platform Multiwoven last year to enhance its ability to streamline data and AI migration to applications while raising $14 million in funding.
Anthropic
Executive: Dario Amodei, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Anthropic is one of the largest AI startups globally, currently valued at over $61 billion.
This unicorn startup is the owner of the popular language model Claude, which can integrate documents, tools, data, and web knowledge to solve complex problems and write code.
The AI startup raised $3.5 billion in a recent E round of funding in March, planning 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, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Anysphere is a leader in the automated coding industry, with its popular AI coding tool Cursor.
This startup has won the favor of major clients like OpenAI, NVIDIA, Major League Baseball, and Uber, who use Cursor to analyze programmers' operations and provide code suggestions.
Thanks to new investments from Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, this AI unicorn recently surpassed $500 million in annual revenue, with a valuation of about $10 billion. In June of this year, the company launched a new $200 monthly subscription plan for Cursor.
Cohere
Executive: Aidan Gomez, CEO
Headquarters: Toronto and San Francisco
Cohere offers innovative multilingual AI foundational models, retrieval, and end-to-end AI products designed to solve real business problems.
Cohere's AI platform provides customers with security, data privacy, and optionality that can span all major cloud providers, private cloud environments, or on-premises deployments.
Last year, the 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, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Decagon provides AI-driven customer support agents aimed at enhancing customer support levels through large-scale automation and resolving inquiries.
The startup's agents enable customers to build, manage, and scale AI agents for chat, email, and phone through its Agent Operating Procedures technology, automating repetitive tasks, increasing productivity, and enhancing support team capabilities.
The startup secured $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, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, California
DevRev offers 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 to drive outcomes.
In 2024, this startup raised $100 million at a valuation of $1.1 billion. Pandey was a co-founder and CEO of Nutanix.
Morphos AI
Executive: Aram Chavez, Chairman
Headquarters: Tempe, Arizona
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 improving how AI systems store and process information through its Green Vectors technology, enhancing the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of AI's large-scale deployment.
The company claims that seamless integration with existing systems can reduce the computational resources and costs associated with AI operations.
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 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 toolkit centered around deep web browsing, code execution, and chart and image creation.
This startup recently partnered with Nidia to provide localized and autonomous AI models for European clients.
Thinking Machine Labs
Executive: Mira Murati, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
The youngest startup on the CRN list is Thinking Machine Labs, founded and led by former OpenAI CTO Mirati.
This startup claims to be developing a versatile 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 played a key role in OpenAI's groundbreaking innovations. Even without any revenue yet, this 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 that includes collaborative tools to build, activate, and oversee AI agents based on company data using Writer's large language model.
From faster product releases to deeper financial research and more refined experiments, 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 like Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, and IBM.
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