Author: Mark Haranas, CRN; Translator: Felix, PANews
These 10 AI startups are paving the way for the future of generative and agent-based AI around the world.
In 2025, AI startups remain the hottest investment market for private equity and VC investors, with billions of dollars pouring into AI startups.
Many startups have become mainstream AI vendors 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, integrating AI directly into business applications, providing AI cost optimization products, or platforms for building agents.
IT research firm Gartner predicts that global spending on generative AI will reach $644 billion by 2025, up 75% year-over-year.
In addition, Gartner predicts that global AI service sales will reach $609 billion by 2028, 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 so far in 2025, which have created some of the most attractive AI innovations in AI agents, automation, knowledge graphs, accelerating AI applications, and solving complex business problems.
AI Squared
Executives: Darren Kimura, CEO
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
AI Squared facilitates AI adoption by simplifying the integration of AI models into 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 reverse ETL platform Multiwoven last year to enhance its capabilities to simplify data and AI migration into applications, while also raising $14 million in funding.
Anthropic
Executives: Dario Amodei, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Anthropic is one of the world’s largest AI startups, currently valued at over $61 billion.
The nascent unicorn is the owner of Claude, a popular language model that combines 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, which it plans to use to advance the development of AI systems, expand computing power, deepen research in mechanistic explainability and consistency, and accelerate its international expansion.
Anysphere
Executives: Michael Truell, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Anysphere is a leader in automated coding, with its popular AI coding tool Cursor.
The startup has won over big customers like OpenAI, Nvidia, Major League Baseball, and Uber, which use Cursor to analyze programmers’ actions and make code suggestions.
The AI unicorn recently surpassed $500 million in annual revenue and is valued at around $10 billion, thanks to new investments from Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. In June, the company launched a new $200-per-month subscription plan for Cursor.
Cohere
Executives: Aidan Gomez, CEO
Headquarters: Toronto and San Francisco
Cohere provides innovative multilingual AI foundation models, search, and end-to-end AI products designed to solve real business problems.
Cohere’s AI platform provides customers with security, data privacy, and optionality across 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
Executives: Jesse Zhang, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Decagon provides AI-powered customer support agents designed to elevate customer support by automating and resolving inquiries at scale.
The startup’s agents enable customers to build, manage, and scale AI agents for chat, email, and phone through its Agent Operating Procedures technology, which automates repetitive tasks, increases productivity, and empowers support teams.
The startup raised $65 million in funding in 2024, led by Bain Capital, and plans to close a $100 million round later this year.
DevRev
Executives: Dheeraj Pandey, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, California
DevRev offers an AI-native platform that merges customer support and product development.
The startup allows customers to generate connected knowledge graphs to drive AI agents. Its AI products, Airdrop and Knowledge Graph, are designed to help customers go beyond automation and turn complex processes into intuitive conversations that drive outcomes by unifying data across all systems.
In 2024, the startup raised $100 million at a $1.1 billion valuation. Pandey was previously co-founder and CEO of Nutanix.
Morphos AI
Executives: Aram Chavez, Chairman
Headquarters: Tempe, Arizona
Startup Morphos AI is focused on helping general AI (GenAI) developers optimize their Large Language Model (LLM) Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) vector databases to improve search accuracy and reduce storage and energy costs.
One of the smallest startups on CRN’s list, Morphos AI offers a SaaS service that aims to make AI more efficient and cost-effective to deploy at scale by improving the way AI systems store and process information through its Green Vectors technology.
The company says it can reduce computing resources and costs associated with AI operations by seamlessly integrating with existing systems.
Perplexity
Executives: 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 aggregate information. The company offers a free AI search engine and information discovery platform.
Perplexity recently launched Perplexity Labs, which makes reports and spreadsheets for dashboards and simple web apps with a suite of tools around deep web browsing, code execution, and chart and image creation.
The startup recently partnered with Nidia to provide localized and autonomous AI models to European customers.
Thinking Machine Labs
Executives: Mira Murati, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
The youngest startup on the CRN list is Thinking Machine Labs, founded and led by Mirati, former OpenAI CTO.
The startup says it is developing a broad range of AI systems, focusing on AI programming and building multimodal AI models with advanced reasoning capabilities.
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the startup’s chief scientist, while CTO Barret Zoph has played a key role in OpenAI’s breakthrough innovations. The startup is seeking $1 billion in funding even before it has any revenue.
Writer
Executives: May Habib, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
AI startup Writer offers an end-to-end agent-building platform with collaborative tools to build, activate, and supervise AI agents based on a company’s data and powered by Writer’s large language models.
Companies are using Writer to transform their business processes, from faster product launches to deeper financial research and better experimentation.
The startup has won hundreds of customers over the past few years, including Accenture, Intuit, and Marriott, and has attracted investors like Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, and IBM.
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