Here are the 10 hottest AI startup companies in 2025 that are making waves in the artificial intelligence world around generative AI, code generation, agentic AI and much more.
These 10 AI startup companies are paving the generative AI and agentic AI future of the world.
Artificial intelligence startups continue to be the hottest market for private equity and venture capital investors with billions of dollars being poured into the AI startup ecosystem in 2025.
Many startups have already become mainstream AI providers around large language models (LLMs), customer support agents and code generation.
Other AI startups like AI Squared, Morphos AI and Writer are focused on driving innovation around integrating AI directly into business applications, AI cost optimization offerings or platforms for building agents.
[Related: How AWS And Google Cloud Create Agentic AI Opportunities For Partners]
IT research firm Gartner expects worldwide generative AI spending will reach $644 billion in 2025, an increase of 75 percent year over year.
In addition, Gartner expects global AI services sales to hit $609 billion by 2028 due to innovation around new generative AI capabilities and traditional AI tech creating better predictive analytics and decision-making solutions.
CRN breaks down the 10 hottest AI startup companies of 2025 so far that are creating some of the most compelling AI innovations in the market around AI agents, automation, knowledge graphs, AI adoption acceleration and solving complex business challenges.
AI Squared
Top Executive: Darren Kimura, CEO
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
AI Squared streamlines AI adoption by simplifying the integration of AI models into a customer’s business applications, enabling teams to quickly deploy, experiment and scale AI solutions.
AI Squared integrates AI through its SaaS and on-premises platforms that combine data sources with AI capabilities by embedding intelligence insight directly into business applications.
The startup acquired Reverse ETL specialist Multiwoven last year to boost its ability to simplify the movement of data and AI into applications, while also raising $14 million in funding.
Anthropic
Top Executive: Dario Amodei, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Anthropic is one of the largest AI startups in the world with a current valuation of over $61 billion.
The startup unicorn is the owner of popular LLM models Claude, which brings together documents, tools, data and web knowledge to tackle complex questions and build code.
The AI startup raised $3.5 billion in a single Series E funding round in March with plans to use the money to advance its development of AI systems, expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion.
Anysphere
Top Executive: Michael Truell, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Anysphere is a leader in the automating code industry as the owner of popular AI code tool Cursor.
The startup has won over giant customers like OpenAI, Nvidia, Major League Baseball and Uber, which use Cursor to analyze a programmer’s actions and suggests lines of code.
The AI unicorn recently surpassed $500 million in annual revenue with a valuation estimated to be around $10 billion, thanks to new investments by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. In June, the startup launched a new $200-per-month subscription plan for Cursor.
Cohere
Top Executive: Aidan Gomez, CEO
Headquarters: Toronto and San Francisco
Cohere provides innovative multilingual AI foundation models, retrieval and end-to-end AI products designed to solve real-world business problems.
Cohere’s AI platform offers customers security, data privacy and optionality to deploy across all major cloud providers, private cloud environments or on-premises.
Last year, the startup raised $500 million from investors inlucding tech giants Cisco Systems and AMD, bringing total funds raised to nearly $1 billion.
Decagon
Top Executive: Jesse Zhang, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Decagon provides AI-powered customer support agents designed to enhance customer support by automating and resolving inquiries at scale.
The startup’s agents automate repetitive tasks, boost productivity and boost support teams by enabling customers to build, manage and scale AI agents for chat, email and calls via its Agent Operating Procedures technology.
The startup raised $65 million in 2024 led by Bain Capital Ventures with sights set on a $100 million funding round later this year.
DevRev
Top Executive: Dheeraj Pandey, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
DevRev provides an AI-native platform that unifies customer support and product development.
The startup lets customers generate connected knowledge graphs to power AI agents. Its AI offerings, Airdrop and Knowledge Graph, aim to take customers beyond automation by unifying data across all systems—transforming complex processes into intuitive conversations that drive results.
In 2024, the startup raised $100 million at a $1.1 billion valuation. Pandey is the former co-founder and CEO of Nutanix.
Morphos AI
Top Executive: Aram Chavez, Chairman
Headquarters: Tempe, Ariz.
Morphos AI is a startup focused on helping GenAI developers optimize their LLM RAG vector databases around increased search accuracy as well as lower storage and power costs.
One of the smallest startups on CRN’s list, Morphos AI provides SaaS aimed at making AI more efficient and cost-effective to deploy at scale via its Green Vectors technology that improves how AI systems store and process information.
The startup said it can reduce the computational resources and costs associated with AI operations via seamless integration with existing systems.
Perplexity
Top 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 startup offers a free AI-powered search engine and information discovery platform.
Perplexity recently launched Perplexity Labs, which can craft reports and spreadsheets to dashboards and simple web apps via its suite of tools around deep web browsing, code execution, and chart and image creation.
The startup recently partnered with Nidia to offer localized and sovereign AI models to customers in Europe.
Thinking Machine Labs
Top Executive: Mira Murati, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
The youngest startup on CRN’s list is Thinking Machine Labs, founded and led by OpenAI’s former CTO Mirati.
The startup said it is developing broadly capable AI systems with a focus on programming AI and building multimodal AI models with advanced reasoning features.
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the startup’s chief scientist, while its CTO is Barret Zoph, who played a critical role in OpenAI’s breakthrough innovation. Even without any revenue yet, the startup is already looking to raise $1 billion.
Writer
Top Executive: May Habib, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
AI startup Writer provides an end-to-end agent builder platform with collaborative tools to build, activate and supervise AI agents grounded in a company’s data and fueled by Writer’s LLMs.
From faster product launches to deeper financial research and better clinical trials, companies are transforming their business processes with Writer.
The startup has won over hundreds of customers over the past few years, including Accenture, Intuit and Marriott, while also attracting investors like Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures and IBM.
