• Legora is taking the legal world by storm with its AI software for lawyers.
• The Stockholm-born startup recently signed Goodwin as a client and opened a New York City office.
• Now, as Legora bears down on the US market, its chief rival, Harvey, faces real competition.

On a drizzly spring morning stroll through New York's Central Park, Max Junestrand, the 25-year-old Swedish founder behind legal tech startup Legora, opened up about a chip on his shoulder.

He started his company over a year after the founding of Harvey, the OpenAI-backed legal tech startup that has emerged as the apex predator in a fast-growing market for artificial intelligence products for law firms and corporate lawyers. Harvey has enjoyed a close partnership with the ChatGPT maker and secured major law firms as clients.

Now, as Legora bears down on new global markets, Junestrand tells Business Insider his company is gaining ground on chief rival Harvey — with less money and fewer employees.

"We're not here to be some European No. 2," he said. "We're here to play."

Founded in Stockholm in 2023, the startup helps legal professionals work smarter with a digital workspace built on top of large language models. Its application is used in nearly 20 countries by more than 250 clients, including the global firm Bird & Bird and Mannheimer Swartling, Sweden's largest law firm.

Last week, at Legalweek, Legora threw down the gauntlet at Harvey by rolling out new product features aimed at serving global tier-one firms, such as a Microsoft Word add-in. Legora said it had signed Goodwin, a leading law firm for tech deals, as a client. It also opened a new office in New York City, the company's first outpost outside Europe, where Junestrand will be based.

Not long ago, selling software to law firms looked like a losing business for startups. Lawyers worked mostly out of documents that were hard for software to read. They stored those files on physical servers on location for higher security and control over their data. But over the past few years, as even tech-averse lawyers recognize the clear potential of artificial intelligence, a new class of startups is trying their luck delivering software to the legal industry.

As a teenager, Junestrand competed professionally in video games before learning to code, figuring a career in tech could open more doors than esports. In 2020, he met his future cofounders, Sigge Labor, and August Erséus, during a volleyball game in the depths of the pandemic. The roommates shared Junestrand's fascination with machine intelligence and a desire to build.

Labor and Erséus had been toying with software that could complete simpler legal tasks, but the state of large-scale language models at the time limited its usefulness. ChatGPT changed that. "It just became blatantly apparent that this was a paradigm shift," Junestrand said. He left university, and the trio started a company, securing a conference room at a Swedish law firm to work from.

An investor shared on LinkedIn that one year ago, Legora had booked nearly $900,000 in annual recurring revenue, or the yearly value of revenue. Legora declined to share a more recent figure.

To date, Legora has raised more than $35 million in funding from investors such as Benchmark, Redpoint, Y Combinator, and Jack Altman's fund, Alt Capital.

Legora's web app looks like a cross between ChatGPT and a chart maker. Its search bar lets users ask questions about the contents of their internal data and browse the web and case law libraries. The app's killer feature is tabular review. It enables the bulk upload of documents and runs software programs called "agents" to answer specific questions about the contents of those documents.

Junestrand took BI through a demo as a pretend lawyer advising SpaceX on raising a make-believe equity round, in which the company's investors want to know about its financial health before deciding whether to write a check.

Junestrand dragged a folder containing dozens of loan agreements into tabular review. File names filled the far left column. In the next column, Junestrand wrote "loan amount" and clicked a button that expanded his prompt, telling the agents to extract the loan's value from the contract. He repeated these steps to work out the loan term.

The agents tunneled through the loan agreements at blazingly fast speeds. In seconds, the columns filled with the dollar amounts and dates. Junestrand clicked into a field and an agreement appeared in the right pane, showing the section where it gleaned the answer.

"Great software has to be intuitive," Junestand said. "Sadly enough, there's a lot of software in the legal space that looks like it was built in the nineties and doesn't prioritize design and ease of use."

Though he doesn't name them, it's easy to figure out who he's talking about. Two of the biggest players in legal tech are LexisNexis and Thompson Reuters. They boast decades of experience in creating products for legal professionals.

However, the old legal tech guard has one clear advantage over the challengers. LexisNexis and Thompson Reuters are sitting on troves of copyrighted data that feed their legal assistant products.

Sean Fitzpatrick, chief executive of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland, spoke at Legalweek about how this data gives it an edge. "The systems are only as good as the data that sits behind them," he said, "and veracity matters in the law. It matters a lot."

Junestand thinks legacy software providers will struggle to keep pace with ChatGPT-era legal tech. He said the technology is moving too rapidly for the incumbents to evolve. He added that he made a conscious decision to keep Legora's engineering team small and nimble, so they can respond quickly to the latest models and AI trends.

As for its battle with Harvey, Junestrand believes the best product will win over lawyers, even if Harvey's ties to OpenAI help boost its brand and credibility.

"When we started, we were immediately at a disadvantage. We were a year behind," Junestrand said, referring to Harvey's headstart on Legora. "And so pace and speed of execution became the things that we optimized for."

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• As law firms probe how to leverage AI, lawyers are worried about the impact on billable hours.
• Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of Lexis Nexis, shared why he thinks billable hours may go up in cost.
• AI gives lawyers "that extra set of eyes" that allows them to deliver better service, he said.

Law firms are working out how to use artificial intelligence to save time, but their lawyers are wringing their hands over the effect on their billable hours.

Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland, thinks a lot about this question. He oversees the teams responsible for delivering data products and insights to legal professionals at law firms, corporations, and government entities. Last week, during a panel discussion at Legalweek, he tried to ease their concerns.

Fitzpatrick predicted that some law partners could charge a standard billing rate of $10,000 an hour within the decade, placing them on the top shelf of high-paying, white-collar professions.

Billing rates are trending upward at big firms across the country, driven by the continued consolidation of law firms and rising demand for top legal talent. The going rate for senior partners at some of the nation's highest-grossing law firms is close to $2,100 an hour, according to an analysis of public disclosures by legal data platform Valeo Partners.

Fitzpatrick's belief is that lawyers who leverage artificial intelligence, from virtual legal assistants to chatbots, will provide a higher quality service to clients. They could then charge more.

During his panel discussion, Fitzpatrick offered a hypothetical.

"Let's say an attorney does 10 hours worth of work at $750 an hour, and let's just say it's a very simple matter. She's the only person that works on it," he said.

She bills the client $7,500.

"Let's say tomorrow, she has almost exactly the same matter, but tomorrow, she's got access to this new technology that helps her with her work. It provides her with some additional perspectives and things that she hadn't thought of previously. It's that extra set of eyes."

"She's actually able to create more value for her client," he continued. "So yesterday, she billed 'em $7,500. Now, she's got a better work product than she did before. Maybe she can bill $8,000."

The work also takes her less time now. She's free to take on additional legal matters and produce more billings.

For top senior partners, "it doesn't take that much inflation to get to the $10,000-per-hour billable hour," Fitzpatrick said. "I think there's a realistic scenario where we could absolutely see this."

Earlier this year, LexisNexis rolled out Protégé, a system that uses agents — software that can carry out tasks without much human hand-holding — to write drafts, create timelines from documents, and allow users to query all their enterprise data. It was built on a patchwork of large-scale and fine-tuned models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, AWS, and Microsoft, the company said.

The legal industry's reliance on billable hours is facing potential disruption. Legal experts, including attorneys and legal-tech startup founders, shared with Business Insider at Legalweek that law firms are moving toward fixed fees instead of billable hours. The idea is that artificial intelligence can handle simpler legal tasks, freeing lawyers to apply more brainpower to problem-solving.

Those lawyers might lose some of the billable hours they pass on to clients. But the value of their time is likely to increase — a belief shared by Max Junestrand, founder and chief executive of Legora, one of the more buzzed-about software firms making legal copilots.

He told Business Insider that clients will press their law firms on how they're leveraging artificial intelligence to "do more with the hours they have." Law firms will apply fixed fees for bread-and-butter matters as "both [AI] adoption increases and the sophistication of the tools continues to improve."

"The lawyers' clients always want service cheaper and better quality," Junestrand said. "The work that AI cannot do today will become even more valuable. So law firms will have a bigger opportunity."

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• I attended Legalweek, an annual gathering of thousands of legal professionals in New York City.
• The potential of artificial intelligence to reshape the legal profession emerged as a key theme.
• Speakers issued stern warnings that a failure to adopt new tech will leave lawyers in the dust.

On the first day of Legalweek, a conference where thousands of lawyers gather to hobnob with their peers and explore the latest tech, Max Junestrand, clad in a black overcoat that highlighted his 6-foot-3-inch stature, stepped out of his hotel, ready to seize the day.

Long viewed as Luddites, law firms and corporate lawyers have begun to adopt artificial intelligence to deliver better service faster and cheaper. This has led to a Cambrian explosion of startups trying to sell tools for drafting contracts and tracking billable hours. Junestrand's startup, Legora, helps legal professionals work smarter with a digital workspace built on top of large language models.

Earlier in the day, Legora jacked up its battle with a chief competitor by announcing in the trade papers that it had signed Goodwin, a leading law firm for tech deals, as a client. It also opened a new office in New York City, the Swedish-born company's first outpost outside Europe. Later in the day, Junestrand would join his employees in Times Square to watch Legora's logo light up the iconic Nasdaq MarketSite screen.

"We don't build Legora so law firms can check the box on doing AI," Junestrand said, sitting at Legora's event booth. "We want to transform and rethink what it means to do great legal work."

'Lawyers are dinosaurs'

At Legalweek at the New York Hilton Midtown, artificial intelligence was on trial, scrutinized with the precision of a shark litigator. Behind closed doors, lawyers spoke on panels about the coming "death of legal busywork" and the costs of fake legal cases making their way into real briefs. In the exhibition hall, software engineers wearing slacks and pencil skirts tried to woo lawyers with promises to shave off hours of work without killing the billable hour.

I learned that Junestrand, the Legora founder, has an uphill battle ahead of him. Selling software to lawyers isn't the same as shilling to sales reps or programmers. Lawyers work mostly out of documents. Before the arrival of large-scale language models, software wasn't very good at extracting data from text. So the tools weren't all that useful.

Junestrand said the advent of large models trained mostly on textual data changed everything. Now, these models can parse and understand complex legal documents, streamlining tasks like legal research and contract review. But for all the hype around virtual paralegals at Legalweek, numerous lawyers said the adoption of the tech has been slow.

"Lawyers are dinosaurs," an employment lawyer said over a catered lunch of beet salad and deli sandwiches. The Philadelphia attorney said when she gets a contract by email, she likes to print it and mark it up with a pen. When she's done, she files it away. That's how she's been doing things since the dictaphone.

Tech savants want to work with lawyers like them

Later in the week, dozens of attendees poured into a dimly lit conference room for a panel discussion on how legal teams can start using artificial intelligence. Panelist Amy Sellars, an attorney at the business law firm Gunster, told lawyers to ask vendors for demos and make it easy for people in their firms to experiment with new tools.

"Lawyers need to wake up," said Todd Itami, an attorney at the large legal defense firm Covington & Burling, saying that learning to use artificial intelligence was "imperative" for their success.

Younger lawyers may be more receptive to Itami's call to action. Aaron Crews, a partner at the global law firm Holland & Knight, places lawyers on a bell curve with early adopters and laggards on the far ends and the rest in the middle. Law students and junior associates often try new products before most others.

The tech-savvy standouts in their programs, according to Crews, are likelier to want to work for firms that take a friendlier stance toward new tech. This means the top firms won't be sought after for long if they fall behind the times.

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Even as Silicon Valley giants cut jobs like a hot knife through butter, the competition among startups for the best global talent remains as fierce as ever. And with critical skills, particularly in artificial intelligence, still in short supply, startups like OpenAI and Anthropic rely on the H-1B visa program to bring in skillful foreign workers and secure their place in the race.

For a startup to hire a foreign worker, it sponsors their petition for an H-1B visa, which lets them work in the US for up to six years. The job candidate is entered into a lottery for one of 85,000 visas. Despite challenges, including a demand for visas that has outstripped supply and ongoing discussions about reforms, startups continue to recruit talent abroad through this Rube Goldberg system to gain a competitive edge.

Using data from the Department of Labor and US Citizenship and Immigration Services, we ranked the startup employers that filed the most H-1B requests during the 2024 government fiscal year. The data comes from applications submitted by businesses seeking to sponsor workers' visas.

Here are the startups leading the charge, ranked by their number of filings.

Ripple: provides crypto infrastructure for financial services

Headquarters: San Francisco

Total funding: $325 million, according to PitchBook

Total certified H-1B filings: 26

Grammarly: writing assistant that edits and corrects language

Headquarters: San Francisco

Total funding: $400 million, according to PitchBook

Total certified H-1B filings: 28

Plaid: collects and shares personal financial info with apps and other services

Headquarters: San Francisco

Total funding: $734 million, according to the company

Total certified H-1B filings: 28

Carta: helps businesses track ownership and manage equity plans

Headquarters: San Francisco

Total funding: $1.19 billion, according to PitchBook

Total certified H-1B filings: 30

Thumbtack: allows users to search for and hire local service providers

Headquarters: San Francisco

Total funding: More than $500 million, according to the company

Total certified H-1B filings: 31

X Corp.: social media platform

Headquarters: San Francisco

Total funding: Elon Musk took X private at a purchase price of $44 billion in 2022.

Total certified H-1B filings: 32

Anthropic: develops foundation AI models aimed at business users

Headquarters: San Francisco

Total funding: More than $17 billion, according to the company

Total certified H-1B filings: 35

Zipline: develops and operates drone delivery fleets

Headquarters: South San Francisco, California

Total funding: $1.23 billion, according to PitchBook

Total certified H-1B filings: 35

Turo: car rental marketplace

Headquarters: San Francisco

Total funding: $527 million, according to the company

Total certified H-1B filings: 36

Scale AI: data labeling company helping apps and models scale

Headquarters: San Francisco

Total funding: $1.6 billion, according to PitchBook

Total certified H-1B filings: 42

Gusto: payroll and HR solution for small businesses

Headquarters: San Francisco

Total funding: $751 million, according to PitchBook

Total certified H-1B filings: 48

Verkada: cloud-managed security cameras

Headquarters: San Mateo, California

Total funding: $700 million, according to the company

Total certified H-1B filings: 52

Nuro: develops self-driving tech for robotaxis and delivery vehicles

Headquarters: Mountain View, California

Total funding: More than $2 billion, according to the company

Total certified H-1B filings: 59

Cohesity: develops software for securing and managing cloud data

Headquarters: San Jose, California

Total funding: $1.8 billion, according to the company

Total certified H-1B filings: 61

OpenAI: develops cutting-edge AI models and apps like ChatGPT

Headquarters: San Francisco

Total funding: $63.92 billion, according to PitchBook

Total certified H-1B filings: 74

Chime: provides fee-free mobile banking services

Headquarters: San Francisco

Total funding: $2.65 billion, according to PitchBook

Total certified H-1B filings: 101

Stripe: provides financial infrastructure for businesses

Headquarters: San Francisco and Dublin

Total funding: $8.73 billion, according to PitchBook

Total certified H-1B filings: 265

Databricks: cloud-based platform to help enterprises build, scale, and govern data

Headquarters: San Francisco

Total funding: More than $14 billion, according to the company

Total certified H-1B filings: 283

ByteDance: Chinese internet technology company

Headquarters: Beijing

Total funding: $18.95 billion, according to PitchBook

Total certified H-1B filings: 997

TikTok: video-based social media platform

Headquarters: Los Angeles and Singapore

Total funding: TikTok is a subsidiary of ByteDance, which has raised $18.95 billion in venture capital, according to PitchBook.

Total certified H-1B filings: 614

• A trifecta of economics, pandemic-era realities, and political pressure is changing tech culture.
• From Big Tech to Silicon Valley startups, companies are pushing to "do more with less."
• Leaders aren't shy about wielding their power and aligning around a hard-driving strategy.

For years, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke enjoyed a reputation for growing the $125 billion e-commerce company without working the grueling hours expected of startup founders.

"My job is incredible, but it's also just a job. Family and personal health rank higher in my priority list," he wrote in a now-deleted post on X, then Twitter, shortly before the pandemic, as reported by Business Insider at the time. "The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so."

This year, even Lütke appeared to change his tune.

"I'm at home for dinner but I work at least 10 or so hours a day and a lot of the weekend," Lütke wrote on X. He was responding to a user who called him a "counter-example" to a meme suggesting you can't have work-life balance and a breakthrough startup. "I don't want people to get misguided by this meme."

Across tech, the tables have turned for employees as performance pressure and proclamations of "efficiency" and "intensity" replace perks and pampering. Sweeping layoffs have become the norm in an industry that, in recent memory, enjoyed job security. The pressure to dominate in AI has created intense competition, as companies use the technology to do more with fewer workers. Already hard-driving workplaces have become even harder.

While the situation for tech employees has been changing since the pandemic boom ended in 2022, more recent developments include a decidedly different tone from executives. Now, companies aren't just making these changes; they want to be seen making them.

Meta earlier this year said it was cutting 4,000 employees deemed low performers as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the "culturally neutered" corporate world had gotten away from "masculine energy." Amazon insisted that employees return to the workplace every weekday, a policy some employees say is stricter than before the pandemic.

Other companies have cracked down, too. Microsoft, which was once referred to as a "country club" for its relatively lax culture, cut 2,000 employees as it overhauled its review process to eliminate underperformers more quickly.

Google, which practically invented tech perks like free lunch, started an "efficiency drive." Its cofounder Sergey Brin, who had stepped away from leading Google but now often shows up to work on the company's Gemini AI models, recently recommended that employees working on its Gemini tools should work 60 hours a week and go into the office "at least every weekday." Wall Street has rewarded this rigor, as stock prices of Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google's parent, Alphabet, have surged since 2022.

Startups also see a trickle-down effect from Big Tech companies' pressures. Krish Ramadurai, a partner at AIX Ventures, said he had noticed a "pronounced shift" toward leaner teams and rigorous performance standards at startups.

Between performance-based cuts, return-to-office mandates, and the stripping of workplace perks, it's clear not only that the tech industry is done coddling employees, but that companies want to send the message those days are over. BI interviewed employees from tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta, as well as various tech startups, about the changes. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity since they're not authorized to talk to the press, though their identities are known to BI.

Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon did not comment. Shopify did not respond to a request for comment.

From comfy to collapsed

For years, fierce competition for tech workers meant companies spoiled employees with astonishing salaries and swanky perks, such as in-office massages and free food cooked by fancy chefs.

By 2022, tech companies seemingly couldn't throw enough money at workers. Early that year, Amazon more than doubled its maximum base salary, and Microsoft gave across-the-board raises to employees up to a certain level of seniority to dissuade them from leaving for competitors.

As the pandemic boom ended, tech stocks plummeted, and interest rates increased through 2022. This prompted an efficiency drive by many companies as investors demanded profitability over growth at all costs.

Also that year, companies watched the billionaire Elon Musk's handling of the Twitter acquisition, in which he cut thousands of employees, plus perks like free lunches, and demanded a commitment to a new "extremely hardcore" vision and "long hours at a high intensity." At one point, Twitter workers were begging on Slack for toilet paper and clean bathrooms amid Musk's drastic cost-cutting.

As of late last year, Fidelity valued X at only about 20% of the $44 billion that Musk bought it for in 2022. Still, his approach may have expanded what the tech industry thought possible in terms of workforce and cost cutting.

"People paid attention because the prevailing wisdom was you couldn't take out that much of an engineering organization and put that much instability on it and not have it fall over," Brad Porter, the founder and CEO of Cobot, told BI. "It did come close to falling. He pushed right to the edge of it actually falling over, but it didn't fall over."

'Do more with less'

By the end of 2022 and in early 2023, tech giants had conducted unprecedented rounds of layoffs. Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft collectively laid off more than 60,000 employees during that time.

Layoffs have remained at a steady drip across the industry since. Such cuts have become so frequent at Google, for example, that employees have taken to crowdsourcing information on layoffs in an internal Google Doc.

Employees told BI about the pressure across the industry to "do more with less." "There's lots of uncertainty," one longtime Amazon employee said, "and lots of pressure to perform the jobs of multiple people at the mercy of ruthless middle management."

Tech companies are also culling middle management layers. Amazon in September announced a plan to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% by the end of this month. In December, CEO Sundar Pichai told his staff that Google had cut vice president and manager roles by 10% as part of its efficiency drive. Microsoft also monitors what it calls "span of control," tracking the number of reports per manager.

Performance pressures

Amid the cuts, employees across the industry say companies are dialing up the performance demands.

Meta told its staff in January that it would eliminate roughly 5% of its workforce, or about 4,000 employees, to "raise the bar on performance management," as Zuckerberg wrote in an internal memo.

Google also increased pressure on employees. Perhaps most telling was Pichai's December comments attempting to clarify what "Googleyness" means for a modern Google. Once a squishy and vague philosophy for the search giant's corporate culture, Pichai said he believed it now meant, among other things, being "mission first."

"There is more pressure for individuals to be better in their roles, and there is much more aggressive performance management happening these days," a longtime Google manager said.

"We're being asked to do more for less," said another current longtime Google employee.

That same Google employee said that Silicon Valley had been moving toward more ruthless, efficient workplaces for a while — and that the current political climate "gives them the green light to do it openly." Google has been working to become more efficient since its chief investment officer Ruth Porat joined the company as CFO from Morgan Stanley in 2015, "but now the masks are off," the person said.

Microsoft was once referred to as the tech industry's "country club," meaning a place employees would go after they were done working hard in their careers and wanted to coast before retirement. A change this year shows how far Microsoft has shifted when it fired 2,000 employees deemed low performers without severance and ended their health benefits the same day. This kind of performance-based mass cut showed a shift for the tech giant.

One longtime Microsoft senior-level employee said they felt that the "culture shifts toward firmer performance expectations" at peer tech companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon made it more acceptable for Microsoft to do the same.

At TikTok, the pressure to perform jumped last year after the company directed managers to deliver more low scores in performance reviews, leading to PIPs and eventual exits. At the same time, six current and former employees told BI their goals had become much harder to hit. One staffer called the goals "unattainable."

The company has also recently heightened RTO requirements for some teams. In February, it told its US e-commerce workers that in addition to being in the office five days a week, they would physically need to be in the building for eight hours a day. Ten current and former workers told BI that burnout had become common, leading to some going on mental health leave to get a break. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.

"You feel like if you're not hitting a target, even if it's a moving target, you're in trouble," a former staffer who went on leave for mental health reasons told BI. "For me, it was just feeling like a failure, like I couldn't do anything right."

It's gotten hardcore in the 'valley of death'

The increasing pivot to performance has even made it to already hard-charging startups.

Startups have a time-honored tradition of an always-on, work-first lifestyle. Early employees are expected to put in grueling hours of coding and customer support during this critical phase, known as the "valley of death," when startups are flush with initial funding but not yet profitable.

The free-money era tested this tradition of hustle and thriftiness. Investors heaped money into small startups when interest rates bottomed out, and the blitz scaling that followed set off an arms race of perks to help startups attract top talent. Employees could work from home and set their own schedules. They pocketed wellness stipends and trotted the globe on extravagant off-sites. The tech startup Bolt gave many employees Fridays off.

"I think many individuals — founders included — lost sight of the true goal of a company. It is to make money," Mang-Git Ng, the founder of Anvil, a paperwork automation company, told BI.

Now, the executives who had lavished high salaries and fancy perks on their employees are resetting expectations, winding down remote work, and cutting head count.

"Everyone who comes into our office at Decagon has opted into working with a team that's here because we want to do big things and see bigger and better results," said Jesse Zhang, the founder of Decagon, who now badges into the office six days a week. "There's no such thing as a rocketship that doesn't have a certain level of intensity to fuel its trajectory."

Call it the Big Tech trickle-down effect.

"Founders aren't sugarcoating it," said Natan Fisher, who runs a recruiting firm, SingleSprout, that specializes in hiring technical talent. "I've had a few cofounders tell employees they aren't working hard enough, and, 'If you're not all in, no hard feelings, we can give severance, but we can't slow down.' Late nights, weekends, even people crashing at the office, it's real."

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Emma Cosgrove, Eugene Kim, and Pranav Dixit contributed to this report.

• Rippling has created a hotline for companies to flag 'suspicious behavior' by its chief rival, Deel.
• Rippling filed a lawsuit on Monday accusing Deel of using a corporate spy to steal company secrets.
• The company also sent document preservation letters to Deel board members.

Rippling has put out a Bat-Signal to summon help with its lawsuit against a competitor.

Rippling, which has had a public and bitter rivalry with Deel that predates a lawsuit it filed Monday, created a hotline for companies to report suspicious activity by Deel, the company told Business Insider.

"Shortly after we filed the lawsuit, we began receiving numerous unsolicited reports from companies who experienced suspicious behavior by Deel over the last several months," a Rippling spokesperson told Business Insider.

Rippling's legal team also ramped up its case against the rival human resources technology company on Tuesday by sending letters demanding that Deel's five board members preserve documents potentially related to the case, another Rippling spokesperson confirmed.

One of the board members, Yasmin Razavi, also serves on the board of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic. Another, Anish Acharya, is a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Neither Deel nor the company's five board directors immediately responded to Business Insider's requests for comment for this story.

Both Rippling and Deel have competed fiercely for clients, and each have been valued at north of $10 billion.

Rippling's lawsuit filed Monday accuses Deel of competing unfairly by recruiting a Rippling employee to spy on the company and steal its secrets.

The alleged mole, according to the lawsuit, performed numerous searches in Rippling's internal Slack, Google Drive, and Salesforce databases. The spy found information about Deel customers who had spoken to Rippling about signing up with its human resources technology services instead, and then funneled that intelligence back to Deel, the lawsuit alleges.

A representative for Deel denied "all legal wrongdoing."

The website for Rippling's hotline asks for information about "similar activity" to the allegations in the lawsuit. If it receives credible tips, it could bolster the company's accusations in court that Deel misappropriated trade secrets.

The lawsuit alleges the corporate spy stole lists of prospective and existing clients, and that Deel could have used that proprietary information to woo clients to its own platform.

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• The defense tech startup industry is attracting more funding from venture capital investors.
• This recent wave is driven by investors' techno-optimist patriotism and geopolitical tensions.
• Funding to defense-related companies went up 33% in 2024 year-over-year, according to McKinsey.

Venture capital's once-skeptical stance on defense technology has all but disappeared as investors pour billions into startups building everything from autonomous drones to cybersecurity tools.

Investors have lined up to deploy fresh cash despite the high capital demands of hardware defense startups, extended horizons for returns, the complexities of working with the federal government, and the difficulty of encroaching on turf dominated by prime defense companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and General Dynamics.

With the success of defense companies like Anduril and Palantir, which have been able to break into that already crowded field and make a name for themselves, investors and startup founders alike are invigorated to build more in defense tech. Anduril has been able to land big contracts from the government, as well as newer players like Alexandr Wang's Scale AI and Shield AI, a maker of autonomous drones and AI-powered software for the military.

This trend has only accelerated in recent months, as the Trump administration has signaled an interest in "reviving" the defense industrial base by leveraging "emerging technologies," as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in his nomination hearing opening statement.

Globally, investors at established venture firms and those working as solo capitalists deployed $31 billion to defense-related companies in 2024, up 33% from the previous year, according to a recent McKinsey report.

Here are the venture capitalists doubling down on defense tech:

Daniel Ateya, RTX Ventures

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Notable investments: Ursa Major, Hermeus, EnCharge AI, Tomorrow.io, Impulse Space

Why he's on the list: After leading the Silicon Valley office for 3M Ventures, Ateya took over as head of venture for RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies) in 2022. So far, it has invested in aerospace and defense startups, including rocket propulsion provider Ursa Major and hypersonic aircraft developer Hermeus.

"Our main focus is on identifying teams with outstanding technical and engineering talent and experience that have developed a disruptive vision and strategy with an actionable plan to build a scalable business," Ateya told Business Insider.

Steve Bowsher, In-Q-Tel

Location: Menlo Park, California

Notable investments: Palantir, Databricks, MongoDB, Anaconda

Why he's on the list: As head of investment strategy (and later President and CEO) of In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital fund, Bowsher, in many ways, helped create the entire defense tech startup ecosystem. He made an early bet on Palantir, blowing the doors open for Silicon Valley techies to go after federal contracts. At the time, conventional wisdom in venture capital was that there was no point in trying to sell to the government; too slow, too much red tape, too much competition.

"I don't know how many reference calls I did for venture capitalists between 2006 and 2012 or so who were thinking about investing in Palantir that wanted to talk to me because they didn't understand the government market," Bowsher told Authority Magazine last year.

The son of a federal employee who grew up devouring spy novels, Bowsher has always been interested in the work of the government but actually cut his teeth in Silicon Valley. After graduating from Stanford, he worked for three startups and spent eight years at venture fund InterWest Partners. By combining Silicon Valley's swashbuckling ethos with a government agency's mission-driven mentality, Bowsher has helped shepherd some of the biggest defense tech success stories of the past two decades.

Katherine Boyle, Andreessen Horowitz

Location: Miami

Notable investments: Anduril, Apex, Hadrian, Rune

Why she's on the list: Boyle is the animating spirit of Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism practice. She's a former Washington Post journalist who made an impression among founders at General Catalyst, where she invested in Anduril, Relativity Space, Nova Credit, and others. In a blog post at the time of her hiring, A16z general partner David Ulevitch wrote, "when we would meet with the best companies in these areas," such as defense, safety, and national security, "we were always asked if we knew Katherine Boyle." She joined the firm in 2021.

Michael Brown, Shield Capital

Location: Palo Alto, California

Notable investments: Nexla, according to PitchBook

Why he's on the list: Brown spent four years working for the Department of Defense, leading the Defense Innovation Unit, which works to advance the use of commercial technology in the military. He left that role in 2022 to join Shield Capital, and he was promoted to partner in 2023.

Prior to leading the Defense Innovation Unit, Brown spent 2016 to 2018 as a Presidential Innovation Fellow working on the unit's collaboration with startups, known as DIUx. Earlier in his career, Brown spent 13 years as CEO of cybersecurity company Symantec and, before that, led Quantum Corporation, a data storage management company.

James Bruegger, Seraphim Capital

Location: London

Notable investments: Hawkeye 360, All.Space, Iceye

Why he's on the list: Brugger is the chief investment officer of Seraphim Capital, which is focused on investing in space technology. He was also an early venture capital investor in Arqit, Iceye, LeoLabs, and D-Orbit and led investments in several companies that went public, including Spire Global and AST SpaceMobile.

According to his LinkedIn profile, his "focus is on identifying and supporting from inception to exit the sector's most ambitious and fearless entrepreneurs as they aspire to harness the infinite potential of Space to turn science fiction into science fact."

Jake Chapman, Marque Ventures

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Notable investments: Mach Industries, Rangeview, Vatn, Firestorm, Extropic, Varda, Standard Nuclear

Why he's on the list: Chapman started his career in venture capital nearly 20 years ago as a fund formation lawyer. He said he "quickly realized that he was a terrible lawyer but loved what his clients were doing." Chapman went on to cofound three companies and later worked as a corporate VC before starting his own deep tech-focused firm, Alpha Bridge Ventures. But over time, Chapman said he "developed an appreciation for the importance of deep tech to the national security mission" and started focusing his efforts more on defense.

He left Alpha Bridge and took over as managing director of the Army Venture Capital Corporation, the VC arm of the US Army, After a few years, Chapman left, along with the team recruited to jump-start the AVCC, and launched the defense and national security-focused firm, Marque Ventures, in 2022.

Dave DeWalt, NightDragon

Location: San Francisco and Scottsdale, Arizona

Notable investments: Saronic, HawkEye 360, Capella Space, Epirus

Why he's on the list: Before launching cyber-focused investment firm NightDragon in 2012, DeWalt held executive roles at three cybersecurity companies, including McAfee. The firm's name is a nod to his past—under DeWalt's leadership, McAfee was the first to expose the Night Dragon Operation, a series of nation-state cyberattacks that began in 2006.

At NightDragon, DeWalt invests in "solutions to better protect governments, organizations, and individuals," according to the firm's website. Recently, NightDragon has invested in autonomous maritime company Saronic and Epirus, which develops high-power microwave technology for countering drones and electronics.

DeWalt also serves on the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Council and is the Vice Chairman of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Advisory Council.

Adam Draper, Boost VC

Location: San Mateo, Calif.

Notable investments: Radiant, Starfish Space, K2 Space, Venus Aerospace

Why he's on the list: Draper has carved out his own niche in his family's venture empire with Boost VC, the deep tech-focused firm he cofounded in 2012. Boost VC leads pre-seed rounds with $500,000 checks.

Draper has invested in sought-after defense tech companies like Starfish Space and K2 Space that aim to disrupt the government's role in emerging technologies. "In recent years I have watched as the government became more self-aware about their lack of technological innovation, and started to work hand in hand with startups rather than against them," Draper wrote in a 2021 Substack essay. "The next 10 years will be about startups aligning with governments as customers and partners to further innovation."

Elad Gil

Location: San Francisco

Notable investments: Anduril, Mistral AI, Gitlab

Why he's on the list: Despite not being directly associated with a name-brand VC fund or a government agency, Gil — one of Silicon Valley's biggest solo capitalists — has left his mark on the defense tech sector.

In 2021, Gil personally led Anduril's $450 million Series D, which valued the company at $4.6 billion. The company, led by Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey, has been one of the most prominent defense-tech darlings in recent memory, and Gil has continued to be an important backer and booster of the company.

Gil is also a prolific investor in the emerging generative AI space, which he believes will have far-reaching impacts on every facet of society, including defense and intelligence use cases. He's also circumspect about the dangers of this nascent technology.

"The first question I asked Anduril when I met them — and it was just the founders — was how do you think about the ethics, and how do you think about what's permissible and isn't?" Gil told Business Insider.

Randy Glein, DFJ Growth

Location: Menlo Park, Calif.

Notable investments: Anduril, Hidden Level, Scale AI, SpaceX, Vannevar Labs

Why he's on the list: Glein cofounded venture capital firm DFJ Growth in the early aughts and currently serves as its managing partner. At DFJ, he has invested in older defense tech companies like Anduril and newer entrants like Scale AI, the data training startup that recently announced a contract with the Department of Defense. Recently, he invested in Hidden Level's Series C, which develops counter-UAS technology.

"They are helping restore our advantage on the modern battlefield and improving airspace safety, leveraging their unique technology to provide the critical, real-time intelligence needed to covertly intercept inbound airborne threats," Glein wrote on X about Hidden Level. "This capability is crucial to protecting our forward deployed troops, defense assets, and airports in a world where drones and UAS have become a major hazard."

Dan Gwak, Point72 Private Investments

Location: Seattle

Notable investments: Shield AI, Vannevar Labs, STOKE Space, Saronic, REGENT

Why he's on the list: Gwak was awarded a Purple Heart and Combat Action Ribbon for his service in the US Marine Corps before getting into VC. He cut his teeth in finance at Credit Suisse and The Carlyle Group and joined In-Q-Tel, the not-for-profit venture firm funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, after his time in the Marine Corps.

After four years as a partner at In-Q-Tel, he joined Point72 Private Investments, the private investing arm of the hedge fund Point72 Asset Management. He oversees the defense tech and growth investment teams at Point72 Ventures. "Today's emergent technologies have the potential to shift the global superpower balance, Gwak told Business Insider. "The startups of today that bring those technologies to bear will be the defense primes of tomorrow."

Tommy Hendrix, Decisive Point

Locations: New York, Washington, DC

Notable investments: Radiant Nuclear, Havoc AI, Standard Nuclear, Scout AI, Firehawk Aerospace, Maybell Quantum, Firestorm Labs, EpiSci

Why he's on the list: Following a decadelong US Army career where he served as an infantry and Special Forces Officer — including as Troop Commander in the US Central Command's Counter-Terrorism Crisis Response Force — Hendrix earned his MBA from Columbia Business School and later his master's degree in law from the George Washington University Law School.

His first foray into a civilian career was as an analyst at asset management firm Blackstone, where he worked for two years before founding his own venture capital firm, Decisive Point, in 2018. Since starting the firm, which focuses on critical technologies for defense, energy, and infrastructure, Hendrix has invested in startups, including Radiant Nuclear, which is building a portable nuclear microreactor to replace diesel generators, and Firestorm, which builds unmanned aerial systems.

While defense tech plays a big role in Hendrix's portfolio, he told Business Insider that the technology is also important to revitalize America's manufacturing industry.

"Today, we are also seeing a lot of interesting opportunities in adjacent sectors like logistics, advanced materials and manufacturing, and nuclear energy," he said.

George Hoyem, In-Q-Tel

Location: San Francisco

Notable investments: Cylance, D-Wave, Swarm Technologies

Why he's on the list: Hoyem leads the investment team at In-Q-Tel, the venture capital fund for the CIA and broader intelligence community. The fund has been an early backer of some of the most successful defense tech startups in recent memory. Its close intertwined relationship with the US intelligence establishment gives it unique insight into the problems and processes of highly secretive organizations. Hoyem has spent years as an essential liaison between government stakeholders and Silicon Valley.

He spent over a decade as a venture investor and can move seamlessly between the intelligence community, the venture world, and the startup ecosystem. Hoyem specializes in helping startups that have never worked with the federal government navigate the complex process of developing technology for defense and intelligence applications.

Larsen Jensen, Harpoon Ventures

Location: San Diego

Notable investments: Merlin Labs, Kodiak Robotics, Ursa Major, Astranis, WireScreen, Firestorm, Solugen

Why he's on the list: An Olympian, Navy SEAL, and now a venture capitalist — Larsen Jensen has always been a competitor. He competed and won silver and bronze in freestyle swimming at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, respectively, and holds the American record in the 400-meter freestyle. He later became a Navy SEAL, and then went on to business school at Stanford.

After stints as a VC at Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed, Jensen founded early-stage firm Harpoon Ventures in 2018. The firm focuses on enterprise tech "critical to national security and democracy." The firm manages $300 million in AUM and has invested in defense tech, cybersecurity, AI, and frontier technology.

Jensen said he was introduced early in his career to VC by the cofounders of coaching platform startup BetterUp, Alexi Robichaux and Eduardo Medina. After witnessing their success, he was "inspired to delve deeper into the venture ecosystem."

Erik Kriessmann, Altimeter

Location: San Francisco

Notable investments: SpaceX, Anduril, K2 Space

Why he's on the list: Kriessmann is a partner at investment firm Altimeter and an Anduril and K2 Space board member. Altimeter recently doubled down on its investment in K2 Space, with Kriessmann co-leading its Series B.

"We are at the dawn of a Space Supercycle, where new launch vehicles and reduced-cost, reliable access to space are transforming the entire market," Kriessmann wrote on X following the fundraise. "K2 Space is taking advantage of this paradigm shift by mass-manufacturing high-power multi-mission satellites that deliver unprecedented capabilities and enable the multi-orbit constellations desired by national security and commercial customers."

Previously, Kriessman worked at Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures.

Paul Kwan, General Catalyst

Location: San Francisco

Notable investments: Saronic, Onebrief, Anduril, Helsing, Nominal, Vannevar Labs, Andesite, JEH Aerospace

Why he's on the list: Kwan spent over two decades as a tech banker at Morgan Stanley, spending his last six years there heading its West Coast team. He moved over to General Catalyst in 2021 to become managing director of its Global Resilience Team.

"We look across the entire defense ecosystem and invest in companies that unlock multiplier effects to modernize our defense, intelligence, and industrial base capabilities," Kwan told Business Insider.

One of those companies is Anduril, where Kwan is a board observer. Now he's looking for the next Palmer Luckey, one of Anduril's cofounders.

"In founders, we look for mission, intentionality, technical depth of the team, commitment to responsible innovation, and the ability to radically collaborate with government customers," Kwan said.

Joe Lonsdale, 8VC

Location: Austin

Notable investments: Oculus, Guardant Health, Oscar, Anduril

Why he's on the list: Serial founder and investor Lonsdale co-founded Palantir in 2004, soon after graduating from Stanford University. He founded 8VC in 2015, which recently announced it raised $998 million for its sixth fund, nearly double its previous fundraise.

Lonsdale moved 8VC from the Bay Area to Austin in 2020, and wrote on X that Texas was "more tolerant of ideological diversity than SF."

In recent years, after his work at Palantir, Lonsdale has emerged as a prolific defense tech startup founder and investor. He cofounded Epirus, which develops technology to counter unmanned aircraft systems, through 8VC's Build program, invested in autonomous surface vessels startup Saronic Technologies, and was an early backer of Anduril.

Gilman Louie, America's Frontier Fund

Location: San Francisco

Notable investments: Maxar Technologies, Looking Glass, Aerospike

Why he's on the list: The founder and former CEO of In-Q-Tel, a VC fund backed by the CIA to connect the intelligence agency with the startup community, Louie is now the cofounder and partner at VC fund Alsop Louie Partners and the founder of the nonprofit America's Frontier Fund.

Louie, a director on the Maxar Technologies and Aerospike boards, is also a member of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board and the US Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

Connor Love, Lightspeed Venture Partners

Location: Menlo Park, Calif.

Notable investments: Anduril, Saronic, Castelion, Helsing, K2 Space

Why he's on the list: Love is a partner at Lightspeed, where he invests in autonomous systems, defense, manufacturing, and space startups. A former US Army captain with leadership roles and a deployment to northern Iraq, Love's work at Lightspeed is informed by his military service. Love got his MBA at Stanford and joined Lightspeed's frontier tech practice after leaving the military.

Love recently co-led Lightspeed's investment in K2 Space, a satellite manufacturing startup, and has also invested in notable defense tech startups like Anduril and Saronic.

Pete Mathias, Alumni Ventures

Location: New York

Notable investments: Unstructured.io, Red 6, Picogrid, Antares Industries, Edgescale AI, Sphere Semi

Why he's on the list: Mathias forged his path as a VC while touring as the drummer for his rock band, Filligar. Working closely with the US Department of State, Filligar was dispatched to regions including Russia, the Middle East, South America, and North Africa to strengthen cultural connections, Mathias told Business Insider.

After his band days, he started in venture by landing a student fellowship at .406 Ventures. He then worked at VC firm Bertelsmann Investments, where he was embedded in the European and Chinese startup ecosystems. He's now a partner at Alumni Ventures, "overseeing investments in critical strategic technologies for the United States." Mathias is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Council on Germany.

"I embrace venture capital's original self: as an asset class for the biggest ideas for the most consequential and timeless of challenges," he told Business Insider. "Defense is one of those challenges."

Alex Moore, 8VC

Location: Austin

Notable investments: Palantir, Saronic, Epirus, Chaos, CX2, Gallatin AI, iCOMAT

Why he's on the list: Moore was employee number one and director of operators at Palantir, where he still sits on the board of directors. He also cofounded social media analytics company Backplane and cloud automation startup NodePrime, which was acquired by Ericsson in 2016.

As an investor, Moore has invested in over 50 seed-stage companies as both an angel investor and on behalf of 8VC, where he has been a managing partner since 2017. At 8VC, he says he looks for founders with the longer-term outlook defense startups require.

"There's a unique type of founder who's not sort of just hacking something together and then jumping around every four years, which is the Silicon Valley ethos," Moore said on a panel in 2023. "Is this guy going to work on this when he's 25 — is he going to work on it when he's 55? I want someone who's going to because it's their whole life, and they don't have anything else."

Chris Morales, Point72 Ventures

Location: Washington, D.C.

Notable investments: Overland AI, Rune, Starfish Space, Apex

Why he's on the list: Morales runs Point72 Ventures' defense tech practice, which he joined in 2020, leading coveted fundraises like autonomous-driving-tech startup Overland AI's Series A, and satellite-servicing startup Starfish Space's Series B.

As a former F/A-18 Super Hornet Weapons Systems Officer in the US Navy and a graduate of the Naval Academy, investing in defense tech is personal for Morales. He also holds an MBA and a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as an investment banker in Goldman Sachs's technology, media, and telecommunications practice, according to LinkedIn.

John Moran, Lockheed Martin Ventures

Location: Bethesda, Maryland

Notable investments: Elroy Air, Hawkeye 360, Heilcity Space, X-Bow

Why he's on the list: As the executive director of Lockheed Martin Ventures, John Christopher "Chris" Moran is in charge of the defense behemoth's venture strategy.

In 2022, Lockheed Martin doubled the size of its VC fund from $200 million to $400 million so it could make larger investments and speed up "defense innovation through investments in growing tech companies."

The firm has made over 100 investments since 2007, according to PitchBook data.

Jackson Moses, Silent Ventures

Location: Dallas

Notable investments: Saronic, CHAOS, Castelion, Gallatin AI, Firestorm

Why he's on the list: Moses founded Silent Ventures to invest in founders of early-stage aerospace, defense, and national security startups. Since launching his venture fund in late 2022, it's invested in startups, including Firestorm, which builds uncrewed aerial systems, and Saronic, an autonomous surface vessel builder for Western naval and maritime forces.

While Moses has long been in the startup world — he founded AI content-moderation startup Spectrum Labs and corporate tax software MainStreet — building Silent Ventures marks his full-time foray into the defense tech world. Before founding the firm, Moses invested across verticals, including B2B software and manufacturing, as an angel investor.

Josh Manchester, Champion Hill Capital

Location: Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina

Notable investments: SpaceX, Anduril, Umbra

Why he's on the list: A former infantry and combat engineer officer in the US Marine Corps, Manchester and his pre-seed and seed stage firm Champion Hill Capital have backed some of the hottest startups in defense tech and space, including SpaceX, Anduril, and Umbra.

Before launching his firm, Manchester also had investing roles at Foundation Capital and Trubridge Capital Partners. In 2023, Manchester addressed generalist VCs' growing interest in defense tech.

"Defense investing is the ultimate form of mission investing," he told TechCrunch. "Defense investors from decades ago are the reason why this article isn't being written in Russian. It's a great thing that the category has new entrants."

Raj Shah, Shield Capital

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Notable investments: Hawkeye 360, Howso, Apex, Albedo, Elroy Air, Resilience

Why he's on the list: Shah has been an F-16 fighter pilot with the US Air Force since 2000, and his current work at Shield Capital is centered on connecting Silicon Valley to the Pentagon. Since joining the firm in 2020, Shah has invested in startups, including cyber-insurance startup Resilience — he's also the company's cofounder — and Hawkeye 360, a satellite startup that maps radio frequency emissions for defense, maritime, and global protection purposes. Before Shield, Shah was the managing partner of the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit, the military's innovation arm intended to connect it with commercial, cutting-edge technology.

Shah told Business Insider that he looks for founders who have grit because founding a company is one of the hardest things a person can do outside combat.

"Founding a deep tech company is especially challenging," he said. "We seek to back founders so passionate and dedicated to their mission that they will run through walls to succeed."

Peter Tague, US Innovative Technology Fund

Location: Charleston, South Carolina

Notable investments: Capella Space, Primer

Why he's on the list: At Thomas Tull's US Innovative Technology Fund, Tague invests in and supports companies serving the defense and commercial sectors. He's added promising upstarts to the fund's portfolio, such as the rapidly growing satellite manufacturer Capella Space.

Before joining the firm, Tague worked at In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit strategic investor for the national intelligence community and its allies, where he established offices in London and Sydney and oversaw an applied research group focused on national security.

Thomas Tull, US Innovative Technology Fund

Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Notable investments: Anduril, Celestial AI, Gecko Robotics, Lambda Labs, Shield AI, Saronic

Why he's on the list: Tull made a fortune selling his film company to a Chinese conglomerate several years ago and now uses his money and influence to support defense-focused startups giving the nation and its allies a technological edge.

With a hefty war chest at his fingertips, Tull is one of the most active investors in the defense-tech category. He's already corralled billions of dollars from backers like Guggenheim Partners for his US Innovative Technology fund.

David Ulevitch, Andreessen Horowitz

Location: New York

Notable investments: Air Space Intelligence, Anduril, Flock Safety, Prepared, Radiant, Skydio

Why he's on the list: Ulevitch helped kick-start the American Dynamism practice at Andreessen Horowitz alongside Katherine Boyle, spurring a wave of investment and support for startups advancing the national interest. Before A16z, Ulevitch founded OpenDNS, a cloud-based security service that was sold to Cisco in 2015 for $635 million.

Ulevitch has more financial firepower than ever before. Last year, A16z unveiled a new $600 million American Dynamism fund for investing in aerospace, defense, public safety, education, housing, supply chain, industrials, and manufacturing.

Chip Walter, Marlinspike

Location: Damascus, Maryland

Notable investments: Anduril, Palantir, Shield AI, Kodiak Robotics, Gecko Robotics

Why he's on the list: As a nearly three-decade Navy veteran, Walter may be better suited than just about anyone else on this list to understand the real-world impact of advanced technology on the battlefield. Throughout his storied federal career, he oversaw the CIA's innovation and technology sourcing strategy, advised the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and deployed to Afghanistan. He would go on to lead Northrop Grumman's in-house venture investment where he brought his years of military and government experience to bear on developing innovative new technologies of defense and intelligence applications.

Now, he serves as managing director at Marlinspike, a Washington, DC-based, veteran-led venture capital fund that focuses on technologies solving complex national security issues. Marlinspike has backed some of the biggest and most successful defense tech companies, including Anduril and Palantir.

Josh Wolfe, Lux Capital

Location: New York

Notable investments: Anduril, Saildrone, Hadrian, Varda, Nominal

Why he's on the list: Wolfe cofounded Lux Capital in 2000 and has become known for backing moonshot companies in areas like biotech, artificial intelligence, aerospace, and defense. Before entering VC, Wolfe worked in investment banking at Salomon Smith Barney and capital markets at Merrill Lynch.

Wolfe has been a longtime defense tech investor and an early backer of defense tech standouts like Anduril and the space infrastructure startup Varda. While the industry hasn't reached its peak, Wolfe is a staunch believer in its future.

"Standout companies (like Anduril) are rapidly attracting talent and capital, turning product launches into programs of record that are reflected in rising revenue and valuations," he told BI. "This momentum is expected to spur the creation of adjacent ventures and attract additional capital, driving industry growth, and we expect dedicated 'defensetech' fund-of-funds to follow."

Darius Rafieyan contributed to an earlier version of this list.

• The HR software company Rippling is suing Deel, alleging it used a spy to steal company secrets.
• The lawsuit says Rippling caught the spy through a honeypot email to Deel's top leaders.
• It alleges the man locked himself in a bathroom when approached with a court order.

The executives at Rippling had a problem.

Private information from the company kept leaking, the company says in a lawsuit filed Monday.

The suit says recruiters at one of its chief rivals, Deel, had contacted more than a dozen Rippling employees using their unlisted personal phone numbers.

Then, it adds, a journalist approached Rippling, a workforce management software company, with a story claiming it may have violated sanctions, citing messages from Rippling's Slack channels.

After launching an investigation, Rippling says, the company found an employee in Ireland it now says was a spy digging for corporate secrets to pass off to the company's competition.

The lawsuit, filed against Deel in San Francisco federal court, says the employee, who oversaw payroll issues in Europe, was looking at Slack channels with "no connection to his payroll operations job responsibilities" and searching for the term "Deel" more than a dozen times a day.

The suit says the man — who is not named in the lawsuit — found sensitive information about prospective customers who were looking to switch from Deel to Rippling. It adds that he downloaded a 31-slide deck that explained Rippling's strategy for competing with Deel.

Rippling's leaders believed they found their mole. So they set up a honeypot operation, the company says.

Believing that Deel "was most likely to activate its spy if faced with potentially damaging press," Rippling's general counsel emailed a legal letter to three of Deel's top leaders, the lawsuit says. The letter identified a Slack channel called "#d-defectors," on which Rippling employees discussed information that Deel would find embarrassing if it was made public, it adds.

In reality, the lawsuit says, the #d-defectors channel did not exist until shortly before Rippling sent the letter to Deel.

"Rather than being a gathering place for ex-Deel employees, the channel was set up as part of a ruse designed to confirm that Deel was instructing D.S. to search for specific information in Rippling's Slack," Rippling's lawsuit says, referring to the person it says was "Deel's spy."

Deel "took the bait," the suit says. Just hours after Rippling sent the letter, it adds, this person searched for and accessed the channel.

It was a "smoking gun," Rippling says in the lawsuit, that Deel's highest echelon — or someone working on its behalf — fed information to that person.

Over the course of four months, the lawsuit says, the man pulled information from Rippling's Slack, shared Google Drive, Salesforce database, and internal human resources directory.

A representative for Deel denied "all legal wrongdoing" and said Rippling was trying to distract from claims that it violated sanctions laws, which Rippling denies.

"Weeks after Rippling is accused of violating sanctions law in Russia and seeding falsehoods about Deel, Rippling is trying to shift the narrative with these sensationalized claims," a Deel spokesperson said in a statement. "We deny all legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaims."

A tech rivalry for the ages

Rippling's lawsuit, which demands a jury trial, marks a fiery escalation in its rivalry with Deel.

Founded in 2016 by Parker Conrad, a mainstay of the workforce software market, Rippling creates tools to streamline a company's back office. It launched with the idea of gathering all of a customer's data about its employees and placing it in one system.

Deel came onto the scene with a different proposition. In 2019, the company functioned as an "employer of record" for companies, allowing its customers to hire globally without having to worry about compliance regulations in different countries. Over time, Deel, led by its cofounder and CEO, Alex Bouaziz, bolted a wider variety of products onto its system, building them in-house and buying up small players in payroll and IT.

The two firms now go head-to-head in the workforce software market, raising bigger and faster rounds of funding to expand their operations.

Their competition has often unfolded in the public eye. This past spring, when Rippling held a tender offer, which refers to the sale of a shareholder's stock in a company, the company barred former employees who work for its competitors, including Deel, from cashing out.

In January, a class action complaint alleged that Deel lacked the proper licenses to process payments for a company accused of operating a Ponzi scheme but that it did so anyway.

The plaintiff's lawyer, Thomas Grady, has been reported to be an investor in Rippling. In a motion to dismiss, Deel denied any wrongdoing and rejected the complaint as a feckless attack by its biggest competitor.

A court order and a flushing toilet

Rippling says it picked up the trail of the person it alleges was a corporate spy partly by looking at his Slack activity. The employee, who joined Rippling in 2023, had rarely used the "preview" function on Slack, which allows users to view a channel's contents without notifying colleagues, the lawsuit says.

In November, the suit says, the employee started previewing dozens of channels a month, sometimes peeking at particular channels more than 100 times each month.

The channels were dedicated to information about Rippling's services and software sales, as well as information about competitors like Deel, the lawsuit adds.

Rippling's suit says the employee's browser and email history indicate he may have also met with Bouaziz and Deel's global head of expansion, Olivier Elbaz, in December.

On Wednesday, after the honeypot operation, Rippling sought a court order in Ireland to seize and inspect the employee's phone.

When a court-appointed solicitor served the employee with the order at Rippling's Dublin office, the suit says, the employee said his phone was in a bag on another floor.

It was a lie, the lawsuit alleges.

"The bag only contained a notebook. It held no mobile device," the lawsuit says.

The suit says the man then went to the bathroom and locked the door, "despite the independent solicitor's repeated warnings that these actions were in violation of the court order."

"I'm willing to take that risk," the employee said, the lawsuit adds.

The employee "then stormed out of the office and fled the scene," the lawsuit says.

Rippling says in the lawsuit the solicitor heard the employee flush the toilet, suggesting he "may have attempted to flush his phone down the toilet rather than provide it for inspection," though a later inspection of the building's plumbing "did not locate any mobile devices."

Have a tip? Contact the reporters via email at [email protected] and [email protected] or Signal at @meliarussell.01 or @JacobShamsian.07. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• In three years, Harvey went from an unknown startup to a pivotal AI force within the legal industry.
• CEO Winston Weinberg spoke to investor Sarah Guo on a podcast about how the legal field is changing.
• He highlighted how the work of young lawyers will evolve and why billable hours may go up in cost.

Harvey, a startup focused on legal and professional services, has a message for lawyers worried about chatbots coming for their jobs: We come in peace.

Founded by a former lawyer and an ex-DeepMind researcher, the company has taken over the legal world by worming its way through leading firms. It hired lawyers as domain experts and linked arms with high-profile firms like A&O Shearman and PwC early on to develop software for legal professionals.

Harvey investor Sarah Guo recently spoke to Winston Weinberg, Harvey's lawyer-trained founder and CEO, on her podcast, "No Priors." They covered the skepticism among some lawyers regarding artificial intelligence and its potential impact on the industry. Weinberg tried to ease those concerns.

"I don't think there is as much displacement fear," Weinberg told Guo. "It is not job displacement, it is task displacement. And I think that's a super important distinction because getting rid of those tasks does not mean the legal industry falls apart. It'll evolve."

Weinberg's reassurance has backing from the who's who of venture capital. Just last month, the company announced it had secured $300 million in Series D funding to further develop its platform and expand its team. This new round saw participation from return investors such as Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, GV, Elad Gil, Guo's Conviction, and the OpenAI Startup Fund, along with new backers Coatue and LexisNexis.

Here are three other predictions the Harvey founder shared about the future of law.

Junior associates become more valuable

The majority of junior associates are hired to do one thing: produce as much billable work as possible. These young attorneys are expected to put in grueling hours of case study and research. They are the foot soldiers of the profession.

And so the notion of a law firm using software to automate away parts of the profession might seem scariest for the people responsible for this grunt work. Not so, according to Weinberg.

"The junior folks are incredibly happy about this," he told Guo on the podcast.

The Harvey founder says that most junior associates spend the first leg of their careers on rote tasks. "So whether that's in reviewing documents in discovery or it's reviewing documents in a data room, et cetera, you end up not being able to do the strategic level things until like 10 years into your career, if you're lucky, five," he said.

Software like Harvey allows them to get tasks done faster. "And so what I think will end up happening is the timeline will compress," Weinberg said, "so you will start being able to actually do the high-level strategic work and interact with clients, which is what people really want to do earlier on in your career."

Billable hours go up in cost

The unstoppable march of artificial intelligence has fanned a long-running debate over the potential death of the billable hour or the standard method of payment in the legal profession.

The idea is that when a firm uses software to speed through routine tasks like document review and due diligence, the number of billable hours to a client is likely to be reduced. The Harvey founder believes, however, that even as billable hours fall, the value of a lawyer's time is likely to increase.

"I don't think the billable hour is going to just completely disappear," Weinberg said. The mundane, repetitive tasks can be automated with a lawyer in the loop. "Those tasks will end up being kind of a fixed-fee model," he explained, "and I think the high-level advisory work on top will still be billable hour and will be actually maybe more expensive."

"There's an argument that the specialist at a law firm who has seen all of these different mergers in the pharmaceutical industry, their rates for hours should not be actually 3x the junior associate in the data room, maybe 10x, I don't know," Weinberg said. "My point is there is a specialization in professional services that is incredibly valuable and is going to be more valuable over time."

Other attorneys echoed this belief when speaking to Business Insider's Natalie Musumeci last fall. Frank Gerratana, a partner at the international firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C., posited that in the future, "lawyers can simply charge more per hour because they're spending more time on the highest value work." Michel Paradis, a partner at the global firm Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP, said firms will charge a premium for "the real value that lawyers provide."

Do you have a story to share about how AI is changing the legal world? Contact this reporter at [email protected].

• The next Blue Bottle has hit New York's tech scene.
• La Cabra's popularity has soared since ChatGPT-maker OpenAI put down roots across the street.
• The Danish coffee chain is famed for its $9 pour-over brews and cardamom buns.

The line to La Cabra stretches onto the sidewalk, a tidy queue of office workers and shoppers sauntering through the warm, muggy embrace of a New York City spring.

Inside, at least twenty patrons hover near the bar like caffeinated moths around a flame, clutching iced matcha lattes and croissants. A barista weaves through the standing-room-only crowd, hoisting a tray of pain suisse aloft.

Welcome to New York's hottest club: the café across from OpenAI's office.

La Cabra, the latest export from Denmark's high-end coffee empire, has inspired a cult following among Manhattan's coffee cognoscenti. Led by founder Esben Piper and head baker Jared Sexton, a Dominique Ansel alum, the sleek, minimalist chain entices crowds with its $9 pour-over brews and cardamom buns worthy of sonnets. Since the ChatGPT-maker moved into SoHo in the fall of last year, the line to get in seems to grow longer each day.

Nestled caddy corner from the Puck Building, La Cabra finds itself in illustrious company. The red-brick structure is owned by Kushner Companies, a real estate developer founded by Charles Kushner, father of Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and Josh Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital. The outdoor gear retailer REI covers 36,000 square feet over three levels. Above it, employees of Thrive and a smattering of its portfolio companies badge into their offices.

Thrive Capital, with nearly $25 billion in assets under management, has a small staff of about 75 people. Plaid also leases the entire sixth floor, while OpenAI occupies 90,000 square feet of office space at its first New York City outpost.

Together, their proximity to La Cabra has turned the Danish coffee roaster into an unofficial think tank for anyone in the mood for a latte with a side of world domination.

Amanda Herson, a tech investor at Founder Collective, says she's been buying coffee and cardamom buns for her office since La Cabra opened on Lafayette Street. She goes in the early morning "when there isn't much of a wait." Tech consultant Jason Liu agrees that mornings tend to have lighter traffic. On frequent trips to New York from San Francisco, he holds office hours at the Puck Building and dashes over to La Cabra for a chocolate croissant and iced espresso with milk.

First Round Capital is a five-minute walk from La Cabra, and partner Hayley Barna goes for the pastries and trendspotting. "Honestly, it's tricky to make it a meeting spot because seating isn't reliable," Barna said.

When I stopped in on a Thursday morning, I took in the scene from a stool at the counter, sipping a cardamom latte from a handleless stoneware cup. With its natural color palette and cabinets inset with panels of rattan, La Cabra feels like a Japanese ryokan meets Ikea. Baristas floated behind the counter wearing the de rigueur Danish uniform of beige shirts with three-quarter sleeves designed by Copenhagen clothier Another Aspect.

First, I dug into a $7 ham-and-cheese croissant baked to a medium brown and speckled with sesame seeds and parsley. It had a crisp, caramelized exterior so that when I bit in, a gust of flakes fell like helicopter seeds, which I picked up and popped into my mouth. The beauty of the laminated spiral gave way to a satisfying buttery crunch with a scant portion of ham. I found it skimping on cheese but recognized that more filling would make the interior soggy.

I couldn't resist trying the $6 Swedish cardamom bun I'd read about online. This knotted pastry was delightfully unexpected: chewy and dense like a cinnamon roll, yet airy enough to puff back into shape with each bite. The recipe goes heavy on the cardamom, infusing the pastry with a piney warmth and gentle sweetness.

The cardamom buns are known to sell out, though Piper, La Cabra's founder, says the chain makes deliveries from its East Village bakery three times a day to restock the pastry case. To expand its operations, the company has secured a fourth location in Manhattan, Piper told Business Insider exclusively.

As I licked my fingers clean of sugar, I scanned the cafe in search of employee badges or logo apparel, hoping for a glimpse of a startup executive in their natural habitat. In New York, unlike San Francisco, it seems that such overt displays of corporate allegiance are not as prevalent. Here, the tech elite and builders blend into the street milieu, swapping hoodies adorned with company logos for more voguish attire.

Feeling the caffeine buzz kick in, I left knowing that I'd return soon — if not for a meeting, then to try the pain suisse.

• Richard Socher, a one-time AI boss at Salesforce, is building a search competitor to Google.
• Socher says Google's search monopoly is under threat as users are now eager to try alternatives.
• You.com is a potential dark horse in the contest to supersede Google Search.

In the fast-paced world of artificial intelligence, the once unassailable dominance of tech giants like Google is being challenged, says Richard Socher, founder and CEO of You.com.

Socher runs a competitor to Google that's built for knowledge workers. Established as a search engine, You.com has expanded its repertoire over the years by incorporating digital agents for writing essays, browsing the web, and other tasks. To date, the company has raised about $100 million in funding.

In an interview with Business Insider, Socher expressed a belief that the era of a single company maintaining an overwhelming, long-lasting monopoly in the tech industry, similar to what Google experienced in the search domain, is coming to an end.

Socher said users are now more inclined to explore new, artificial intelligence-charged options and switch between services more readily than in the past.

"This sort of insane, untouchable monopoly that Google had for 20 years, those days are over," Socher said. "I don't think any company will have such a strong monopoly for such a long time anymore because users are getting faster to switch and more eager to try out things."

This change in user behavior would imply that companies, even those with significant market power, can no longer rely on maintaining a monopoly based solely on inertia or default settings. Instead, these companies must continuously innovate and provide genuine value to retain their user base.

Meanwhile, new entrants and smaller players like You.com are seizing an opportunity to pick up users who are open to exploring alternatives.

Since launching in 2021, You.com says it has reached "millions" of people. The platform is free to use, with premium features available through a $15 monthly plan. You.com also provides enterprise customers with a toolkit designed to bring real-time web search and accuracy to their own applications.

The company tells Business Insider its revenue has skyrocketed since the beginning of 2024, reaching 100 times the amount earned the previous year.

Before he took on Google Search, Socher founded a deep-learning company called MetaMind that he sold to Salesforce. He became chief scientist at Salesforce, where he led the company's research efforts and worked on bringing natural language processing and computer vision to its platform.

In 2018, while at Salesforce, Socher published a paper alongside Bryan McCann, a fellow Salesforce research scientist, on multitask learning — a method in machine learning where a model is trained to perform multiple tasks at the same time. The paper influenced subsequent research in the field, with Dario Amodei and Ilya Sutskever citing it in a paper from their lab, OpenAI, a year later.

The research also seeded an idea for a new kind of search engine. Socher remembered thinking, "If you can have one neural network that answers all of your questions, why am I still going to Google where I get these lists of blue links?" In 2020, he and McCann left Salesforce to start You.com. Marc Benioff wrote one of the first checks.

The future of search is still up for grabs, and Socher will have more to contend with than Google. Companies like OpenAI and Perplexity are locked in a contest to offer the most popular chat-based search engine, and ChatGPT's hundreds of millions of active users make You.com's user base look feeble. Additionally, OpenAI has considered developing a web browser, The Information reported, while Perplexity has teased a web browser called Comet, which could provide more seamless and integrated user experiences.

In this environment, the real winners of search will be those who anticipate the next big shift and are nimble enough to lead it. As Socher put it, "I made peace with the fact that AI will just keep changing. We'll have to move quickly."

• OpenAI has been elevating research and technical talent to leadership roles after recent departures.
• The company has also brought on some new faces to fill the vacancies in its executive suite.
• Here are some of the key people to watch going forward.

Last year, OpenAI found itself navigating a storm of departures. Recently, the company has been busy elevating its research and technical talent to leadership positions while strategically bringing in new hires to patch up the holes in its executive suite.

This shuffle in leadership couldn't come at a more critical time, as the company faces intensified competition from heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and Elon Musk's xAI. Staying ahead means securing top-flight talent is essential. After all, "OpenAI is nothing without its people," or so employees declared on social media after the failed Sam Altman ouster.

Meanwhile, the company is juggling a cascade of legal challenges, from copyright lawsuits to antitrust scrutiny, all while navigating the shifting sands of regulatory guidance under President Donald Trump. On top of that, OpenAI is trying to restructure as a for-profit business, raise tens of billions of dollars, and build new computer data centers in the US to develop its tech.

It's a high-wire act that hinges on the expertise and execution of its new and newly promoted leaders. Below are some of the key power players who are helping to shape OpenAI's future.

Leadership

Sarah Friar, chief financial officer

Friar joined last year as the company's first financial chief and a seasoned addition to the new guard. Formerly Square's CFO, Friar knows how to turn a founder's vision into a story that investors want to be a part of. She took two companies public: Square and Nextdoor, the hyperlocal social network she led through explosive growth during pandemic lockdowns.

At OpenAI, Friar leads a finance team responsible for securing the funds required to build better models and the data centers to power them. In her first few months on the job, she helped the company get $6.5 billion in one of the biggest private pools of capital in startup history.

She inherited a business with a colossal consumer-facing business and high-profile partnerships with Microsoft and Apple. At the same time, OpenAI is burning through billions of dollars as it seeks to outpace increasingly stiff competition from Google, Meta, and others. Friar is expected to bring much-needed financial acumen to OpenAI as the company moves to turn its research into mass-market products and a profitable business.

Jason Kwon, chief strategy officer

In his role as chief strategy officer, Kwon helps set the agenda for a slew of non-research initiatives, including the company's increasingly active outreach to policymakers and the various legal challenges swirling around it. His background as the company's former general counsel gives him a strong foundation in navigating complex legal and regulatory landscapes.

Kwon works closely with Anna Makanju, the VP of global impact, and Chris Lehane, the VP of global affairs, as they seek to build and strengthen OpenAI's relationships in the public sector.

Kwon was previously general counsel at the famed startup accelerator Y Combinator and assistant general counsel at Khosla Ventures, an early investor in OpenAI.

Che Chang, general counsel

Being at the forefront of artificial intelligence development puts OpenAI in a position to navigate and shape a largely uncharted legal territory. In his role as general counsel, Chang leads a team of attorneys who address the legal challenges associated with the creation and deployment of large language models. The company faces dozens of lawsuits concerning the datasets used to train its models and other privacy complaints, as well as multiple government investigations.

OpenAI's top lawyer joined the company after serving as senior corporate counsel at Amazon, where he advised executives on developing and selling machine learning products and established Amazon's positions on artificial intelligence policy and legislation. In 2021, Chang took over for his former boss, Jason Kwon, who has since become chief strategy officer.

Kevin Weil, chief product officer

If Sam Altman is OpenAI's starry-eyed visionary, Weil is its executor. He leads a product team that turns blue-sky research into products and services the company can sell.

Weil joined last year as a steady-handed product guru known for playing key roles at large social networks. He was a longtime Twitter insider who created products that made the social media company money during a revolving door of chief executives. At Instagram, he helped kneecap Snapchat's growth with competitive product releases such as Stories and live video.

Weil is expected to bring much-needed systems thinking to OpenAI as the company moves to turn its research into polished products for both consumer and enterprise use cases.

Nick Turley, ChatGPT's head of product

In the three years since ChatGPT burst onto the scene, it has reached hundreds of millions of active users and generated billions in revenue for its maker. Turley, a product savant who leads the teams driving the chatbot's development, is behind much of ChatGPT's success.

Turley joined in 2022 after his tenure at Instacart, where he guided a team of product managers through the pandemic-driven surge in demand for grocery delivery services.

OpenAI's chatbot czar is likely to play a crucial role as the company expands into the enterprise market and adds more powerful, compute-intensive features to its famed chatbot.

Srinivas Narayanan, vice president of engineering

Narayanan was a longtime Facebook insider who worked on important product releases such as Facebook Photos and tools to help developers build for its virtual reality headset, Oculus. Now, he leads the OpenAI teams responsible for building new products and scaling its systems. This includes ChatGPT, which is used by over 400 million people weekly; the developer platform, which has doubled usage over the past six months; and the infrastructure needed to support both.

Research

Jakub Pachocki, chief scientist

Ilya Sutkever's departure as chief scientist last year prompted questions about the company's ability to stay on top of the artificial intelligence arms race. That has thrust Pachocki into the spotlight. He took on the mantle of chief scientist after seven years as an OpenAI researcher.

Pachocki had already been working closely with Sutskever on some of OpenAI's most ambitious projects, including an advanced reasoning model now known as o1. In a post announcing his promotion, Sam Altman called Pachocki "easily one of the greatest minds of our generation."

Mark Chen, senior vice president of research

A flurry of executive departures also cast Chen into the highest levels of leadership. He was promoted last September following the exit of Bob McGrew, the company's chief research officer. In a post announcing the change, Altman called out Chen's "deep technical expertise" and commended the longtime employee as having developed as a manager in recent years.

Chen's path to OpenAI is a bit atypical compared to some of his colleagues. After studying computer science and mathematics at MIT, he began his career as a quantitative trader on Wall Street before joining OpenAI in 2018. Chen previously led the company's frontier research.

He has been integral to OpenAI's efforts to expand into multimodal models, heading up the team that developed DALL-E and the team that incorporated visual perception into GPT-4. Chen was also an important liaison between employees and management during Sam 0Altman's short-lived ouster, further cementing his importance within the company.

Liam Fedus, vice president of research, post-training

Fedus helps the company get new products out the door. He leads a post-training team responsible for taking the company's state-of-the-art models and improving their performance and efficiency before it releases them to the masses. Fedus was the third person to lead the team in a six-month period following the departures of Barret Zoph and Bob McGrew last year.

Fedus was also one of seven OpenAI researchers who developed a group of advanced reasoning models known as Strawberry. These models, which can think through problems and complete tasks they haven't encountered before, represented a significant leap at launch.

Josh Tobin, member of technical staff

Tobin, an early research scientist at OpenAI, left to found Gantry, a company that assists teams in determining when and how to retrain their artificial intelligence systems. He returned to OpenAI last September and now leads a team of researchers focused on developing agentic products. Its flashy new agent, Deep Research, creates in-depth reports on nearly any topic.

Tobin brings invaluable experience in building agents as the company aims to scale them across a wide range of use cases. In a February interview with Sequoia, Tobin explained that when the company takes a reasoning model, gives it access to the same tools humans use to do their jobs, and optimizes for the kinds of outcomes it wants the agent to be able to do, "there's really nothing stopping that recipe from scaling to more and more complex tasks."

Legal

Andrea Appella, associate general counsel for Europe, Middle East, Asia

Appella joined last year, bolstering the company's legal firepower as it navigated a thicket of open investigations into data privacy concerns, including from watchdogs in Italy and Poland. Appella is a leading expert on competition and regulatory law, having previously served as head of global competition at Netflix and deputy general counsel at 21st Century Fox.

Regulatory scrutiny could still prove to be an existential threat to OpenAI as policymakers worldwide put guardrails on the nascent artificial intelligence industry. Nowhere have lawmakers been more aggressive than in Europe, which makes Appella's role as the company's top legal representative in Europe one of the more crucial positions in determining the company's future.

Haidee Schwartz, associate general counsel for competition

OpenAI has spent the last year beefing up its legal team as it faces multiple antitrust probes. Schwartz, who joined in 2023, knows more about antitrust enforcement than almost anyone in Silicon Valley, having seen both sides of the issue during her storied legal career.

Between 2017 and 2019, she served as the acting deputy director of the Bureau of Competition at the Federal Trade Commission, one of the agencies currently investigating Microsoft's agreements with OpenAI. Schwartz also advised clients on merger review and antitrust enforcement as a partner at law firm Akin Gump. She'll likely play an important role in helping OpenAI navigate the shifting antitrust landscape in President Donald Trump's second term.

Heather Whitney, copyright counsel

Whitney serves as lead data counsel at OpenAI, placing her at the forefront of various legal battles with publishers that have emerged in recent years. She joined the company last January, shortly after The New York Times filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and its corporate backer, Microsoft. OpenAI motioned to dismiss the high-profile case last month.

Whitney's handling of these legal cases, which raise new questions about intellectual property in relation to machine learning, will be crucial in deciding OpenAI's future.

Previously, Whitney worked at the law firm Morrison Foerster, where she specialized in novel copyright issues related to artificial intelligence and was a member of the firm's AI Steering Committee. Prior to her official hiring, she had already been collaborating with OpenAI as part of Morrison Foerster, which is among several law firms offering external counsel to the company.

Policy

Chan Park, head of US and Canada policy and partnerships

Before OpenAI had a stable of federal lobbyists, it had Park. In 2023, the company registered the former Microsoft lobbyist as its first in-house lobbyist, marking a strategic move to engage more actively with lawmakers wrestling with artificial intelligence regulation.

Since then, OpenAI has beefed up its lobbying efforts as it seeks to build relationships in government and influence the development of artificial intelligence policy. It's enlisted white-shoe law firms and at least one former US senator to plead OpenAI's case in Washington. The company also spent $1.76 million on government lobbying in 2024, a sevenfold increase from the year before, according to a recent disclosure reviewed by the MIT Technology Review.

Park has been helping to guide those efforts from within OpenAI as the company continues to sharpen its message around responsible development of artificial intelligence.

Anna Makanju, vice president of global impact

Referred to as OpenAI's de facto foreign minister, Makanju is the mastermind behind Sam Altman's global charm offensive. On multiple trips, he met with world leaders, including the Indian prime minister and South Korean president, to discuss the future of artificial intelligence.

The tour was part of a broader effort to make Altman the friendly face of a nascent industry and ensure that OpenAI will have a seat at the table when designing artificial intelligence regulations and policies. Makanju, a veteran of Starlink and Facebook who also served as a special policy advisor to former President Joe Biden, has been integral in that effort.

In addition to helping Altman introduce himself on the world stage, she has played an important role in expanding OpenAI's commercial partnerships in the public sector.

Chris Lehane, vice president of global affairs

Lehane joined OpenAI last year to help the company liaise with policymakers and navigate an uncharted political landscape around artificial intelligence. The veteran political operative and "spin master" played a similar role at Airbnb, where he served as head of global policy and public affairs from 2015 to 2022 and helped it address growing opposition from local authorities.

He previously served in the Clinton White House, where Newsweek referred to him as a "master of disaster" for his handling of the scandals and political crises that plagued the administration.

Lehane is poised to play a crucial role in ensuring that the United States stays at the forefront of the global race in artificial intelligence. When President Trump introduced Stargate, a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank aimed at building large domestic data centers, Lehane was on the scene. From Washington, he traveled to Texas to meet with local officials, engaging in discussions about how the state could meet the rapidly growing demand for energy.

Lane Dilg, head of infrastructure policy and partnerships

In her newly appointed role, Dilg works to grease the wheels for the construction of giant data centers needed to build artificial intelligence. She took on the position in January after two years as head of strategic initiatives for global affairs, working with government agencies, private industry, and nonprofit organizations to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.

In hiring Dilg, OpenAI gained an inside player in the public sector. Dilg is a former senior advisor to the undersecretary of infrastructure at the US Department of Energy and was interim city manager for Santa Monica, California, managing the city through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dilg will undoubtedly play an important role in expanding and nurturing OpenAI's relationships in Washington as it seeks to secure President Trump's support for building its own data centers.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at meliarussell.01. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

Darius Rafieyan contributed to an earlier version of this story.

• The startup CTGT has raised over $7 million in a seed funding round led by Gradient Ventures.
• The company addresses the growing demand for domain-specific, customized machine learning models.
• Other investors include General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Paul Graham.

CTGT, a startup focused on helping enterprise clients train and deploy machine learning models at lower cost, has raised $7.2 million in a funding round led by Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-geared venture arm.

The deal shows investors are still optimistic about startups developing tools to train models, as companies like Google, OpenAI, and Elon Musk's xAI jostle to produce a foundation model more capable than all others.

Cyril Gorlla, cofounder and CEO of CTGT, says many businesses have access to these generalized models but can't deploy them because of the inherent risks. It may hallucinate a response or display bias. For example, a healthcare provider can't risk a medical chatbot giving dangerous advice. A tech company wouldn't want a digital agent referring customers to its competition.

CTGT's solution allows enterprise clients to take one of these off-the-shelf foundation models and imbue it with their brand voice and data. It claims to lower the massive amounts of computing resources needed through a process called feature learning, where a system learns to recognize patterns and structures in raw data without being explicitly programmed.

Gorlla says the platform actively monitors and audits a client's custom models, allowing it to better spot and eliminate unwanted behavior. Enterprises can also refine and retrain models on the fly without the need to take models offline for updates.

Vig Sachidananda, a partner at Gradient, says the startup addresses a need for more reliable and bespoke alternatives to generalized models.

"We're seeing AI models rapidly progress in capabilities," Sachidananda said. "As models take on more tasks and those with increasing complexity there is a growing need from enterprises for systems that can help improve safety, provide more accurate responses, and mitigate biases."

"We're excited about CTGT as they're developing a novel approach to tackle these problems by helping enterprises interpret and control how models internally understand concepts, such as those that can relate to unsafe or unexpected behavior," he added.

Other investors in the company's seed funding round include General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, and angel investors like Paul Graham, Zapier cofounder Mike Knoop, François Chollet, creator of the Keras deep-learning library, and one of Facebook's first employees, Taner Halıcıoğlu.

Gorlla, 23, started the company last year with a former classmate, Trevor Tuttle, at the University of California San Diego. The two dropped out and were admitted to Y Combinator, the storied startup accelerator behind Airbnb, DoorDash, and Twitch.

CTGT, which gets its name from Gorlla and Tuttle's scrambled initials, says it's already testing its tech with three unnamed Fortune 10 companies. One of its first customers, the professional accounting firm Ebrada Financial Group, uses the platform to improve the reliability of its frontline customer service chatbots.

• Artificial intelligence has led to a boom in new startup creation and dealmaking.
• Business Insider researched startups that have strong founding teams and investor dollars.
• These are our top picks, listed alphabetically, of startups you could bet your career on in 2025.

After years of contraction, cost-cutting, and layoffs, there's been a resurgence of tech dealmaking in Silicon Valley thanks to the AI boom. Business Insider rounded up a number of technology and AI startups that are growing. Here are our top picks.

Abridge

HQ: Pittsburgh

Total raised: $462.5 million

What it does: The medical scribe startup translates patient-doctor interactions into clinical notes in electronic medical records.

What makes it promising: Abridge's business exploded in 2024 as investors rushed to fund companies automating administrative tasks in healthcare. The startup, which is backed by top VC firms, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, just raised $250 million in new funding at a million valuation. Its deals with top health systems, such as Kaiser Permanente, and its partnership with medical records giant Epic have made Abridge the healthcare AI startup to beat.

Anysphere

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $176 million

What it does: Anysphere makes AI coding software

What makes it promising: You may not have heard of Anysphere but you are likely familiar with its popular AI coding assistant, Cursor, that can predict a user's next line of code. The company recently raised $105 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. Notable investors include Benchmark, Andreessen Horowitz, and OpenAI.

Attention

HQ: New York

Total raised: $17.1 million

What it does: Attention uses natural language processing to fill out CRM programs and generate action items from sales calls.

What makes it promising: Some companies spend millions of dollars on customer relationship management programs, which are essentially software for sales teams that house crucial information about current and potential customers. The problem? Many teams don't properly fill out their CRM, rendering the investment useless. That's where Attention comes in — the startup uses AI to listen in on sales calls, fill out company CRMs with crucial information, and generate action items so a sales team member has the info they need to go back and close a deal.

Attention raised $14 million from Alven, Eniac, Frst, Liquid 2 Ventures, 645 Ventures, and Aglaé in October 2024.

Clasp

HQ: Boston

Total raised: $30 million, according to the company

What it does: Clasp helps employers secure critical talent before graduation, tackling workforce shortages in hard-to-hire fields like healthcare. Think of it like ROTC for critical professions. If a hospital system is facing a shrinking pipeline of nurses, it can partner with Clasp to access a national network of universities and training programs, match with current nursing students, and commit to repaying their student loans over a multi-year word period.

What makes it promising: Founded in 2018, Clasp has over 10,000 individuals on its platform and plenty of room to grow. While it's currently focused on building critical talent pools for the healthcare industry, the company plans to expand into other hard-to-hire industries. In 2024, Clasp raised over $10 million in a funding round led by Crosslink Capital and is actively investing in its growth team to scale employer and school partnerships.

CodaMetrix

HQ: Boston

Total raised: $95 million

What it does: CodaMetrix uses AI to analyze clinical notes and derive medical codes for billing and claims.

What makes it promising: Coding is a critical step of the revenue cycle management process for hospitals, typically requiring providers to manually assign numerical codes to medical services and diagnoses to ensure they get paid for their care.

CodaMetrix spun out of Mass General Brigham in 2019 to automate those administrative tasks and reduce provider burden, and it's captured a wave of investor interest in the sector, last raising a $40 million Series B round in March. The startup has worked with top health systems like Mayo Clinic and Yale Medicine to develop new revenue cycle management solutions, and it added some key hires to its executive team last year, including a new chief technology officer and COO.

Cohere Health

HQ: Boston

Total raised: $106 million

What it does: Cohere Health automates the pre-authorization process for medical treatments.

What makes it promising: Cohere Health works with health plans like Humana and Geisinger to make the prior authorization process more efficient and accurate, using AI to save money for the plans and reduce the number of unnecessary denials for patients. The startup last raised a $50 million Series B extension in February 2024, led by Deerfield Management and including existing investors, including Define Ventures and Flare Capital Partners.

Cohere has announced a number of new products in the last year, including tools released in January to help health plans meet prior authorization compliance standards set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Coram AI

HQ: Sunnyvale, California

Total raised: $30 million

What it does: Coram AI puts agentic AI software into existing security systems and cameras.

What makes it promising: The US is filled with businesses and buildings that have non-operational security systems, Coram says. The startup's solution is an AI software that ports onto existing security hardware systems to provide generative AI visual security via AI agents that can identify and track threats in real time.

Coram raised $13.8 million in January from Battery Ventures, 8VC, and Mosaic Ventures.

Cortica

HQ: San Diego

Total raised: Over $300 million

What it does: Cortica provides virtual and in-person pediatric care for autism, as well as commonly co-occurring conditions like behavioral issues and sleep disorders.

What makes it promising: Cortica has set itself apart by going after value-based care contracts with health plans and employers that pay the startup for better patient outcomes, a rarity in specialized mental healthcare. The startup employs more than 2,000 providers that help care for children with autism at its clinics, in the home, or virtually, aiming to deliver "whole-child care" through everything from physical therapy to speech-language pathology to neurology. Cortica most recently raised an $80 million round in November, co-led by JP Morgan's healthcare investment fund Morgan Health and Nexus NeuroTech Ventures.

Daedalus

HQ: Karlsruhe, Germany

Total raised: $32.6 million

What it does: Daedalus helps factories and their production robots operate more efficiently.

What makes it promising: Launched by ex-OpenAI engineer Jonas Schneider, who was a key part of the AI juggernaut's robotics team, Daedalus was part of Y Combinator's winter 2020 cohort. The startup, which also has an office in San Francisco, uses AI robotics technology to cull the need to reprogram production robots constantly. Instead, it automates a lot of the tasks associated with the manufacturing process; for example, if clients give Daedalus a CAD drawing, it will render a fully-completed version of the drawing.

In February 2024, the startup raised a fresh $21 million Series A. The funding will help Daedalus in its mission of automating the manufacturing process across various industries, from semiconductors to healthcare.

Decagon

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $100 million

What it does: Decagon develops AI support agents that autonomously resolve customer inquiries over chat, email, or voice calls.

What makes it promising: The company raised $100 million, including a $65 million Series B, late last year. Bain Capital Ventures led the Series B round, and Elad Gil, A*, Accel, Bond Capital, and Acme Capital participated. According to the company's blog, the fundraise quadrupled Decagon's valuation. Bilt, Duolingo, Eventbrite, Notion, and Rippling use Decagon to manage interactions with customers by gathering data and reviewing conversations.

Decart

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $53 million, according to the company

What it does: Decart is an AI research lab focused on efficiency. Its infrastructure platform aims to dramatically cut the costs of training and running foundation models.

Why it's promising: Last fall, Decart emerged from stealth with $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia and Oren Zeev and launched a demo, Oasis, that captivated the tech world. Oasis's video platform enables users to create interactive, open-world experiences from a single uploaded image and generates content in real time based on user input. In December, the Israeli-founded startup secured an additional $32 million from Benchmark and other investors. Since then, Decart has doubled its team size and continues developing new products.

Elise AI

HQ: New York

Total raised: $172 million

What it does: EliseAI sells AI assistants, primarily to housing operators, as well as healthcare providers. These speed up menial tasks such as maintenance requests and scheduling appointments.

What makes it promising: The startup hit a unicorn valuation in 2024 with a $75 million Series D. Its technology is revolutionary for the housing sector, which previously suffered from inefficient technology, resulting in consumers absorbing additional costs, said founder and CEO Minna Song.

When arranging house viewings and meetings, keeping up with messaging prospective tenants can take up a lot of time and energy. Elise AI's chatbot automates these interactions so they free up time for management teams to pursue more meaningful work. The tech has also been embraced by the healthcare industry, which experiences similar pain points for managing invoices and bills, as well as patient appointments.

Flo Health

HQ: London, United Kingdom

Total raised: $300 million

What it does: Flo is a digital women's health company, which provides a period tracking and wellness app.

What makes it promising: Flo became the first digital women's health company to hit a unicorn valuation in 2024, following a $200 million raise from General Atlantic.

The startup, which launched in 2015, ballooned in popularity as it offered a comprehensive suite of products, such as period tracking and personalized insights into reproductive health via its app. After Roe v. Wade was repealed, Flo developed an 'Anonymous Mode' setting that would allow users to access the app without associating any identifying information with their health data.

Following its fundraise in 2024, the startup is making a big hiring push in Lithuania — recruiting for over 100 roles in Vilnius. It will also expand its user base and double down on offerings for those with menopause.

Glean

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $560 million, according to the company

What it does: Glean makes search chatbots and agents for businesses, allowing workers to search for information across various systems and applications and create and summarize content.

What makes it promising: Glean's business is taking off as organizations seek quick productivity gains. Founded by a group of former Google Search engineers, Glean topped $100 million in annual recurring revenue last fiscal year, up from $50 million earlier in the year. The company plans to expand into new markets and verticals in 2025 to keep up its momentum.

Grow Therapy

HQ: New York City

Total raised: $178 million

What it does: Grow Therapy works with independent therapy practices to streamline their administrative tasks and connect patients with therapists covered by their insurance.

What makes it promising: Grow helps therapists start and run their own mental health practices. SignalFire founder and CEO Chris Farmer named Grow Therapy to Business Insider's list of the most promising healthcare AI startups of 2024, citing the startup's focus on handling administrative tasks "so therapists can focus on their patients and control their own schedule instead of being underworked and underpaid at someone else's practice."

Grow Therapy most recently raised $88 million in Series C funding in April, led by Sequoia Capital.

Harvey

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $500 million

What it does: Harvey is a developer of a generative AI legal tech platform for lawyers and paralegals to help with contract analysis, due diligence, litigation, and regulatory compliance.

What makes it promising: Many startups are attempting the herculean task of disrupting the legal industry, but Harvey is in the pole position. Backed by big-name investors like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, Harvey has ridden the AI wave to recently double its valuation to $3 billion in a fresh $300 million round of funding. In 2024, Harvey saw 4x annual recurring revenue growth and now has 235 customers in 42 countries.

Hue

HQ: Remote

Total raised: $4.5 million

What it does: Hue helps brands and retailers sell online by collecting user-generated video reviews and embedding that content into product pages.

What makes it promising: Hue is bringing the power of TikTok-style video reviews to brands and retailers, significantly increasing conversion rates and time spent on-site. Founded by a trio of women who come from the consumer industry they now serve, Hue closed on $4.5 million in seed funding last year from Fika Ventures, Underscore VC, and others.

Knime

HQ: Zurich, Switzerland

Total raised: $53.8 million

What it does: Knime has built a low-code, open-source data analytics platform for businesses.

What makes it promising: The startup is headquartered in Switzerland but has a global presence, with offices in Texas and Berlin. Its mission is to democratize data analytics and utilize generative AI to make that mission more accessible, cofounder and CEO Michael Berthold previously told Business Insider.

The startup raised $30 million in equity funding from Invus in August 2024 and serves over 400 enterprise customers — including the likes of Audi, Novartis, and P&G.

Landbase

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $12.5 million

What it does: Landbase uses AI agents to automate businesses' go-to-market procedures.

What makes it promising: Launched in 2023, Landbase has quickly applied the use of agentic AI to automating GTM strategies, training its GTM Omni model on billions of data points.

In July 2024, it raised a fresh $12.5 million from First Minute Capital and 8VC. It also recently acquired LavaReach, an AI-powered prospect research tool.

Legora, formerly Leya

HQ: Stockholm with offices in London

Total raised: $37 million

What it does: Lawyers use Legora to streamline legal work across reviewing, drafting, and research.

What makes it promising: Just months after graduating from the storied startup accelerator Y Combinator, Legora raised back-to-back rounds of funding from investors like Benchmark, Redpoint, and Jack Altman's fund Alt Capital. The company has so far grown its business in Europe and the US and is now quickly expanding to new markets. The website's careers page shows the company is hiring go-to-market managers in New York, Madrid, and London.

Midi Health

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $100 million

What it does: Midi partners with employers and health systems to provide virtual care for menopause.

What makes it promising: Midi is leading a growing market for menopause support as women's health investors expand their reach beyond fertility and maternal care. 18% of employers surveyed by Mercer said they plan to provide menopause benefits to employees in 2025, up from a measly 4% in 2023. Midi provides virtual services, including hormonal-replacement therapy and lifestyle support for those struggling with hormonal changes as they age, navigating symptoms like hot flashes and weight gain through perimenopause and menopause.

Midi also works with health systems to offer specialized telehealth services and coordinate care alongside a patient's in-person doctors. The startup raised a $63 million Series B round last year from dozens of angel investors, including actress Amy Schumer and former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, as well as VC firms like GV (Google Ventures) and Emerson Collective.

Neubird

HQ: Redwood City

Total raised: $44.5 million

What it does: Uses artificial intelligence to monitor, analyze, and resolve IT issues for companies.

What makes it promising: Hawkeye, the startup's AI-powered ITOps engineer, automates the detection and resolution of IT issues, freeing software engineers from routine troubleshooting. The startup's growing customer base includes both startups and large financial institutions, according to TechCrunch. The startup raised a $22.5 million seed extension round led by Microsoft's M12 in December, just eight months after raising a $22 million seed round from Mayfield, TechCrunch reported.

Nimble

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $221 million

What it does: Nimble develops fully autonomous e-commerce fulfillment centers powered by its warehouse robots that can retrieve inventory, pick items, pack orders, and sort packages.

What makes it promising: Backed by FedEd and Accel, Nimble is building a national network of next-generation robotic warehouses to provide faster, lower-cost logistics. It aims to solve a critical pain point for customers like Puma and AdoreMe, who are attempting to scale operations while facing a national shortage of warehouse workers. The company most recently raised $106 million in a round co-led by FedEx and Cedar Pine that propelled its valuation to $1 billion.

Norm Ai

HQ: New York

Total raised: $38 million

What it does: Builds AI agents to automate compliance tasks and regulatory assessments.

What makes it promising: Norm's AI platform takes complex regulations and converts them into code that can be parsed by computers, allowing companies to clearly explain compliance findings, for example. The startup raised three rounds of funding — a Series A and two follow-on investments — in just 11 months. Coatue Management led its $27 million Series A, and Bain Capital Ventures, Blackstone Innovations Investments, and others participated.

Please, formerly MultiOn

HQ: Palo Alto, California

Total raised: Undisclosed

What it does: Please develops an AI assistant that helps consumers with their plans, using agents to complete actions like booking trips and managing reservations.

What makes it promising: The startup, which rebranded from MultiOn to Please in January, develops web-based AI agents that are powered by LLMs. Major players like Amazon and General Catalyst invested in the company in a round that valued it at $100 million, The Information reported.

Reality Defender

HQ: New York

Total raised: $40 million

What it does: Reality Defender has developed a deepfake detection platform that spots AI-generated content.

What makes it promising: As the use of AI-generated content burgeons, the technology has also been increasingly used to create fraudulent content and misinformation. Reality Defender's platform can detect if something is AI-generated in images, text, video, and audio.

In particular, the startup has found a niche in providing its services to enterprise clients to help identify deepfakes. It has developed an API and web app that allows users to analyze content and gauge if it's been modified by AI; however, it doesn't directly discern if something is a deepfake. Rather, users are given inference points so they can determine the extent to which AI has altered something.

In October 2024, the startup raised a fresh $33 million to grow its offerings in the financial sector.

Remark

HQ: Boston

Total raised: $10 million

What it does: Remark develops a shopping guidance platform that connects shoppers with online product experts.

What makes it promising: Remark helps shoppers make purchase decisions by allowing them to asynchronously chat with product experts, both human and AI, simulating the experience of chatting with a sales associate at a brick-and-mortar store. The two-year-old company helps consumers looking to purchase items in the fashion, home goods, outdoor, baby products, beauty, and skincare industries, Remark told Business Insider. And it's already seeing promising results: Brands using Remark have seen a 10-12% revenue lift and a 30+% conversion rate, according to the company.

Robin AI

HQ: London and New York

Total raised: $71 million

What it does: Robin AI develops an AI legal assistant that drafts and analyzes contracts for companies and their legal teams.

What makes it promising: Robin AI announced not one but two rounds of funding in 2024: a $26 million Series B, led by Temasek, and a $25 million follow-on investment, with participation from Paypal Ventures and Cambridge University. The company's AI-powered platform helps in-house counsel teams and enterprises streamline their contract review processes. Richard Robinson, who worked as a lawyer at Clifford Chance, and James Clough, previously a machine learning researcher, founded the company in 2019.

Rogo

HQ: New York

Total raised: $27 million

What it does: Rogo develops an AI agent that helps Wall Street professionals with tasks such as company research and memo drafting.

What makes it promising: Investment banking may look high-octane on HBO's "Industry," but working on Wall Street is a grind. Enter Rogo. The AI-powered platform helps analysts quickly analyze earnings, construct market maps, and other tasks. Two of Rogo's cofounders, Gabe Stengel and John Willett, previously worked in investment banking. Investors include Khosla Ventures, Jack Altman's AltCapital, AlleyCorp, and BoxGroup.

Rox

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $50 million

What it does: Rox's team of AI sales assistants automates tasks and provides data-driven insights for sales teams.

What makes it promising: AI-powered tools like Rox are gaining traction with sales teams by reducing administrative work and improving deal execution. The company streamlines CRM updates, summarizes relevant news events, and drafts outreach in its platform, helping sales reps focus on closing deals rather than on tedious tasks. As of November 2024, over 35 enterprise sales teams from companies such as MongoDB and Ramp have used Rox. The startup raised both its seed round, led by Sequoia with participation from Google Ventures, and its Series A, led by General Catalyst, in stealth. It's currently in public beta.

Sierra

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $285 million

What it does: Seirra's AI-powered conversational agents interact with customers.

What makes it promising: Founded by OpenAI chairman and ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former Google executive Clay Bavor, Sierra's valuation soared to $4.5 billion at the end of 2024. Just don't call it a chatbot, as Taylor prefers to be thought of as "conversational AI." Whatever you call it, companies like ADT, Casper, and Sonos have used Sierra to handle customer service inquiries.

Skyfire

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $8.5 million

What it does: Skyfire is a payment network that lets AI agents autonomously spend money on behalf of their human counterparts.

What makes it promising: With AI agents expected to be a big theme in 2025, investors are excited about the types of tasks they can take over from humans. While other AI agents are handling customer service and sales calls, Skyfire is an early agentic player in the fintech space and is tackling the regulatory and societal considerations that come with giving a robot license to swipe a credit card.

Skyfire launched from stealth last summer and raised $8.5 million in seed funding from financial firms Neuberger Berman, DRW, and Brevan Howard Digital, plus Intersection Growth Partners, Arrington Capital, RedBeard Ventures, and others.

Smartcat

HQ: Amsterdam

Total raised: $75 million

What it does: Smartcat provides AI-generated translation services for businesses.

What makes it promising: For companies that want to scale globally, Smartcat offers a more cost-effective solution than hiring a gaggle of human translators. Smartcat's AI can translate both written and spoken words into more than 280 languages, making it easier to deploy corporate content, such as marketing materials and internal training videos, to office locations around the world.

Smartcat raised a $43 million Series C last year from Left Lane Capital, Koro Capital, Marbruck Investments, and Chrome Capital.

StackGen

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $12.3 million

What it does: StackGen uses AI to auto-generate infrastructure such as servers, databases, and networking from code.

What makes it promising: The AI revolution is coming for developers, with plenty of startups cropping up to help — and in some cases, replace — software engineers designing apps and building websites. StackGen is unique because it operates at the infrastructure layer of software development: Its AI reads code created by human developers and uses the information to generate technical infrastructure like servers and databases. StackGen raised $12.3 million last fall from a group of investors, including Thomvest Ventures, FireBolt Ventures, WestWave Capital, and Secure Octane.

Sublime Security

HQ: Washington, DC

Total raised: $94 million

What it does: Sublime's email security platform detects and prevents malicious behaviors in the inbox, enabling organizations to defend against phishing, email fraud, and other cyberattacks.

What makes it promising: Sublime's business has exploded as generative AI gives attackers a way to rapidly produce mass spear-phishing campaigns. The company has quadrupled its customer base over the past year and added enterprise customers like Elastic, Benteler, and SentinelOne to a roster of existing customers like Spotify, Reddit, and Brex. The company has won backing from top investors, including IVP, Index Ventures, and Slow Ventures.

SuperAGI

HQ: Newark, Delaware

Total raised: $15 million

What it does: SupaerAGI develops AI Agents for fully automated sales, marketing, support, and app development.

What makes it promising: SuperAGI got a big boost last year, picking up funding from Newlands VC, the secretive firm started by WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum. Aiming to supercharge business teams, SuperAGI is used by developers at Google, Tesla, OpenAI, and Microsoft.

Synthesia

HQ: London

Total raised: Over $350 million

What it does: Synthesia is an AI video creator that helps companies with tasks such as employee training, customer support, and sales.

What makes it promising: Founded in 2017, Synthesia was early to the generative AI boom. It reportedly doubled its valuation in 2024 and moved beyond video creation to help businesses solve a wider range of needs. More than 5,000 companies use Snythsia, from Heineken to Dupont to Zoom.

Together AI

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $232 million

What it does: Together AI has created an open-source generative AI and infrastructure platform for developing AI models. The company runs data centers suited specifically for AI workloads.

What makes it promising: The company most recently raised $106 million in a round led by Salesforce Ventures that saw its valuation cross the $1 billion mark. Other big-name investors include Coatue, Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Greycroft, and Nvidia. The startup is reportedly raising another round of funding that would value it at $3 billion.

Torq

HQ: New York

Total raised: $192 million

What it does: Torq has created autonomous security operations to help companies guard against cyber attacks.

What makes it promising: Torq achieved 300% revenue growth and increased its headcount by 200% in 2024, according to the company. It recently hired a new head of sales Usman Gulfaraz, to help the company get to $100 million in annual recurring revenue for 2026. Customers include Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inditex, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, and Siemens.

Unify

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $18.2 million

What it does: Unify is a developer of a performance management system for sales teams.

What makes it promising: Backed by OpenAI and Thrive Capital, Unify helps salespeople tailor "warm outbound" emails that are less likely to get lost in crowded email boxes. Unify's growing team includes ex-staffers from Spotify, Airbnb, and Ramp.

Vapi

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $20 million

What it does: Vapi is building an infrastructure tool for developers to build AI voice agents.

What makes it promising: Investors are foaming at the mouth to back promising AI agents, and one group of startups is specifically using the tech to understand spoken commands. One of these so-called AI voice agent startups is Vapi, which is creating a tool for developers to create, test, and deploy AI voice agents of their own that can be applied in a number of business settings, from reception desk to employee training to sales call.

Vapi raised $20 million at the end of 2024 from Bessemer Venture Partners. Abstract Ventures, AI Grant, Y Combinator, Saga Ventures, and Michael Ovitz.

Writer

HQ: San Francisco

Total raised: $326 million

What it does: Writer is a full-stack generative AI platform that gives businesses tools to create their own AI applications and automate other workflows.

What makes it promising: Writer has carved out a niche in enterprise AI and offers a secure, customizable generative AI platform tailored for businesses — which sets it apart from more generalist models like OpenAI. The company has attracted major clients, including Fortune 500 firms, by focusing on data privacy, compliance, and domain-specific AI solutions, and its recently released AI model emphasizes control, security, and enterprise-grade performance.

Writer raised a $200 million Series C in November 2024 from Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Workday Ventures, Accenture, Balderton, Insight Partners, and Vanguard. The round valued the startup at $1.9 billion.

7AI

HQ: Boston

Total raised: $36 million

What it does: 7AI uses AI agents to autonomously respond to alerts and investigate cyber threats on behalf of security operations teams.

What makes it promising: 7AI cofounders Lior Div and Yonatan Striem Amit previously cofounded Cyberreason, another cybersecurity company. 7AI raised a $36 million seed round in June 2024 that valued the company at over $100 million. The financing was led by Greylock Partners, with participation from Spark Capital and CRV.

• Pulse raised $3.9 million to enhance unstructured data preparation for machine learning models.
• The startup addresses the demand for custom copilots and agents using internal enterprise data.
• Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross led the seed funding round for Pulse.

Pulse, a five-person startup specializing in unstructured data preparation for machine learning models, has raised $3.9 million in a funding round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.

Pulse sells businesses a toolkit designed to convert raw, unstructured data into formats ready for use by machine learning models. This addresses the growing demand for enterprises to build custom copilots, chatbots, and digital agents tailored to their internal data.

"Let's say you're a financial institution or a healthcare company. There is no room for an LLM to make something up or hallucinate a number or an error," said Sid Manchkanti, cofounder and CEO of Pulse.

Before Pulse, Manchkanti was a software developer at Nvidia. He started the company with his childhood friend, Ritvik Pandey, who previously worked on Tesla's supercomputer project for training machine learning models, called Dojo.

Other investors in the company's seed round include Y Combinator, Sequoia Scout, Soma Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, the venture capital firm founded by Joe Montana, and individuals from Nvidia, OpenAI, and fintech startup Ramp.

Training data is the raw material that enables large language models to learn the relationships between words and phrases and mimic human-like text. However, training these models isn't just about feeding them massive amounts of information. It takes curating and preparing information in the right way. You don't put diesel in a gas engine.

Structured data is organized and searchable data that fits neatly into rows and columns, like data in an Excel spreadsheet or customer records. Unstructured data looks more like the files you work with on a daily basis. Think pages-long customer contracts, employee handbooks, sales presentations, and product demo videos. According to the tech market intelligence firm IDC, 90% of the world's data is unstructured.

The conversion of messy data into training data often involves human workers. They may read through documents and images, enter relevant information into formats such as spreadsheets or databases, and review and clean the data — correcting errors and labeling the data to provide context for machine learning applications.

To automate this process, Pulse's solution uses computer vision techniques and fine-tuned extraction models to understand complex documents and accurately parse their data.

Manchkanti says Pulse's technology not only streamlines the process — making it faster and more efficient for businesses to leverage their unstructured data in machine learning models — but also improves accuracy. He estimates that teams lose 20% to 30% of their data with existing solutions due to poor extraction.

Pulse's round builds on a swell of money into startups offering tools to eliminate this unstructured data bottleneck. Unstructured has raised $65 million in funding to date and counts over a thousand paying customers. Instabase recently secured $100 million in funding to expand its toolkit for extracting and processing unstructured data.

Manchkanti said the new money put into Pulse would allow the company to hire engineers and add data extraction for other formats, namely audio and video.

• Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, has launched Thinking Machines Lab.
• Her new startup focuses on human-AI collaboration and maintaining high standards for AI safety.
• Murati has hired top talent from Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Thinking Machines Lab, a new company created by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, emerged from stealth on Tuesday.

In a blog post, the startup positioned itself as an artificial intelligence research and product lab focused on making these systems more accessible.

"To bridge the gaps, we're building Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable," Murati wrote.

From the moment Murati stepped away from OpenAI, venture capitalists started circling the machine learning maven, vying to be among the first to offer checks to her new company.

In just a few months, Murati has assembled a team of machine learning researchers and engineers from Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other tech goliaths. The company reunites several of Murati's former coworkers, including John Schulman, who co-led the creation of ChatGPT; Jonathan Lachman, formerly the head of special projects at OpenAI; and Alexander Kirillov, who worked closely with Murati on ChatGPT's voice mode.

In the post, Murati said the startup would "emphasize human-AI collaboration" and "build multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively." She also said the startup would contribute to AI safety by "maintaining a high safety bar" that prevents the misuse of the company's released models, sharing best practices on how to build safe AI systems, and adding to external safety research.

• Shotsy is a first-of-its-kind app for tracking the use of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy.
• Software engineer Aja Beckett built the app out of necessity after finding manual notetaking clumsy.
• The company now has $2 million in fresh funding to ramp up marketing efforts and grow its team.

When Aja Beckett started using a GLP-1 medication, she took notes on her phone to track her doses, side effects, and hunger. As her notes became long and unruly, Beckett, who was working as a software engineer for The Athletic, decided to build an app instead.

Today, that app, Shotsy, has been downloaded over 100,00 times and has reached a revenue run rate of $1 million — a projection of yearly revenue based on current revenue numbers. The app is available to download and use for free and offers additional features that can be accessed through a $19.99 annual subscription. Beckett says the eight-month-old company is profitable.

Investors are taking notice. Shotsy has raised $2.25 million in seed funding to ramp up marketing and grow its team, the startup tells Business Insider exclusively. April Underwood of Adverb Ventures led the round, while Coalition Operators, Springbank Collective, and angel investor Esther Dyson participated.

The excitement around weight-loss drugs has both Big Pharma and Silicon Valley chasing the Wegovy wave. The telehealth unicorn startup Virta Health recently began prescribing Ozempic for weight loss in a push toward profitability. Omada Health, which works with employers and health plans to deliver better care to people with type 2 diabetes, said employer interest in its weight-loss program is behind its latest growth spurt. And on Super Bowl Sunday, ads for junk food and beer shared airtime with a controversial Hims & Hers spot promoting its version of the popular weight-loss drug.

But even as startups rush to capitalize on this supersized market, there hasn't been a basic app for tracking medication use. Beckett knows this firsthand.

Beckett, 43, said she's struggled with her weight for years and cycled through diets like keto and Weight Watchers. She became curious about Ozempic after reading about these drugs in the news. Thirteen months ago, she began using Zepbound, an injectable branded to treat obesity.

Beckett kicked her Dr. Pepper habit almost overnight. As she lost weight, a bum ankle that had bothered her for years was no longer sensitive. She also noticed that she could think more clearly without the "food noise."

She started tracking her weekly injections in the Notes app on her phone. Beckett noted that side effects like nausea peaked at different lengths of time after her shot, and by logging her doses, she could estimate when she would feel ill and plan accordingly. She also tracked her injection sites to make sure she rotated body areas and how much weight she lost per shot.

But the Notes app left her wanting. So she built an app, saying that her fading obsession with food gave her more energy on nights and weekends to code.

Beckett also became active on a Reddit group for Zepbound users. She invited other members to take the app for a test drive. The excitement was palpable, and the feedback poured in.

"Nobody else was providing any tools for specifically GLP-1 users," Beckett said. "So it was really exciting for all of us in the community to feel seen."

Shotsy saw 3,000 downloads in the first 24 hours after its App Store debut.

Still working full-time, Beckett used some of the subscription proceeds to hire a part-time designer to improve the app's look. The app continued to rack up downloads. She felt comfortable quitting her job when the app generated enough revenue to replace her software engineering salary.

"It started to feel like I was missing out on an opportunity to do everything I wanted to do with Shotsy," Beckett said.

By chance, she ran into an engineer friend and gave him a demo while traveling through an airport on her return from a developer conference. He asked to connect her to some investors, including Underwood, the former Slack head of product.

Shotsy clicked with the investor for a few reasons. It tapped into an emerging market that Swiss bank UBS says could eclipse 40 million people by 2029. Shotsy was the first to market with an app consumers were craving, as evidenced by the Reddit love. And it had a founder solving a problem she understood from experience.

"She needed it, she built it. It's gotten incredible traction as a side hustle," Underwood said. "She now has cash in the bank that allows her to build a team around her that is going to be able to extend the capabilities of the app to make it more useful and stickier, reach more audiences, and address more needs."

Beckett said Shotsy has only scratched the surface of its product road map, but she didn't comment on what that may include. Ashley Mayer, a general partner at Coalition Operators who led its Shotsy investment, said that the most important thing Shotsy can do now is create a product that users love.

"If you earn people's trust and you accompany them on a journey that is life-changing and emotional," said Mayer, Glossier's former communications boss, "you earn the right to build other experiences for them or help them in other ways."

• Glean has launched tools for building and managing digital agents that carry out tasks on their own.
• The company faces competition from Google, Snowflake, and Dropbox in enterprise search.
• Glean's new features include agent libraries and real-time internet search.

Glean is going all in on digital agents.

The enterprise software unicorn on Wednesday unveiled a new suite of tools for businesses to build, deploy, and manage digital agents. The company continues rolling out new products in the face of competition from Google, Snowflake, Dropbox, and others.

Glean's service lets employees query all their enterprise data. It tunnels through the customer's various systems and applications at unbelievable speeds and summarizes the findings.

The company has been testing new reasoning capabilities for several months with a select group of customers. It's now releasing some of those features widely.

Employees can describe a task using plain language, and Glean parses the prompt into smaller tasks and takes steps to achieve the desired outcome. For example, an employee can tell the Glean chatbot, "prep for my one-on-one with Tina." Glean blasts through their shared emails, Slack messages, Google Docs, Figma files, and other sources to suss out what topics should be addressed and then writes an agenda for the meeting.

The employee can save this "agent," basically a set of instructions, to their workspace and recall it at any time. They can also configure the agent's settings to run ahead of every one-on-one with Tina and drop a link to the agenda in the calendar event.

Emrecan Dogan, Glean's head of product, said the company has just begun to deliver on the promise of what agents can really do.

"Your agents are working for you while you are asleep," Dogan told Business Insider on a call earlier in the week.

Founded by a team of former Google search engineers, Glean began its life as "Google search for businesses." The rub is that Google has since entered that space. It's made numerous upgrades to the Google Cloud platform, enabling developers to build search into their applications. The Information reported in November that Google is preparing to launch a new enterprise search product to compete directly with Glean's.

The new agent environment is part of Glean's strategy to offer more powerful software features to customers as it faces mounting competition. The company said last week that it crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in the 2024 fiscal year.

On the call with Business Insider, Dogan demonstrated other use cases that leverage Glean's latest release. He prompted the chatbot to prepare a table comparing Glean to Candian rival Coveo for a sales call. In seconds, it combed internal data sources and searched the web to prepare the table, all while showing on-screen the steps it took in real time.

The new release also includes an agent library designed to help workers get started with pre-built agents. Employees can share custom agents with their teams so workers don't waste precious time if, Dogan said, "somebody spent the brain cycles to come up with a better agent."

• Tech startups like Perplexity, You.com, and Liner aim to challenge Google's dominance in search.
• They're now enlisting college students to promote and endorse their brands on campuses.
• To win over young people is one strategy to win the market.

As Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others rush to build a more powerful search engine, smaller tech rivals are trying a well-worn strategy to spur growth: using college students to help convert people into faithful users.

In the past year, startups like Perplexity, You.com, and Liner, which is South Korea's search equivalent, have recruited hundreds of students to promote and endorse their services. These "campus ambassadors" post flyers, throw hackathons and speaker events, and give away fast food and merch in exchange for signing up.

Perplexity's downloads have been helped by guerilla marketing tactics that specifically target students. Greg Feingold, the company's head of community, says a successful back-to-school campaign pulled in over 50,000 sign-ups for a free month of Perplexity Pro. By December, the three-year-old search and chatbot developer saw usage surge among American students, with millions of queries sent each week.

"They're a substantial part of our user base," Feingold said, "and also they come back to the product a lot. It's so tied to what they are using the internet for, which is research, studying, this kind of knowledge work that Perplexity is built for."

As of March 2024, Perplexity had around 15 million monthly active users; it declined to give a more recent user total. The company was last valued at around $9 billion in a funding round led by IVP.

Building a viral app all but requires buy-in from teens, tweens, and twenty-somethings. By now, most of them have heard of ChatGPT. It's been over two years since the chatbot's public launch dazzled the tech world. And the use of ChatGPT is ticking up, particularly among younger people. About a quarter of American teens say they've used ChatGPT for schoolwork, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in the fall.

Enlisting students allows ChatGPT's rivals to reach trendsetters who have access to thousands of other students through their dorms, mailing lists, private WhatsApp groups, and classes. This strategy mirrors the tactics used by iconic apps like Facebook, Snapchat, and Tinder.

"This is the generation that has grown up with tech in their lives," said Emma Yee Yick, global community lead at startup Notion, where she's run a campus ambassador program these past three years. "And so now they're in college, and they are the ones who are going to decide what tools we use in the future."

ChatGPT, but better

Liner is one of the most popular search engines you've never heard of. With over 10 million users globally, Andreessen Horowitz recognized it as the fourth-most widely used generative AI web product last year. The app works similarly to Perplexity but instead of combing large swaths of the internet, it narrows its search to credible sources like academic papers and government databases.

But as a South Korean startup, Liner's name barely registers outside some higher education circles. The company's campus ambassador program aims to change that.

Every week, Kristine Zhou, a sophomore and Liner ambassador at the University of California, Berkeley, hangs outside the student center with a laptop and a party tray of Chick-fil-A. She offers demos to students passing by, reeling them in with free chicken sandwiches. But the real hook, said Zhou, is Liner's focus on providing users with reliable content.

The program kicked off last semester at four California universities, which the company picked for their proximity to Liner employees in San Francisco, said Alex Yoon, head of US operations.

With Perplexity, student evangelists focus on practical applications when tabling on the quad or speaking to a club. Arthita Ghosh, a graduate student at Chicago Booth in London on an exchange term, engages students by asking about their travel plans. She uses the app to swiftly generate a two-day itinerary with must-see attractions, travel times, and costs.

Isis Decrem, a computer science major at the University of Chicago, emphasizes the versatility of Perplexity. She demonstrates the ability to switch between models within the app to vary the outcome.

You.com is also in the business of search but doesn't call itself a search engine. Founded by two former Stanford machine learning researchers, the company makes a digital workspace for conducting research, creating content, and building custom agents to perform tasks on their own. To help grow its foothold, You.com leverages campus ambassadors at 18 universities, including Stanford, New York University, and Georgia Tech.

Vishal Makhijani, You.com's chief operating officer, notes that if the program works as it should, the company should see benefits for years to come.

"You.com is trying to be the leading productivity platform for knowledge workers, and college students are just knowledge workers in a year or two," said Makhijani, who was the longtime chief executive of online education company Udacity.

Those loyal users might continue using You.com in their first jobs, streamlining the company's efforts to sell into organizations and shortening sales cycles, said Makhijani.

Goodies and goodwill

To be sure, the unspoken goal of competitors in this market is to secure a second-place finish. Google is the dominant search engine, with a 90% share of the global search market.

While these startups may not dethrone Google as the go-to search engine, their efforts are far from futile, especially for the student ambassadors involved.

Though the position is usually unpaid (Liner pays students $20 an hour), the student ambassador will likely benefit from free subscriptions, logo apparel, virtual events with company leaders, and the opportunity to link their name with a buzzy startup. In today's frozen job market, many students believe working as a campus ambassador helps bridge the gap to their ideal employers.

Perplexity saw an over 600% increase in applications for its spring semester program compared to the fall, according to Feingold, Perplexity's community lead. The program now boasts "hundreds" of ambassadors across the globe, from Egypt to France to South Africa.

The ambassador program's reach is reflected not just in numbers but also in daily student life. At the MIT Sloan School of Management, Honey Pamnani knew she'd made an impact during class when her professor answered a student's question with a simple directive.

"Just Perplexity it."

• Glean hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year after doubling its customer base.
• Enterprise search is a competitive field, with players like Google and OpenAI.
• Glean plans to expand into new markets and verticals to sustain growth.

Glean, a company that makes search chatbots and agents for businesses, said it achieved an annual recurring revenue of $100 million in its last fiscal year. That's up from hitting $50 million ARR, or the yearly value of last month's revenue, in 2024.

A company that began as "Google search for the workplace" has more than doubled its customer base in the past year alone and was most recently valued at $4.6 billion in a funding round that included Altimeter, Kleiner Perkins, Sapphire Ventures, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. It has become a daily use product for hundreds of customers, including Databricks, Duolingo, and Plaid.

Glean is part of a select group of AI startups seeing fast-growing revenue and strong investor interest. Anysphere, the 3-year-old startup behind the AI coding assistant Cursor, recently was valued at $2.5 billion and hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue, The New York Times reported last month. The AI legal startup Harvey is raising a new round at a $3 billion valuation and was bringing in $50 million in annual recurring revenue as of December, The Information said.

Enterprise search has become a key battleground for a wide variety of businesses, such as Google, Snowflake, and Dropbox. OpenAI last year bought an enterprise search startup that could help ChatGPT compete more directly with Glean.

Glean's business has grown as organizations grasp the enormous potential of artificial intelligence to provide quick productivity gains, Arvind Jain, Glean's founder and CEO, said. The company often sells to customers who are just getting their feet wet and buying their first pure AI software, Jain added.

He said they say, "'Can I just have an assistant like ChatGPT but something that is knowledgeable about my company, my employees, everything?' That's what Glean is."

Employees today rely on various systems and applications to do their work. These systems produce large amounts of data that's often siloed, which makes it challenging for employees to find information quickly. Glean's service allows workers to search across these disparate data sources and create and summarize content.

Glean says it avoids the issue of hallucinations through a technique called retrieval-augmented generation. This framework gathers relevant information from external knowledge sources and feeds it to a large language model to write a response. In the past year, Glean has baked in agentic reasoning, which describes the ability of artificial intelligence systems to break up queries into steps and execute a plan to train "agents" for specific tasks.

Room to grow

Glean has projected annual recurring revenue of $200 million to $250 million by the end of 2025, a person with direct knowledge of the business' financials said.

Jain didn't comment on the specific numbers but said there were several areas where Glean was targeting its next pockets of growth. It's reaching into new markets, such as Japan and Europe, where Jain said it already had some customers.

The company is hiring several account executives in those regions and a partner manager in Japan to work with software resellers and consultancies that help customers implement Glean's technology.

Glean will also need to expand beyond its base of technology companies to sustain its growth. Jain said Glean had customers in verticals such as healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and financial services and would continue to push into new areas.