• 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.

• OpenAI said it was investigating whether DeepSeek inappropriately used its AI outputs.
• DeepSeek built AI models using less-advanced chips at a fraction of the cost of US rivals.
• "We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology," OpenAI said.

OpenAI is investigating whether DeepSeek inappropriately trained its powerful AI models using the US startup's technology.

A spokesperson for OpenAI said the company was reviewing the matter closely and would take "aggressive, proactive countermeasures" to protect its AI models from improper use.

"We know that groups in the PRC (People's Republic of China) are actively working to use methods, including what's known as distillation, to try to replicate advanced US AI models," the spokesperson wrote in an email. "We are aware of and reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and will share information as we know more."

DeepSeek built top-performing AI models using less-advanced chips at what it says is a fraction of the cost of rivals such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta. The news has hammered some tech stocks this week and put a big question mark over massive spending on AI chips and related infrastructure.

It's a particular challenge to OpenAI because DeepSeek's models are priced way below the US startup's offerings.

OpenAI lets developers with a valid license integrate its proprietary models into their own applications. Its terms of use, however, prohibit developers from using outputs from its models to develop any models that directly compete with its products and services.

David Sacks, the White House's artificial-intelligence and crypto czar, told Fox News it was possible that DeepSeek had engaged in intellectual property theft.

"We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology and will continue working closely with the US government to protect the most capable models being built here," the OpenAI spokesperson told BI on Wednesday.

Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that Microsoft notified OpenAI that its security researchers in the fall had observed individuals they believed may be affiliated with DeepSeek siphoning a large amount of data using OpenAI's application programming interface, or API.

• Delve launches from stealth with $3 million in funding to automate compliance evidence collection.
• Legacy systems require teams to manually collect screenshots; Delve uses AI agents to automate.
• Delve says it has reached a revenue run rate of over $1 million and has signed 100+ customers.

Delve, a San Francisco startup that uses artificial intelligence agents to collect and verify compliance evidence for businesses, just launched from stealth with $3.3 million in funding, the startup tells Business Insider exclusively.

Businesses handling data at scale need to collect and submit a variety of documents to show compliance with data and security standards. Legacy systems for gathering this evidence require teams to manually collect screenshots of security configurations.

"Compliance is one of those industries that's silently waiting for its revolution," said Selin Kocalar, a cofounder and chief operating officer of Delve.

Delve says it saves customers hours of busywork by using agents — software that can perform specific tasks without much human intervention — to collect evidence across web apps, internal tools, and custom software. For example, a customer can write a single instruction and Delve's agents automatically collect the required screenshots. The platform continuously monitors the customer's tech stack and alerts team members of compliance gaps before they affect security.

Delve says it has reached a revenue run rate of several million dollars and has signed over a hundred customers, including 11x, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed sales automation platform and Bland, a startup developing agents for phone-based tasks. Delve investors include Y Combinator, General Catalyst, FundersClub, and Soma Capital.

The startup's founders, Kocalar and Karun Kaushik, met as classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and started working on a medical scribe solution. They saw up close the pains of showing compliance with HIPAA, a federal law that protects the privacy and security of health information, and decided to switch to building Delve.

According to Kocalar, the platform now covers SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, GDPR, PCI DSS, and custom frameworks, with additional certifications in the works.

Businesses are increasingly turning to agents like Salesforce's Agentforce and Microsoft's Copilot to help them automate tasks and offload busywork. Investors are taking notice. In 2024, according to PitchBook data, startups exploring the application of agents raised $8.2 billion in funding. Some of that money flowed to startups in compliance, such as Norm Ai, which converts regulations from public laws to company policies into working computer code, and Greenlite, which applies agents to financial compliance.

• LinkedIn is gaining traction among venture capitalists for networking and brand building.
• More than half of investors on the Forbes Midas List are posting at least monthly on LinkedIn.
• A ghostwriter for startup investors says LinkedIn gives founders a clear sense of their mindset.

X has long been the virtual water cooler where tech founders and investors come to network, crow about success, or meme the latest Paul Graham essay. While it still reigns supreme in the venture capitalist's hierarchy of social media platforms — when it comes to polishing a brand that helps them stand out in a crowded field — more and more dealmakers are also embracing LinkedIn.

According to a study by the global advisory firm Milltown Partners, LinkedIn and X are seeing shifts in how often investors on the Forbes Midas List are posting. In 2024, 55% of these top VCs posted on LinkedIn at least once a month. That's on par with the 54% of investors posting monthly on X, although that platform saw the number of VCs posting daily on X halved.

Maren Bannon of January Ventures hasn't posted on X in a year, despite having many thousands of followers, because she said the "ROI" of posting is unclear. "I have become more active on LinkedIn," Bannon said, "because that's where the people I want to reach are spending time." She's not the only one.

The venture capitalist Henri Pierre-Jacques said he used to tweet twice a day but dialed it back last year. He noticed that his tweets weren't getting as much traction after X pushed an update so that when people open the app, they see a stream of tweets from people they don't follow. "I don't post nearly as much on Twitter anymore because it's not worth it," Pierre-Jacques said. (He still posts often.)

On LinkedIn, Pierre-Jacques, a managing director of Harlem Capital, shares a hodgepodge of fund news, career advice, and family photos. His recent accounting of what he's learned from the billionaires in his network garnered 1,100 likes and 96 comments. "I used to go to Twitter for big reach, now I go to LinkedIn," he said.

LinkedIn is where the major links of the funding food chain intersect, according to Alexa von Tobel, a managing partner of Inspired Capital. Founders are looking for their next hire. Investors like Pierre-Jacques are searching the platform for free agents working at "Stealth Startup" with the hope of backing the next big thing. And investors of pensions, endowments, and other institutions that supply the capital for venture funds say they're using the site in the course of their diligence.

Institutional investors surveyed around the globe said LinkedIn has a greater impact on future investment decisions than any other digital channel, save for a company's investor relations website, according to a 2023 survey from PR firm Brunswick Group.

"For us, we're a small fund, so we don't have a marketing budget," said Jenny Fielding, a managing partner of Everywhere Ventures. She said a tier-one investor can afford to hire marketers or sponsor conferences to raise its profile. "Our best asset is really the personal brands of our team," Fielding said, "so we just try to get the word out about issues that are important to us and to our key stakeholder, which is the founder."

As LinkedIn gets bigger, other investors are shelling out to make an impression. "LinkedIn used to be a nice-to-have, and we're realizing more and more that it's a need-to-have," said Alyssa Greenfield, a ghostwriter who authors LinkedIn posts for tech investors and founders. Her regular clients meet with her monthly to riff on what's new and brainstorm ideas, but she said some of her most inspired content comes out of a quick text from an investor after meeting a founder.

Greenfield's business has ballooned in the last year, with much of the inbound coming from small, lesser-known firms. She recently signed a firm as a client to build up the LinkedIn presence of six or seven partners. "They're feeling like the best founders out there are not going to give them the time of day if there's no content from their partners online that gives them a sense of what it might be like to work with them," Greenfield said.

Founders know what they're getting when they read Hunter Walk on LinkedIn. The super angel, whose early investments include Plaid, Gusto, and Chime, became a LinkedIn "influencer" in 2012 and now counts 870,000 followers. His near-constant stream of insights, sardonic quips, and cartoons serves as an open invitation into his investor mindset, giving founders a clear indicator of whether their values align with his.

Although Walk said he's not looking for an explicit return on LinkedIn, he believes that posting helps him stay "passively top of mind" in the high-tech circles he runs in. "Hopefully, that reminds them to follow up with me outside of LinkedIn," Walk said.

• TRAC developed an AI model to predict the startups most likely to become unicorns.
• The firm has updated its list to reveal 30 new startups in 2025 that the model identified.
• TRAC says the companies it identifies have a one-in-five probability of becoming a unicorn.

Even though venture capitalists invest in tech, they have traditionally chosen early-stage investments that are decidedly low-tech, based largely on gut feelings, founder background, and personal relationships.

TRAC, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm cofounded by Fred Campbell, Joseph Aaron, Scott Pyne, Steve Marek, and Dick Fredericks in 2020, wants to change that.

The firm developed a proprietary model that uses AI to predict which early-stage startups are most likely to become unicorns, companies valued at more than a billion dollars. In 2023, TRAC first revealed 30 of the startups its model identified exclusively with Insider and also revealed its methodology. This year, the firm agreed to provide an updated list.

A few things are surprising about TRAC's model, which is based on over 30 sources of both public and private data that Aaron calls "Moneyball for venture capital."

For one thing, the firm says it is much more effective to focus on which startups are not likely to succeed versus picking the winners.

"Our algorithms are not really selecting needles from a haystack, as much as removing all the hay," Aaron explained. "Our AI eliminates about 99% of all early-stage companies from consideration, because our data predicts these companies have a higher probability of failure."

Another surprising thing about TRAC's model is it does not value founders as predictive. Instead, it finds the 291,000 investors in its database much more useful for determining a startup's success, especially a tiny number of just about 247 top angel investors and firms it calls "SuperForecasters."

"These extraordinary investors make a profit on two-thirds of their positions and one in five of their investments returns over 10X," Aaron explained.

While TRAC declined to share the full list of SuperForecasters it did share a random sampling of 30 of them with BI last year.

Less than 2% of all startups attract a SuperForecaster so that eliminates over 98% of all startups from TRAC's formula.

How accurate is TRAC's formula? Like early-stage investing as a whole, it takes a long time to know who is truly good at their job because venture investing is typically judged after a decade or more.

The firm says the companies it identifies have a one-in-five probability of becoming a unicorn, and it has been especially good at eliminating false positives, or an investment that goes bust.

"Most early-stage companies fail within 18 months of raising a round," Aaron said. "Similar vintage early-stage VCs would have had upwards of 20% of their portfolio be false positive within the first few years."

From the 2023 list, some of the companies listed have already achieved unicorn status or come close. Legal AI startup Harvey AI was valued at $1.5 billion in 2024. AI startup Hebbia raised $130 million at a $700 million valuation in 2024.

TRAC says it has made 61 seed investments, and none have lost money. "

"That is the only stat we have with bragging rights," Aaron said.

Here is the updated list of 30 companies in 2025 TRAC's model identified as being the next unicorns, in alphabetical order. The companies all have a valuation of less than $270 million. The average valuation is $149 million.

Amplify

What it does: Comprehensive life insurance platform

Founded: 2019

Last post-money valuation: $90 million, according to the company

Total raised: $45 million, according to the company

CEO: Hannah Wu

Founders: Hannah Wu and Qiyun Cai

Select investors: Greycroft, Anthemis, Mana Ventures, Crosslink Capital

Anrok

What it does: Global sales tax platform specifically built for software companies

Founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: $250 million, according to the company

Total raised: $54 million, according to the company

CEO: Michelle Valentine

Founders: Michelle Valentine and Kannan Goundan

Select investors: Khosla Ventures, Elad Gil, Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital

Beacons

What it does: E-commerce platform and online solutions for creators

Founded: 2019

Last post-money valuation: $123 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $30 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Neal Jean

Founders: Neal Jean, David Zeng, Greg Luppescu, Jesse Zhang

Select investors: Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Kora, Mantis VC

Beehiiv

What it does: Helps people publish newsletters

Founded: 2021

Last post-money valuation: $225 million, according to the company

Total raised: $49.7 million, according to the company

CEO: Tyler Denk

Founders: Tyler Denk, Jacob Hurd, Benjamin Hargett

Select investors: New Enterprise Associates, Sapphire Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Scott Galloway

Cal.com

What it does: Open-source scheduling infrastructure for various business sectors

Founded: 2021

Last post-money valuation: $175 million, according to the company

Total raised: $32.5 million, according to the company

President: Bailey Pumfleet

Founders: Bailey Pumfleet and Peer Richelsen

Select investors: Seven Seven Six, OSS Capital, Obvious Ventures, Tribe Capital, Alex Bouaziz, Jack Altman, Anthony Pompliano

Canary Technologies

What it does: Guest management platform and operational workflows for hotels

Founded: 2018

Last post-money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $97 million, according to the company

CEO: Harman Singh Narula

Founders: SJ Sawhney and Harman Singh Narula

Select investors: Insight Partners, F-Prime Capital, Y Combinator

Databento

What it does: Distributes market data from over 45 trading exchanges

Founded: 2019

Last post-money valuation: $110 million, according to the company

Total raised: $37 million, according to the company

CEO: Christina Qi

Founders: Christina Qi and Luca Lin

Select investors: Redpoint Ventures, Unusual Ventures, Indicator Ventures, Tribe Capital, Operator Collective

Factory

What it does: Helps organizations manage and automate their software development

Founded: 2023

Last post-money valuation: $120 million, according to the company

Total raised: $20 million, according to the company

CEO: Matan Grinberg

Founders: Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes

Select investors: Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, Mantis VC, Ali Ghodsi

Fieldguide

What it does: Workflow automation software for assurance and advisory firms

Founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $50 million, according to the company

CEO: Jin Chang

Founders: Jin Chang and Chris Szymansky

Select investors: Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, Y Combinator, Floodgate, Elad Gil, Justin Kan

FlutterFlow

What it does: Low-code platform for mobile app developers

Founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: $170 million, according to the company

Total raised: $30 million, according to the company

CEO: Abel Mengistu

Founders: Alex Greaves and Abel Mengistu

Select investors: GV, CRV, Gradient Ventures, Xoogler Ventures, Y Combinator

Goldcast

What it does: Helps companies conduct and measure their event marketing efforts

Founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: $119 million, according to the company

Total raised: $40 million, according to the company

CEO: Palash Soni

Founders: Kishore Kothandaraman, Palash Soni, and Aashish Srinivas

Select investors: Underscore VC, Unusual Ventures, Westbridge Capital, HubSpot Ventures, Manik Gupta, Lenny Rachitsky, Scott Belsky, Elias Torres

K2 Space

What it does: Developing satellites that can deliver heavy payloads into orbit

Founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $71 million, according to the company

CEO: Karan Kunjur

Founders: Karan Kunjur and Neel Kunjur

Select investors: Altimeter Capital, Alpine Space Ventures, First Round Capital, Republic Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Also Capital

Lumos

What it does: Provides identity management software across a company's entire workforce and apps

Founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: $205 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $65.3 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Andrej Safundzic

Founders: Alan Flores-López, Leo Mehr, and Andrej Safundzic

Select investors: Andreessen Horowitz, Scale Venture Partners, Neo

Legacy

What it does: Provides at-home sperm testing and freezing services

Founded: 2018

Last post-money valuation: $150 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $47.87 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Khaled Kteily

Founder: Khaled Kteily

Select Investors: Bain Capital, Alumni Ventures, TRAC, FirstMark

Mermaid Chart

What it does: Uses AI for visual diagramming

Founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $9.5 million, according to PitchBook

Founder: Knut Sveidqvist

Select investors: Sequoia, M12, Open Core Ventures

Neurable

What it does: Makes neurotechnology headphones that capture brain data and tell the user about their cognitive performance

Founded: 2015

Last post-money valuation: $23.5 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $30.9 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Ramses Alcaide

Founders: Adam Molnar and Ramses Alcaide

Select investors: Trac, Deepwater Asset Management

Nexus Laboratories

What it does: Developing a verifiable computing system that will bring greater ownership and identity protection to all users online

Founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: Unknown, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $27.2 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Daniel Marin

Founder: Daniel Marin

Select investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, SV Angel

Optery

What it does: Privacy management software that gives individuals control of their personal data

Founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: $7.14 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $2.7 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Lawrence Gentilello

Founders: Lawrence Gentilello, Chen Atlas, and Dekel Barzilay

Select investors: Y Combinator, Trac, Goodwater Capital

Orb

What it does: Offers real-time billing solutions for AI and software companies

Founded: 2021

Last post-money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $44.1 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Alvaro Morales

Founders: Kshitij Grover and Alvaro Morales

Select investors: Greylock, Menlo Ventures, Mayfield

Otto

What it does: Software designed to help veterinary clinics deliver better care

Founded: 2015

Last post-money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $43 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Zeynep Young

Founders: Steven Carter and Price Fallin

Select investors: Mercury Fund, Dundee Venture Capital, Atento Capital

Peregrine Technologies

What it does: Enables local police departments and public safety agencies to manage and visualize their data

Founded: 2018

Last post-money valuation: $360 million, according to the company

Total raised: $60 million, according to the company

CEO: Nicholas Noone

Founders: Nicholas Noone and Ben Rudolph

Select investors: Friends & Family Capital, Fifth Down Capital, Goldcrest Capital, Craft Ventures, Godfrey Capital

Pylon

What it does: Customer operations platform that broadcasts product updates and upcoming events and collects data

Founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: $86.06 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $19.37 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Advitheey Chelikani

Founders: Advith Chelikani, Marty Kausas, and Robert Eng

Select investors: Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Y Combinator

Rad AI

What it does: Generative AI to help healthcare providers manage their workflow

Founded: 2018

Last post-money valuation: $273.49 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $83.99 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Doktor Gurson

Founders: Dr. Jeff Chang and Doktor Gurson

Select investors: Khosla Ventures, Gradient Ventures

Render

What it does: Cloud hosting platform that helps developers create apps quickly and easily

Founded: 2018

Last post-money valuation: $230 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $156.8 million, according to the company

CEO and founder: Anurag Goel

Select investors: Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Abstract Ventures, Elad Gil

Runa

What it does: Payments Infrastructure within the financial technology sector, offering embedded payouts, rewards, and incentives

Founded: 2016

Last post-money valuation: $100 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $54 million, according to the company

CEO and founder: Aron Alexander

Select investors: Albion, SAP.io, Clocktower

Runpod

What it does: provides cloud GPU computing services

Founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: $120 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $20 million, according to PitchBook

CEO and founder: Zhen Lu

Select investors: Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital

Stairwell

What it does: cybersecurity company

Founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: $300 million, according to Pitchbook

Total raised: $70 million, according to PitchBook

CEO and founder: Mike Wiacek

Select investors: Accel, Lux Capital, Sequoia Capital

Starfish Space

What it does: It develops technology that helps satellites last longer, including refueling satellites and manually altering their orbits for safe disposal.

Founded: 2019

Last post-money valuation: $95 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $51 million, according to the company

CEO: Austin Link

Founders: Austin Link and Dr. Trevor Bennett

Select investors: Shield Capital, Point72, TRAC

Statsig

What it does: Digital product testing platform that runs rapid product experiments and analyzes users' responses to new features and functionality

Founded: 2021

Last post-money valuation: $420 million, according to the company

Total raised: $53 million, according to the company

CEO and founder: Vijaye Raji

Select investors: Sequoia Capital, Madrona Venture Group

Vitable Health

What it does: Provides affordable primary and urgent care health coverage plans, including primary and urgent care, mental health, and care

Founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: $65 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $25 million, according to PitchBook

CEO and founder: Joseph Kitanga

Select investors: Y Combinator, First Round Capital, Softbank

• AI startup Perplexity bids to merge with TikTok's US business before potential shutdown.
• Perplexity was recently valued at $9 billion, a lot less than the estimated value of TikTok US.
• Perplexity backers include SoftBank and Nvidia, with $914 million in funding secured: PitchBook.

Hours before TikTok could go dark, AI startup Perplexity has put in a bid to merge with the platform's US business, according to a person familiar with the matter.

It's unclear how a startup of Perplexity's size could merge with an operation this huge. The startup was recently valued at $9 billion, while TikTok's US operations could be worth $40 billion to $50 billion, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives estimated earlier on Saturday.

"We now expect a slew of TikTok bids to come over the coming weeks from a host of larger tech players, private-equity, and other strategic names for this key social media platform," Ives wrote in a note to investors.

The person familiar with Perplexity's bid said the combined entity would include other institutional investors. This person declined to name these other investors, and asked not to be identified discussing private matters. CNBC reported the news earlier on Saturday.

A law passed by Congress and signed by President Biden last spring requires ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese owner, to sell the app's US operations by January 19 or be banned.

While Perplexity is relatively small compared to TikTok US, the startup does have large, deep-pocketed backers including SoftBank, Nvidia, and the venture capital firm IVP.

Perplexity has secured $914 million in funding to date, according to PitchBook data. In April, investors valued Perplexity at $1 billion. That figure soared to $9 billion in the newest round of funding, which closed in December.

The startup uses artificial intelligence to power a new type of search engine that responds to queries with a brief answers and annotations, instead of a list of links.

Correction: January 18, 2025 — An earlier version of this story misstated who besides Perplexity is involved in this bid.

• Insight Partners has raised $12.5 billion for new software investments as the tech market heats up.
• The new funds mark the largest raise by a VC firm in over two years, per PitchBook data.
• Insight investors say they expect a higher caliber of startups to show up for funding this year.

As more startups go to fundraise to top off their bank accounts, Insight Partners is leaning into the opportunity with billions in new cash for its software investments.

Insight has closed on $12.5 billion for its newest set of funds, Business Insider has learned. The sum is little more than half the size of its previous fundraise of $20 billion in 2022 — a big step down that Insight managing director Ryan Hinkle says is indicative of a "great reset" in tech investing over the last several years.

The firm will allocate the new funds across several different categories: its 13th flagship fund, buyout investments, and an opportunities fund, which provides later-stage companies with financing that combines debt and equity features. Insight declined to share the exact financial breakdown of funds.

Insight had initially set out to raise $20 billion for this set of funds, The Financial Times reported last year. The firm lowered its target as investors in venture capital funds broadly backed off the asset class, spooked by plunging tech stock prices, geopolitical chaos, and recession fears. Household names like Tiger Global and TCV have also switched up strategies and closed funds below their targets in recent years.

Insight's $12.5 billion haul is still an impressive get in a market that's limping back to normalcy. According to PitchBook data, the new funds mark the largest sum raised by a venture capital firm in over two years. In 2024, General Catalyst raked in $8 billion in fresh capital, while Andreessen Howoritz's newest fundraise topped $7.2 billion.

Insight invests in companies from the seed round to the IPO and focuses on categories powered by software, such as healthcare, cybersecurity, data, and the future of work. The firm employs about 485 people, including a hundred investment professionals — a massive dragnet for sourcing and closing deals. Early investments include Twitter, Alibaba, Shopify, and, more recently, buzzy AI startups like Jasper, Wiz, and Writer.

Insight returned over $8 billion to the firm's own investors last year out of profits from exits in the portfolio, according to the firm. Among them, Salesforce bought Own, a data management provider, for $1.9 billion, and Mastercard purchased the threat intelligence company Recorded Future from Insight for over $2 billion.

Insight has gassed up the tank as investors widely expect funding for startups to rebound. In late 2022, many founders saw the writing on the wall and cut spending to stretch their cash reserves further. Fewer founders went out to fundraise in an investor-friendly market. Two and a half years later, some of those same founders are now electing to raise money again in order to lean into risk and spend to grow. Hinkle said Insight is eagerly awaiting those firms.

"The better the income statement and performance of these companies, the less likely they have been raising capital the past two and a half years," said Hinkle, noting he was generalizing.

"This is my expectation, at least, that the batch of companies that hasn't raised since 2021, they're either thinking about an exit, which is good because we can buy those companies, or they're thinking about raising capital again, which is good because we can provide the capital," Hinkle said. Either way, he said, Insight has a product for them.

Praveen Akkiraju, a managing director at Insight, had another reason to feel optimistic. Software spending cooled off in the downturn, but more businesses are planning to increase their tech budgets to capture the efficiencies that artificial intelligence can provide. Recent leaps in the field, such as the application of "agents" and the shrinking cost of computing, have also amplified their interest. This is good news for software companies that sell into the enterprise market.

"Every company cares about AI. It doesn't matter if you're legacy software, hardware, transportation, construction, or you're an electrician," Akkiraju said. "That's what's unique about this. It's enabling tech that's going to fundamentally lift the entire ecosystem."

Hinkle also offered a caveat to his funding outlook. He doesn't expect startups to come to market for funding in the same numbers as they did in 2021. Dealmaking will remain subdued, he said. Hinkle put it this way: After weeks of freezing temperatures in New York, 42 degrees and sun can feel downright tropical. But it's still frigid. And the tech winter hasn't thawed yet.

• Kevin Egan, a former chief sales officer at Atlassian, has joined the venture-capital firm IVP.
• Egan worked in the trenches of Salesforce, Dropbox, and Slack in the early days of the cloud.
• At IVP, Egan will help close investments and assist portfolio companies with their sales strategy.

IVP, a 45-year-old venture-capital firm that has backed Slack, Coinbase, Glean, and Perplexity, is building out its brain trust with the addition of Kevin Egan as a venture partner. Egan stepped down as chief sales officer at Atlassian in August.

Egan is an enterprise sales guru who scaled Salesforce, Slack, and Dropbox in the early days of the cloud. Now he's joining one of the most enduring venture firms on Sand Hill Road to help its startups at an inflection point — they've figured out a product that the market wants and now need to scale it, said Ajay Vashee, a general partner at IVP.

"Kevin was the go-to-market exec that helped to make that happen for us," said Vashee, who worked with Egan at Dropbox as chief financial officer.

Salesforce to Slack

Egan has worked in the trenches of some of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies of the past 25 years. He spent a decade at Salesforce in sales and operations before Dropbox brought him on in 2012.

Dropbox was the king of cloud storage, with 100 million users, but it had yet to push into the business market. Egan won over big clients such as Under Armour and NBCUniversal, helping establish the cash flow Dropbox needed to go public. He left in 2016 amid a flurry of executive departures.

Egan spent the past 3 ½ years at Atlassian, the $63 billion maker of collaboration software like Jira and Trello. That company exploded during the pandemic because of the rapid adoption of cloud services, though growth slowed as software sales cycles broadly became longer and more expensive in a weak economy. Egan said he was able to control churn by getting "closer to the customer" and helping them realize the financial return on their investment.

Following years of softening software spending, the outlook is brightening, Vashee said. Startups such as Jasper, which develops workflow tools for marketing teams, and Superhuman, an email app that drafts replies and summarizes emails, are seeing traction selling into the business market, said Vashee, who's invested in both.

Enterprises are investing in AI tools as they recognize the long-term efficiencies and competitive advantages that software can provide. Recent leaps in the field and the shrinking cost of computing have also amplified their interest.

"What a lot of those companies have realized, and what the broader ecosystem has come to terms with, is that the real opportunity is in the more focused enterprise applications of AI," Vashee said. That has forced some companies to evolve their sales strategy, a task that's squarely in Egan's wheelhouse.

In his new role, Egan will help source and close new investments and work with portfolio companies to strategize how to scale faster and better. He adds to the firm's bench of former operators in venture partner roles, including Tamar Yehoshua, who is also a product leader at the buzzy enterprise search startup Glean.

In addition to Egan, IVP has poached Zeya Young from Andreessen Horowitz and Miloni Madan Presler from Summit Partners, the firm told Business Insider exclusively. Yang focuses on AI, enterprise software, and healthcare companies, while Madan Presler invests in enterprise software and infrastructure companies. The firm is also hiring a partner in its London office.

Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI, has prophesied that this may be the year the first "agents" — a set of artificial intelligence tools that can perform tasks on their own — "join the workforce." Investors whose job it is to back new technologies before they become ubiquitous are swooning with the promise of these digital coworkers.

The rise of agents offers a fertile ground for a select group of startups to establish themselves as the front-runners of this shift. In that spirit, Business Insider reviewed viewed press releases, news articles, and PitchBook data for startups exploring the application of agents across various sectors and then filtered for those companies that raised rounds of more than $25 million and less than $75 million in 2024. The result is a list of 20 startups that seem positioned to scale this year on the back of new funding.

"If 2024 was the year of LLMs, we believe 2025 will be the year of agentic AI," said Praveen Akkiraju, a managing director at Insight Partners, whose agentic plays include Writer, Jasper, and Torq.

The last wave of artificial intelligence brought copilots, a type of virtual assistant designed to work side-by-side with a user. Some write code, some recap meetings or emails, and some scribe notes on a physician's behalf. Copilots require some human hand-holding but significantly amplify productivity and efficiency.

Since that breakthrough, a new generation of virtual assistants has emerged. Agents describe an artificial intelligence that can complete tasks without much human supervision. They don't just assist — they take charge. Agents can break down complex tasks into smaller sub-tasks, make decisions, execute plans, and adjust their approach based on outcomes.

Here's a simple way to think about the difference: a copilot can assist with crafting a tailored vacation itinerary, while an agent can go further by booking the flights, reserving the hotel, and organizing activities — all without a user needing to intervene at each step.

With Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI's significant investments in agentic models and the subsequent investor hysteria around this technology, it's clear that agents are the flavor of the season. PitchBook data shows startups exploring the application of agents have alone raised $8.2 billion in 2024.

Jill Chase, a partner at CapitalG, a growth fund under Alphabet, said software infrastructure that makes agents work "will be poised for explosive growth." Aaron Jacobson, a partner at NEA and early investor in Databricks, said enterprises will deploy agents at large to "make a real business impact." Seema Amble, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, suggested that agents will change how professionals use software.

"In the short term, human workers will be the reviewer in the loop," said Amble, an enterprise software investor. "In the future, as trust is established over time, I expect many data-derived actions will shift toward being entirely a set of narrowly defined task-driven agents."

Here's a list of agentic startups who have raised rounds of more than $25 million and less than $75 million in 2024, ranked from the least amount raised to the most amount raised.

Maven AGI

What it is: Maven AGI reimagines enterprise customer support by leveraging agents.

Founded: 2023

Total funding: $28 million

Notable deal: Maven AGI launched from stealth with $28 million in Series A funding led by M13 in May of 2024.

Wordware

What it is: Polish-British startup Wordware is building a software platform that can develop and deploy agents using plain English rather than code.

Founded: 2021

Total funding: $30 million

Notable deal: At $30 million, Wordware's November 2024 fundraise is one of the largest seed rounds in Y Combinator's history, the startup. said. Spark Capital led the funding round, with YC and VC firm Felicis participating.

Decagon

What it is: Decagon is developing agents that act as customer support representatives for enterprise customers.

Founded: 2023

Total funding: $35 million

Notable deal: Decagon emerged from stealth in June of 2024 and announced both its $30 million Series A and $5 million seed rounds. The startup's investors include Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, and Elad Gil.

Resolve AI

What it is: Resolve AI is building a production-engineer agent that troubleshoots errors and solves production issues, freeing up human engineers' time to create new products and features.

Founded: 2024

Total funding: $35 million

Notable deal: Greylock led Resolve AI's $35 million seed round in November 2024. Unusual Ventures also participated in the round alongside angel investors 'Godmother of AI' Fei-Fei Li, Google DeepMind's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and executives from OpenAI, GitHub, AWS, and Notion also participated in the round.

Norm Ai

What it is: Norm Ai enables corporate compliance chiefs to convert regulations, from public laws to company policies, into working computer code.

Founded: 2023

Total funding: $38 million

Notable deal: Norm Ai raised a $27 million Series A round led by Coatue in June of 2024, following an $11 million seed round earlier in the year.

7AI

What it is: Founded by two cybersecurity veterans, 7AI is building a "swarm" of agents that monitor for threats and protect enterprise companies from cyberattacks.

Founded: 2023

Total funding: $36 million

Notable deal: 7AI launched from stealth in June of 2024 with a $36 million seed funding round led by Greylock. CRV and Spark Capital also participated in the round.

Robin AI

What it is: Buzzy legaltech startup Robin offers a copilot for lawyers to help draft and revise contracts.

Founded: 2019

Total funding: $39 million

Notable deal: Singapore investment company Temasek led Robin's $26 million Series B funding round in January 2024, and VC firms QuantumLight, Plural, and AFG Partners also participated in the round.

Braintrust

What it is: Developers at companies like Airtable, Instacart, and Stripe use Braintrust to build, monitor, and troubleshoot their artificial intelligence applications.

Founded: 2023

Total funding: $45 million

Notable deal: Andreessen Horowitz led a $36 million Series A round of funding for Braintrust in August of 2024.

Lawhive

What it is: Lawhive's artificial intelligence-powered legal assistant, Lawrence, automates routine legal tasks, from client onboarding and compliance checks to document drafting.

Founded: 2019

Total funding: $52 million

Notable deal: Lawhive closed two rounds of funding just eight months apart, with a $10 million seed round in April of 2024 and a $40 million Series A round in December.

Qodo

What it is: Formerly known as CodiumAI, Qodo deploys agents into the coding process to take over tasks such as generation, testing, review, and documentation.

Founded: 2022

Total funding: $50 million

Notable deal: Qodo raised a $40 million Series A funding round in September of 2024 led by Susa Ventures and Square Peg. Firestreak Ventures, ICON Continuity Fund, TLV Partners, and Vine Ventures also participated in the round.

Rox

What it is: Rox's agents assist sales teams by monitoring customer activity, identifying risks and opportunities, and recommending action plans for human employees.

Founded: 2024

Total funding: $50 million

Notable deal: Rox completed its seed and Series A rounds in stealth. The deals — totaling $50 million from investors including GV, Sequoia, and General Catalyst — were announced in November of 2024.

Decart

What it is: Decart builds enterprise and consumer products on top of its own infrastructure stack, designed to reduce some of the costs of building or using artificial intelligence models.

Founded: 2023

Total funding: $53 million

Notable deal: Decart emerged from stealth with $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia Capital and Zeev Ventures in October of 2024, and raised another $32 million in a Series A round led by Benchmark in December.

HeyGen

What it is: HeyGen, a generative AI video creator for enterprises, launched agents as virtual avatars that can provide around-the-clock customer support.

Founded: 2020

Total funding: $60 million

Notable deal: Benchmark led HeyGen's $60 million Series A in June of 2024. Other investors in the round included Thrive Capital, Bond Capital, Conviction, Dylan Field, Elad Gil, Aviv Nevo, Neil Mehta, and SV Angel.

11x

What it is: 11x builds artificial intelligence-powered sales development reps for handling the workflows of traditional revenue teams.

Founded: 2022

Total funding: $76 million

Notable deal: Andreessen Horowitz led a $50 million Series B round for 11x in November of 2024, just two months after the startup grabbed $24 million in a Series A round led by Benchmark.

Astrix Security

What it is: Astrix Security is creating a security platform to shield an enterprise customer's agents from cyberattacks.

Founded: 2021

Total funding: $85 million

Notable deal: Astrix closed a $45 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures in December of 2024. Workday Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, CRV, and F2 Venture Capital also participated.

Ema

What it is: Ema is building agents called "personas" that complete complex business tasks for their human employee counterparts.

Founded: 2023

Total funding: $61 million

Notable deal: Ema increased its Series A funding round to $50 million in July of 2024, and counts Accel, Section 32, Prosus Ventures, Sozo Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, Wipro Ventures, SCB 10X, Colle Capital, and Frontier Ventures among its investors.

You.com

What it is: You.com's multi-agent system enables knowledge workers to conduct research, create content, and build custom agents on top of any artificial intelligence model for virtually any task.

Founded: 2020

Total funding: $99 million

Notable deal: Georgian led a $50 million Series B round of funding for You.com in September of 2024.

Anysphere

What it is: Anypshere, the startup behind the artificial intelligence-powered code editor, Cursor, allows developers to turn terse directives into working code.

Founded: 2022

Total funding: $171 million

Notable deal: Anysphere raised back-to-back rounds of funding just four months apart, with a $60 million Series A round in August of 2024 and a $100 million Series B round in December. The latest round crowned Anyshere a unicorn with a valuation of $2.6 billion.

Torq

What it is: Torq's multi-agent system enables security professionals to create and deploy sophisticated workflows, triage alerts, and respond to security events.

Founded: 2020

Total funding: $192 million

Notable deal: Torq closed two separate rounds of funding in the last 12 months, including a $42 million Series B round and a $70 million Series C round led by Evolution Equity Partners.

Legion

What it is: Legion, a workforce management platform used by companies like Barry's and Five Below, has developed agents to predict customer demand across locations, create and analyze schedules and timesheets, and reduce human bias.

Founded: 2016

Total funding: $195 million

Notable deal: Legion won $50 million in financing from Silicon Valley Bank in December of 2024, following a $50 million growth round led by Riverwood Capital earlier last year.