10 AI Startup Companies To Watch In 2025

Writer, Safe Superintelligence and Physical Intelligence are among the startups.

A startup bringing generative artificial intelligence to business processes. An OpenAI executive’s next act. And a company focused on “artificial physical intelligence” to make robots as simple to control as chatbot assistants.

Writer, Safe Superintelligence and Physical Intelligence are among the startups to make CRN’s 10 AI Startup Companies To Watch In 2025.

For this list, CRN considered companies founded in 2018 or later and ones with impressive funding rounds in the later part of 2024 that should help carry them through an ever-competitive AI landscape in 2025. CRN also gave extra weight to startups with channel partner programs.

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2025 AI Startups

Market research firm International Data Corp. (IDC) predicts the global AI infrastructure market will surpass $100 billion in spending by 2028, according to a November report.

CRN has been compiling lists of some of the hottest startup companies for 2024, including big data startups, semiconductor startups plus security startups.

Here are some of the most promising AI startups to watch in 2025.

Anthropic

CEO: Dario Amodei

Anthropic–the company behind AI chatbot Claude–closed out 2024 with a host of advancements.

Those product upgrades include an updated Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) risk governance framework, a version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet that can move computer cursors and click on on-screen locations, plus latency-optimized inference support for Claude 3.5 Haiku in Amazon Bedrock, according to the San Francisco-based company.

In November, Anthropic grew even closer to its partner Amazon with a new $4 billion investment from the cloud giant, bringing Amazon’s total investment in the startup to $8 billion. The two organizations are also at work on future versions of the Trainium accelerators.

CEO Dario Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021, according to his LinkedIn account. Amodei previously worked at OpenAI for about four years, leaving with the title of vice president of research. At OpenAI, he led efforts to build GPT-2 and GPT-3.

DevRev

CEO: Dheeraj Pandey

Taking on Zendesk, Atlassian Jira, Salesforce Service Cloud and other popular products, DevRev positions its cloud-based, AI-native platform as a way to unify customer support and product development.

In August, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor revealed that it landed a $100.8 million Series A round of funding, bringing DevRev’s valuation to $1.15 billion. The vendor has more than 1,000 customers.

DevRev users can generate connected knowledge graphs to power AI agents. The platform allows for integrated roadmapping, issue tracking and user insights. DevRev has a partner program for resellers, implementers and other business models.

CEO Dheeraj Pandey co-founded DevRev in 2020, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously co-founded software-defined computing platform Nutanix in 2009 and led it as CEO.

GMI Cloud

CEO: Alex Yeh

GMI–short for General Machine Intelligence–offers a cloud-based graphics processing unit platform for users to train, fine-tune and inference AI models, with scalable GPU containers and preconfigured machine learning frameworks.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor’s on-demand GPUs start at $4.39 per GPU-hour, and its private cloud is priced for at least $2.50 per GPU-hour.

In October, GMI Cloud announced that it raised $15 million in equity funding and $67 in debt financing in a Series A round, with the money going toward a new data center in Colorado.

GMI has a partner program for system integrators, consultancies and other business models, according to the vendor.

CEO Alex Yeh founded GMI Cloud in 2021, according to his LinkedIn account.


Guidewheel

CEO: Lauren Dunford

FactoryOps is the name Guidewheel gives its artificial intelligence-powered platform for measuring equipment performance and forecasting production volumes and delivery dates.

Users of the San Francisco-based startup’s wares clip noninvasive sensors to machine power supplies, send data to the cloud in real time and then make data-driven decisions around issues with the machines. Customers include Coca-Cola, Igloo and Kimberly Clark.

In August, Guidewheel revealed that it raised $31 million in a Series B round of funding. BlackRock and Temasek’s Decarbonization Partners fund led the round, with participation by Rethink Impact, GSBackers, Greycroft and Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV).

After the funding round, Guidewheel pushed out product updates including an improved issues scoreboard and better waste tracking, according to the vendor.

CEO Lauren Dunford co-founded the company in 2018, according to her LinkedIn account. Her resume includes about five years with Revolution Foods, leaving the company in 2016 with the title chief of staff.

Perplexity

CEO: Aravind Srinivas

Perplexity is headed into 2025 with plenty of funds and plenty of notoriety.

The startup faces a legal fight from the parent companies of the New York Post and Wall Street Journal over intellectual property use in AI. The New York Times reportedly sent the startup a cease-and-desist letter concerning how Perplexity scrapes articles.

Other publishers including Adweek, The Los Angeles Times and Lee Enterprises have entered partnerships with Perplexity.

CNBC and Reuters reported in November that San Francisco-based Perplexity is raising $500 million at a $9 billion valuation led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP).

Perplexity offers users a free AI search engine with a focus on research, summarizing information instead of giving users web links to content.

CEO Aravind Srinivas co-founded Perplexity in 2022, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously worked at OpenAI for about a year as a research scientist on language and diffusion generative models.

Physical Intelligence

CEO: Karol Hausman

Physical Intelligence, also called Pi, wants to bring AI into the physical world. Assisting in that mission is a $400 million funding round from Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos, OpenAI and others, as reported by multiple news outlets.

The startup says its π0 (pi-zero) foundation model can get robots to bag groceries, fold laundry, stack eggs in a carton and more, according to Pi. The company’s long-term goal is artificial physical intelligence akin to asking chatbot assistants to perform tasks.

CEO Karol Hausman co-founded Pi in 2024, according to his LinkedIn account. His resume includes about six years with Google, leaving the tech giant with the title of staff research scientist and robot manipulation lead at Google Brain.

Safe Superintelligence

CEO: Daniel Gross

Safe Superintelligence has an air of mystery with its bare-bones website. But the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever could have more attention in 2025 as it flexes the $1 billion in cash SSI raised late in 2024.

Sutskever co-founded SSI in 2024. He was previously caught up in the leadership turmoil at OpenAI in late 2023, when the organization’s board–including Sutskever–ousted CEO Sam Altman, only for Altman to return days later. Sutskever changed his mind and later signed a letter demanding Altman’s return, according to Reuters.

Safe Superintelligence calls itself “the world’s first straight-shot SSI lab, with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence.”

Sutskever and his leadership team wrote in June on SSI’s website that its “singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles, and our business model means safety, security, and progress are all insulated from short-term commercial pressures.”

Reuters said that SSI will have a U.S. team in Palo Alto, Calif., and that it has a $5 billion valuation. The news outlet identified Sutskever as SSI’s chief scientist and co-founder Daniel Gross as its CEO.

Gross co-founded search engine Cue, acquired by Apple in 2013, according to his website. He left Apple in 2017 to become a Y Combinator partner.

According to Sutskever’s LinkedIn account, he co-founded OpenAI in 2016. He previously worked at Google for about three years, leaving with the title of research scientist.

World Labs

CEO: Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li–computer scientist, author and frequent event speaker on AI–has gotten into the startup game with World Labs, which is dedicated to large world models (LWMs) for bringing AI from 2D to 3D.

Li co-founded San Francisco-based World Labs in 2023, with the startup emerging from stealth in 2024. World Labs has raised more than $230 million in funding, with investors including Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff (Li’s husband, Silvio Savarese, is an executive vice president and chief scientist of Salesforce Research).

Adobe Ventures, AMD Ventures, Databricks Ventures, NVentures–the venture capital arm of NVIDIA–Salesforce Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Anne Wojcicki, Susan Wojcicki, Reid Hoffman and other tech luminaries are among the investors in World Labs, according to the startup.

World Labs says its technology can generate 3D environments from a single image for movies, games, simulators and other use cases.

Her resume includes serving as Stanford University’s AI Lab director from 2013 to 2018 and chief AI and machine learning scientist at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018.

Writer

CEO: May Habib

Writer closed out the year with a hefty war chest for 2025’s AI wars, netting a $200 million Series C round of funding at a $1.9 billion valuation.

Participants included Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Workday Ventures, Accenture, Balderton, Insight Partners and Vanguard.

The San Francisco-based vendor positions its technology as capable of building GenAI into any business process. Its platform leverages the Palmyra family of large language models for enterprise-level quality and control. The LLMs are used for answering questions, image analysis, versed in 30 languages and fine-tuned for health care, finance and other industries, according to Writer.

The company is now at work on self-evolving models that adapt to changes without a full retraining cycle, growing its AI Studio developer tool and other projects.

CEO May Habib co-founded Writer in 2020, accordingto her LinkedIn account. Her resume includes co-founding another startup, Qordoba, in 2015.

Writer also has a partner program for system integrators, consultancies and other business models, according to the vendor.

xAI

Founder: Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s xAI startup appears to hold an enviable position entering the new year, with a fresh round of capital and its founder achieving newfound influence in Washington, D.C., thanks to his relationship with incoming President Donald Trump.

A December regulatory filing showed that the Burlingame, Calif.-based startup raised about $6 billion in equity financing. Also that month, xAI revealed that it started rolling out a new version of the Grok-2 GenAI chatbot to users of Musk’s social media company X–formerly Twitter–and improved its image generation capabilities.

Musk is also perhaps best known as the CEO of car company Tesla and founder and CEO of SpaceX.