The 10 Hottest AI Startups Of 2024 (So Far)

CRN highlights 10 AI startups that are leading in LLMs, cybersecurity and enabling MSPs to drive AI customer wins.

From the world’s leading large language model (LLM) providers and AI cybersecurity companies to AI startups targeting MSPs, there are 10 startups that stand out from the crowd in the ever-growing artificial intelligence market.

Many AI startups on this list have raised billions of dollars in funding, such as Anthropic and Cohere, while others have raised millions to fuel partner initiatives and enable MSPs to drive AI sales, including Cynomi and SuperOps.

Gartner predicts that by 2026, over 80 percent of enterprises will have used GenAI applications in production environments, up from less than 5 percent in 2023.

In addition, the research firm predicts that in two years, enterprises that apply AI security management controls will increase the accuracy of their decisions by eliminating up to 80 percent of faulty information.

The AI and generative AI revolution is taking hold in 2024 as enterprises across the globe in industries like government, finance and health care begin to implement various AI solutions to drive productivity and solve their most critical business challenges.

The most popular IT markets like cloud computing and cybersecurity are being injected with AI capabilities and innovation at a blistering pace, such as with new virtual assistants and data analytics technology that goes beyond traditional business intelligence.

Many of the companies on CRN’s list have launched partner programs in a move to better leverage channel partners as the tip of the spear for driving AI sales.

As part of AI Week 2024 CRN breaks down the 10 hottest AI startups in 2024 that every partner and AI customer should know about.

Anthropic

Dario Amodei, Co-Founder, CEO

San Francisco

In 2021, former OpenAI executives left to start rival Anthropic, which took the AI world by storm with the launch of its LLM, Claude.

Anthropic has raised billions of dollars from companies including Amazon and Google thanks to its AI innovation roaring around Claude, which now includes the Claude 3 model family of Opus, Sonnet and Haiku.

Claude is one of the most popular LLMs in the industry, becoming generally available for various top cloud AI products, including Amazon Bedrock. Anthropic has also launched products such as the Claude iOS app, Claude API interface for developers, and the Claude Team workspace offer for teams to collaborate.

Anthropic has raised nearly $8 billion in total as it looks to remain a dominant force in the LLM AI market for the foreseeable future.

Cohere

Aidan Gomez, Co-Founder, CEO

Toronto

Cohere provides LLMs and RAG (retrieval augmented generation) capabilities for enterprises and developers to build products and solve various use cases with language AI.

Cohere’s AI models are built on transformer architecture and trained on supercomputers to offer solutions that don’t need expensive machine learning development.

The company’s Command R and R+ LLMs are designed to tackle large workloads and enable businesses to move into production with AI. Cohere’s GenAI enterprise knowledge assistant, Coral, features more than 100 integrations with CRM, collaboration, database, search infrastructure and other tools.

The startup was founded in 2019 by former Google researchers with investors including Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures and SentinelOne, as well as $270 million in a Series C financing round led by Inovia Capital.

This month, Cohere raised $450 million from investors including Cisco Systems and Nvidia.

Cynomi

David Primor, Co-Founder, CEO

Israel

Focused on AI enabling MSPs and consulting partners, Cynomi’s AI-powered automated vCISO platform continuously assesses customers’ cybersecurity posture, builds remediation plans and executes them to reduce risk.

Cynomi’s vCISO provides an offering tailored to MSPs and MSSPs looking to expand their security services. The platform blends CISO expertise with AI capabilities to streamline operations and automate tasks to make sure customers comply with regulations and cybersecurity frameworks.

The startup combines proprietary AI algorithms with CISO-level knowledge to enable Cynomi partners to overcome cybersecurity skill gaps, scale their business and allow them to offer new services. Cynomi has launched a partner program for MSPs, MSSPs, consultancies and other partner business models.

In April, the startup announced $20 million in new funding, which Cynomi said will fuel international expansion, particularly in Europe.

H20.ai

Sri Ambati, Founder, CEO

Mountain View, Calif.

Open-source generative AI and machine learning superstar H2O.ai is at the forefront of democratizing GenAI.

H2O.ai’s open-source h2oGPTe solution combines Document AI and its autoML Driverless AI to transform organizations, including over 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies such as AT&T, PayPal and Workday.

H2O.ai has a community of 2 million data scientists tasked with co-creating GenAI applications that are usable by everyone. The startup said business users can now leverage the power of LLMs to boost productivity with enterprise applications. H2O.ai’s GenAI capabilities enable sophisticated question answering and content generation based on existing data stores.

This month, the startup launched native machine learning and GenAI applications on the Snowflake Marketplace to provide seamless integrated workflows within Snowflake accounts.

Hatz AI

Jimmy Hatzell, Co-Founder, CEO

New York

Launching out of stealth last year, Hatz AI is looking to help MSPs build an AI-as-a-Service business with AI applications and agents, vector storage and custom LLMs.

The startup’s platform is powered by an LLM Ops engine called Mido and includes multitenant management through an MSP admin dashboard.

Hatz AI MSP partners can quickly integrate AI into their product offering by building specialized AI applications and workflows for their customers and offering organizationally managed AI assistants. The startup’s portfolio also allows MSPs to build a system of record for small businesses with custom LLMs and vector storage, all managed through the Hatz AI Platform.

Hatz AI has captured the attention of various MSPs with its promise of AI as a Service and a $2.5 million seed funding round to help bring its offerings to the market.

Prosimo

Ramesh Prabagaran, Co-Founder, CEO

San Jose, Calif.

AI startup Prosimo launched a new AI Suite for Multi-Cloud Networking this year to help enterprises adopt, manage and troubleshoot AI applications and workloads.

Prosimo utilizes AI to alleviate challenges that arise with cloud networking management with its offerings aimed at helping customers save millions by reducing performance cost and excess drag due to inefficiencies in cloud management. The startup supports AI workloads across deep observability, network policy and traffic, end-to-end private connectivity and application-driven routing.

The Prosimo platform provides software for user-to-app and app-to-app. The Prosimo Nebula assistant uses natural language to provide predictive recommendations and accelerated root cause analysis.

The startup does 100 percent of its business through ecosystem partners, with nearly 90 percent of enterprise customers having already commissioned an AI cloud project.

SuperOps

Arvind Parthiban, Co-Founder, CEO

Claymont, Del.

SuperOps offers an AI-powered remote monitoring and management platform as well as professional services automation specifically designed for MSPs.

The startup seeks to transform MSPs by automating and streamlining their service delivery and monitoring and management with its AI-powered PSA-RMM platform with built-in network monitoring, IT documentation and project management. SuperOps recently boosted its platform with automated networking monitoring scans, executive summary report creation and ticket summarization.

SuperOps said its mission is to help partners become more efficient, effective, process-driven and profitable. To that end, SuperOps is now offering Project Vision X, which teaches MSPs the mechanics of managed services.

This month, SuperOps partnered with Pax8 to become the first PSA-RMM tool available through the Pax8 Marketplace. The startup has raised more than $30 million since launching in 2020.

Torq

Ofer Smadari, Co-Founder, CEO

New York

Security hyperautomation company Torq is seeking to transform the cybersecurity industry with its AI hyperautomation platform.

By connecting the entire security infrastructure stack, the startup empowers organizations to instantly and precisely remediate security events and orchestrate complex security processes at scale.

Torq recently unveiled its HyperSOC offering that enables organizations with automation, management and monitoring for critical SOC responses at speed. It uses natural language processing to initiate and accelerate security event investigation, triage and remediation at scale, deliver comprehensive case management capabilities with unprecedented ease, and automate complex processes.

Torq customers include Blackstone, Chipotle, HashiCorp, Nubank, Riskified, Telefonica and ZoomInfo, as well as cybersecurity giants that rely on Torq to hyperautomate their own SecOps infrastructures, including Check Point Software Technologies, Juniper Networks and SentinelOne.

Weka

Liran Zvibel, Co-Founder, CEO

Campbell, Calif.

AI-native data platform provider Weka is looking to set the standard for AI infrastructure with its cloud- and hardware-agnostic software for performance-intensive applications.

The Weka Data Platform transforms stagnant data silos into dynamic data pipelines that help AI, machine learning and GPU workloads run more efficiently, while providing data access from data centers and the edge to multi-cloud environments. With over 300 of some of the world’s largest AI and GPU deployments running on Weka’s platform, the startup is expanding to meet demand for data infrastructure that efficiently addresses the performance demands of technologies like generative AI and high-performance GPUs.

Weka’s software can be deployed anywhere, delivering scale and sustainability for GPUs, AI and other large workloads to help customers achieve faster insight, discoveries and business outcomes.

In May, the startup raised $140 million in a Series E funding round, bringing Weka’s total valuation to $1.6 billion.

Wiz

Assaf Rappaport, Co-Founder, CEO

New York

AI security startup Wiz scans every layer of the cloud to provide visibility while using its Security Graph’s context to identify and eliminate the risks for the cloud.

Wiz launched native AI security capabilities with its AI-SPM (AI security posture management) offering, which aims to protect the use of AI tools during the software development process. The cloud security vendor has since extended its AI-SPM support to include the OpenAI API Platform.

In May, Wiz said it raised $1 billion in a move that values the cloud security startup at $12 billion. The startup’s total funding is nearly $2 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive Capital.

In April, Wiz acquired Gem Security to boost its threat detection capabilities in the cloud. Wiz said it currently works with 40 percent of the Fortune 100 companies.