The 10 Hottest AI Startups Of 2023 (So Far)

With AI taking hold of the IT industry this year, CRN breaks down the 10 coolest AI startup companies you need to know about in 2023.

There has been a seismic boom in the artificial intelligence industry in 2023 as companies of all shapes and sizes are doubling down on AI innovation, which is leading to net-new customer opportunities.

While some AI startups are being acquired, others are generating tens of millions in funding this year from investors and private equity firms that is driving the AI innovation engine to new heights.

The AI drumbeat in 2023 so far has been focused on bringing new revenue and insight to businesses, leveraging AI to find savings on operational costs, and helping to create faster collaboration and go-to-market plans via generative AI. Many of the largest technology companies, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon, have stated that AI is the future of their company, which is why it’s key to know about some of the most innovative startups in the industry.

[Related: Gartner: AWS, Google, Microsoft Lead Cloud AI Developer Market]

Top AI Startups In 2023

Many of the top AI startup companies on CRN’s 10 Hottest AI Startups of 2023 list including household names like OpenAI to startups like People.ai and Concentric AI. Most of the 10 companies on CRN’s list specialize in a certain vertical industry—from low-code AI integration and observability platforms to video cameras and generative AI.

The following companies made CRN’s 10 Hottest AI Startups list of 2023:

* AI Squared

* Arize AI

* CloseFactor

* Concentric AI

* Landing AI

* Observe.AI

* OpenAI

* Ox

* People.ai

* Spot AI

These 10 AI startups have launched out of stealth mode over the past few years, typically generating millions in funding, and are led by top-notch industry veterans hailing from Cisco Systems, Google and Intel. Here’s why you need to know about these 10 AI startups that are making waves in the red-hot artificial intelligence industry.

AI Squared

Founder, CEO: Benjamin Harvey

AI Squared aims to make it easy to integrate machine learning into customers’ most important web-based applications. The startup is the owner of a low-code AI integration platform with a mission to empower companies to make any existing applications intelligent by simplifying and accelerating the integration of AI into apps, ultimately increasing AI adoption.

AI Squared’s platform integrates automation, data-driven insight and guided recommendations to create an intelligent application that can deliver a more personalized interface, improve productivity and support decision-making. Founded in 2021, the startup is based in Washington, D.C.

In May, AI Squared made a huge hire by naming Michelle Bonat as its new CTO. She previously served as CTO and AI top executive at JPMorgan Chase.

Arize AI

Co-Founder, CEO: Jason Lopatecki

Arize AI is a machine learning observability platform that helps machine learning (ML) teams deliver and maintain more successful AI in production. Arize’s automated model monitoring and observability platform allows teams to quickly detect issues when they emerge, troubleshoot why they happened, and improve overall model performance across structured and unstructured data.

The remote-first company has headquarters in Berkeley, Calif.

In April, the startup debuted deeper support on the Arize platform for generative AI and an open-source observability library for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs). The new Arize Pheonix observability library is specifically built to help data scientists evaluate outputs from LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Bard and Anthropic’s Claude.

CloseFactor

Co-Founder, CEO: Leena Joshi

CloseFactor provides a go-to-market AI operating system for revenue teams and serves up tailor-made opportunities with people who are ready to buy now. Using machine learning to automatically curate unstructured information about companies and extract meaningful insight that go-to-market teams can act on, CloseFactor identifies a client’s best customers, empowering sales and marketing teams to hit their goals.

Founded in 2020, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company set out to solve revenue teams’ productivity problem with target account research. By leveraging machine learning to automate the entire process, CloseFactor realized it could free up reps to focus more on sales.

In 2023, CloseFactor raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Vertex Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Over the past 10 quarters, the startup said it has increased revenue by 5,411 percent.

Concentric AI

Founder, CEO: Karthik Krishnan

Concentric AI aims to help businesses address their unmet data security needs by discovering and protecting business-critical content. Concentric AI protects intellectual property, financial data, customer data, business-confidential content and more—across on-premises and cloud-based data stores, as well as messaging and communication applications.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company’s Concentric AI Semantic Intelligence Data Security Posture Management offering uses deep learning and risk distance analysis to accurately categorize data, assess risk and remediate security issues without relying on up-front rules or complex configuration.

In April, Concentric AI unveiled a new channel partner program with a promise of better enablement for partners selling the startup’s SaaS product, which provides AI-based services for autonomous data security posture management. Founder and CEO Krishnan has held various top executive positions at HPE, Intel, Niara and Juniper Networks before founding Concentric AI in 2018.

Landing AI

Founder, CEO: Andrew Ng

Landing AI provides software that aims to make computer vision easy. Guided by a data-centric AI approach, Landing AI’s flagship product, LandingLens, is a computer vision cloud platform that enables users to build, iterate and deploy computer vision solutions quickly and easily.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup this year launched a visual prompting capability that takes the text prompting framework found in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and similar technologies and bring it to computer vision. Even with limited data sets, companies can realize the value of AI and move AI projects from proof-of-concept to production by leveraging Landing AI.

The startup was founded by Ng, who is the co-founder of Coursera and founding lead of Google Brain. Landing AI has a partner program that already includes solution providers Capgemini, Deloitte and Vaital.

Observe.AI

CEO: Jain Swapnil

Observe.AI said its offerings provide the fastest way to boost contact center performance with live conversation intelligence. The Observe.AI platform uncovers insight from 100 percent of customer interactions and maximizes frontline team performance through coaching and end-to-end workflow automation.

The San Francisco-based startup aimed to help companies act faster with real-time insight and guidance to improve performance—from more sales to higher retention.

In June, the company introduced a 30-billion-parameter Contact Center LLM and new Generative AI Suite for boosting agent performance. Observe.AI’s new Generative AI Suite leverages the LLM to enhance agent performance before, during and after customer interactions via capabilities like surfacing real-time answers, automated call summarization and automated coaching notes that drive agent self-improvement.

OpenAI

CEO: Sam Altman

OpenAI disrupted the entire AI landscape in late 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, a new AI chatbot based on its GPT technology. The San Francisco-based AI research and deployment specialist said its mission is to ensure that AI benefits all of humanity.

OpenAI recently released GPT-4, which the startup said can solve difficult problems with greater accuracy thanks to its broader general knowledge and problem-solving abilities. The enhanced product can generate, edit and iterate with users on creative and technical writing tasks.

The AI startup is backed by software giant Microsoft, which has reportedly poured billions into OpenAI over the past three years. In 2023, Microsoft said that it was injecting OpenAI technology into Microsoft Office 365, Edge, Bing as well as other products.

Ox

CEO: Charu Thomas

Ox is an AI software provider that develops supply chain automation technology to increase frontline efficiency across industrial operations. The Bentonville, Ark.-based company offers real-time visibility to track operators and measure frontline workers.

Ox’s patented Operator Experience platform integrates with existing systems to help supply chain companies design intelligent applications. Founded in 2019, Ox combines wearable technology and AI software to guide frontline supply chain workers through tasks, a service that the startup said has increased customer operational productivity by more than 20 percent.

In April, Ox closed a $12.6 million Series A round of funding to further develop its platform.

People.ai

Founder, CEO: Oleg Rogynskyy

The People.ai enterprise revenue intelligence platform ensures organizations can speed up complex sales cycles by engaging the right people in the right accounts. Through the startup’s AI technology, People.ai enables sales teams to clearly see whom to engage with in each of their accounts and determine exactly what to do to deliver the highest-yielding deals.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based company calls itself as a leader in guiding enterprise sales teams on a proven path to pipeline and revenue generation.

In May, the startup launched AccountGPT, an enhancement to its account planning application that enables go-to-market teams to create strategic account plans quickly and easily by removing menial tasks and manual data entry. AccountGPT utilizes generative AI and LLMs to auto-complete sections of account plans by populating data within seconds from publicly available sites such as company websites, quarterly earnings reports and more.

Spot AI

CEO: Tanuj Thapliyal

With an AI camera system, Spot AI makes video footage actionable to help companies improve their security, safety, efficiency and customer experience. The startup provides an offering that helps businesses deploying cameras to utilize video intelligence, enabling better decisions around security, workforce safety and process efficiency.

Spot AI was launched in 2021 by top engineers hailing from Stanford, Cisco Meraki and Samsara. The Burlingame, Calif.-based startup said it is on a mission to create a safer and smarter physical world with the power of sight.

In late 2022, Spot AI closed $40 million in a Series B funding round. In November, the startup launched a license plate recognition feature so that users can search video footage for specific vehicles.