Written by: Mark Haranas, CRN
Translated by: Felix, PANews
In 2025, AI startups remain the hottest investment market for private equity and VC investors, with billions of dollars continuously flowing into AI startups.
Many startups have become mainstream AI providers in large language models (LLM), customer service agents, and code generation.
Other AI startups, such as AI Squared, Morphos AI, and Writer, focus on driving innovation by directly integrating AI into business applications, offering AI cost optimization products, or building agent platforms.
Gartner predicts that global generative AI spending will reach $644 billion by 2025, a year-on-year increase of 75%.
Moreover, Gartner anticipates that global AI service sales will reach $609 billion by 2028, thanks to innovations around new generative AI capabilities and traditional AI technologies that are creating superior predictive analytics and decision-making solutions.
CRN has selected the top 10 hottest AI startups so far in 2025, which have created some of the most attractive AI innovations in AI agents, automation, knowledge graphs, accelerating AI applications, and solving complex business challenges.
AI Squared
Executive: Darren Kimura, CEO
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
AI Squared simplifies the integration of AI models with customer business applications, facilitating AI adoption and enabling teams to quickly deploy, experiment with, and scale AI solutions.
AI Squared integrates AI through its SaaS and on-premises platforms, combining data sources with AI capabilities and embedding intelligent insights directly into business applications.
The startup acquired the reverse ETL platform Multiwoven last year to enhance its ability to simplify data and AI migration to applications, while also raising $14 million in funding.
Anthropic
Executive: Dario Amodei, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Anthropic is one of the world's largest AI startups, currently valued at over $61 billion.
This unicorn startup is the owner of the popular language model Claude, which can integrate documents, tools, data, and web knowledge to solve complex problems and write code.
The AI startup raised $3.5 billion in a Series E funding round in March, with plans to use the funds to advance AI system development, expand computational capabilities, deepen research into mechanism interpretability and alignment, and accelerate international expansion.
Anysphere
Executive: Michael Truell, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Anysphere is a leader in the code automation industry, with the widely popular AI code tool Cursor.
The startup has won favor from major clients like OpenAI, NVIDIA, MLB, and Uber, who use Cursor to analyze programmers' operations and suggest code.
Backed by new investments from Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, this AI unicorn recently broke through $500 million in annual revenue, with a valuation of around $10 billion. In June this year, the company launched a new subscription plan for Cursor at $200 per month.
Cohere
Executive: Aidan Gomez, CEO
Headquarters: Toronto and San Francisco
Cohere provides innovative multilingual AI foundation models, retrieval, and end-to-end AI products aimed at solving real business problems.
Cohere's AI platform offers customers security, data privacy, and the option to deploy across all major cloud providers, private cloud environments, or on-premises.
Last year, the startup raised $500 million from investors including tech giants Cisco Systems and AMD, with total funding approaching $1 billion.
Decagon
Executive: Jesse Zhang, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Decagon provides AI-driven customer support agents aimed at elevating customer support through large-scale automation and consultation resolution.
The startup's agents use its Agent Operating Procedures technology to enable customers to build, manage, and scale AI agents for chat, email, and phone, thereby automating repetitive tasks, increasing productivity, and enhancing support team capabilities.
The startup secured $65 million in funding in 2024, led by Bain Capital, and plans to complete a $100 million funding round later this year.
DevRev
Executive: Dheeraj Pandey, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, California
DevRev provides an AI-native platform that integrates customer support and product development.
The startup allows customers to generate interconnected knowledge graphs to drive AI agents. Its AI products Airdrop and Knowledge Graph aim to help customers go beyond automation by unifying data across all systems, transforming complex processes into intuitive conversations to drive outcomes.
In 2024, the startup raised $100 million at a valuation of $11 billion. Pandey was previously the co-founder and CEO of Nutanix.
Morphos AI
Executive: Aram Chavez, Chairman
Headquarters: Tempe, Arizona
Startup Morphos AI focuses on helping Generative AI (GenAI) developers optimize their large language model (LLM) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) vector databases to improve search accuracy and reduce storage and energy costs.
As one of the smallest startups on the CRN list, Morphos AI offers SaaS services aimed at improving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of AI large-scale deployment through its Green Vectors technology, which enhances how AI systems store and process information.
The company states that by seamlessly integrating with existing systems, it can reduce computational resources and costs associated with AI operations.
Perplexity
Executive: Aravind Srinivas, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Perplexity uses AI models like GPT-4 and Claude to understand user queries, search the internet in real-time, and summarize information. The company offers a free AI search engine and information discovery platform.
Perplexity recently launched Perplexity Labs, which can create reports and spreadsheets for dashboards and simple web applications through a toolkit focusing on deep web browsing, code execution, and chart and image creation.
The startup recently partnered with Nidia to provide localized and autonomous AI models for European customers.
Thinking Machine Labs
Executive: Mira Murati, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
The youngest startup on the CRN list is Thinking Machine Labs, founded and led by OpenAI's former CTO Mirati.
The startup says it is developing comprehensive AI systems, focusing on AI programming and building multimodal AI models with advanced reasoning capabilities.
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the chief scientist of this startup, and CTO Barret Zoph played a key role in OpenAI's breakthrough innovations. Even without any revenue, the startup is seeking $1 billion in funding.
Writer
Executive: May Habib, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
AI startup Writer provides an end-to-end agent-building platform with collaborative tools to build, activate, and supervise AI agents based on company data and leveraging Writer's large language models.
Companies are transforming their business processes with Writer, from faster product launches to deeper financial research and more refined trials.
The startup has won hundreds of customers in recent years, including Accenture, Intuit, and Marriott, while attracting investors like Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, and IBM.
