Apr 4, 2023

A list of the leading generative AI startups -- these are the companies that will shape the future of generative AI. By Generative AI startups have emerged as the newest formidable players in the tech world, using natural language processing, machine learning, and other forms of artificial intelligence to generate new, original content for a variety of business use cases. Larger tech companies like Google and AWS are working hard to build up their generative AI technologies as well, but many of these tech giants are having trouble keeping up with the agile gen AI startups that are willing to take risks to establish their AI niches. We’ve created a list of the top 50 generative AI startups to watch today and over the next few years. Some of these companies, like OpenAI, have already proven themselves and turned into multi-billion dollar companies. Others have not yet emerged from early rounds of funding. Regardless of where they individually fall in their stages of development, each of these startups has generated enough buzz to earn a spot on our list to top generative AI startups. OpenAI OpenAI is one of the largest AI startups in the world and is certainly the largest in the generative AI space. Along with its prebuilt AI solutions, OpenAI also offers API and application development support for developers who want to use its models as baselines. Founded: 2015. Category and use cases: Language modeling, content generation, image generation and editing, audio transcription and translation, and custom and embedded model development. Products and solutions: GPT-3, GPT-4, ChatGPT Plus, DALL-E, Whisper, and InstructGPT (Ada, Babbage, Curie, and Davinci). Hugging Face Hugging Face is a community forum, similar to GitHub, that focuses solely on AI and ML model development and deployment. Some of the community’s main focus areas include text classification, question answering, image classification, translation, summarization, audio classification, and object detection. Founded: 2016. Category and use cases: Community for open source, public submissions and deployments of NLP, computer vision, and other AI models. Products and solutions: Expert Acceleration Program, Private Hub, Inference Endpoints, AutoTrain, and Hardware. Synthesis AI Synthesis AI is a cutting-edge synthetic data generation startup that creates computer-vision-driven imagery, videos, and human simulations. Its use cases span across industries and focus on ethical AI development, making it one of the most exciting AI startups on our radar today. Founded: 2019. Category and use cases: Synthetic data generation for computer vision, image labeling, image generation, video generation, ID verification, automotive and driver monitoring, pedestrian detection, teleconferencing, security scenarios, virtual try-on, avatar creation, AR/VR/XR, and 3D human models. Products and solutions: Synthesis Humans, Synthesis Scenarios, and Data Visualizer. Jasper Jasper ’s core product is designed specifically for business and marketing content generation. Some core areas where Jasper works well include social media, advertising, blog, email, and website content creation. Founded: 2021. Category and use cases: Long-form and short-form content creation, Dialog-driven content creation and language modeling, AI assistant browser extension, art creation, and multi-language reading and writing. Products and solutions: Jasper Art and Jasper Chat. Cohere Cohere offers NLP solutions that are specifically designed to support business operations. With Cohere’s conversational AI agent, enterprise users can quickly search for and retrieve all kinds of company information without searching through massive applications and databases. Founded: 2019. Category and use cases: Text retrieval, text generation, text classification, enterprise conversational AI agent, and multilingual embedding and language models. Products and solutions: Embed, Neural Search, Summarize, Generate, and Classify. Anthropic Anthropic ’s Claude platform is similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with its large language model and content generation focus. First released widely in March 2023, Claude is viewed as a more customizable platform with less propensity for rude or inappropriate responses. Founded: 2021. Category and use cases: Content generation, coding, customer support, text translation, text classification, text translation, text summarization, search, legal document summarization, career coaching, workflow automation, and text editing. Products and solutions: Claude and Claude Instant. Inflection AI Founded by former leaders from LinkedIn and DeepMind in 2022, Inflection AI ’s mission and goals are still mostly under wraps. However, the company has already received major funding rounds and indicated that it plans to completely transform how humans are able to speak to and communicate with computers. Founded: 2022. Products and solutions: TBA. Glean Glean is a generative AI workplace search company that relies on deep-learning models to understand natural language queries in the context of organizational, departmental, and individual user characteristics. Glean connects to a variety of enterprise apps and platforms, making it easier to set up and maintain access to business information sources. Founded: 2019. Categories and use cases: Cognitive enterprise search, data ingestion and management, knowledge management, and enterprise environment app and data unification. Products and solutions: Glean Search, Glean Knowledge Management, and Glean Work Hub. Stability AI Stability AI is one of the most successful startups in the generative AI space for image and video generation. Though the company has come under controversy for alleged copyright infringement of artists’ work, Stable Diffusion in particular continues to be a popular solution, operating in the background of many other generative AI startups’ platforms. Founded: 2019. Category and use cases: Text-to-image generation, image editing, video generation, and open-source AI and application development models. Products and solutions: Stable Diffusion 2.0, Stable Diffusion Reimagine, DreamStudio, Photoshop Plugin, Blender Plugin, and Platform API. Lightricks Lightricks first gained notoriety with its social-media-friendly image editing app, Facetune. It has since expanded Facetune and its other apps with cutting-edge AI, making it possible to edit and generate content for videos, photos, and artwork. Founded: 2013. Products and solutions: Facetune, Photoleap, Videoleap, Popular Pays, Filtertune, Beatleap, Motionleap, and Artleap. Insilico Medicine Insilico Medicine is a pharmaceutical research and development startup that uses generative AI and machine learning to create more efficient processes across biology, chemistry, and analytics. It’s focused on reducing the time and cost of drug development, particularly in areas such as immunology, oncology, central nervous system disorders, and fibrosis. Founded: 2014. Category and use cases: Novel molecules generation with de-novo drug design and scalable engineering, clinical trial design and prediction, and deep biology analysis engine for multi-omics target discovery. Products and solutions: Pharma.AI, PandaOmics, Chemistry42, and inClinico. Synthetaic Synthetaic ’s platform, RAIC, is primarily designed to analyze and ingest unstructured and unlabeled datasets from videos, satellite imagery, and video and drone footage. The company famously tracked the origin of a Chinese balloon in February 2023 . Founded: 2019. Products and solutions: RAIC. Gridspace Gridspace offers solutions for organizations that want to better automate, manage, and analyze contact center and customer interactions. The company offers voice bots and live agent training, making it possible to create a hybrid bot-human agent workforce in healthcare, retail, and other customer-service-driven organizations. Founded: 2012. Category and use cases: Conversational AI, virtual agents and voice bots, virtual contact centers, observability and call monitoring, and customer service. Products and solutions: Gridspace Grace, Gridspace Sift, and Gridspace Pulse. MOSTLY AI MOSTLY AI ’s synthetic data generation platform balances data democratization and app development efficiencies with data anonymity and security requirements. The platform has proven especially useful in the banking, insurance, and telecommunications industries. Founded: 2017. Products and solutions: MOSTLY AI. Latitude.io Latitude.io is one of the first and foremost providers of AI-generated gaming experiences. With its flagship AI Dungeon, users can enter actions into the game while AI drives the rest of the game narrative forward. Founded: 2019. Products and solutions: AI Dungeon and Voyage (AI Art, Medieval Problems, Loom, and Things). Rephrase.ai Rephrase.ai makes it possible for companies and individuals to create custom videos without extensive in-house equipment or experience. Text-to-voice conversion, avatar and template libraries, and campaign analytics combine to create a platform for self-service video production that still has a personal feel to it. Founded: 2019. Products and solutions: Rephrase Studio. Entos Entos is a company made up of top scientists, biotechnology experts, and machine learning experts who are working to optimize oncology therapeutics with AI. Their pipeline therapeutics release is actively in the works and is expected to launch within the next two years. Founded: 2019. Products and solutions: Pipeline of oncology therapeutics (to be released). Etcembly Etcembly is a company that is improving T-cell receptor immunotherapies with its machine-learning platform, EMLy. The platform sifts through complex TCR patterns and datasets to discover and identify personalized TCR therapeutic options for patients. Founded: 2019. Category and use cases: ML database for TCR immunotherapies, AI-driven TCR discovery and identification, and computer-assisted engineering. Products and solutions: EMLy. AI21 Labs AI21 Labs creates tools that focus heavily on contextual natural language processing for reading and writing. Third-party developers can build on AI21 Labs’ language models for their own text-based apps and services with AI21 Studio. Founded: 2017. Products and solutions: Wordtune, Wordtune Read, and AI21 Studio. Infinity AI Infinity AI is another top generative AI startup that focuses on synthetic data generation, simplifying the collection and labeling of useful data. Infinity AI’s solutions have been used in fitness, smart retail, robotics, and warehouse safety scenarios. Founded: 2021. Products and solutions: Infinity API, Data Flywheel, and Marketplace. Notion Notion has found much of its success in providing note-taking, task management, and other kinds of daily work management applications. Notion AI was generally released in early 2023, quickly gaining traction as an option for teams that want to summarize notes, create quick lists, and write emails with the help of generative AI. Founded: 2016. Products and solutions: Notion AI, Wikis, Projects, and Docs. Character.AI Character.AI is a company that offers creative ways to develop and chat with user-created characters. Though the tool can simply be used for fun conversations, it can also be used to simulate important conversations like job interviews. Founded: 2021. Products and solutions: Character.AI. Plask Plask creates technology to make animation easier and more cost-effective. The tool can be used to create animated or hyperrealistic 3D motion videos. Founded: 2020. Products and solutions: Plask (Freemium and MoCap Pro) and Plask API. Charisma Charisma provides a plug-and-play platform for various entertainment companies and storytellers to create realistic characters and storylines that adjust to player/user inputs. Examples of media created with Charisma include The Kraken Wakes game and the Will Play virtual learning platform. Founded: 2015. Products and solutions: Charisma and Unreal Engine plugin. Synthesia Synthesia is a generative AI company that focuses on video creation for personal and enterprise use. Users can rely on AI avatars and voices to communicate in training, marketing, and how-to videos in 120 different languages. Founded: 2017. Products and solutions: Synthesia. Andi Andi is a generative-AI-driven search bot that not only helps users to search for information across the web but also summarizes and further explains that information. Users appreciate Andi’s clean interface and lack of ads. Founded: 2021. Products and solutions: Andi. Syntho Syntho is another synthetic data generation startup that uses generative AI to create synthetic data twins of actual sensitive data. Syntho’s Syntho Engine is often used for realistic product demos, data analytics, and test data generation. Founded: 2020. Products and solutions: Syntho Engine. Kaliber Kaliber focuses on developing AI-powered surgical software for arthroscopic surgery needs. The company also provides solutions to help patients and other members of the surgical team get the information they need more seamlessly. Founded: 2015. Category and use cases: Digital surgical assistance, AI-labeled patient communication platform, AI-powered feedback for surgeons, and automated surgery stage recognition. Products and solutions: Kaliber SaMD platform is in development. PatentPal PatentPal is a tool that is specifically designed with patent law requirements in mind. The tool takes claims that have already been written by the author to generate tonally and factually accurate patent specification drafts. Founded: 2018. Products and solutions: PatentPal. podcast.ai Podcast.ai , a subsidiary of Play.ht , is a weekly podcast that is entirely created with generative AI voices and transcripts. The podcast covers a different topic each week and has even used Steve Jobs recordings and biographical information to record an episode with “him”. Founded: 2016 (Play.ht). 20 Emerging Generative AI Players to Watch Revery AI Bertha.ai Biomatter Biomatter , founded in 2018, uses its Intelligent Architecture platform to design and develop proteins for health and sustainable manufacturing. Paige AI Replika Osmo Osmo , founded in 2023 as a spinout from Google Research, uses machine learning and has created a map of odor to help computers predict how something smells based on its molecular structure. Tavus Tavus , founded in 2020, is a generative AI company that creates new versions of videos users create based on specific viewer qualities and other personalizations. Midjourney Midjourney , founded in 2022, offers generative AI for image and artwork creation, though the company has come under fire for using millions of artists’ images without prior consent. Aimi.fm Aimi.fm , founded in 2019, is a generative AI music player that also supports basic music creation functionalities for artists. Activ Surgical Activ Surgical , founded in 2017, uses intraoperative surgical intelligence to give surgeons real-time information and better visuals during surgery. Aqemia Aqemia , founded in 2019, uses AI to preclude experimental data and scale drug discovery in the pharmatech space. You.com You.com , founded in 2020, is a private and secure search engine that summarizes and personalizes results with generative AI. Veesual Veesual , founded in 2020, uses deep learning and image generation to enable virtual try-on for fashion e-commerce. Tabnine Inworld AI Inworld AI , founded in 2021, is a company that uses generative AI and text-to-character prompts to help gaming and media companies make NPC characters more realistic. New Equilibrium Biosciences New Equilibrium , founded in 2019, works with a combination of AI, chemistry, and biophysics to optimize drug discovery for disordered proteins. Adept Adept , founded in 2022, is a new OpenAI competitor that relies on AI and natural language commands to create better interfaces between humans and computers in the workplace. Twain Twain , founded in 2021, is designed to help sales professionals write content that works better for sales outreach. Diagram Diagram , founded in 2022, is a company that provides product design, prototyping, and other generative AI design features to its customers. Soundraw Soundraw , founded in 2020, is a generative AI solution for music composition that can be tailored to different genres, instruments, and other musical variables. Bottom Line: Generative AI Startups Ever since the debut of ChatGPT in November of 2022, generative AI – and artificial intelligence in general – has taken a huge leap forward. Business leaders, consumers and investors have all woken up to the vast potential for generative AI to aid content creators and business staffers in countless tasks, freeing them up to do higher value work. It’s the young companies on this list that will shape the future of AI, which in turn will shape the future of technology and society at large in many and profound ways.