Investment market analysts called 2022 another "RIP Good Times," despite such deals as the Figma-Adobe agreement or the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk.
Indeed, the amount of venture capital investments and the number of new unicorns in 2022 has decreased to the level of 2020.
Image credits: Crunchbase
Image credits: Crunchbase
This decline encourages investors to make a stricter selection of investments for the new 2024 year, even in such promising areas as artificial intelligence startups. Thus, AI-driving technologies company Argo AI, backed by Ford and VW and last valued at $12.4 billion in July 2021 in funding and partnership with Lyft, closes down as it’s unable to raise new funds. Therefore, the AI stars like Open AI and Stability AI shined even brighter in 2022.
At the end of 2022, we launched our own AI startup. The application Dyvo is based on Stable Diffusion and generates cartoonish and photorealistic images. The magic of creating AI art has captured us, and now we are looking for more and more of its applications.
In this article, we want to share the top artificial intelligent startups that inspired us.
OpenAI
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit artificial intelligence research lab by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others. Now OpenAI consists of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The AI company conducts fundamental, long-term research toward creating safe AGI "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."
In 2021, OpenAI released DALL-E, a deep learning model that can generate digital images from natural language descriptions called "prompts" and combine concepts, attributes, and styles.
Image credits: OpenAI website
In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a chat aimed at natural language answering questions, translating, and generating improvised text. It reached over a million signups within the first five days and projected a US$200 million revenue for 2023 and US$1 billion for 2024.
Image credits: OpenAI website
“This capacity for mimicry allows ChatGPT to write essays and poetry, think up jokes, formulate code, and answer questions whether to a child or an expert.”
Kenan Malik, The Guardian
Dialpad
The second place in our top AI startups list is Dialpad, which disrupted the collaboration market with the first real-time speech recognition engine for enterprise conversations. Nowadays, it is an industry-defining Ai-Powered Customer Intelligence Platform that combines the most advanced Ai Contact Center, Ai Sales, Ai Voice, and Ai Meetings with Ai Messaging.
On December 21, 2022, Dialpad announced a $50 million investment into the research and development of artificial intelligence technologies for business process automation and predictive insights.
“Dialpad’s intuitive Ai insights will simplify how work is done by enabling the end-users to become more informed decision-makers and better understand customers’ unique needs.”
Craig Walker, Ceo and Founder at Dialpad
Grammarly
Grammarly was initially designed as an educational app to help students improve their English.
Now Grammarly uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to help improve people’s writing, from basic spelling, grammar, and style to more advanced suggestions on tone and context-specific language.
The freemium subscription model has brought the startup 30+ million active daily users and big fishes like Dell, NASA, Microsoft, and Cisco.
Image credits: Grammarly website
“From changes in our tone to workplace communication shifts at large, the global pandemic has left a lasting impact on how we communicate. The shift to remote-first everything — including school and work — has only increased the need for digital communication assistance like ours,”
Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, Grammarly global head of product
AEye
AEye is a global leader in adaptive, high-performance LiDAR systems for vehicle autonomy, advanced driver assistance systems, and robotic vision applications.
AEye’s iDAR™ (Intelligent Detection and Ranging) Sensing Platform leverage biomimicry and principles from automated targeting applications used by the military to scan the environment, intelligently focusing on what matters most, enabling faster, more accurate, and more reliable driving.
Image credits: AEye website
“At AEye, we have created a software-defined adaptive lidar solution that can help us navigate in a safer, more efficient, and productive way.”
AEye mission
Moveworks
Moveworks uses natural language understanding (NLU), probabilistic machine learning, and automation to resolve employees’ requests.
Moveworks was started in 2016 as an employee’s IT support. In March 2021, the AI startup released an Employee Service Platform for HR, finance, facilities, and internal communications. This year Moveworks was valued at $2.1 billion.
In October 2022, Moveworks launched Employee Experience Insights (EXI) — an analytics and insights solution relying to Moveworks’ proprietary NLU models to understand and categorize each employee issue.
Image credits: Moveworks website
“EXI analyzes unstructured data in tickets and gives CIOs clear insight into the exact drivers of poor employee experience, without the need for any manual data tagging. These data insights result in an actionable to-do list based on the initiatives that have the potential to create the biggest impact across the business.”
Varun Singh, cofounder and VP of Moveworks
Abnormal Security
Abnormal Security is an email security company that protects enterprises and organizations from targeted email attacks including phishing, malware, ransomware, social engineering, executive impersonation, supply chain compromise, internal account compromise, spam, and graymail.
They employ behavioral AI to baseline known-good user behavior and precisely detect anomalies across all email attacks. The startup's valuation hit $4 billion in May 2022.
Image credits: Abnormal Security website
“Abnormal has a cloud-native, API-based approach which offers enhanced visibility into internal email context and threats. It also uses a behavioral AI-based approach to baseline known-good user behavior and precisely detects anomalies to stop all email attacks.”
Evan Reiser, co-founder and CEO
Observe.ai (Z21 Labs)
Observe.ai is a platform for boosting contact center performance with artificial intelligence. Their AI engine analyzes interactions across channels to improve employee performance, quality assurance, pinpoints new revenue and coaching opportunities.
In April 2022, Observe.ai raised $125M in a Series C with some notable investors such as SoftBank Vision Fund and Zoom.
Image credits: Obsreve.ai website
“The aim is to target the “dreadful experiences” that tend to be the norm when it comes to contact center engagements.”
Swapnil Jain, the CEO of Observe.ai
Jasper
Jasper developed an AI-powered content platform that helps create original content while optimizing it for ROI and even repackaging it in different ways and languages. In October 2022, the company raised $125 million in Series A funding at a $1.5 billion valuation.
Image credits: Jasper website
“So long as you know who your target audience is and the tone for your brand, the content description or content brief you provide will come to life in a matter of moments. It's not just long-form content or blogs you can generate with these AI writers; you can produce ad copy, social media text, captions, or even video script drafts that do much of the initial heavy lifting. “
Hackernoon
Darwinbox
Darwinbox is a cloud-based Human Resources Management Software (HRMS) that covers recruitment, payroll, employee engagement, talent management, and people analytics.
The SaaS platform engages and empowers employees across the entire lifecycle (hire-to-retire) with a smarter, simpler & mobile-first HR Tech experience powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).
AI startup raised $4 million from Microsoft Corporation in November 2022 and $5 million in an extension of a Series D in January 2023.
Image credits: Darwinbox website
Stability AI
Rounding out our list of top startups is the true star of 2022, Stability AI, an AI-driven visual art startup designing and implementing an open AI tool to create images based on text input.
The company’s funding the development of open-source music- and image-generating systems like Dance Diffusion and Stable Diffusion.
Emad Mostaque co-founded and bootstrapped Stability AI in 2020, motivated by a personal fascination with AI and what he characterized as a lack of “organization” within the open-source AI community. Now they have a cluster of more than 4,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs running in AWS, which it uses to train AI systems.
Stability AI plans to make money by training “private” models for customers and accessing them through DreamStudio (a platform and API).
Image credits: Stability AI website
“We believe that open-source AI technologies have the power to unlock human creativity and achieve a broader good. Stability AI is a big idea that dreams beyond the immediate applications of AI.”
Sri Viswanath, a general partner at Coatue
Summary
The AI industry is poised to grow to an estimated $126 billion by 2025. Artificial intelligent startups are transforming industries ranging from medicine to software development to art. AI apps and solutions have already become essential for many businesses.
Startup lovers, investors, and entrepreneurs can follow, use or join them.
If you want to create your own AI startup, contact us, and we will share our experience creating an AI application to realize your idea.