10 AI Startup Companies To Watch In 2026
From Anthropic and Perplexity to WitnessAI and Jeff Bezos’ Project Prometheus, here are the 10 AI startup companies you need to keep tabs on in 2026.
Billions of dollars are being poured into AI startup companies seeking to be on the bleeding edge of the artificial intelligence era.
IT research firm Gartner estimates that the AI market grew almost 50 percent year over year in 2025 to approximately $1.5 trillion, fueled by ongoing data center building and increased enterprise investments in AI.
There’s little doubt that the AI boom is reshaping the IT landscape at a rapid pace via new innovations around AI agents, autonomous automation and open foundation models.
CRN found 10 AI startups standing out from the crowd in 2026.
Top 2026 AI Startups
From large language model (LLM) superstars like Anthropic and Mistral AI to startup specialists like Airia and Imbue, AI startups are making headlines and driving innovation unlike ever before.
Some AI startups began emerging from stealth in 2025 including former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ new and well-funded startup Project Prometheus, as well as startup Aurascape, which launched out of stealth with an AI-native security platform.
CRN breaks down 10 of the most innovative and interesting AI startup companies in the world that every business should know about as 2026 gets underway.
Anthropic
CEO: Dario Amodei
Anthropic is one of the hottest AI startups on the planet thanks to its innovative Claude family of LLMs.
In September, Anthropic raised $13 billion in a Series F round at a $183 billion valuation to expand its enterprise offerings, research and international growth as revenue grew from $1 billion to $5 billion over the span of eight months.
Last month, the San Francisco-based startup acquired Bun, which helps developers run and manage codes more effectively, to enhance the speed and stability of its Claude Code agent.
The startup dubs its recently released new Claude Opus 4.5 model the best in the world for coding, agents and computer use.
Airia
CEO: Kevin Kiley
Airia is an enterprise AI security and orchestration platform that enables customers to deploy AI quickly, safely and at scale.
Built for complex and regulated environments, Airia reduces vulnerabilities in agentic ecosystems and streamlines workflows across agents, models, and an organization’s applications and data sources. Its platform integrates with existing systems and data sources to transform workflows into intelligent AI agents.
Atlanta-based Airia has already grown to 150 employees across five continents and over 300 enterprise customers in just 15 months out of stealth.
In September, Airia co-founder John Marshall invested $50 million into the startup.
Aurascape
CEO: Moinul Khan
AI startup Aurascape launched out of stealth with $50 million in funding in early 2025 alongside an AI-native security platform.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup’s Aurascape platform is built specifically to prevent AI-driven threats, protect users and data, and keep teams productive.
The platform provides visibility and controls for every AI interaction with key capabilities including risk analysis, response decoding for thousands of AI applications, threat prevention for sophisticated AI threats, as well as data security with minimal false positives for AI interactions. It also processes and protects multimodal data.
DevRev
CEO: Dheeraj Pandey
DevRev is the owner of AI-native platform that features a conversational AI assistant named Computer, which unifies customer, product and engineering data.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup’s platform aims to break down data silos, automate manual tasks and enhance collaboration between teams. Its technology takes structured and unstructured data from existing tools—such as Salesforce and Zendesk—then organizes it into a knowledge graph that powers conversational enterprise AI.
DevRev’s new Computer Agent Studio offering makes agent building accessible to every user, with no-code, low-code, and full-code options available.
Imbue
CEO: Kanjun Qiu
AI startup Imbue specializes in building tools that make AI coding reliable, collaborative and accessible with Sculptor, a user interface for coding agents.
Imbue’s Sculptor coordinates coding agents so users can delegate tasks, verify results, and shape the direction of their projects. The coding agent environment suggests and generates fixes to code in a safe sandbox, enabling real-time improvements.
With Sculptor, the San Francisco-based startup lets users spin up a new agent that runs in its own container, so the agent can all execute code safely in parallel. Sculptor containers keep machine safe and lets users move between agents seamlessly.
Mistral AI
CEO: Arthur Mensch
Mistral AI owns one of the most popular open-weight large language models, Mistral, with new LLMs being developed at a rapid pace.
The French startup enables organizations to customize, fine-tune and deploy AI assistants, agents and multimodal AI with its open models.
In December, the startup unveiled its new Mistral 3 models that includes three small, dense models and Mistral Large 3, which the company says is its most capable model yet. Mistral Large 3 was trained from scratch on 3,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs.
Perplexity
CEO: Aravind Srinivas
Perplexity is making waves in the AI industry by offering a free, AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate and real-time answers to questions.
Perplexity AI is a chatbot search engine that utilizes AI to retrieve information from various web sources. Built upon OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and offering access to the open internet, the platform gathers information and links from sources including Reddit and social media platforms like X.
The San Francisco-based startup helps users with research and writing by offering both free and paid plans.
Project Prometheus
Co-CEO and Co-Founder: Jeff Bezos
Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced a new, heavily funded AI startup called Prometheus several months ago that made waves across the AI industry.
Backed with over $6 billion in funding, Project Prometheus is reportedly working on AI systems that can support the manufacturing of computers, cars, and the aerospace industry.
The startup is reportedly aiming to build AI models that lean in more complex ways than chatbots can.
Although details are scarce about Project Prometheus, the startup has already hired nearly 100 employees including top researchers and engineers from AI companies such as OpenAI and DeepMind.
WitnessAI
CEO: Rick Caccia
WitnessAI provides visibility, AI-native protection, and behavior-based governance for AI models, applications and autonomous agents.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup enables safe and effective adoption of enterprise AI, through security and governance guardrails for public and private LLMs.
Its WitnessAI Secure AI Enablement Platform provides visibility of employee AI use, control of that use via AI-oriented policy, and protection of that use via data and topic security.
By delivering enterprise-grade security, compliance, and governance controls, WitnessAI said it enables customers to unlock AI with confidence and trust.
Writer
CEO: May Habib
With a focus on enterprise clients, Writer provides a generative AI platform with its own family of LLMs dubbed Palmyra.
Writer’s Palmyra models are engineered for corporate security, accuracy, and compliance, including models customized for financial work, medical needs, and creativity.
The San Franciso-based startup’s platform integrates these models with a Knowledge Graph that securely connects to a company's internal data (RAG).
The AI startup recently released a new agent named Action Agent which can autonomously complete multi-step workloads across multiple services.