5 generative AI startups you need to know about

Image: Kilito Chan/Getty Images

By Kirstie McDermott

A new record was set for VC investments in 2021, in what turned out to be a banner year for venture capital funding in the U.S. These ticked up to around $345 billion, nearly twice as much as the previous year.

Of course, 2022 and 2023 weren’t quite so stellar. While $242 billion of funds were invested in young, innovative, non-listed companies in 2022, this was a considerable drop on the year before. 2023 was worse again, with just $170.6 billion invested; it’s a figure that is more or less equal to 2020’s numbers.

This year, though, there is one area that is helping to keep the numbers rising, and that is artificial intelligence (AI).

5 jobs to discover this week

According to Crunchbase, so far this year, 35% of U.S. startup investment has gone to AI-related companies. It says this “appears to be the highest percentage on record, besting even 2023, when OpenAI secured its $10 billion Microsoft-backed financing”.

From the big names of Open AI, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI (which raised $6,000,000,000 in its Series B), hundreds of AI startups are emerging across fintech, health, and logistics.

Here are five to know about now; across music, search, financial compliance, health and customer service.

Suno

Meta, TikTok and Kensho alumni have come together to create Suno, an AI music generator. With a promise that it can “make a song about everything”, Suno has raised $125 million in funding and has a valuation of $500 million.

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing: because it has trained on so many songs in order to create its outputs, the music industry has taken note. In June, members of the Recording Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit against the company. It alleges that the data Suno is using to train its models infringes on copyrights held by major record labels.

Perplexity

AI search engine Perplexity was founded in 2022 and its investors include Jeff Bezos, SoftBank and Nvidia. It has experienced huge growth since its inception and has already reached a Unicorn valuation.

AliveCor

Generative AI offers huge potential in healthcare, and AliveCor is interested in heart health. It aims to create the most sophisticated AI in personal ECGm and has received $350 million in funding.

CEO Priya Abani says that “In engineering terms, the heart is a single point of failure.” Through its connected Kardia Mobile device, she says that “For the first time, we allow patients to take an FDA cleared ECG anytime, anywhere—and make instant determinations about what that ECG is telling you about your own heart health.”

Decagon

One of the job areas already identified to be affected by generative AI is that of customer service. Often, chatbots can do the job as effectively, and faster. Decagon is a startup dedicated to enterprise-grade AI agents for customer support automation.

It offers “Zero-lift integrations” with existing tools and data sources such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack and Stripe, among others. This year, it raised $35 million in seed and Series A funding.

Greenlite

Fintech companies have many compliance requirements that can cause headaches. They need to comply with demands related to code, security, compliance, and corporate governance, for example.

The regulatory landscape is one of rapid change and as a result, 93% of fintechs find it challenging to meet compliance requirements. Greenlite is an AI company which automates compliance for enterprise fintech. It allows users to assign compliance workflows like alert handling, periodic reviews and document processing to AI workers, which improves efficiency and reduces human error.

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