Funding-Fueled Growth: Ten IT Startup Companies to Watch Out for in 2023
In the ever-evolving landscape of technology startups, securing funding for innovative ideas remains a key driver of growth and success. While experts suggest a potential slowdown in investment for 2023, groundbreaking companies continue to captivate investors with their pioneering concepts.
According to research by Foley & Lardner LLP, five key areas have attracted significant investment in 2023: Artificial Intelligence, Sustainability and Clean Tech, Health Tech and Digital Health Solutions, FinTech Innovation, and E-Commerce and Direct-to-Consumer Brands.
As we steadily approach an AI-first world, the opportunities for tech startups to leave their mark have never been more significant. With the imminent dominance of AI and robotics in our future, Venture Capital firms and tech investors are keenly observing the industry for novel ideas that can be transformed into reality. However, it’s not just AI that captures the attention of investors; other spheres also garner substantial interest.
Recognizing the potential of these dynamic startups, The Prime View has curated a list of the most promising startups of 2023 based on their latest publicly announced investments and the innovative products they are developing.
Anthropic – $450M
Website: Anthropic
Anthropic is a prominent generative AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI veterans. In 2021, Dario Amodei, the former VP of research at OpenAI, launched Anthropic as a public benefit corporation. The startup attracted a team of talented individuals, including OpenAI’s former policy lead Jack Clark. Anthropic competes with OpenAI, Cohere, AI21 Labs, and others in developing and commercializing text and image-generating AI systems. However, Anthropic aims to go beyond existing capabilities and create a “next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching.” This algorithm holds the potential to build virtual assistants capable of answering emails, conducting research, and generating art, books, and more.
Anthropic recently concluded a Series C funding round, raising $450 million with Spark Capital as the lead investor. Also, tech giants such as Google, Salesforce, Zoom, Sound Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and other undisclosed venture capital parties participated in this funding round. These investments demonstrate a strong belief in Anthropic’s technology, which leverages AI to perform conversational and text-processing tasks across various industries.
Anthropic has already announced partnerships with Zoom and Google, focusing on building customer-facing AI products centered around reliability, productivity, and safety. With over a dozen customers in sectors like healthcare, HR, and education, Anthropic’s AI solutions are gaining traction.
Cohere – $270M
Website: Cohere
Cohere is a startup empowering developers and enterprises to build exceptional products and derive substantial business value using language AI. Founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst (one of the first employees at Google’s Toronto AI lab), Cohere aims to create an AI model ecosystem tailored for enterprise use cases.
Cohere differentiates itself by providing a cloud-agnostic AI platform that can be deployed across various cloud environments or on-premises. The startup collaborates closely with customers to develop custom language models based on their proprietary data.
Cohere has gained recognition and raised significant capital, accumulating $445 million in funding. Only OpenAI ($11.3 billion) and Anthropic ($450 million) have raised more funds among generative AI startups, placing Cohere at the forefront along with Inflection AI ($225 million) and Adept ($415 million).
The latest $270 million funding round valued the company at approximately $2.1 billion to $2.2 billion.
Cohere plans to utilize the fresh capital to advance its AI platform, targeting enterprise customers and emphasizing data privacy and simplicity of implementation.
Builder.ai – $250M
Website: Builder.ai
Established in 2016, Builder.ai offers businesses of all sizes the opportunity to build a web or native mobile apps modularly. Their AI-powered software assists in building and managing software projects. With Builder.ai’s platform and human-assisted AI, enterprises, small businesses, and entrepreneurs can develop, operate, and scale software without requiring technical expertise or writing code. Notable partnerships include JP Morgan & Chase, Etisalat UAE, and various technology and financial enterprises.
The startup has recently entered into a strategic collaboration with Microsoft, which includes an undisclosed equity investment. This collaboration will involve joint efforts in developing AI solutions. Builder.ai’s “Natasha” AI will be accessible to Teams users for app and software development. Builder.ai’s software assembly line will also integrate with Azure OpenAI Service and other Azure Cognitive Services.
Recently Builder.ai secured $250 million in a Series D funding round led by the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA). The funding round also saw participation from existing and new investors, including Iconiq Capital, Jungle Ventures, and Insight Partners.
With this latest funding, Builder.ai’s total funding exceeds $450 million, and they report a revenue growth of 2.3 times.
The company intends to enable users to build apps on their platform through human conversation, departing from the conventional no-code/low-code approach characterized by expert-driven systems.
Lightmatter– $154M
Website: Lightmatter
Lightmatter, a photonic computing startup, is poised to impact the rapidly growing AI computation market significantly. With its unique hardware-software combo, Lightmatter aims to level up the industry while addressing the pressing need for energy efficiency.
Traditional AI computation processes, such as matrix-vector products, rely on GPUs and TPUs that use silicon gates and transistors. However, these traditional chips are reaching their limits in density and speed for a given wattage or size. Lightmatter’s approach is to leverage optical flow using microscopic optical waveguides, enabling light to perform logic operations. This analog-digital hybrid approach is faster and more efficient, potentially revolutionizing the field. Using multiple colors simultaneously increases the chip’s power, allowing for greater computation capabilities.
Lightmatter, led by CEO and founder Nick Harris, originated from optical computing work at MIT. After raising significant investments, including a recent $154 million C round, they are preparing for mass production in 2024.
Lightmatter has several pilots going with its full stack of Envise (computing hardware), Passage (interconnect, crucial for large computing operations), and Idiom. This software platform should let machine learning developers adapt quickly. Before 2024, the pilots are in beta.
Redpanda – $100M
Website: Redpanda
Redpanda, a company specializing in real-time data streaming, offers a modern solution for capturing real-time data while maintaining compatibility with Kafka, a popular open-source streaming project.
With the recent announcement of a $100 million Series C funding round, Redpanda has demonstrated remarkable growth and market traction. Its streaming technology has become foundational for building new modern applications, providing limitless data retention and unification capabilities. Redpanda’s value proposition resonates with both CIOs, who benefit from cost savings, and developers, who appreciate the technology’s ease of migration from Kafka.
The funding will support Redpanda’s expansion in key areas, including go-to-market strategies, scaling for larger customers, and enhancing customer support. Notable customers include Cisco, Akamai, Lacework, and Vodafone. Led by CEO Alex Gallego, Redpanda is committed to building a diverse workforce as the company grows.
Cyera – $100M
Website: Cyera
Cyera, a startup co-founded by Yotam Segev and Tamar Bar-Ilan, focuses on providing companies with greater visibility and enhanced security over their proprietary data. As enterprises face exponential data growth and data security challenges, Cyera offers a platform that leverages AI-powered data security posture management (DSPM) capabilities.
In a recent $100 million Series B funding round led by Accel, Cyera showcased its unique positioning and holistic approach compared to other DSPM vendors.
By utilizing an OpenAI large language model, Cyera delivers a contextual understanding of the data managed by organizations, enabling the identification of exposures, posture issues, and risks associated with data access.
The platform covers cloud environments, including software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service, with plans to support on-premises deployments in 2024.
Despite being a relatively small team, Cyera has gained substantial traction among the S&P 500, achieving double-digit customer growth and 800% revenue growth in 2022. With continued investment in engineering talent and R&D, Cyera aims to revolutionize data security in the cloud era.
Synthesia – $90M
Website: Synthesia
Synthesia is a startup that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to create synthetic videos for advertising and other applications. By using AI-driven avatars, which are realistic characters with synthetic voices, Synthesia aims to provide personalized digital marketing and training experiences while reducing the costs typically associated with video production.
Startup was founded in 2017 by a team of AI researchers and entrepreneurs from University College London, Stanford, Technical University of Munich, and Cambridge, Synthesia, which now employs around 200 people. AI tech that lets customers create instructional videos featuring stock or custom AI avatars. Users type in a text, select an avatar and choose a language to generate videos.
Synthesia’s AI is trained on real actors, and actors are paid per video generated with their image and voice.
With a recent Series C funding round led by Accel and strategic investment from Nvidia, Synthesia raised $90 million, bringing its total funding to $156.6 million.
The company boasts over 50,000 customers and has seen remarkable growth, generating over 15 million videos on its platform. Synthesia has a solid client base, including Tiffany’s, IHG, and Moody’s Analytics. While concerns about potential misuse exist, Synthesia emphasizes its strict vetting process for customers, ensuring ethical usage of its technology.
Cortex – $35M
Website: Cortex
Cortex focuses on developing an internal developer portal to help engineering teams build better software at scale. Originally a tool for managing microservices architectures, Cortex expanded its focus to become an internal developer portal.
This shift has resulted in significant revenue growth, with a 400% increase year-over-year. Cortex’s customers include TripAdvisor, Docker, Grammarly, Unity, and SoFi.
In its product, Cortex provides users with services and resource catalogs, scorecards for performance evaluation, hubs for team collaboration, and a new scaffolding service for standardized service architecture. The startup recently raised $35 million in a Series B funding round led by IVP, bringing its total funding to just under $53 million. Cortex aims to drive cultural change within organizations, empowering developers to take ownership and improve the quality of their code.
Elementl – $33M
Website: Elementl
Elemental is a startup building a data platform based on the popular Dagster orchestrator. Dragster founder Nick Schrock, also known for co-creating GraphQL during his time at Facebook, founded Elemental to address the challenges of data orchestration in the modern cloud and containerized environments.
The company secured a $33 million Series B funding round led by Georgian, with participation from 8VC, Human Capital, Sequoia, Index, Amplify, Hanover, and Slow.
Elementl’s approach revolves around data assets, providing developers a comprehensive view and control over the entire data lifecycle. The company has seen significant growth, triple the number of active projects using Dagster, and a thriving open-source community.
SpecterOps – $25M
Website: SpecterOps
SpecterOps, a cybersecurity company based in Seattle, specializes in analyzing cyberattack paths in enterprise cloud platforms. Its attack path management platform, BloodHound Enterprise, maps and quantifies identity attack paths in Microsoft’s Active Directory and Azure, helping organizations identify and mitigate vulnerabilities.
With the rise in cyber threats, businesses are pressured to invest in robust security systems. SpecterOps, founded in 2016 and led by CEO David McGuire, recently raised $25 million in funding.
Notable customers include Capital Group, the University of Texas at Austin, and Woodside Energy. The Series A funding round was led by Decibel, with participation from industry leaders such as Kevin Mandia, CEO and founder of Mandiant, and Jon Oberheide and Dug Song, co-founders of Duo Security. SpecterOps aims to provide effective solutions in the face of increasing cybersecurity risks.
These ten startups have garnered substantial funding and have innovative technologies that address critical challenges in their respective domains. Stay with The Prime View to keep an eye on this progress as new and new companies continue to shape the tech landscape in 2023 and beyond.