AI startups in San Francisco

Andrew Feldman, Gary Lauterbach, Sean Lie

Founded 2015, Cerebras makes the Wafer-Scale Engine — the largest AI chip ever built — and sells AI training/inference systems and cloud. It closed a ~$1.1B round (Sept 2025) at a ~$23B valuation, reported ~...

Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, Ion Stoica, Reynold Xin & Berkeley AMPLab co-founders

Founded 2013 out of UC Berkeley (creators of Apache Spark); the leading data + AI 'lakehouse' platform. Closed a >$4B Series L in Dec 2025 at a $134B valuation and surpassed a $5.4B revenue run-rate (up 65% ...

Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu, Robert Wachen

Founded 2022, Etched builds Sohu — a transformer-specialized ASIC that hard-wires the transformer architecture into silicon for dramatically faster/cheaper inference. It reportedly secured ~$500M in early 20...

Brett Adcock

Founded 2022, Figure is the most-funded pure-play humanoid robotics company (~$1.9B raised). Its Figure 03 humanoid, launched October 2025 and redesigned for high-volume manufacturing and home use, was named...

Lin Qiao & Dmytro Dzhulgakov

Founded 2022 by ex-Meta PyTorch engineers; a fast, cost-optimized generative-AI inference platform for enterprises. Raised $250M Series C in Oct 2025 at a $4B valuation and was in talks in 2026 at a reported...

Jonathan Ross, Douglas Wightman

Founded 2016 by an ex-Google TPU engineer, Groq builds LPU inference chips optimized for low-latency LLM serving via GroqCloud. After raising at a ~$6.9B valuation in 2025, it became the landmark AI-chip dea...

Karol Hausman, Sergey Levine, Lachy Groom

Founded 2024, Physical Intelligence builds general-purpose foundation models (pi-zero) that let a single AI transfer manipulation skills across different robot bodies — folding laundry, assembling electronic...

Rodrigo Liang, Kunle Olukotun, Christopher Ré

Founded 2017 out of Stanford, SambaNova builds reconfigurable dataflow (RDU) AI chips and full-stack systems for enterprise/government AI inference and training. It has raised over $1.1B (Series D at a ~$5B ...

Alexandr Wang & Lucy Guo

Founded 2016; data-labeling and data-engine platform for training AI/ML models and a major government/defense AI contractor. In Jun 2025 Meta took a ~49% stake for ~$14.3B, valuing Scale at ~$29B, and co-fou...

Vipul Ved Prakash, Ce Zhang, Chris Ré & Percy Liang 🇮🇳

Founded 2022; a GPU/AI-cloud ('neocloud') for training and serving open-source models at scale. Raised $305M Series B (Feb 2025, $3.3B) then $800M Series C (Jul 2026) leaping to an $8.3B valuation. Co-founde...

AI clinical documentation & coding

Founded 2020 by Nikhil Buduma and Mike Ng. AI documentation and medical-coding platform for health systems. Closed a $243M Series C in July 2025 (Oak HC/FT, a16z) at a $1.25B valuation, reaching unicorn stat...

AI model inference infrastructure

Founded 2019. Infrastructure for deploying and serving AI/ML models in production at scale (used by AI-native companies incl. Lovable). Raised a $150M Series D at a $2.2B valuation ($280M+ total) from Greylo...

physical AI for food manufacturing

San Francisco company providing AI-enabled meal-assembly robots to food manufacturers on a robotics-as-a-service model; robots have completed 70M+ servings across the US and Canada. A rare Bay Area foodtech/...

AI go-to-market / sales data automation

Founded by Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan. AI-powered GTM platform that aggregates 100+ data sources and automates prospecting, enrichment and outbound. Raised a $100M Series C in August 2025 at a $3.1B valua...

AI customer support agents

Founded 2023 by Jesse Zhang and Ashwin Sreenivas (ex-Palantir, Citadel). Enterprise conversational-AI agents for customer support. Raised a $131M Series C (June 2025, $1.5B) co-led by Accel and a16z, then a ...

enterprise AI-native workflow automation

Founded 2022. Builds and deploys AI-native workflows into large-enterprise operations (partnered closely with OpenAI). Raised a $175M Series B at a $1.8B valuation ($200M+ total) from Khosla Ventures and Lig...

AI platform for plaintiff law firms

SF-based legal-AI company (CEO Jay Madheswaran) building an AI platform that helps plaintiff/personal-injury firms manage cases and deliver outcomes. Raised $103M in a Series B at a $1B+ valuation, led by Sp...

AI for personal-injury law

Founded 2019 by Rami Karabibar, Raymond Mieszaniec and Saam Mashhad. AI that builds demand packages and case documents for personal-injury firms. Raised a $150M Series E in October 2025 at a $2B+ valuation (...

agentic AI for audit & advisory firms

SF-based vertical-AI platform (YC) delivering end-to-end agentic workflows for audit, assurance and advisory firms to raise margins and win business. Has raised ~$122M. A leading example of AI reshaping the ...

enterprise AI search & work assistant

Founded 2019 by Arvind Jain (ex-Google, ex-Rubrik co-founder) and team. Enterprise AI search and agent platform that indexes a company's apps to answer work questions and run agents. One of the Bay Area's fa...

legal AI for law firms & enterprises

Founded 2022 by Winston Weinberg (ex-litigator) and Gabriel Pereyra (ex-DeepMind/Meta AI). AI agents for contract analysis, due diligence, compliance and litigation, used by 142,000+ lawyers across 1,500+ cu...

Stephen Balaban & Michael Balaban

Founded 2012; GPU cloud and hardware for AI training and inference (the "AI Developer Cloud"). Raised a $480M Series D at ~$2.5B (Feb 2025) and a $1.5B+ Series E (TWG Global) in Nov 2025 targeting a ~$4–5B+ ...

AI agent engineering platform

Founded 2022 by Harrison Chase. Widely used open-source framework plus LangSmith/LangGraph tooling for building, observing and deploying LLM agents. Raised a $125M Series B at a ~$1.3B valuation (~$160M tota...

AI hiring & expert data-labeling marketplace

Founded 2023 by Thiel Fellows Brendan Foody, Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath (Bay Area high-school debate teammates). Started as AI-driven recruiting; pivoted to sourcing specialized human experts to train f...

Edo Liberty

Founded 2019; the pioneering managed vector database powering retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for AI apps. Previously valued at ~$750M; a foundational piece of the AI-infra/memory stack founded by ex-AW...

enterprise AI customer-service agents

Founded 2023 by Bret Taylor (ex-Salesforce co-CEO, OpenAI chair) and Clay Bavor (ex-Google). Builds branded AI agents that resolve customer-service interactions, billed per successful outcome. Raised a ~$950...

AI language-learning app

Founded 2016 in San Francisco by Andrew Hsu and Connor Zwick. AI speaking-focused language tutor backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund. Raised a $78M Series C in Nov 2024 reaching unicorn status at a $1B valuati...