The Information’s50 Most Promising Startups2024

Developers and hobbyists have praised Anysphere’s coding assistant, Cursor, for its ease of use. Coding assistants have emerged as one of the most promising early use cases for conversational AI, and their success has drawn millions of dollars in venture capital to startups developing tools for developers. However, these startups face competition from larger companies such as Microsoft GitHub’s Copilot and Amazon’s CodeWhisperer. Cursor differentiates itself from competitors with its ability to incorporate knowledge of a developer’s entire codebase in its suggestions, developers say. For instance, the assistant can suggest lines of code in the developer’s coding style and understand how different files in the same project relate to each other. Those features have helped the company grow rapidly: Cursor gained more new customers in September than any other company, outranking companies such as OpenAI, Canva, Adobe and LinkedIn, according to data from Ramp, which makes software for tracking corporate expenses.

The generative AI boom has yet to produce any breakout consumer apps besides ChatGPT. Suno is among the apps that have gotten closest. The Cambridge, Mass.-based startup went viral this year for its app that allows users to generate short songs in a variety of styles, from rap to blues to electronic, based on simple prompts. In the year since it started charging for its product, Suno has served more than 25 million users, and its annualized revenue has grown to more than $40 million. But the company faces big challenges after three major music label groups—Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group—sued Suno for using copyrighted music to train its AI models without permission. The startup is sure to face more legal battles.

Even before the latest generative AI boom, several startups were working to automate and simplify work for salespeople. Clay, founded in 2017, was one of those. More recently, the company has started using large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others to search and summarize websites and PDFs to identify prospective customers for salespeople, and then to draft outreach emails to those prospects. That’s helped Clay explode from 2,500 customers in May to more than 4,000 now, mostly through word-of-mouth. Unlike AI sales startups that sell to small or medium-sized businesses, Clay targets mostly large enterprises, serving companies including OpenAI and Square.

The market for tools that automate key sales functions, like identifying potential customers or sending pitch emails, is becoming crowded, with offerings from both startups and tech giants like Salesforce and Microsoft. But 2-year-old 11x has shown an ability to move quickly to capitalize on the opportunity, growing annual recurring revenue from zero in September 2023 to $8 million as of last month, CEO Hasan Sukkar said.

Leya has avoided some of the problems plaguing other AI-fueled legal startups, most notably that making lawyers more efficient can reduce their billable hours and revenue. Leya also targets legal teams within large corporations that don’t face the same paradox. The Stockholm-based company is focusing on the European market, which VCs say is less crowded than the U.S. market. There also are more providers of legal data in Europe that startups can work with compared with the U.S., which is dominated by just a few providers, VCs say.

For developers making AI-powered applications, building the product is just the first step in the process. Developers must then monitor the applications’ performance, evaluating which models and prompts give their users the best experience and what can lead to errors and hallucinations. Braintrust is an early leader among the growing group of startups tackling this evaluation process. Its customer base, which includes companies such as Stripe, Notion and Instacart, doubled in the last quarter as its annual recurring revenue grew to around $1 million. Still, it faces an uphill battle, with competition both from other startups and from OpenAI, which released evaluation tools earlier this month. Some developers may prefer Braintrust’s tools, as OpenAI’s will only allow them to evaluate OpenAI models and could lock them into the company’s products, developers say.

One major obstacle to the long-awaited future of AI-powered agents that can book flights and make dinner reservations for us is the ability to easily and reliably navigate the web. Browserbase’s software looks to solve this problem. The company doesn’t just serve AI agent startups, though. Customers can use its tech to automate many complex tasks that involve browsing the web, such as filling in online forms or seeing how long it will take orders to be delivered, said founder and CEO Paul Klein. The range of use cases has helped the startup gain $1 million in annualized revenue in just nine months.

Pay-as-you-go pricing is increasingly replacing seat-based billing for enterprise software. Metronome has been a major beneficiary of the trend, reaching more than $15 million in annual recurring revenue earlier this year. It has also benefited from AI tailwinds. As more companies roll out often pricey chatbots and other AI features, whose costs can get out of hand. One major customer has been OpenAI, which depends on Metronome to bill customers for their use of its models like GPT-4o.

Badge has developed a new form of cryptography that has solved a central problem in identity security: how to verify people’s identity without storing their biometric information in a way that could be stolen. Rather than store data about users’ faces, Badge uses algorithms that can reliably turn a face scan into a private key—a string of code—that can then be used to verify a person’s identity. Badge doesn't store a photo of someone’s face, meaning a hacker who theoretically stole that data wouldn’t be able to use it to impersonate someone. Founded by two MIT professors, the company came out of stealth this summer and already counts Cisco, Okta, and CyberArk as partners who resell its technology.

BforeAI only started selling its software last year but has already gained traction with several big businesses willing to pay to protect their online brands. The startup has over two dozen customers, including Meta Platforms and Bloomberg, most of whom are Fortune 500 companies, according to someone familiar with the business.

Many medical practices still rely on manual paperwork or tedious recordkeeping processes, making them a prime candidate to benefit from AI automation. Tennr is making a dent in that market. It has attracted hundreds of customers who are contracted to pay it more than $5 million this year—a figure that has grown by nearly 20 times over the past six months, according to CEO Trey Holterman.

Cofounded by Sanaz Yashar, who fled Iran to Israel as a teenager, Zafran has begun to catch on with security executives at large companies who say it can deliver on its promise to speed the process of mitigating vulnerabilities. Customers include Kraft Heinz, Chipotle and Netskope, another cybersecurity company.

While cloud security is now a crowded field, most companies in cloud security focus on what’s known as “posture management,” or helping customers make sure their cloud-based coding environments are secure. Upwind takes a slightly different approach by focusing on runtime, monitoring how the code itself behaves in real time. The company has been steadily gaining customers and now has more than $5 million ARR after launching out of stealth mode last year.

Oomnitza’s software isn’t necessarily revolutionary, but the company’s product is well-liked by security executives because it’s easy to use and helpful. The company has a strong customer list, including Apple, which has spent more on Oomnitza software each year for the past four years, according to someone familiar with the business. Oomnitza’s largest backer, SYN Ventures, has a strong track record with small and midsize cybersecurity companies in recent years, including Talon Security, which sold to Palo Alto Networks last year for more than $600 million, and RevelStoke, which was acquired by Arctic Wolf last year for an undisclosed amount. SYN Ventures partner Rob Potter became Oomnitza’s CEO last month.

The company’s software makes it easier to post videos quickly and without editing skills. Opus Clip says it has 100,000 paying customers, up more than fivefold over the past year. Its 6 million overall users include major media companies such as iHeartMedia and Univision as well as high-profile creators such as podcaster Scott Galloway. Over the past year, users have created 170 million video clips, while 68 million clips have been exported to other platforms.

Opal’s webcams have become popular with remote workers, as well as creators who have used them to film content. Opal plans to develop other kinds of devices powered by OpenAI’s AI models and work closely with Open AI researchers to prototype various device ideas, The Information previously reported. The company has also attracted​​ investments from high-profile creators including Casey Neistat, Marques Brownlee and Charli and Dixie D’Amelio. Neistat and Brownlee have also shared ideas with the company and tested early prototypes. As of January, Opal had shipped more than 25,000 devices since it launched in 2020. The Open AI Startup Fund is leading a $60 million Series B funding round for Opal, The Information previously reported, though the round has not yet closed.

Tezza has been effective in driving downloads and awareness of the app through paid ads on TikTok, as well as founder Tessa Barton regularly sharing new effects on the app. The app has 2.5 million monthly active users and has been used by major influencers including Kim Kardashian, Gigi Hadid and Chiara Ferragni. The company’s offline presence, such as in-person events, has also helped it grow a loyal community of fans.

Companies like Udio have the potential to disrupt the music industry, changing how music is made. The SoundCloud era has made it possible for anyone to release their own songs. Udio stands out by providing flexible tools to a range of musicians, from hobbyists to professionals. The company counts prominent musicians will.i.am and Common as investors. King Willonius' track "BBL Drizzy," created on Udio, reached 3.3 million streams on SoundCloud within a week before it was taken down for violating copyright. Udio still has a lot to overcome, but investors are excited about its potential, especially because four of the company’s five founders honed their technical skills as researchers at Google DeepMind.

Beli has become a popular app in the New York City food scene and has quickly gained steam in other foodie hubs, like London and Los Angeles. It’s also been embraced across college campuses like New York University where young people are bonding over their restaurant picks. So far, the app has recorded 40 million rankings, with about 1 million unique restaurants ranked, the company said in September. It recently partnered with restaurant booking services OpenTable and SevenRooms to allow users to make reservations directly from the app.

When Sabrina Carpenter appeared in a polka-dot dress in her “Taste” music video, the dress sold out in stores, but savvy shoppers turned to Pickle. The company has a solid wedge in the New York City fashion scene and is building up supply in Los Angeles. Local rentals are especially convenient on Pickle because users can pick up garments in person or have them delivered by DoorDash, but the option for long-distance delivery means growing markets like Miami and Chicago are not left out. Pickle is using just the right amount of AI by automatically scanning images uploaded by prospective lenders and adding tags to facilitate searches.

The company has landed venture heavyweights that are key for expanding in the Middle East’s booming real estate market—especially Wa’ed Ventures, a Saudi-centric venture fund backed by Aramco. So far, the company has cut through the noise of a crowded market, helping sell 300 properties and landing 750,000 users.

Polymarket is the world’s largest crypto-based prediction market by trading volume. In the runup to the 2024 U.S. election, it has seen a surge in users and trading volume surpassed $2 billion. It is not available to U.S. users due to regulatory restrictions. For now, Polymarket is not charging commissions on trades and has no meaningful revenue.

In just a few years, the fintech company has hired over 100 people and landed solid customers, such as XP, a Brazilian investment management company and Itau, one of Brazil’s largest banking institutions. It has also attracted capital during a time when fintech investors are more risk-averse, most recently a $21 million Series A round in June 2024. The company still must show it can win clients outside of Latin America.

Founded by Robert Leshner, a crypto pioneer who created the popular decentralized lending protocol Compound, Superstate currently offers two funds, one for short-duration U.S. government securities with $155 million assets under management, and another called crypto carry fund with $43 million assets under management. Its primary clients are crypto investors, venture funds and hedge funds that are moving money between crypto assets and cash. Stablecoin issuers also use Superstate’s funds as reserve assets.

Rishabh Jain and Shreyas Kumar founded the company after Apple’s privacy changes in 2020 made it more difficult and expensive for brands to track customer data and ad performance. Fermat creates personalized landing pages to which brands can funnel shoppers from their digital ads. Jain, Fermat’s CEO, says the company’s revenue has grown more than five-fold from a year ago and that millions of consumers interact with Fermat every month.

ShopMy revenue has grown quickly, projected to reach $20 million this year from roughly $4 million last year. It’s also hit breakeven, The Information previously reported. ShopMy has focused on getting creators to share links on popular sites such as Instagram and TikTok. Brands also can earn revenue from ShopMy links and use ShopMy to manage their influencer marketing programs. Brand partners have earned more than $180 million in revenue, and ShopMy doubled the size of that business from last year to this year.

Countless startups have tried to make it easier for shoppers to buy and sell secondhand items, from publicly traded The RealReal and ThredUp to privately held companies like Trove and Treet. Croissant shows shoppers what they can resell an item for before they purchase it. John Howard, Croissant’s co-founder and CEO and a former fintech investor at KKR, says brands have reported shoppers spending 50% more when they opt in to Croissant’s “guaranteed buybacks.” Croissant makes money by taking a small cut of sales made when the buyback option is enabled. Croissant currently works with brands and retailers including Shopbop, Reformation, J.Crew, Lululemon, Nike and Neiman Marcus.

Tracksuit aims to help marketing employees better understand how their brands stack up next to competitors, providing market research that would typically only be available by hiring large firms like Nielsen or Qualtrics. Tracksuit’s software allows growing brands to easily access data from surveys Tracksuit conducts to better understand how brands stack up to their competitors for factors like brand awareness and customer perceptions. The company says it works with over 600 brands around the world including Supergoop and Bondi Sands and is aiming to expand deeper into the U.S.

Many startups have aimed to replicate Cher Horowitz’s computerized closet from the 1995 film Clueless. Locker may have gotten the closest—its mobile app and website allow shoppers to save items from e-commerce sites to their profiles and easily shop in a few clicks once they’re ready to purchase. Users can group items into Pinterest-like collections on their profiles (some are as broad as “dresses” while others are more specific, like “game day outfits”), which they can easily share, either directly on Locker or through shareable links. The company, which earns a cut of purchases users make via its links, currently counts more than 150,000 users across its app and website and is preparing to launch a cash-back feature this fall it hopes will boost how frequently customers use Locker.

The company has built several humanoid prototypes and is exploring various use cases for business customers. Its strategic investor Meituan, the Chinese food delivery giant, is testing Galbot’s prototypes at its cloud kitchen facilities where robots carry the food from the kitchen to the entrance of the facility so the delivery worker can pick it up. Ten domestic restaurants are testing Galbot robots to take orders from tables and serve food. It expects to generate revenue by selling or leasing its robots to businesses and it is currently negotiating deals with retailers. Co-founder He Wang, who got his Ph.D. from Stanford and has taught at Peking University’s School of Computer Science, is one of China’s top researchers in AI for robots. The other co-founder, Tengzhou Yao, previously worked for the Shanghai robotics center of Swedish-Swiss multinational industrial tech firm ABB.

Zongwei’s customers already include the biggest players in electric car batteries and consumer electronics, such as BYD, Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. and Foxconn. Numerous other smaller manufacturers in China’s gigantic tech manufacturing supply chain are potential customers. BYD, China’s biggest electric vehicle maker, is a strategic investor in Zongwei. While major Western industry automation firms such as Beckhoff Automation, Bosch Rexroth and Rockwell Automation make similar conveyor systems, Zongwei’s China-based development and manufacturing of its own products, as well as its close ties to China’s electronics supply chain, make the startup well-positioned to compete.

Startups such as Reorc (formerly called Recurve) offer tools to organize and consolidate data in ways that are more suitable for AI-powered analytics. The company, founded earlier this year, already has customers—such as Chinese kitchen appliances brand Buydeem and online classifieds site 58.com—thanks in part to CEO Tony Ren’s connections. In 2014, Ren founded a Chinese data science startup called Yimian, which was acquired in 2020 by a U.K. company that is now part of U.S. media and marketing firm Omnicom Group. An Omnicom subsidiary is one of Reorc’s customers. As its AI engineers and data experts are in China and its software engineers are in Vietnam, where the cost of hiring such a team is about one-tenth of that in Silicon Valley, a potential advantage is its relatively low research and development expenses.

Led by a former executive of major Chinese online video app Bilibili, Lynksoul is trying to carve out a niche targeting fans of videogames and anime—including men who develop strong emotional attachment to female anime characters. When a user plays a videogame or watches a movie, he or she can have conversations with one of Lynksoul’s several dozen anime-like AI characters. The AI companion, which recognizes and understands what the user is doing on the screen, can root for the user during the game and share tips, or talk about the movie they are watching. The startup, which launched its first product in August 2023, has 2.5 million users in China and is also expanding into Japan, the home of “otaku,” or nerdy, obsessive fans of anime and other forms of popular culture. Users can pay for new costumes or virtual gifts for their favorite AI characters, such as a watermelon for an anime girl who loves to eat watermelons. It’s also working to add a subscription service to unlock more activities users can share with their AI anime companions. Lynksoul, which started generating revenue in July, is targeting 20 million yuan ($2.8 million) in revenue next year.

Aruna aggregates demand from global buyers and distributes their orders to more than 50,000 fishermen in Indonesia who have registered with the startup. It generates revenue by taking a cut from what buyers pay. Almost 80% of Aruna’s transactions are exports to international buyers, with the U.S. accounting for nearly half of those exports, followed by Asia and the Middle East. To meet traceability and sustainability requirements, Aruna screens fishermen who join its platform and provides training for them. Aruna was founded in 2016 but didn’t settle on its current business model, and win its first venture capital funding, until 2019. The company also has built storage warehouses and other infrastructure across Indonesia.

Some of the startup’s co-founders previously worked for China’s WeBank, a Tencent-backed online bank, to develop a digital banking system. Sirius, founded three years ago, is drawing on the co-founders’ experiences at WeBank to help traditional banks and other financial institutions in emerging markets build digital services such as opening accounts, payment processing, online lending and digital wallets. The startup now has customers in Thailand, Hong Kong and Taiwan in Asia, and Colombia and Chile in Latin America. Clients include Davivienda, a major bank in Colombia, and Krungthai Card, a credit card company in Thailand.

The startup’s cofounders have impressive résumés—Rochan Sankar led the data center Ethernet switching unit at Broadcom and Shrijeet Mukherjee worked in Google’s networking infrastructure group after his previous employer was bought by Nvidia. Nvidia—which runs its own multi-billion dollar networking unit—is an investor. Enfrabrica says its technology could increase the utilization of GPUs and help developers cut the cost of using large language models by up to 50%. The company’s chips—called accelerated compute fabric devices—are on pre-order, meaning they are not yet available.

Larger cloud providers typically require customers to sign multi-year agreements to rent large amounts of GPUs, making it difficult and expensive for companies to scale their resources up and down. Foundry allows developers to rent GPUs by the hour and aims to be less expensive than larger cloud providers, in part through partnerships with cloud computing providers and other companies that have idle GPUs. Foundry’s valuation increased by a factor of seven from its seed round to Series A round, which was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners last summer. For the past several months, Foundry’s revenue has grown by more than 90% month-over-month, according to Davis. Foundry has said customers include KKR, Pika, Poolside and Arc Institute.

It takes years to design, manufacture and validate a new chip, making it hard for startups to crack the market. Positron shortened that cycle by making its first product a field programmable gate array, or FPGA, which takes less time to develop. Within a year and a half of being founded, the company shipped a first version of its chip, which it began testing with customers this year. Founder Thomas Sohmers—a former Thiel fellow and veteran semiconductor and cloud executive—says the chip’s architecture will work better than older designs with transformer-based AI systems. The company is in the process of raising another round of venture capital, according to someone with direct knowledge.

The startup indicated its AI chip, which it aims to start selling in 2026, could have 12 times better performance per dollar than Nvidia’s Rubin chip, which is also due to be released that year. MatX is looking to raise between $75 million and $100 million in new capital to bring its first product to market. Its cofounders previously worked on Google’s tensor processing unit, which competes with Nvidia’s GPU.

ons of startups are working on optical interconnects for data centers because photons move data more efficiently than electrons. Quintessent is taking a slightly different approach than most: It is focusing on developing a better laser. Building off of a decade of research done at UC Santa Barbara, the company is taking advantage of new laser materials that it believes will be more efficient and reliable than those commonly used today.

Mako is only seven months old, but a handful of early customers are already using its software and reporting savings of more than 50% on their compute bills. The company formerly known as A2 Labs is in discussions with cloud providers and companies that rent large numbers of graphics processing units about testing its technology. Mako is raising more than $8 million in a seed round, according to someone with direct knowledge.

Founded by Brad Porter, a veteran of Amazon’s robotics and delivery technology teams and former chief technology officer of Scale AI, Collaborative Robotics is looking to make “cobots” that can work alongside people. The company is building its own hardware and proprietary AI models to power it. The company deployed its robots with its first client, shipping giant Maersk, outside Seattle earlier this year; the Mayo Clinic will begin using them this fall. Porter, who deployed more than 500,000 robots while at Amazon, said that Collaborative Robotics wants to deploy its robots “anywhere where people are moving boxes, totes and carts around.”

Mytra’s co-founders used robotics to simplify automotive manufacturing at Tesla and Rivian. Now, they’re looking to apply their robotics chops to simplify the movement of goods inside warehouses. Co-founder and CEO Chris Walti, who previously helped manage manufacturing of Tesla’s Model 3 car and helped develop its Optimus humanoid robot, said Mytra’s system can work within existing warehouses more seamlessly than competing systems, and can also operate easily alongside both humans and other robots. The company has been piloting its system with grocery giant Albertsons.

Industrial painting is a multibillion-dollar industry that’s expanding alongside global trade as new warehouses and pipelines are built. At the same time, a labor shortage is making it difficult to hire high quality workers. PaintJet CEO Nick Hegeman said he was inspired to co-found the company in 2020 after struggling to hire quality laborers when he ran an industrial painting company. PaintJet says its robots, which are mounted on industrial lifts, can paint faster and more cleanly than humans. They’re also cheap enough to operate that the company has been winning bids against traditional painting companies, Hegeman said. Projects so far have included Amazon warehouses, oil storage tanks and large ships.

Viture’s first product, Viture One, which lets users play games on a 120-inch virtual screen, became a hit among gamers; its Viture Pro, launched earlier this year, also received positive reviews. Co-founder and CEO David Jiang previously worked on Google Glass. The light weight of Viture’s glasses and accompanying neck bands allows users to keep wearing them for hours. The neck bands, which run on an operating system that supports Viture’s own apps as well as Android apps, remotely connect to users’ PlayStation and Xbox consoles at home and stream games. Viture became the third-largest player by market share in the AR smart glass market in the first quarter of 2024 thanks to Viture One, according to research firm Counterpoint. The startup is also trying to attract non-gamers by beefing up search and other productivity features.

The sleek-looking stove is billed as an environmentally friendly alternative to gas stoves and stands to make cooking quicker and more efficient. Founder Sam D'Amico knows hardware: He previously worked on Oculus and Quest VR headsets at Meta Platforms and on Google Glass at Google. He has his sights set next on producing more high-power appliances, including ovens.

Solar power plants are expanding as the cost of solar panels drops. That is propelling demand for energy storage and cheap batteries. Sodium-ion is the cheapest commercial battery chemistry. Peak is now buying Chinese-made sodium-ion batteries, and plans to begin making its own cells in the U.S. in 2027, relying among other things on large soda ash reserves in Wyoming.

Liquid electrolyte, the kind used in almost all lithium-ion batteries, has limited how much voltage can be applied, and hence how much energy the batteries can deliver; when the voltage is too high, it destroys the electrolyte. South 8 has developed a liquified gas electrolyte that allows up to 5 volts in a battery, higher than the 4.5 volt maximum in the best current electrolytes.

Renewable power projects, such as solar or wind with batteries, can be delayed for years while sponsors navigate local and federal permitting regulations. Blumen attempts to unblock that bottleneck, using large language models to identify and index the required permits. Later, Blumen plans for the system to be capable of applying for the permits.