Artificial intelligence dominates this year’s list of 25 venture-backed startups we think most likely to reach a $1 billion valuation.
Edited by Amy Feldman, Forbes Staff
Editorial Operations: Elisabeth Brier
Reporters: Emily Baker-White, Jeremy Bogaisky, Moya Johnson, Richard Nieva and Rashi Shrivastava
This is the 11th year we have partnered with TrueBridge Capital Partners to scour the land for budding unicorns. To qualify, startups must be venture-backed, based in the U.S. and (currently) worth less than $1 billion. Unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence dominates this year—20 of the 25 companies are AI-focused, with applications in military, accounting and health tech. Pay attention to this list: Our track record is superb. Of the 250 alumni, 140, or 56%, became unicorns, including DoorDash, Figma and Anduril. Forty-two were acquired; only two went public for less than $1 billion. Just five—2% of our selections—have imploded or shut down.
Founders: Robert Coe, Mike Monovoukas (CEO), Lee Smith
Equity raised: $83 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $18 million
Lead investors: Benchmark, Iconiq Growth, Redpoint
If you want to build medical devices, you need patients. Boston-based AcuityMD helps manufacturers find the right physicians based on the patients they treat by using de-identified data (think surgical histories, medical referrals) for 325 million people to craft marketing plans. Customers include Synchron, which used it to find patients for a brain-computer interface preclinical trial, and Intellijoint, which did so to market a new surgical tool for hip and knee replacements.
Founders: Arthur Leopold (CEO), Jonathan Meyers
Equity raised: $16 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $2 million
Lead investors: AlleyCorp, Benchmark, Craft
There are lots of influencers on the internet, and finding the right one for an ad campaign can be frustrating and time-consuming. Enter New York City–based Agentio, which offers a marketplace of creators so brands can easily find which influencers will work best for them. It’s great for the creators too: They simply upload details about their upcoming YouTube videos to Agentio to sell ad spots to businesses such as Away, DoorDash, Mint Mobile and Uber.
Founders: Max Benassi, Ian Cinnamon (CEO)
Equity raised: $290 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $60 million
Lead investors: 8VC, Andreessen Horowitz, Point72 Ventures
The U.S. military and companies like Amazon and SpaceX are racing to launch thousands of small satellites into low-Earth orbit. Los Angeles–based Apex wants to speed up the process—and cut costs—by offering a standardized satellite that buyers can trick out with their own sensors and instruments. It’s had early success with the Pentagon, winning a $46 million Space Force contract in February. (For more, see “Apex Wants To Bring Henry Ford-Style Mass Production To Satellites.”)
Jeffery Liu (left) and Jon Wang
Assort Health
Founders: Jeffery Liu (co-CEO), Jon Wang (co-CEO)
Equity raised: $26 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $200,000
Lead investors: Chemistry, First Round, Quiet Capital
Hospitals and doctors’ offices are continuously overwhelmed by phone calls, leading to annoyingly long hold times for patients. Assort Health, headquartered in San Francisco, sells a text-to-voice artificial intelligence chatbot to search physicians’ calendars to match their openings with the type of appointment required. The software has cut wait times for millions of inbound calls to medical groups including, among others, Chesapeake Healthcare and Peninsula Orthopaedic Associates.
Founders: Matthew Harp (CEO), Mitchell Troyanovsky
Equity raised: $37 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $350,000
Lead investors: BTV, Khosla Ventures
This NYC tech outfit makes AI accounting software that can do clerical work in minutes, streamlining data entry tasks like transferring information from receipts. After adopting Basis’ software in 2024, accounting firm Wiss claimed a nearly 30% reduction in time spent on such jobs. Another big draw is the technology’s security features, which don’t store sensitive login details.
Founder: Ankur Goyal (CEO)
Equity raised: $45 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $2 million
Lead investors: Andreessen Horowitz, Basecase, Gil Capital, Greylock
AI promises business efficiencies, but how do you measure them? San Francisco–based Braintrust offers an all-in-one command center for testing and monitoring AI-powered apps, like keeping an eye on how frequently a chatbot gives incorrect answers. Customers such as Airtable, Instacart, Notion and Stripe use it to assess accuracy and figure out what went wrong when something breaks. CEO and founder Ankur Goyal, 35, previously founded AI search engine Impira, which Figma acquired in 2023.
Founder: Paul Klein IV (CEO)
Equity raised: $68 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $1 million
Lead investors: Basecase, CRV, Kleiner Perkins, Notable Capital
Goodbye, browsers: Browserbase wants to change how we interact with the internet entirely. Instead of clicking, typing and scanning information from websites, AI can do it for you, a concept known as a “headless browser.” Want to book a flight from Seattle to JFK? Instead of searching yourself, type a simple request into Browserbase and its AI will come back with the best options.
Surbhi Sarna
Cody Pickens for Forbes
Founders: Jigish Patel, Surbhi Sarna (CEO), Nate Smith
Equity raised: $30 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $0
Lead investors: Redpoint
When Surbhi Sarna tried to raise funds for her ovarian cancer startup nVision Medical in 2012, she struggled to scrape together $500,000. After selling it for $275 million in 2018 and spending the next five years as a partner at accelerator Y Combinator, Sarna had no problem raising $30 million in seed funding for San Francisco–based Collate. It aims to use AI to automate the paperwork required for life sciences companies, such as that for clinical trials and FDA approval. “This stuff they would have spent months doing we can do over the course of days,” says Sarna, 39. Collate’s revenue is expected to reach $1 million this year.
Founders: Tomer Cohen (CEO), Ben Wiley
Equity raised: $30 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $1 million
Lead investors: Alt Capital, Amplify Partners, First Round Capital
Tomer Cohen, 27, and Ben Wiley, 26, believe that normal speech will be the main way we interact with artificial intelligence in the future. Their startup, David AI, supplies some 100,000 hours of high-quality voice audio in 15 languages to major tech firms, helping them build smarter AI models capable of understanding speech. They have a straightforward approach to getting all that data: David AI simply pays people to record it.
Dean Leitersdorf
Cody Pickens for Forbes
Founders: Dean Leitersdorf (CEO), Moshe Shalev
Equity raised: $53 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $20 million
Lead investors: Benchmark, Sequoia, Zeev Ventures
Dean Leitersdorf has an ambitious goal: to build the next big all- purpose AI lab to rival OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. His entrant in the race is called Decart, a nod to René Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher famous for the aphorism “I think, therefore I am.” “It’s the most AI thing you could say,” says Leitersdorf, a 26-year-old computer science Ph.D. He thinks recruiting mainly out of his native Israel will give Decart a chance against the giants, and its first product helps businesses squeeze more power out of AI chips. Last year, Decart went viral when its model Oasis generated a clone of Microsoft’s Minecraft game using nothing but AI. (Boy, we’re good: Shortly after this list went to press, Decart became a full Billion-Dollar Startup after raising $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation.)
Josh Araujo
Shawn Hubbard for Forbes
Founders: Alberto Lacaze, Karl Murphy
CEO: Josh Araujo
Equity raised: $303 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $30 million
Lead investors: Hedosophia, Moore Strategic Ventures, XYZ Venture Capital
Engineers Alberto Lacaze, 55, and Karl Murphy, 65, spent about 20 years developing technology to retrofit more than 50 types of vehicles to drive themselves, including transit buses and military convoy trucks. Now the startup is cashing in, winning a $93 million contract from the U.S. Army to produce mine-clearing robots. It’s also part of a team building self-driving missile launchers for the Marines. Getting rid of human drivers both keeps soldiers out of harm’s way and saves lots of money on fuel, says CEO Josh Araujo, 45, who took the helm from Lacaze in 2022, since you can ditch heavy armor and use a smaller engine. “You can completely reshape how you design those vehicles.”
Founders: James Fox, Grant Lee (CEO), Jon Noronha
Equity raised: $23 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $16 million
Lead investors: Accel, Afore Capital, South Park Capital
Former investment banker Grant Lee, 42, was inspired to start Gamma after spending years making traditional slide decks, often under time pressure and with little design support. Now his AI-powered software can spin up a slick presentation, website or social media post from raw text, documents or existing decks. Gamma says more than 50 million people globally have tried the product so far, and it has found early traction at companies including Amazon and Zoom.
Founders: Greg Foster, Merrill Lutsky (CEO), Tomas Reimers
Equity raised: $81 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $2 million
Lead investors: Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Homebrew
New York City–based Graphite’s flagship product, Diamond, is an AI assistant to speed up code reviews, in which programmers make sure their work is up to snuff, by flagging potential bugs and suggesting improvements. It’s designed to understand context and reason about code like a human teammate, leading to adoption at fast-growing companies including Anysphere, Figma, Ramp and Shopify.
Founders: Victor Perez (CEO), Diego Rodriguez
Equity raised: $83 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $5 million
Lead investors: Abstract Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Pebblebed
As AI revolutionizes creative work, many visual artists find themselves overwhelmed by the array of competing products. Krea, a design tool built by a team of musicians, poets, designers and videographers, offers visual artists one place to access a range of AI models that can generate new images from text prompts, refine existing ones or enhance video. The startup has attracted more than 20 million users globally, including from teams at Lego, Pixar and Microsoft.
Founders: Erica Khalili, Homam Maalouf, Jacqueline Reses (CEO), Ronak Vyas
Equity raised: $110 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $170 million
Lead investors: Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Khosla Ventures, Ribbit Partners, Zeev Ventures
In 2022, former Square human resources chief Jacqueline Reses, now 55, and a team of investors acquired a nearly century-old community bank with the goal of transforming it into a fintech startup. That business, Kansas City, Missouri–based Lead Bank, is now one of the few FDIC-insured financial institutions that issue loans and process payments for fintechs and crypto startups. It recently launched a stablecoin debit card with Visa and payments platform Bridge.
Founders: Russ d’Sa (CEO), David Zhao
Equity raised: $82 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $5 million
Lead investors: Altimeter Capital, Redpoint
When you use voice mode on ChatGPT, your phone connects to a LiveKit server. The San Francisco–based startup provides the technical back end to enable real-time audio and video for a bunch of applications, including roughly 25% of 911 emergency calls in the U.S. In all, it’s used by almost 125,000 developers at places like Meta and Microsoft and supports 3 billion calls every year. The company raised $45 million at a $345 million valuation in April.
Celine Halioua
Ethan Pines for Forbes
Founder: Celine Halioua (CEO)
Equity raised: $135 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $0
Lead investors: Bain Capital Ventures, Collaborative Fund, First Round Capital, Khosla Ventures, Longevity Fund, Valor Equity Partners
Dogs don’t live long enough. Celine Halioua—an Oxford Ph.D. dropout and former chief of staff at the first VC firm focused on longevity-related biotechs—started San Francisco-based Loyal to develop drugs that could delay their aging by targeting metabolic and hormonal imbalances before they become disease. The company’s first beef-flavored longevity pill could hit the market by 2026, potentially extending dogs’ lives—and perhaps someday ours as well. (For more, see “Longer Leash On Life: Inside The Dog Longevity Startup.”)
Amar Hanspal
Cody Pickens for Forbes
Founders: Amar Hanspal (CEO), Brian Mathews
Equity raised: $46 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $0
Lead investors: CapitalG, Redpoint
Architects at some 20 firms use Amar Hanspal’s two-year-old software to design buildings and complex structures while collaborating with one another in real time. It’s like Figma, but for architects. The tool, trained on thousands of floor plans and public data, uses AI to generate 3D layouts after designers specify details like the number of conference rooms, ceiling heights and window placements. Before starting Motif, Hanspal, 61, did a 15-year stint at Autodesk, the construction industry’s $5.5 billion (2024 revenue) software incumbent. “People are designing intelligent buildings. We want to build an intelligence system that assists them,” he says.
Founders: Jason Hoch, Cameron McCord (CEO), Bryce Strauss
Equity raised: $102 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $5 million
Lead investors: General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Sequoia Capital
Those who make planes, robots and drones want to move fast. But Cameron McCord, 35, an ex-Navy nuclear engineer who spent five years working at defense startups, believed they didn’t have the right tech to manage product testing. Nominal, which he cofounded in 2022, sells software that collects and analyzes the results of trials of aircraft and other hardware. Customers include the U.S. Air Force, Palmer Luckey’s drone outfit Anduril and seaplane developer Regent.
Founders: Adit Abraham (CEO), Raunak Chowdhuri
Equity raised: $33 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $1 million
Lead investors: Benchmark, First Round Capital
MIT grads Adit Abraham, 26, and Raunak Chowdhuri, 23, named their startup Reducto after the Harry Potter spell that shatters objects. Their mission is a little tamer: Reducto’s AI software turns messy documents into clean, usable data. Similar to how a human would review paperwork, Reducto’s tech scans documents multiple times to catch and fix mistakes. So far, it has processed over 250 million pages for companies including Scale AI, Vanta and Airtable.
Misha Laskin
Reflection AI
Founders: Ioannis Antonoglou, Misha Laskin (CEO)
Equity raised: $130 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $0
Lead investors: CRV, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital
In 2016, Google DeepMind researcher Ioannis Antonoglou, now 37, helped develop AlphaGo, the first AI to beat an elite human player at the board game Go. Eight years later, he teamed up with Laskin, 35, another former DeepMind researcher, to build Reflection AI, with the goal of building a “superintelligence” that can write and maintain code. Most AI coding companies are still focused on tools that help developers, but Reflection wants to fully replace them.
Gabriel Stengel
alexander karnyukhin for forbes
Founders: Tumas Rackaitis, Gabriel Stengel (CEO), John Willett
Equity raised: $75 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $2 million
Lead investors: AlleyCorp, Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital
New York City–based Rogo is building a chatbot to help junior bankers with time sucks like crunching numbers, preparing presentations and spreadsheets or doing basic research. Trained on financial datasets from places like Crunchbase and FactSet, the tool is used by some 10,000 busy juniors at firms including Tiger Global to trim hours from their 90-hour workweeks, says Gabriel Stengel, 27. With Rogo automating the gruntwork, bankers will be able to focus on more strategic tasks and building relationships with clients, he adds.
Founders: Ishan Mukherjee (CEO), Avanika Narayan, Diogo Ribeiro, Shriram Sridharan
Equity raised: $50 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $0
Lead investors: General Catalyst, GV, Sequoia
Ishan Mukherjee, 37, a former Apple engineer, started Rox in 2024. The startup, headquartered in San Francisco, builds AI “agent swarms” that act like virtual assistants for sales teams—automating research, outreach and follow-ups so reps can focus on closing deals. Companies such as Ramp, MongoDB and Confluent are already using Rox to grow faster with fewer resources.
Albert Pai (left) and Eric Simons
Stackblitz
Founders: Albert Pai, Eric Simons (CEO)
Equity raised: $135 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $4 million
Lead investors: Emergence, Greylock, GV, Insight
In 2024, Eric Simons, 34, was on the verge of shuttering Stackblitz. The startup simply couldn’t figure out how to make money from its browser-based coding tools. But when it embraced the “vibe coding” AI software craze, its product, Bolt, took off. It allows people to build apps just by typing in a description. The company’s customer base has surged to 5 million, with the company bringing in 85% of the year’s revenue in just four months.
John Hu
Ethan Pines for Forbes
Founders: Vitalii Dodonov, John Hu (CEO)
Equity raised: $5 million
Estimated 2024 revenue: $25 million
Lead investor: Forerunner Ventures
Having millions of followers online doesn’t immediately translate into a full-time salary. Stan tries to make it easier for those with online fame to cash in on their success with an online storefront linked to their social media profile. Stan, which claims to have achieved profitability after raising just $5 million from Forerunner Ventures back in 2022, provides an easy way for creators to sell their social media followers everything from personalized merch to coaching sessions. (For more, see “This Startup Helps Creators Sell Classes, Coaching And More To Their Fans.”)
More from Forbes
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2025/08/12/next-billion-dollar-startups-2025/