From Anthropic and Perplexity to WitnessAI and Jeff Bezos’ Project Prometheus, here are the 10 AI startups you need to watch in 2026.
Billions of dollars are invested AI startups seeking to be at the forefront of the artificial intelligence era.
IT research firm Gartner estimates that the AI market will grow nearly 50% year over year in 2025 to around $1.5 trillion, fueled by continued construction of data centers and increased corporate investment in AI.
There is no doubt that the AI boom is rapidly reshaping the IT landscape with new innovations around AI agents, autonomous automation, and open foundation models.
CRN found 10 AI startups stand out from the crowd in 2026.
Top 2026 AI startups
Large Language Model (LLM) superstars like Anthropic And Mistral AI to startup specialists like Airia and Imbue, AI startups are making headlines and driving innovation like never before.
Some AI startups have begun to emerge from stealth in 2025, including former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ well-funded new startup, Project Prometheus, as well as startup Aurascape, which launched from stealth with a native AI security platform.
CRN breaks down 10 of the most innovative and interesting AI startups in a world that all businesses should experience at the dawn of 2026.
Anthropic
CEO: Dario Amodei
Anthropic is one of the hottest AI startups on the planet thanks to its innovative Claude family of LLMs.
In September, Anthropic raised $13 billion in a Series F round at a valuation of $183 billion to expand its enterprise offerings, research and international growth as its revenue grew from $1 billion to $5 billion over an eight-month period.
Last month, the San Francisco-based startup acquired Bun, which helps developers run and manage codes more efficiently, to improve the speed and stability of its Claude Code agent.
The startup calls its recently released Claude Opus 4.5 model the best in the world for coding, agents and computer usage.
Airia
CEO: Kevin Kiley
Airia is an enterprise AI security and orchestration platform that enables customers to deploy AI quickly, securely, and at scale.
Designed for complex, regulated environments, Airia reduces vulnerabilities in agent ecosystems and streamlines workflows between agents, models, and an organization’s applications and data sources. Its platform integrates with existing systems and data sources to transform workflows into intelligent AI agents.
Atlanta-based Airia already has 150 employees across five continents and more than 300 enterprise clients in just 15 months, stealthily.
In September, Airia co-founder John Marshall invested $50 million in the startup.
Aurascape
CEO: Moinul Khan
AI startup Aurascape launched from stealth with $50 million in funding in early 2025, along with a native AI security platform.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup’s Aurascape platform is purpose-built to prevent AI-based threats, protect users and data, and keep teams productive.
The platform provides visibility and controls for every AI interaction with key capabilities including risk analysis, response decoding for thousands of AI applications, prevention of sophisticated AI threats, and data security with minimal false positives for AI interactions. It also processes and protects multimodal data.
DevRev
CEO: Dheeraj Pandey
DevRev owns a native AI platform that includes a conversational AI assistant called Computer, which unifies customer, product and technical data.
The Palo Alto, California-based startup’s platform aims to break down data silos, automate manual tasks and improve collaboration between teams. Its technology extracts structured and unstructured data from existing tools, such as Salesforce and Zendesk, then organizes it into a knowledge graph that powers enterprise conversational AI.
DevRev’s new Computer Agent Studio offering makes agent creation accessible to all users, with no-code, low-code, and full-code options available.
Impregnate
CEO: Kanjun Qiu
AI startup Imbue specializes in creating tools that make AI coding reliable, collaborative, and accessible with Sculptor, a user interface for coding agents.
The Imbue Sculptor coordinates coding agents so users can delegate tasks, check results, and shape the direction of their projects. The Coding Agent environment suggests and generates fixes to code in a secure sandbox, enabling real-time improvements.
With Sculptor, the San Francisco-based startup allows users to create a new agent that runs in its own container, so all agents can securely run code in parallel. Sculptor containers keep machines secure and allow users to move seamlessly between agents.
Mistral AI
CEO: Arthur Mensch
Mistral AI has one of the most popular wide open language models, Mistral, with new LLMs being developed at a rapid pace.
The French startup allows organizations to personalize, refine and deploy assistants, agents and multimodal AI with its open models.
In December, the startup revealed its new Mistral 3 models, which include three small and dense models, as well as the Mistral Large 3, which the company says is its most capable model yet. Mistral Large 3 was fully trained on 3,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs.
Perplexity
CEO: Aravind Srinivas
Perplexity is making waves in the AI industry by offering a free, AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate, real-time answers to questions.
Perplexity AI is a chatbot search engine that uses AI to retrieve information from various web sources. Built on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and providing access to the open internet, the platform brings together information and links from sources like Reddit and social media platforms like X.
The San Francisco-based startup helps users with their research and writing by offering free and paid plans.
Prometheus Project
Co-CEO and co-founder: Jeff Bezos
Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced a new, heavily funded AI startup called Prometheus several months ago that has been making waves in the AI industry.
With more than $6 billion in funding, the Prometheus project would work on AI systems that could support the manufacturing of computers, cars and the aerospace industry.
The startup reportedly aims to create AI models that work in more complex ways than chatbots.
Although details are scarce about the Prometheus project, the startup has already hired nearly 100 employees, including top researchers and engineers from AI companies such as OpenAI and DeepMind.
WitnessAI
CEO: Rick Caccia
WitnessAI provides visibility, native AI protection, and behavior-based governance for AI models, applications, and autonomous agents.
The Mountain View, California-based startup enables safe and efficient adoption of enterprise AI, with security and governance guardrails for public and private LLMs.
Its WitnessAI Secure AI Enablement platform provides visibility into employee AI use, control of that use through AI-driven policy, and protection of that use through data and subject security.
By providing enterprise-grade security, compliance and governance controls, WitnessAI said it enables customers to unlock AI with confidence.
Writer
CEO: May Habib
With a focus on enterprise customers, Writer provides a generative AI platform with its own family of LLMs called Palmyra.
Writer’s Palmyra templates are designed for business security, accuracy, and compliance, including custom templates for financial work, medical needs, and creativity.
The San Francisco-based startup’s platform integrates these models with a Knowledge Graph that securely connects to a company’s internal data (RAG).
The AI startup recently released a new agent named Action Agent that can autonomously perform multi-stage workloads across multiple services.