There’s been a ton of hype for AI over the last few years – and as always, the hype is usually without substance. With all the hooplah about things like chatbots not materializing into anything substantial, it does seem like we’re descending back into an AI winter.
With that said, when you cut through the noise and fluff, there are a few top startups doing fascinating things with AI that are worth following.
Scale AI
The race for a standardized AI data/training platform has been neck in neck for the past decade. Although Amazon’s Mturk leads in sheer volume, Scale has set itself apart as the best-in-class AI data tagging/centralization platform, particularly in the fields of computer vision and natural language.
To date, Scale AI has raised over $100 million in venture funding.
Lyrebird
Although text-ingesting and image processing has seen dramatic improvements in the last half decade, artificial voice technology hasn’t advanced significantly in the past 10 years. YC-backed Lyrebird aims to change it – their strong research-oriented team has built a best-in-class AI voice synthesizer that’s won numerous startup awards.
Dataiku
Raising north of $50m in venture funding, Dataiku is one of the most promising startups in the enterprise AI space and is expected to see a unicorn valuation in the near future. The only all-in-one, end-to-end machine-learning-as-a-service platform, Dataiku is bringing the machine learning revolution to massive enterprise at scale.
CrowdStrike
While it’s a bit odd ranking a post-IPO company with a market capitalization north of $6 billion as a “startup”, the promising technology behind the security company is still in its early stages of maturity – that’s what’s so exciting. CrowdStrike’s new Falcon technology is building the world’s first AI sentinel, actively monitoring for security threats and keeping vigilance on the world’s online infrastructure.
