For this year, OpenAI is an easy choice for the top AI company. It’s ChatGPT platform – which was launched in late November – was a game changer. Over a million people signed up for the service within a week.
ChatGPT has shown the tremendous progress with AI, especially with its creative abilities. There was even buzz that the system could represent a threat to the mighty Google search engine.
OK then, so what are some of the other interesting AI companies to keep an eye on? Which may also have breakout moments?
There are certainly many to choose from. With years of heavy investments from venture capitalists, there are thousands of AI startups.
But here’s a look at six that certainly have strong prospects.
1 – Aisera
AI remains a top priority for enterprises. The technology has not only demonstrated the effective streamlining of operations but the improvement of the top line.
Just take a look at Aisera. The company leverages next-generation Conversational AI to help with automating employee and customer experiences. As a testament to this technology, the company recently announced a $90 million Series D funding.
The company has been growing at a rapid clip, ramping over 300% during the past year. Aisera’s platform manages over 80 million users.
A key to the success has been partnerships with Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Workday. There are also many customers across the Fortune 1000 like McAfee, Zoom and Dave. In other words, the technology has proven to be strategic.
With the economy slowing, companies are expected to pull back on spending. But Aisera should remain in the growth mode. After all, at the heart of the business model is a focus on realizing sustainable efficiencies in an organization.
2 – Astera Labs
Managing high-performance chips in a datacenter – such as for AI applications – is no easy feat. A big problem is handling the interconnections. If not done properly, the result can be suboptimal use of the powerful technologies.
But as for Astera Labs, it has been innovating new systems to handle the issues. The platform connects memory devices, accelerators and peripherals to CPUs and GPUs. By doing this, there is more effective utilization of memory, which can greatly speed up the applications
In November, the company announced a $150 million venture investment at a valuation of $3.15 billion. Some of the investors included Fidelity, Atreides Management, Intel Capital, and Sutter Hill Ventures.
3 – NeuReality
The spike in growth for generative AI has led to a need for advanced inference chips. This technology has been critical for systems like GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion, which allows for the creation of compelling images.
A leader in the inference chip market is NeuReality. The company’s technology is focused on improving latency but also lowering costs and power.
The fact is that generative AI can be extremely expensive. According to a tweet from Sam Altman, who is the CEO of OpenAI: “we will have to monetize [ChatGPT] somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering.”
For NeuReality, another important part of the strategy is to democratize the inference technology. With an integrated package of software and hardware, smaller companies can better use sophisticated AI technologies.
4 – Harvey
The legal field seems like an ideal target for AI. But there has a been a problem: there are so many complex long-tail scenarios.
What to do? Perhaps generative AI could be the solution.
This is the approach of Harvey. The startup is leveraging OpenAI’s GPT-3 technology to improve legal workflows, such as with research, drafting documents and analysis.
The vision is not to replace attorneys. Rather, Harvey will be a high-powered legal assistant.
The cofounders do have the right pedigrees. Winston Weinberg was a lawyer at O’Melveny & Myers and Gabriel Pereyra had served as a research scientist at DeepMind.
In early December, the OpenAI Startup Fund announced a $5 million investment in the company. There were also various angels in the round, like Jeff Dean, who heads up Google AI.
5 – Protect AI
When spinning up cool AI models using Jupyter Notebook, how secure is this? Well, there are definitely vulnerabilities. These can certainly mean big problems because models often use sensitive data. There may also be proprietary methods that are exposed.
But there are some startups emerging to help secure AI pipelines. One is Protect AI.
Its first product, NB Defense, is free and yes, it is for Jupyter Notebook. This will be a way for Protect AI to get mindshare and adoption, which will help with the rollout of paid products.
All this is part of MLSecOps (Machine Learning + Security + Operations). The idea is that security must be a part of AI models from the start.
In December, Protect AI announced a $13.5 million seed round. The investors included Avisio Ventures, boldstart ventures, Knollwood Capital, and Pelion Ventures.
6 – Jasper
When Dave Rogenmoser launched his first startup, it quickly failed. He realized it was mostly a failure of marketing.
Because of this, he immersed himself in the topic and started several companies in the space. As should be no surprise, the results were much better.
But his latest venture, Jasper, would instantly become a huge success. With minimal funding, the company generated $35 million in revenue during its first year.
For Rogenmoser, he saw that GPT-3 could be a lever for creating impactful marketing content, such as tweets, blogs and tag lines. The mission was to help people write “mind-bendingly good” copy.
To boost the growth, Jasper has launched a Chrome extension. This has made it even easier to use the service with systems like Good Docs, Gmail, Notion and HubSpot.
In November, Jasper announced a Series A round of $125 million. The valuation was set at $1.5 billion.
