economie

85 of the most promising startups of 2024, according to top VCs

August 7, 20240
Aileen Lee

Cowboy Ventures

Startup: Clay

Recommended by: Aileen Lee, Cowboy Ventures

Relationship: No financial interest

Total funding: $66 million, according to Pitchbook.

What it does: It helps teams enrich their data, automate personalizing outreach, and implement any idea for a go-to-market strategy.

Why it’s on the list: Clay just raised a new round of funding from Sequoia and Meritech, raised $13 million Series A funding, from Redpoint Ventures, Felicis, Tishman Speyer Ventures, and Bull City Venture Partners

“While software in this space has traditionally focused on the largest businesses in the world, GreenPlaces is purpose-built for the broad base of companies (think those with 100–10,000 employees) who comprise the majority of global emissions but today lack sufficient resources to dedicate towards sustainability,” Clark said.

Grow Therapy: helps therapists start and run their own practices
Tobias Citron

Primary

Startup: Haize Labs

Recommended by: Tobias Citron, Primary

Relationship: No financial interest

Total funding: Undisclosed.

What it does: Automatic stress testing of large language models.

Why it’s on the list: Haize promises to “robustify” any large language model through automated red-teaming that continuously stress tests and identifies vulnerabilities. As AI models become more powerful and perform tasks on a scale an order of magnitude beyond what a human mind alone can contain, the question of how to make sure they’re secure becomes increasingly difficult to answer.

“[It’s a] novel technology and [Haize had] an amazing launch, led by a super smart founder with ambitions to build a generational company,” said Citron.

Helaina: a food science startup
Chris Farmer

SignalFire

Startup: Helion

Recommended by: Chris Farmer, SignalFire

Relationship: No financial interest

Total funding: $608 million, according to PitchBook.

What it does: Helion is developing nuclear fusion technology to produce low-cost, clean energy using fuel derived from water.

Why it’s on the list: “Through newly pioneered fusion energy breakthroughs in plasma physics that have yet to be scaled up and brought to market, Helion could generate virtually limitless, carbon-free energy,” Farmer said.

Big Tech is buying into Helion’s vision already — Microsoft $35 million in Series A funding led by Evolution Equity Partners with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Acrew Capital, boldstart ventures and others. Prior to founding Protect AI, co-founders Ian Swanson and Daryan Dehghanpisheh worked at AWS and Oracle.

“Protect AI is the platform for AI and ML Security. Protect AI is the broadest and most comprehensive platform to secure your AI. It enables you to see, know, and manage security risks to defend against unique AI security threats, and embrace MLSecOps for a safer AI-powered world,” said Sim.

“Amazing team, amazing product, ramping up customer base quickly,” Sim said. “This is one of the most important areas of AI.”

Restate: Programming model for distributed app development
Alexia Bonatsos

Alexia Bonatsos

Startup: Retro

Recommended by: Alexia Bonatsos, Dream Machine

Relationship: No financial interest

Total funding: $9 million, according to PitchBook.

What it does: a photo journaling and sharing app for close friends.

Why it’s on the list: Founded by two former Instagram employees, Retro has raised seed funding from Thrive Capital, Dylan Field, Scribble Ventures, and Box Group.

“Retro is a well-crafted consumer social app, and is focused on friends, while the big platforms pivot to entertainment,” said Bonatsos.

Sakana AI: an AI research lab
Navin Chaddha

Navin Chaddha

Startup: Sema4.ai

Recommended by: Navin Chaddha, Mayfield

Relationship: Investor

Total funding: $54 million, according to PitchBook

What it does: Sema4.ai is building enterprise AI agents that can reason, collaborate, and act.

Why it’s on the list:

During its launch out of stealth, the company announced $30.5 million in funding from Mayfield and Benchmark, along with the acquisition of open-source automation leader, Robocorp.

Sema4.ai says it’s trying to close the “automation gap” within companies, whereby skilled knowledge workers have to fill the gaps left by AI-powered systems that are “all talk, no action.”

The company is developing AI agents that can move beyond simple repetitive tasks and actually solve real-world problems, taking into account the unique context of the organization and working seamlessly with existing teams. “The company paves the way for enterprises to realize the full potential of AI,” says Chaddha.

Seven AI: uses AI to find and investigate
cybersecurity threats
Jason Risch

Greylock

Startup: Seven AI

Recommended by: Jason Risch, Greylock

Relationship: Investor

Total funding: $36 million, according to PitchBook.

What it does: Uses an AI agentic approach to hunt and investigate cyber threats in a security operations center.

Why it’s on the list:

Seven AI recently raised $26 million from Greylock, and was this past spring by releasing Zamba, an SSM-hybrid foundation model that Zyphra says can run locally on almost any device. The team, which includes former employees of Google DeepMind, StabilityAI, Neuralink, and Nvidia, is now developing a multimodal edge intelligence platform and an on-device personal AI.

“Every major AI company is focused on using off-the-shelf technology to create bigger and bigger models with little regard for cost and energy usage,” said Hemani, whose firm Bison Ventures participated in Zyphra’s seed round of funding. “Zyphra has been able to demonstrate that you can have a model as powerful as GPT-4o literally in the palm of your hand.”