CRN profiles 10 AI startups leading the way in driving AI customer acquisition for LLMs, cybersecurity, and MSPs.
From the world’s leading large-scale language model (LLM) providers and AI cybersecurity companies to AI startups targeting MSPs, here are 10 startups that stand out from the crowd in the growing artificial intelligence market.
Many of the AI ​​startups on this list have raised billions of dollars in funding, such as Anthropic and Cohere, while others, such as Cynomi and SuperOps, have raised millions to power partner efforts and enable MSPs to drive AI sales.
Gartner predicts that by 2026, more than 80% of enterprises will be using GenAI applications in production, up from less than 5% in 2023.
Additionally, the research firm predicts that in two years’ time, companies that have implemented AI security management controls will see improved decision-making accuracy by eliminating misinformation by up to 80%.
[Related: AWS, Microsoft, Software AG Lead Gartner’s Industrial IoT Platforms Magic Quadrant]
In 2024, the AI ​​and generative AI revolution is taking hold as businesses around the world in industries such as government, finance, and healthcare begin to implement various AI solutions to increase productivity and solve their most critical business challenges.
The most popular IT markets, such as cloud computing and cybersecurity, are seeing a frenzy of AI capabilities and innovations being introduced, including new virtual assistants and data analytics technologies that go beyond traditional business intelligence.
Many of the companies on CRN’s list are launching partner programs to better leverage their channel partners as spearheads in driving AI sales.
As part of AI Week 2024, CRN breaks down the 10 hottest AI startups in 2024 that all partners and AI customers should know about.
Anthropological
Dario Amodei, Co-Founder and CEO
San Francisco
In 2021, former OpenAI executives left the company to found rival Anthropic, which launched Claude, an LLM, and took the AI ​​world by storm.
Anthropic has raised billions of dollars from companies like Amazon and Google thanks to its AI innovation centered around Claude, which currently includes the Claude 3 model family: Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku.
Claude is one of the most popular LLMs in the industry and is generally available on a variety of top cloud AI products including Amazon Bedrock. Anthropic has also released products such as the Claude iOS app, the Claude API interface for developers, and the Claude Team workspace offer for teams to collaborate.
Anthropic has raised a total of approximately $8 billion as it aims to remain a dominant force in the LLM AI market for the foreseeable future.
Close Contact
Aidan Gomez, Co-Founder and CEO
Toronto
Cohere provides LLM and RAG (Search Augmentation Generation) capabilities to enable businesses and developers to build products and solve various use cases using Language AI.
Cohere’s AI models are built on the Transformer architecture and trained on supercomputers, providing a solution that doesn’t require expensive machine learning development.
The company’s Command R and R+ LLM are designed to handle large-scale workloads and help enterprises leverage AI to move into production. Coral, Cohere’s GenAI enterprise knowledge assistant, features over 100 integrations with CRM, collaboration, databases, search infrastructure and other tools.
The startup was founded in 2019 by former Google researchers and raised $270 million in a Series C funding round led by Inovia Capital, with participation from investors including Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures and SentinelOne.
This month, Cohere raised $450 million from investors including Cisco Systems and Nvidia.
Shinomi
David Primore, Co-Founder and CEO
Israel
Focused on AI-enabled MSP and consulting partners, Cynomi’s AI-powered automated vCISO platform continuously assesses clients’ cybersecurity posture, develops and executes remediation plans, and reduces risk.
Cynomi’s vCISO offers customized services for MSPs and MSSPs looking to expand their security services. The platform blends CISO expertise with AI capabilities to streamline operations and automate tasks to help clients comply with regulations and cybersecurity frameworks.
The startup combines proprietary AI algorithms with CISO-level knowledge to help Cynomi’s partners overcome the cybersecurity skills gap, expand their business, and offer new services. Cynomi has launched a partner program for MSPs, MSSPs, consultants, and other partner business models.
In April, the startup announced $20 million in new funding, which Cynomi said will help fuel international expansion, particularly in Europe.
H20.ai
Sri Ambati, Founder and CEO
Mountain View, California
H2O.ai, an open source generative AI and machine learning superstar, is at the forefront of democratizing GenAI.
H2O.ai’s open source h2oGPTe solution combines Document AI and autoML Driverless AI to transform organizations, including over 50% of the Fortune 500, including AT&T, PayPal, and Workday.
H2O.ai has a community of 2 million data scientists tasked with collaboratively creating GenAI applications that anyone can use. According to the startup, business users can now leverage the power of LLM to boost productivity with enterprise applications. H2O.ai’s GenAI capabilities enable advanced question answering and content generation based on existing data stores.
This month, the startup launched its native machine learning and GenAI applications on the Snowflake Marketplace to provide a seamlessly integrated workflow within your Snowflake account.
Hats AI
Jimmy Hatzel, Co-Founder and CEO
new york
Hatz AI came out of stealth last year and aims to help MSPs build AI-as-a-Service businesses with AI applications and agents, vector storage, and custom LLM.
The startup’s platform is powered by an LLM Ops engine called Mido and features multi-tenant management via an MSP admin dashboard.
Hatz AI MSP partners can rapidly integrate AI into their products by building specialized AI applications and workflows for their customers and providing orchestrated and managed AI assistants. The startup’s portfolio also enables MSPs to build systems of record for SMBs with custom LLM and vector storage, all managed through the Hatz AI platform.
Hatz AI has caught the attention of a range of MSPs with its promise of AI as a service and the fact that it has just raised a $2.5 million seed round of funding to bring its services to market.
Prosimo
Ramesh Prabagaram, Co-Founder and CEO
San Jose, California
AI startup Prosimo released a new AI Suite for Multi-Cloud Networking this year to help enterprises deploy, manage and troubleshoot AI applications and workloads.
Prosimo leverages AI to mitigate the challenges of cloud network management. Its solutions aim to help customers save millions of dollars by reducing performance costs and overhead due to cloud management inefficiencies. The startup supports AI workloads across deep observability, network policy and traffic, end-to-end private connectivity, and application-driven routing.
The Prosimo platform delivers user-to-app and app-to-app software, and the Prosimo Nebula assistant uses natural language to provide predictive recommendations and accelerate root cause analysis.
The startup does 100% of its business through ecosystem partners, with almost 90% of its enterprise customers already commissioning AI cloud projects for it.
Super Ops
Arvind Parthiban, Co-Founder and CEO
Claymont, Delaware
SuperOps provides an AI-powered remote monitoring and management platform and professional services automation designed specifically for MSPs.
The startup aims to transform MSPs by automating and streamlining service delivery, monitoring and management with its AI-powered PSA-RMM platform that incorporates network monitoring, IT documentation and project management.SuperOps recently enhanced its platform by adding automated network monitoring scans, executive summary report generation and ticket summarization capabilities.
SuperOps says its mission is to help its partners become more efficient, effective, process-driven, and profitable enterprises. Toward that goal, SuperOps now offers Project Vision X, which teaches MSPs how managed services work.
This month, SuperOps partnered with Pax8 to become the first PSA-RMM tool available on the Pax8 Marketplace. The startup has raised more than $30 million since its 2020 founding.
torque
Ofer Smadari, Co-Founder and CEO
new york
Security hyperautomation company Torq aims to transform the cybersecurity industry with its AI hyperautomation platform.
By connecting the entire security infrastructure stack, the startup enables organizations to instantly and precisely remediate security events and orchestrate complex security processes at scale.
Torq recently launched its HyperSOC product, which enables organizations to rapidly automate, manage and monitor critical SOC responses. It uses natural language processing to initiate and accelerate investigation, triage and remediation of large-scale security events, providing comprehensive case management capabilities with unprecedented ease and automating complex processes.
Torq’s customers include Blackstone, Chipotle, HashiCorp, Nubank, Riskified, Telefonica and ZoomInfo, as well as leading cybersecurity companies such as Check Point Software Technologies, Juniper Networks and SentinelOne who use Torq to hyper-automate their SecOps infrastructure.
Weka
Liran Zvibel, Co-Founder and CEO
Campbell, California
Weka, an AI-native data platform provider, aims to set the standard for AI infrastructure with cloud- and hardware-agnostic software for performance-intensive applications.
The Weka Data Platform transforms stagnant data silos into dynamic data pipelines, helping streamline AI, machine learning and GPU workloads while providing data access from data centers and edge to multi-cloud environments. More than 300 of the world’s largest AI and GPU deployments run on Weka’s platform, and the startup is expanding to meet the demand for data infrastructure that efficiently scales with the performance demands of technologies like generative AI and high-performance GPUs.
Weka’s software can be deployed anywhere, providing scalability and sustainability for GPU, AI and other large-scale workloads, enabling customers to achieve faster insights, discoveries and business outcomes.
In May, the startup raised $140 million in a Series E funding round, bringing Weka’s total valuation to $1.6 billion.
With
Assaf Rapaport, Co-Founder and CEO
new york
AI security startup Wiz scans all layers of the cloud to provide visibility while using the context of the security graph to identify and eliminate cloud risks.
Wiz launched native AI security capabilities in its AI-SPM (AI Security Posture Management) product, which aims to secure the use of AI tools during the software development process, and the cloud security vendor has since expanded its AI-SPM support to also support the OpenAI API platform.
In May, Wizz announced it had raised $1 billion, valuing the cloud security startup at $12 billion. The startup’s total funding brings it to nearly $2 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive Capital.
Wiz acquired Gem Security in April to strengthen its cloud threat detection capabilities, and Wiz says it now works with 40% of Fortune 100 companies.
