9 Early-Stage Enterprise AI Startups To Watch

Organizations are collecting and analyzing more information than ever before — and relying on artificial intelligence to predict user behavior, develop new solutions, and automate redundant processes. 

Within the growing field of artificial intelligence, enterprise AI has shown particular promise, emerging as one of the most well-funded categories. Startups in the space offer services ranging from automated data collection from unstructured sources to real-time data analysis and synthesis. 

We used the CB Insights database to surface 9 notable early-stage startups leveraging artificial intelligence to serve the enterprise. Companies were selected based on recency of funding, investor quality, and Mosaic Score — CB Insights’ algorithm that uses financial and non-financial signals to predict private company health. 

All of the companies below are seed-stage or Series A startups that have raised funding since the beginning of 2017. Scroll down to read the full list, shown in descending order of disclosed funding.

Early-stage enterprise AI startups to watch

1. Element AI

Headquarters: Montreal, Canada

Disclosed Funding: $102M

Select Investors: Data Collective, Intel Capital, Microsoft Ventures, Tencent Holdings, 500 Startups

Element AI leverages artificial intelligence research to create bespoke business applications, helping to launch and incubate AI solutions in partnership with large corporations and research institutions. Its tailor-made application programming interfaces (APIs) deliver benefits to users immediately, without long integration phases. Element AI’s executive team includes Dr. Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer in the field of deep learning.

2. UiPath

Headquarters: New York, New York

Disclosed Funding: $30M

Select Investors: Accel Partners, Credo Ventures, Earlybird Venture Capital 

UiPath specializes in robotic process automation, leveraging computer vision to operate the user interface layer of software more efficiently and accurately than human users. 

Clients include big four accounting firms like Deloitte, EY, and PwC, which use UiPath to automate redundant processes internally and for clients. UiPath’s services have also been used by manufacturers to automate inventory management and supplier communications. 

3. Hyper Anna

Headquarters: Sydney, Australia

Disclosed Funding: $13.7

Select Investors: AirTree Ventures, Insurance Australia Group, Reinventure, Sequoia Capital China

Hyper Anna provides a virtual data scientist that leverages artificial intelligence to deliver on-demand insights to financial services companies. The startup’s predictive tools have been used for business development, expense management, revenue forecasting, and supply chain management, among other applications.

As a winner of Westpac’s Businesses of Tomorrow 2017, Hyper Anna looks to expand to Asia and the US in the near future. 

4. Bonsai

Headquarters: Berkeley, California

Disclosed Funding: $13.6M

Select Investors: Microsoft Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Samsung NEXT, Siemens

Bonsai helps organizations build and deploy intelligent systems by improving the programming and management of AI models. Its technology has been used in industries including robotics, manufacturing, retail, logistics, and energy.

The company’s latest feature, Gears, allows users to import external ML algorithms built with platforms like Google’s TensorFlow into the Bonsai platform.

5. Saagie

Headquarters: Le Petit Quevilly, France

Disclosed Funding: $11.6M

Select Investors: BNP Paribas, CapHorn Invest

Saagie provides open-source data technologies to increase organizational efficiency. Saagie’s smart data platform provides a variety of solutions, including compliance automation for KYC (know your customer) and data governance for GDPR (general data protection regulation). 

6. Bigstream

Headquarters: Mountain View, California

Disclosed Funding: $5.5

Select Investors: Cota Capital, Intel Capital

Bigstream Solutions uses a combination of hardware and software techniques to accelerate data extraction, integration, and analysis. Intel, which backed a tranche of Series A funding to Bigstream in Q4’17, collaborates with the company on sales and marketing initiatives for the ad tech and fintech sectors.

7. Streetbees

Headquarters: London, United Kingdom

Disclosed Funding: $5.1M

Select Investors: LocalGlobe, Octopus Ventures

Streetbees is real-time intelligence platform that collects data by crowdsourcing information through a network of gatherers. The company pays users to provide feedback, answer surveys, and upload visual content that is shared with industry professionals in real-time. Streetbees also uses artificial intelligence and mobile geolocation technology to verify the authenticity of each contribution.

8. Peak

Headquarters: Manchester, United Kingdom

Disclosed Funding: $4.6M

Select Investors: MMC Ventures

Peak is a subscription-based data analytics platform that unifies, processes, models, and extracts insights from enterprise data. The data-analytics-as-a-service platform is primarily used by business development teams for customer segmentation, product demand forecasting, and qualifying sales leads. 

9. XBrain

Headquarters: Seoul, South Korea

Disclosed Funding: $1.1M

Select Investors: SparkLabs

XBrain is the developer of Daria, a cloud-based machine learning assistant that helps developers and data scientists build and deploy machine learning models. Daria automatically selects the best machine learning model for each dataset and provides detailed comparison analysis, allowing for a quicker evaluation of model performance.