Startup

What is in Startup

HokAI tracks 29 active tools in Startup.

Startup — Companies

• Aion Labs — Aion Labs, run by Poland's Deep Forge sp. z o.o., sells an OpenAI-compatible API for six LLMs tuned for roleplay and storytelling, plus email agents.
• Black Forest Labs — Black Forest Labs makes FLUX.2 (32B, 4MP, $0.03/image). Raised $330M at $3.25B (Dec 2025). Former Stability AI team, founded 2024 in Freiburg, Germany.
• Figure AI — Figure AI is a San Jose humanoid robotics startup founded in 2022 by Brett Adcock, now shipping its third robot on Helix, its in-house AI model.
• Groq — Groq, founded in 2016 in Mountain View, CA, builds the LPU inference chip and GroqCloud, with $2.4B raised and the LPU architecture licensed to Nvidia for $20B.
• HokAI — Singapore-run directory of AI tools, models, agents, skills and services, with a free Smart Match engine that names three picks for the job you describe.
• Inception — Inception (Inception Labs) builds Mercury diffusion language models. Founded in 2024 by three professors, it sells them through an OpenAI-compatible API.
• Lightricks — Jerusalem-based creative software maker whose LTX division builds an open-weights video and audio model family, split from Facetune in 2026.
• Liquid AI — Liquid AI is an MIT CSAIL spinout with over 3,100 Liquid Foundation Model variants built for phones, cars, and other edge devices instead of the cloud.
• Loop AI — Enterprise AI company founded in 2012 that trains client-owned small language models, valued at $4.2B after a Dec 2025 funding round.
• Mecha Health — San Francisco startup founded 2024 building foundation models that draft chest X-ray radiology reports, raised $4.1M seed in Nov 2025.
• Multiverse Computing — Multiverse Computing compresses frontier AI models by up to 95% using quantum-inspired tensor networks, enabling edge and on-device deployment at a fraction of the standard compute cost.
• Mundo AI — Vancouver startup founded 2024 (YC W25) building multilingual and perceptual-intelligence training data for frontier AI labs.
• OS3 — San Francisco robotics startup founded 2025 (YC S26) building HALE 1.0, a semi-humanoid labor robot with public pricing and an active hospitality pilot.
• Osmosis — YC W25 startup building a reinforcement fine-tuning platform, with four open-weight models published on Hugging Face.
• Parasma — Parasma is a San Francisco biocomputing startup founded 2026, backed by Y Combinator's S26 batch, training human neurons as a compute substrate.
• Perplexity AI — Perplexity AI is an AI-powered search engine using retrieval-augmented generation to provide accurate, cited answers to questions. Founded by former OpenAI researchers, the company reimagines search through conversational AI.
• Physical Intelligence — 2024-founded San Francisco robotics startup behind the pi-zero (π0) VLA models, valued at $5.6B in late 2025.
• Protect AI — Protect AI is a Seattle-based AI security startup founded in 2022 that raised $129M and was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $500M+ in July 2025.
• Recraft — Recraft is a London-based AI design platform founded in 2022, used by more than 4 million designers for on-brand vector and raster image generation.
• Safe Superintelligence Inc. — A private AI research lab led by Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy that is building safe superintelligence and has released no product, API or model.
• Sakana AI — Sakana AI: Tokyo startup founded 2023, raised $379M at $2.65B valuation. Makes Fugu orchestration model, Marlin deep-research agent, and Namazu LLMs for Japan.
• SambaNova Systems — SambaNova Systems, founded 2017, builds custom RDU chips for AI inference. Raised $2.4B+ total; Series F first close at $11B valuation (Jul 2026).
• Scale AI — Scale AI, founded 2016 in San Francisco, is the $29B training data company providing annotation, RLHF, and model evaluation to AI labs and the US government.
• Skild AI — Skild AI (Pittsburgh) builds S1, an in-context-learning robotics foundation model, now deployed with 60-plus enterprise customers.
• Sourceful — Manchester-based AI startup founded 2020, behind the Riverflow image generation models. Raised $31.8M from Index Ventures. Riverflow 2.0 ranked #1 on Artificial Analysis for text-to-image and image editing.
• Suno — Suno, the Cambridge, Massachusetts startup behind the Suno music app, is backed by Bond Capital and Menlo Ventures, licenses catalogs from Warner, BMG and Believe, and shipped v6 in September 2026.
• TypeSafe AI — San Francisco AI lab that emerged from stealth in 2026 to build Jev, a machine-native decision model for real-time software automation.
• Upstage — Seoul-based AI company behind the Solar LLM family and Document Parse OCR, valued at $1B as South Korea's first generative-AI unicorn.
• World Labs — Spatial-intelligence lab behind Marble and the World API, started by Fei-Fei Li. In September 2026 it agreed to join AMD in an all-stock acquisition.

Frequently asked questions