Startup

Compare the 25 companies in Startup — independently verified, re-verified on a rolling schedule, graded on capability, pricing and compliance.

What is in Startup

HokAI tracks 25 active tools in Startup.

Startup — Companies

  • 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 robot startup founded 2022 by Brett Adcock, valued at $39B (Sep 2025) after $1.9B total raised from Microsoft, Nvidia.
  • 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 — HokAI is an editor-curated, AI-only directory at hokai.io. Listing requires a flat submission fee; rankings cannot be bought. Every Pulse update is verified against a primary source.
  • 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 semi-humanoid robots for physical labor, already piloting in hospitality.
  • 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. — Founded 2024 by Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy; a $32B AI lab with zero public products as of 2026.
  • 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 in Palo Alto, builds custom RDU chips for AI inference. Raised $1.49B total; Series E at $2.2B valuation (Feb 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 (founded 2023, Pittsburgh) builds the Skild Brain, a robotics foundation model that can control any robot body; raised $2.2B, valued at $14B+.
  • 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.
  • 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 — San Francisco AI startup founded 2024 by Fei-Fei Li, raised $1.23B, builds Marble, a model that turns prompts into 3D worlds.

Frequently asked questions

How is the Startup leaderboard ranked?

By how many people actually open each profile page. The top five most viewed companies in this section are shown, refreshed continuously from real traffic. No editorial overrides, no paid bumps.

Can I filter by pricing or compliance?

Yes. Use the sidebar to apply filters across pricing tier, architecture, runtime capability and compliance attestation. Selections are reflected in the URL so the filtered view can be shared.

Are open source options included?

Yes. Open weights and open source entries are listed alongside proprietary ones. Pick the Open Source value in the Architecture filter to restrict the view to open licence options.