Silicon Valley’s startup scene looks different than it did in the era when “startup” mostly meant a small software company chasing rapid growth. Today, the region’s emerging companies are building across a wider and more technically demanding range of industries, from AI, robotics and cybersecurity to fintech, healthcare, space technology, drone delivery and enterprise infrastructure.
That shift reflects a broader change in the startup economy. Venture funding is increasingly concentrated around AI, automation, defense tech, robotics and other infrastructure-heavy categories, where companies often need deep technical talent, patient capital and clear paths to real-world adoption. In Silicon Valley, that has expanded the definition of a startup beyond early-stage consumer apps to include companies building software, hardware, data systems and operational platforms for businesses, governments and consumers alike.
The companies on this list show how broad that definition has become. Some are newer ventures trying to commercialize emerging technologies, while others are more mature private companies still operating with the speed, ambition and category-building mindset associated with startup culture. Together, they represent the modern Silicon Valley startup ecosystem: technical, capital-intensive, AI-aware and increasingly focused on solving complex problems in the physical and digital worlds.
Startups to Watch in Silicon Valley
- Airwallex
- Sendbird
- Step
- Productiv
- Wing
- Robust.AI
- Agora.io
- Brightline
- Dusty Robotics
- NUVIA Inc.
Silicon Valley Startups to Know
Location: San Francisco, California (Co-headquartered in Singapore)
Industry: Financial Technology, Artificial Intelligence
What they do: Airwallex is a global fintech company providing financial infrastructure and SaaS solutions that streamline international payments, foreign exchange and treasury workflows. Its single platform allows organizations to open local business accounts in dozens of countries and accept payments without foreign transaction fees. For professionals in Silicon Valley, the company offers opportunities to tackle complex international challenges and influence the development of financial technology.
Location: San Mateo, California
Industry: Artificial Intelligence, Communication APIs
What they do: SendBird provides a developer platform for integrating in-app chat, voice and video calls and business messaging into digital applications. Its technology supports AI-driven customer interactions to help automate and manage communication workflows. Businesses across multiple industries can use Sendbird to handle their customer service, sales and marketing needs.
Location: San Francisco, California
Industry: Artificial Intelligence
What they do: Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial intelligence research and development company that builds multimodal AI models and tools designed for customization. Its Tinker platform enables organizations and developers to fine-tune open-weights models and integrate collaborative AI workflows tailored to their specific needs. The company also contributes to the broader scientific community by publishing research, code, and datasets to improve understanding and safety across AI systems.
Location: San Francisco, California
Industry: Artificial Intelligence
What they do: Standard AI utilizes a spatial AI platform that operates as a behavior engine to analyze how people and objects move through physical environments. By processing real-time movement data, the technology evaluates behavioral patterns within locations such as retail storefronts, entertainment venues and public spaces. These insights enable operators to optimize spatial layouts and improve facility navigation.
Location: San Carlos, California
Industry: Robotics, Artificial Intelligence
What they do: Robust.AI builds AI-powered collaborative mobile robots designed to work alongside people in dynamic warehouse and manufacturing environments. Its flagship product, Carter, delivers fully autonomous material handling with human-centric design, enabling rapid deployment and scalability without infrastructure changes. Robust.AI combines intelligent automation with adaptable workflows to make genuine autonomy accessible across industrial verticals.
Location: San Francisco, California
Industry: Cloud Infrastructure
What they do: Dockup allows for a more streamlined deployments process when building on AWS, connecting Github and AWS accounts while automatically working behind the scenes to create AWS resources for pulling source code, managing containers, creating permissions and locking down a network. The Dockup platform also empowers teams and individuals with auto scaling and load balancing, rolling deployments and SSL renewal capabilities.
Location: San Jose, California
Industry: Travel Tech
What they do: AriaDirect streamlines international travel, offering a mobile app that simplifies visa and Passport applications through an intuitive step-by-step process, real-time status tracking and expedited document delivery. The platform addresses a critical pain point in travel logistics, enabling users to complete visa applications in minutes rather than navigating complex consulate procedures.
Location: Redwood City, California
Industry: Artificial Intelligence, Retail Software
What they do: Rundoo builds AI-powered point-of-sale and operations software for independent supply stores. Its unified platform replaces fragmented legacy systems with a single connected system for inventory, pricing, payments and customer management. Rundoo's AI capabilities help store owners identify at-risk accounts and automate tasks like report generation and competitor analysis.
Location: Santa Clara
Industry: Engagement APIs, Cloud Infrastructure
What they do: Agora provides APIs and development tools that allow software teams to embed live audio, video and interactive messaging directly into their applications. Its proprietary Software-Defined Real-Time Network delivers the underlying cloud infrastructure required for low-latency global communication across web, mobile and desktop platforms. The platform also integrates with advanced external models, including OpenAI’s Realtime API, to support interactive conversational AI capabilities.
Location: London, England
Industry: Banking, Financial Services
What they do: Wise is a banking experience designed for small business owners, featuring a digital platform that provides owners access to all of the financial tools their businesses need at a moment’s notice. The mobile bank offers digital payment capabilities to keep all business costs centrally located, and Wise rewards users with low interest rates along with physical cards to its dedicated user base.
Location: Palo Alto, California
Industry: Artificial Intelligence, Defense Technology
What they do: Vannevar Labs, founded by Brett Granberg and Nini Hamrick, builds agentic AI systems designed to deliver decision advantage for U.S. national security missions. Drawing on their combined experience in government and counterterrorism operations, the co-founders created a defense-tech platform pre-trained for emerging threats facing the United States. Vannevar's AI infrastructure processes vast intelligence datasets to anticipate and inform critical decisions, making it a key defense provider.
Location: San Francisco, California
Industry: Food Tech
What they do: Shef operates a marketplace connecting home cooks with customers seeking ready-to-heat, homemade meals delivered to their door. The platform enlists vetted home cooks — or Shefs — who prepare meals in small batches based on advance orders, making culturally authentic cuisine more accessible and affordable while eliminating prep work for customers. Shef's platform enables food entrepreneurs to monetize their culinary skills from home kitchens.
Location: San Jose, California
Industry: Gaming
What they do:The “memeification” of our society is at a peak and Fad Mania wants to make it more fun — and profitable — for us all. The company creates a new game each week that is inspired by the hottest trending meme of that moment, releasing games through a mobile app that allows users to interact with top memes while earning cash prizes.
Location: San Francisco, California
Industry: E-Commerce, Supply Chain Management
What they do: Flieber operates an artificial intelligence platform designed to help retail brands coordinate inventory management and forecast customer demand across supply networks. Its technology uses predictive models to automate replenishment decisions and maintain balanced stock levels across sales channels. Additionally, the platform features Studio, a no-code tool that enables users to build customized software agents and operational workflows using natural language instructions.
Location: Mountain View, California
Industry: Robotics
What they do: Dusty Robotics automates construction layout with its FieldPrinter, an autonomous robot that prints building information models (BIM) directly onto jobsite floors. The platform enables builders to work dramatically faster than traditional methods while ensuring design intent reaches the field without error. By bridging BIM coordination and field execution, Dusty Robotics helps construction teams reduce rework, compress schedules and reallocate skilled labor to higher-value work.
Location: San Jose, California
Industry: Sports Technology, Artificial Intelligence
What they do: MyRace transforms race results into AI-powered insights that help athletes understand their performance beyond raw times and rankings. Partnering with major marathons and races worldwide, the platform analyzes over a million race results to deliver personalized analysis, pacing insights and performance comparisons — features once only available only to elite runners with professional coaching. MyRace serves athletes, race organizers and brands, offering free AI-generated summaries and interactive visualizations to enhance athletic performance.
Location: San Francisco, California
Industry: Venture Capital
What they do: Knockout Capital is an investment arm of Weclikd Inc., putting funding into companies actively working to improve capabilities in the robotics industry. Led by a founding partner with years of experience at Morgan Stanley and UCLA’s Gonda Neuroscience Center and Glaucoma Institute, Knockout Capital’s goal is to connect the most promising startups, highly skilled technical talent and curious investors to ensure the future of robotics is purpose-driven and collaborative.
Location: Mountain View, California
Industry: Cloud Infrastructure
What they do: Lyrid orchestrates APIs across public, private and hybrid cloud environments, enabling developers to aggregate and optimize cloud deployments without server infrastructure. Using machine learning to ensure optimal performance, the company delivers a CDN-like developer experience that centralizes code deployment before distributing it across connected cloud platforms. Lyrid addresses the growing demand for seamless multi-cloud management and enterprise infrastructure solutions.
Location: Mountain View, California
Industry: Artificial Intelligence
What they do: Pactum uses AI to automate enterprise contract negotiations, enabling buyers and suppliers to reach fairer deals faster. The platform's autonomous agents progressively learn contract term values to execute compliant, structured negotiations at scale — reducing manual effort and ensuring better outcomes for both parties
Location: San Jose, California
Industry: Venture Capital
What they do: TDK Ventures operates as a corporate venture capital firm providing early-stage funding to deep tech startups focused on applied science and engineering. Its portfolio emphasizes material science, micro-electronics and semiconductor innovations, offering companies access to TDK's technical and manufacturing infrastructure. The firm targets businesses developing technical solutions for digital transformation and energy infrastructure.
Location: Palo Alto, California
Industry: Enterprise Software, Artificial Intelligence
What they do: Productiv operates as a centralized platform for SaaS and Shadow AI management, providing organizations with comprehensive visibility into their active applications and AI capabilities. Its analytics evaluate real-world usage patterns to help IT teams identify redundant software and balance business value against security risks. By automating cost-reduction workflows, the technology enables enterprises to streamline their software portfolios and eliminate unnecessary technology expenditures.
Location: Mountain View, California
Industry: Private Equity
What they do: Frost Capital is a private equity fund and investment management firm, investing in tech-enabled companies that are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. The Frost & Sullivan affiliated firm prioritizes permanent capital vehicles as opposed to the time-limited equity funds traditionally sought after by many startups. This allows companies to deploy strategies that lead to better value over a longer term.
Location: Palo Alto, California
Industry: Travel Tech
What they do: Navan’s technology includes a marketplace of travel options, 24/7 access to support and customizable dashboards for real-time data visibility. Businesses use Navan’s platform to plan trips, oversee policy compliance and manage expenses, supported by its AI-powered assistant Ava. The company, founded in 2015, is headquartered in Palo Alto with over a dozen offices around the world.
Location: San Francisco, California
Industry: Artificial Intelligence
What they do: ModelFront builds AI that checks and fixes machine translations, instantly predicting which translations are accurate enough to publish and which require human review. Founded by engineers from Google Translate and Silicon Valley startups, the company enables enterprises to safely automate millions of words while maintaining human quality — eliminating costly manual post-editing of reliable translations through hybrid translation workflows.
Location: San Jose, California
Industry: Healthtech
What they do: Aumhum operates a digital mental healthcare platform that integrates psychiatric, psychological and general medical care into a single system. Through its mobile application and clinical infrastructure, the platform connects users with licensed specialists while providing self-directed tools such as assessments, guided meditations, and therapeutic courses. This framework combines clinical oversight with care coordination across therapy, medication management and biological health factors to support continuous treatment.
Location: Palo Alto, California
Industry: Venture Capital
What they do: Tau Ventures is an artificial intelligence-focused venture capital firm that provides seed-stage funding to early-stage technology companies. Founded by Amit Garg and Sanjay Rao, the firm invests in startups applying machine learning to digital health, autonomous robotics, and enterprise infrastructure. Its portfolio includes companies such as RapidDeploy, BioBeats and nuTonomy that address complex operational challenges across health and industrial sectors.
Location: South San Francisco, California
Industry: Artificial Intelligence, Healthtech
What they do: AKASA is a San Francisco-based generative AI company transforming healthcare revenue cycle management. With integrated AI, the platform automates prior authorization, medical coding, clinical documentation, document analysis and claims processing. AKASA also partners with leading health systems like Cleveland Clinic to deploy AI-powered coding assistants that reduce manual administrative work while improving accuracy and compliance.
Location: San Francisco, California
Industry: Virtual Reality (VR), EdTech
What they do: EcoSystemOne is a metaverse creator platform enabling immersive learning experiences through VR environments. The company's drag-and-drop interface and AI-powered collaboration tools allow educators and organizations to build interactive simulations for language education, corporate training, team building and game-based learning without coding. Small group classes can leverage EcoSystemOne platform to create tangible learning journeys that break down traditional classroom barriers, with analytics tracking collaboration cohesion and joint attention metrics to measure engagement and knowledge retention.
Location: Palo Alto, California
Industry: Fintech
What they do: Step, now owned by Beast Industries, is a fintech platform providing zero-fee mobile banking for teens and young adults. The app enables users to build credit, manage spending, send and receive money, and make secure purchases with a Step Visa Card. Step combines financial tools designed to teach the next generation money management fundamentals — addressing a gap in financial literacy that extends beyond traditional banking into credit building and investment education.
Location: San Mateo, California
Industry: Space Tech
What they do: Xona Space Systems is building Pulsar, a Low Earth Orbit satellite constellation delivering centimeter-level positioning, navigation, and timing services as a commercial alternative to GPS. Its constellation consists of approximately 300 small satellites that broadcast signals 100 times stronger than GPS, enabling reliable navigation in dense urban and remote environments where GPS might fail otherwise. Pulsar's cryptographically authenticated signals can alsoresist jamming and spoofing attacks, addressing critical vulnerabilities in legacy location systems.
Location: San Francisco, California
Industry: IT Infrastructure
What they do: Netdata develops an infrastructure monitoring platform designed to track system performance across physical, cloud and hybrid environments. Utilizing automated metric collection and machine learning, the technology identifies operational anomalies and evaluates root causes to guide technical troubleshooting. The architecture maintains data privacy by keeping raw performance metrics stored on local infrastructure while transmitting only system metadata to the cloud.
Location: Palo Alto, California
Industry: Healthtech
What they do: Brightline is a pediatric mental health startup addressing a critical gap in behavioral health car. The company operates a hybrid care model combining brick-and-mortar clinics with virtual therapy, delivering evidence-based treatment for anxiety, ADHD, OCD and other conditions to children and families.
Location: San Francisco, California
Industry: EdTech, HealthTech
What they do: Invincible allows parents to communicate with those who care for their children when they aren't there. The mobile app allows users to add contacts like school teachers, school health staff members, coaches and after-school leaders to a quick-contact list. The Invincible platform comes complete with a scheduling tool that enables parents to keep their kids' days organized.
Location: Livermore, California
Industry: Artificial Intelligence
What they do: Datasaur is a data-labeling platform accelerating machine learning workflows with intelligent tools designed for enterprise teams. The company provides a responsive platform and powerful engine for labeling data at scale, enabling organizations to achieve faster project completion while improving model performance. Datasaur’s platform combines automated labeling with human-in-the-loop workflows, allowing teams to spot issues quickly and focus on high-impact annotation tasks.
Location: San Jose, California
Industry: On-Demand Services
What they do: Nearal is a mobile marketplace platform connecting local service professionals with customers in their communities. The app enables independent professionals to build professional profiles, list their expertise, hourly rates and showcase completed projects to attract clients seeking services nearby. By facilitating direct connections between independent professionals and local customers, Nearal supports the gig economy's expansion into service-based work while helping professionals establish sustainable local practices.
Location: San Francisco, California
Industry: Beauty Tech, Artificial Intelligence
What they do: Formulate uses AI-powered automation and personalized chemistry to transform how beauty products are manufactured. The company began by matching customers with personal chemists to design custom hair and skincare formulas free of sulfates, parabens and cruelty. It has since evolved into a contract manufacturing platform serving emerging and established beauty brands through Formulate Labs, offering low minimum order quantities and on-demand production via automated micro-factories.
Location: Palo Alto, California
Industry: Artificial Intelligence
What they do: Fiddler AI is an enterprise AI control plane that provides companies with visibility and control across the agentic lifecycle. The platform enables AI professionals to understand, analyze, validate and monitor AI model behavior in production, delivering crucial data on compliance and performance. As autonomous agents become central to enterprise operations, Fiddler's observability and guardrails infrastructure helps organizations ensure their AI systems operate reliably and securely at scale.
Location: San Francisco, California
Industry: HR Tech
What they do: Braintrust operates an AI-driven talent network that connects vetted technical professionals with enterprise organizations seeking specialized expertise. The platform utilizes automated matching alongside technical project managers to streamline hiring and oversee project execution. By bypassing traditional recruitment intermediaries, the system enables companies to flexibly scale their technical capacity for software, artificial intelligence and infrastructure initiatives.
Location: San Mateo, California
Industry: Venture Capital
What they do: Flourish Ventures is an early-stage global venture capital firm with that backs fintech founders reshaping financial services. The firm invests in companies operating in challenger banking, consumer lending, digital money, insurtech, personal finance, regulatory technology and related verticals, with a focus on developing fairer, more customer-centric financial systems. Backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Flourish operates a fund supporting ambitious entrepreneurs advancing financial health across the US and emerging markets.
Location: Palo Alto, California
Industry: Drone Delivery, Logistics
What they do: Wing, an Alphabet subsidiary, is an on-demand drone delivery service. The company operates one of the world’s largest aircraft fleets and serves the largest residential drone delivery footprint in the United States., delivering groceries, pharmacy products and other essentials to homes in minutes. Wing’s drones reach speeds up to 70 miles per hour and currently operate across various U.S. metros, including the San Francisco Bay Area.
