Startups
Trending AI companies doing genuinely important work
8090 Solutions
"AI is writing your software. Who's in control?"
Founded by Chamath Palihapitiya and a team of ex-Amazon, Meta, and Google engineers, 8090's Software Factory is an AI-native SDLC orchestration platform that governs the full software development lifecycle — from requirements through deployment. Its four-module system (Refinery → Foundry → Planner → Validator) maintains a living Knowledge Graph connecting product intent, architectural decisions, and implementation so AI agents produce consistent, documented, production-grade code. In March 2026, Ernst & Young deployed Software Factory across tens of thousands of US consultants via EY.ai PDLC — delivering a reported 70% productivity gain and 80x faster delivery. One enterprise customer used it to replace a $15M/yr SaaS vendor with their own solution.
Every enterprise is drowning in legacy software and vibe-coded AI slop. 8090 is the only platform that treats the full SDLC as an orchestration problem — not just code generation. With Chamath's capital, a world-class team, and EY as a launch partner deploying to tens of thousands of consultants, this is the most credible bet on who controls AI software development at enterprise scale.
"The answer engine for the internet."
Replacing the ten blue links with a single, sourced, conversational answer. Perplexity combines LLM reasoning with real-time web search to give users accurate, cited responses faster than any search engine.
Search is a $200B market. Perplexity is the most credible threat to Google's core business since its founding.
"The world's first fully autonomous AI software engineer."
Devin can plan, code, debug, and deploy end-to-end software projects without human hand-holding. Cognition is moving fast toward a future where AI writes the majority of production code.
Software engineering is a $1.5T labor market. Autonomous coding agents don't sleep, don't context-switch, and compound in capability daily.
"A general-purpose physical intelligence for robotics."
Founded by ex-Google, Stanford, and Berkeley researchers, Physical Intelligence is training foundation models for robots — the same paradigm shift that GPT brought to language, applied to physical action.
The bottleneck to robotic automation has never been the hardware — it's the software. Foundation models for physical intelligence could unlock a $10T+ wave of automation.
"Voice AI that sounds indistinguishable from human."
The leading voice synthesis and cloning platform. ElevenLabs powers voice for games, audiobooks, content, dubbing, and accessibility tools across 29 languages with sub-second latency.
Every piece of digital content will be voiced. ElevenLabs has a near-unassailable lead in voice quality and is expanding into the real-time voice stack.
"Open, efficient frontier models — built in Europe."
France's answer to OpenAI. Mistral releases powerful open-weight models that punch above their weight class and has built a commercial API business with enterprise contracts across the EU.
Open models shift leverage back to developers. Mistral is the most credible open-source alternative to GPT-4 class models — with a sovereign-AI angle that matters deeply in Europe.
"AI built for the world's most demanding legal work."
Harvey is deploying AI across the Am Law 100 — the world's top law firms. It handles contract analysis, due diligence, litigation research, and regulatory work at a fraction of the time and cost.
Legal is one of the most document-heavy, high-stakes industries in the world. Harvey has achieved what most thought was impossible: elite law firms trusting AI on billable work.
"Work AI that knows your company."
Glean connects to every enterprise tool — Slack, Google Drive, Salesforce, Confluence — and builds a real-time knowledge graph of your company. Ask it anything. It knows the answer.
Enterprise knowledge management is broken. Employees spend 20% of their time searching for information. Glean is becoming the operating system for enterprise intelligence.
"AI-native video creation for the next era of storytelling."
Runway's Gen-2 and Gen-3 models can generate, edit, and transform video from text and images. Used by major studios and independent creators alike — it's the Adobe of generative video.
Video is the largest media category on earth. Runway is collapsing the cost of production by orders of magnitude and is years ahead of most competitors on video quality.
"Spatial intelligence — AI that understands the 3D world."
Founded by Fei-Fei Li (the creator of ImageNet), World Labs is building large world models — AI systems that can understand, navigate, and reason about 3D physical space.
Spatial intelligence is the missing piece between AI assistants and AI agents that can act in the physical world. Fei-Fei Li is the most credible person alive to build it.