7 AI Startups For Midmarket IT Leaders To Watch In 2025
These companies provide compelling business use cases for their offerings.
While midmarket tech leaders have expressed wariness over GenAI’s hype, with some questioning the technology’s use for “serious workloads,” there are no indications that organizations will slow down their adoption of AI solutions in 2025.
In fact, GenAI can benefit businesses with “faster product development, enhanced customer experience and improved employee productivity,” according to research firm Gartner.
Investors remain in love with AI startups. A recent study revealed that AI startups are outpacing other types of new businesses when it comes to raising funds.
The top 50 most-funded AI startups raised a combined $52.8 billion this year as of October 2024, with a valuation of over $358 billion, according to the study from WriterBuddy.ai, the provider of an AI-based writing assistant.
The types of AI startups most funded are those dealing with AI infrastructure and models, raising $35.5 billion in 2024. Next were those in the data and analytics space. AI startups in defense and security made for the third-most funded AI companies, raising $3.8 billion.
The report data was collected from a variety of sources including Crunchbase, PitchBook, and news articles, WriterBuddy said.
Here are 10 AI companies with solid business use cases that midmarket leaders may want to keep focused on in 2025 (the funding data is from Crunchbase and WriterBuddy data).
7 AI Startups For Midmarket Leaders To Watch In 2025
- OpenAI
OpenAI has been the most-funded AI startup to date, raising $17.6 billion in equity funding as of fourth quarter, 2024 and has a valuation of $157 billion.
Why midmarket IT leaders should watch OpenAI: While concerns remain around LLMs and the security of company IP, OpenAI launched its enterprise service targeted to businesses with an emphasis on enterprise-level security and privacy, as well as a powerful data analytics capability.
2. Anthropic
Founded in 2020, Anthropic has raised a total of $8.4 billion as of October 2024 with a valuation of $40 billion.
Why midmarket IT leaders should watch Anthropic: Anthropic has been adding more capabilities to its platform, and one that has a solid business use case is the new “computer use” feature within Claude 3.5 Sonnet. With computer use, Claude can interact with tools that can manipulate a computer desktop environment. For example, Claude can interact with a spreadsheet to automate filling out vendor request forms.
3. Databricks
A provider of GenAI-powered data intelligence and analytics, Databricks has raised nearly $4 billion since launching in 2013, with a valuation of $43 billion.
Why midmarket IT leaders should watch Databricks: Databricks offers a course for business leaders, introducing them to its platform. In the course, executives can learn how Databricks supports data governance, security, and how other leaders are using the AI platform to reduce their total cost of ownership.
4. Scale AI
Launched in 2016, Scale has raised $1.6 billion as of October 2024, with a valuation of $13.8 billion.
Why midmarket IT leaders should watch Scale: Scale provides data for training models and a gen AI platform for customers to implement their own AI solutions.
5. Mistral AI
The French-based gen AI company has raised $1.04 billion as of October 2024, with a valuation of $6.2 billion. Mistral was launched in 2023 by former Meta and Google employees.
Why midmarket IT leaders should watch Mistral: Mistral offers automation and customized AI solutions for business. Plus, the company says it does not use customers’ data for training its public LLMs.
6. Cohere
Cohere, launched in 2019, has a valuation of $5.5 billion as of October 2024.
Why midmarket IT leaders should watch Cohere: Cohere provides large language models and RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) capabilities for enterprises.
7. Perplexity AI
Perplexity is an AI-based search engine, with a valuation of $8 billion as of Q4 2024.
Why midmarket IT leaders should watch Perplexity: In April 2024, the company launched Perplexity Enterprise Pro – an AI alternative to traditional search engines and its first B2B offering. Enterprise Pro gives businesses targeted search capabilities, it’s SOC2 certified, and according to Perplexity, customer data is never used to train its public LLMs.