autonomous-agents
(16)
Emergence AI Raised $97 Million to Make Agents Behave - Then Its Own Test Exposed the Hard Part
The IBM veterans behind Emergence AI want software agents to cross the messy borders between enterprise systems. Their own numbers explain both the opportunity and the catch: orchestration improved task success, but even the better system completed fewer than half the jobs in a company-run test.
Blaxel
Blaxel is a San Francisco cloud infrastructure startup building what its founders call the 'AWS for AI agents.' Its platform runs autonomous agents on isolated microVMs that resume in roughly 25 milliseconds, alongside a distributed agent filesystem, programmable networking, and an AI gateway for model routing and failover. Founded in 2024 by a six-person team of repeat cloud builders who previously sold a data platform to OVHcloud, Blaxel went through Y Combinator's Spring 2025 (X25) batch and raised a $7.3M seed round led by First Round Capital. It already processes millions of agent requests daily across 16 regions.
MindFort
MindFort is a San Francisco AI security lab building autonomous agents that continuously find, validate, and patch vulnerabilities in web applications and APIs. Founded out of Y Combinator's X25 batch by offensive-security veterans, it runs like a 24/7 AI red team - proving exploits in isolated runtime environments before it reports them, then opening pull requests with the fix. The company raised a $3M+ seed led by Soma Capital in April 2026.
Lassie
Lassie is a San Francisco AI company building an autonomous 'AI healthcare admin worker' for independent medical and dental practices. Its agents log into insurance portals, pull reimbursements, reconcile electronic payments, post entries to practice-management systems, handle appeals and enrollments, and flag exceptions for humans - doing the back-office busywork rather than adding review burden. Founded by Robinhood/Coinbase and Superhuman alumni, Lassie operates in 700+ practices across 49 states and raised a $35M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in June 2026.
Upriver
Upriver is an AI-native data engineering platform that connects to a company's full data stack - Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Airflow, dbt - then explores it, builds and validates pipelines, fixes them when they break, and encodes the tribal knowledge that usually lives in engineers' heads. Founded in 2024 by Talpiot graduates Ido Bronstein and Omri Lifshitz, the Tel Aviv company aims to make data infrastructure invisible so AI systems can run on a reliable data foundation without constant manual upkeep.
CREAO AI
CREAO AI is an AI-native platform that turns plain-language requests into autonomous, full-stack 'Agent Apps.' Instead of asking users to wire together visual workflows, a cloud-based 'super agent' writes code, calls APIs, connects integrations and runs the work in a sandbox - then saves the result as a reusable, schedulable app with its own memory. Founded at the end of 2024 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, the company reached 200,000 organic users within months of its September 2025 launch and has raised roughly $25M across three rounds in under a year, most recently a $10M round led by Aramco's Prosperity7 Ventures.
Fundamental Research Labs
Fundamental Research Labs (formerly Altera) is a San Francisco applied AI research company building autonomous, socially intelligent agents - what it calls 'digital human beings.' Founded by former MIT computational neuroscientist Dr. Robert Yang, the company ships consumer and prosumer products including Shortcut (a superhuman Excel agent) and Fairies (a general-purpose AI assistant), and raised a $33M Series A in August 2025 led by Prosus Ventures.
NinjaTech AI
NinjaTech AI is a Palo Alto-based generative AI company building autonomous AI agents that complete real, multi-step work. Its consumer product, Ninja (myninja.ai), packages 24+ frontier models into one workspace; its flagship SuperNinja agent plans, codes, researches, and executes entire workflows inside a dedicated virtual machine. Founded in 2022 by ex-Google and ex-AWS leaders, the company runs on AWS Trainium and Cerebras silicon.
Day AI
Day AI is an AI-native CRM company building CRMx, a customer relationship platform designed for AI agents rather than manual data entry. Founded in 2023 by former HubSpot leaders Christopher O'Donnell and Michael Pici, Day AI automatically ingests conversations, emails and meeting notes to capture the 'why' behind every customer interaction, then answers plain-English questions like 'which accounts are showing churn signals?' in seconds. Backed by Sequoia with $24M total raised, it aims to turn CRM from a system of delayed data entry into a real-time intelligence layer.
Lyzr AI
Lyzr AI is an enterprise agent-infrastructure company that helps banks, insurers, and other regulated organizations move AI agents from proof-of-concept to production. Its open-core Agent Framework bakes Safe AI and Responsible AI modules into the core architecture, while products like Agent Studio and a roster of named agents (Jazon the AI SDR, Skott the AI marketer) let teams build, govern, and deploy autonomous agents inside their own firewall or VPC. Backed by Accenture and valued at $250M, Lyzr positions itself as the trusted layer between large language models and the compliance-bound enterprise.
Agency
Agency (agen.cy) is a San Francisco company building the tooling layer for AI agents. Its flagship product, AgentOps.ai, is an observability, testing, and compliance platform that logs every decision an autonomous agent makes - so teams can see what their agents actually do, catch failures, and ship reliably. Founded in 2023 out of the city's AI hackathon scene, the company also runs an AI-agent consulting practice and raised $2.6M in pre-seed funding in 2024.
SuperAGI
SuperAGI is a Palo Alto-based AI company building autonomous agents that run real work - sales outreach, software engineering, marketing, support - on a single platform. Founded by Ishaan Bhola and Mukunda NS, it began as an open-source agent framework on GitHub and grew into a 25+ app super-platform used by SMB and enterprise teams, backed by $10M Series A from Jan Koum's Newlands VC.
11x
11x builds autonomous AI 'digital workers' for go-to-market teams - software agents like Alice, an AI sales development rep, and Jordan, a multilingual AI phone rep. Founded in 2022 and based in San Francisco, the startup raised a $50M Series B from Andreessen Horowitz in late 2024 at a roughly $350M valuation. After turbulence around customer claims and culture, founder Hasan Sukkar stepped down as CEO in May 2025 and CTO Prabhav Jain took over.
Cognition
Cognition is the San Francisco AI lab behind Devin, the first autonomous AI software engineer, and the post-acquisition home of the Windsurf IDE. Founded in 2023 by three IOI gold-medalists, the company builds agents that plan, write, test and ship production code, and is reshaping how engineering teams scale.
Factory
Factory builds agent-native software development for enterprises. Its Droids - specialized AI agents for coding, reliability, product, and knowledge work - take tickets, write code, open PRs, and triage incidents alongside human engineers. Founded in 2023 by Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes, the San Francisco company raised a $150M Series C in April 2026 at a $1.5B valuation led by Khosla Ventures.
Simbian
Simbian is a Mountain View startup building autonomous, self-improving AI agents for security operations. Its platform pairs a Context Lake of institutional knowledge with TrustedLLM-powered agents that triage alerts, hunt threats, run pentests, and manage firewalls 24/7 — built to counter AI-powered attacks that move faster than humans can react.