Ahrefs built one of the web’s busiest crawlers to answer a marketer’s oldest question: why does that page outrank mine? Now the bootstrapped company is teaching the same data engine to map a stranger terrain - what brands appear when people ask AI for an answer.
Similarweb built a business by measuring what companies cannot see in their own analytics: everyone else. Now it is turning that outside-in view of the internet into fuel for marketers, investors, retailers and AI agents.
Revere is a San Francisco AI startup (Y Combinator F25) building an agent platform that helps government contractors price and win bids. It automates market and cost research, competitor modeling, and competitive simulation to produce a modeled probability-of-win (pWin) at different price points, so proposal teams can increase win rates and protect margin without spending weeks assembling fragmented intelligence.
Patsnap is a Singapore-founded innovation intelligence company whose AI-native platform helps R&D and IP teams search, analyze, and act on the world's patents, scientific literature, and market data. Used by more than 10,000 organizations across 50-plus countries, its flagship Eureka platform applies large language models and specialized AI agents to compress labor-intensive tasks - prior art search, freedom-to-operate analysis, patent landscaping, and drug-discovery intelligence - from weeks into minutes.
Apptopia is a Boston-based mobile app intelligence company that turns billions of app performance signals into investor-grade data. Using machine learning and a real-user device panel of 15M+ devices, it estimates downloads, revenue, usage and engagement across thousands of public and private apps, then packages those signals for institutional investors, brands and publishers. More than 200 financial firms use Apptopia to read consumer behavior ahead of earnings, and its metrics are distributed through the Bloomberg Terminal.
Datavations is a New York-based, AI-powered market intelligence platform built exclusively for manufacturers and distributors in the building materials and home improvement industries. It aggregates granular, store-level and SKU-level retail data across thousands of stores to give suppliers the cross-retailer visibility they otherwise lack - helping them optimize pricing, inventory, and product assortment, and walk into merchant meetings armed with data their retail partners don't have. Founded in 2020 by Philip Odelfelt, the company raised a $17M Series A in July 2025 led by Forestay Capital.
DataWeave is an AI-powered digital commerce analytics company that helps consumer brands and retailers grow revenue and protect margins online. Its SaaS platform aggregates and analyzes public e-commerce data at massive scale to deliver pricing intelligence, digital shelf analytics, assortment insights, and brand protection to more than 400 global brands and retailers, including Zappos, Costco, and Home Depot.
NewtonX is a New York-based B2B market research and intelligence company that connects businesses to hard-to-reach, identity-verified experts. Instead of relying on a fixed panel, its AI-driven Graph scans more than 1.1 billion professionals across 140+ industries to custom-recruit the exact decision-makers a research brief requires, then runs surveys, interviews, and AI-moderated studies on top. Founded in 2016 by former McKinsey consultants Sascha Eder and Germain Chastel with Anuja Ketan, NewtonX serves Fortune 500 companies, top management consultancies, and financial institutions that need trustworthy, fraud-resistant data to make high-stakes decisions.
Alium is a New York-based startup building an AI-powered vendor intelligence platform for enterprise software buyers. It runs structured, compensated 1-on-1 interviews with practitioners - the VPs of marketing, CISOs, and IT directors who actually use the tools - then uses AI to synthesize those conversations into ratings and insights. Founded in 2020 by former CB Insights operators Jonathan Sherry and Alexandre Testu, Alium emerged from stealth in January 2025 with $7M in seed funding, aiming to replace pay-for-play review sites and analyst reports with unbiased peer intelligence, starting with marketing and ecommerce technology.
FounderNest is an AI-native market intelligence platform that helps innovation teams at large corporations, CVCs, R&D, M&A and strategy groups discover, evaluate and track emerging startups, technologies and trends. Its AI Market Intelligence Analyst (AMIA) scans 50M+ companies, 160M+ patents and billions of data points to surface opportunities faster than traditional research.
Quid is an AI-powered consumer and market intelligence platform that reads billions of structured and unstructured data points - news, social posts, reviews, patents, forums - and turns them into business outcomes. Born from the 2020 merger of NetBase (social listening) and Quid Inc. (AI text analytics and network visualization), the company now sells a workflow platform (Q Platform) and a library of AI agents (Q Agents) so brands can see what's coming and decide what to do about it before competitors do.
Crayon is a Boston-based competitive intelligence software company that helps businesses track, analyze, and act on what their competitors are doing. Its platform automatically captures market movements from hundreds of millions of sources, then turns that raw signal into battlecards, alerts, newsletters, and AI-generated talk tracks that sales, marketing, product, and executive teams use to win more deals. Founded in 2015 by former HubSpot executive Jonah Lopin, Crayon has raised roughly $38 million and serves 500+ customers including Dropbox, Gong, Zendesk, Intuit, and ZoomInfo.
Waldo is an agentic brand intelligence platform that compresses the multi-week grind of brand research, competitive analysis, and strategy into minutes. Founded by Justin Wohlstadter, it pairs proprietary data integrations - social platforms, ad libraries, syndicated research - with 50+ structured workflows built for strategists. Agencies and brands give it a brand, a category, and an audience, and AI agents return recurring intelligence briefs on trends, ads, audience conversations, and competitor moves. Backed by a $10M Series A led by Footwork, Waldo already counts agencies like Havas, IPG, and Omnicom and brands like Conair and Kettle & Fire among its users.
Profitmind (operated by Netail, Inc.) is a Pittsburgh-based retail decision-intelligence company that builds agentic AI to help merchandising teams make faster, more profitable pricing, assortment, inventory, promotion, and marketing decisions. Founded by retail veteran Dr. Mark Chrystal and incubated inside Andrew Ng's AI Fund/Landing AI ecosystem, its platform unifies a retailer's strategy, internal data, and external competitive signals into prioritized, explainable recommendations - serving retailers from $20M to $100B in revenue across three continents.
Starbridge is a New York-based AI go-to-market platform built for companies selling to government and education. It scrapes the messy, fragmented world of public sector data - board meeting minutes, budgets, RFPs, contract expirations and procurement records - and turns it into ranked buying signals, account intelligence and auto-drafted proposals so sales teams can find and win deals before the RFP drops. Founded in 2024 by Coursedog veteran Justin Wenig, it has raised $52M total, including a $42M Series A led by Craft Ventures in October 2025, and serves 160+ enterprise public sector sales teams.
Wiser Solutions is a San Mateo-based retail intelligence company that gives brands and retailers real-time data and insights to win at the moment a shopper decides to buy. Its SaaS platform spans price intelligence, MAP monitoring, market intelligence, and in-store retail execution - tracking more than 10 billion products, 150,000 sellers, and 600,000 stores across 45+ countries. Trusted by 700+ global brands and retailers including Amazon, Ferrero, Beko, and Best Buy.
Hypersonix is an agentic AI platform purpose-built for retail and eCommerce profitability. Its flagship product, ProfitGPT, gives merchants autonomous decision-making across pricing, promotions, forecasting, and inventory - replacing weeks of analyst work with minutes of AI-driven insight. With 5M+ SKUs optimized and 100K+ daily autonomous pricing decisions, Hypersonix helps retailers like LVMH, Woodman's Market, and Rogers Sporting Goods capture margin lift of 10-12% within 90 days.