large-language-models
(30)
Character.AI Built a World of Talking Personas. Then the Model Race Cost More Than the Fantasy
The chatbot company found millions of people would spend an hour inside a made-up conversation. Then compute costs, a founder homecoming and a safety reckoning turned one clever app into a test of whether AI can become an entertainment medium.
The Startup Teaching Governments to Read the $20 Trillion They Can't See
Most financial crime hides in plain sight, scattered across the open web. IVIX built an AI platform that reads all of it at once - and hands governments a map.
AnswerThis
AnswerThis is an AI research assistant that turns literature reviews from months of work into minutes. It searches a database of more than 250 million academic papers and answers complex scientific questions with line-by-line, verifiable citations. Founded by University of Richmond seniors Ayush Garg and Ryan McCarroll and backed by Y Combinator (Fall 2025), the platform is used by over 250,000 researchers and crossed $1M in annual recurring revenue within eight months.
Legora
Legora is a Stockholm-founded collaborative AI platform built for legal work. It helps lawyers research, review, and draft across complex matters, running inside familiar tools like Microsoft Word and Outlook. Formerly known as Leya, the company (founded 2023) serves tens of thousands of legal professionals at 1,000+ law firms and in-house teams across more than 50 markets, and crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue before raising a $600M Series D at a $5.6B valuation in 2026.
Nous Research
Nous Research is an open-source AI lab founded in 2023 that builds world-class open-weight language models - most notably its Hermes family - and decentralized infrastructure for training them. Its Psyche network coordinates heterogeneous GPUs across the internet via the Solana blockchain, offering a community-driven, transparent alternative to closed labs like OpenAI. Backed by Paradigm and others, the company positions open, unrestricted models as a counterweight to centralized AI.
Pryon
Pryon is a Raleigh, North Carolina enterprise AI company that builds a secure retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) platform for regulated organizations. Founded in 2017 by Igor Jablokov - the entrepreneur whose earlier voice-recognition company Yap became Amazon's first AI acquisition and seeded Alexa - Pryon ingests text, audio, images and video from enterprise systems and pairs that content with large language models to deliver fast, source-attributed answers. Its RAG Suite and Memory Layer are designed to run anywhere from public cloud to fully air-gapped environments, targeting customers in government, defense, energy, life sciences, manufacturing and finance where accuracy, security and verifiability matter more than novelty.
Regard
Regard is a New York-based healthcare AI company that builds a clinical insights platform acting as an AI co-pilot for physicians. It reviews the full electronic health record - not just the sliver of chart data doctors typically read - to proactively surface likely diagnoses and draft near-complete clinical documentation before a patient is seen. Used by clinicians across 150+ hospitals, Regard aims to reduce missed diagnoses, ease documentation burden, and recover otherwise-lost hospital revenue.
Slice Labs
Slice Labs is a New York-based insurtech that builds cloud-based, digital-first insurance products. Founded in 2015 by Tim Attia, Stuart Baserman and Ernest Hursh, Slice pioneered the first on-demand, pay-as-you-go insurance in the US and later opened its Insurance Cloud Services (ICS) platform so insurers, carriers and technology companies could launch their own digital products. Its Slice Mind engine applies machine learning and, more recently, large language models to underwriting, risk scoring and claims. Today Slice operates as a tech-driven provider of Excess & Surplus (E&S) insurance for small-to-midsize commercial businesses across 40+ US states.
Talkmap
Talkmap is a Dallas-based enterprise AI company that turns 100% of a contact center's customer conversations - calls and chats - into structured, real-time intelligence. Its Talkdiscovery platform combines patented AI, machine learning, and computational linguistics to automatically detect customer intent, sentiment, and emerging trends, then routes those insights to specialized AI assistants for retention, sales, compliance, coaching, and analysis. Founded in 2017 (originally as discourse.ai) and led by CEO Tim Moss with founder Jonathan Eisenzopf, the company serves large brands in telecom, banking, insurance, and healthcare, keeping customer data inside private cloud environments rather than sending it to third-party models.
Triomics
Triomics builds oncology-specific AI infrastructure that turns messy, unstructured cancer patient records into structured, cited, actionable data. Its OncoLLM engine and workflow agents automate clinical trial matching, visit preparation, and cancer registry reporting for leading cancer centers, cutting manual chart review time while increasing trial enrollment. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in New York, the company is used by 4 of the top 10 U.S. cancer hospitals and raised a $22M Series B led by Battery Ventures in May 2026.
UneeQ
UneeQ builds AI-powered digital humans - lifelike, real-time animated avatars that give chatbots and enterprise AI a human face, voice and body language. Founded in New Zealand in 2009 as FaceMe and now headquartered in Austin, Texas, the company pairs its Synanim synthetic-animation engine and Synapse AI-orchestration brain to deploy digital humans for customer experience, brand engagement and immersive employee training across banking, airlines, telecom, retail, healthcare and government.
Inflection AI
Inflection AI is a Palo Alto-based artificial intelligence company, structured as a public benefit corporation, founded in 2022 by Mustafa Suleyman, Reid Hoffman, and Karen Simonyan. Originally known for the empathetic consumer chatbot Pi and its Inflection large language models, the company was reshaped in March 2024 after Microsoft licensed its technology for roughly $650 million and hired most of its team. Under CEO Sean White, Inflection re-founded itself as an enterprise-focused AI provider, selling data-secure, customizable models (Inflection 3.0) that let organizations own their intelligence, data, and infrastructure - including an on-premises appliance developed with Intel.
FurtherAI
FurtherAI builds domain-specific AI 'teammates' for the insurance industry, automating the busywork of underwriting, claims, submissions, policy comparison and compliance. Founded in 2023 by Aman Gour and Sashank Gondala and launched out of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, the San Francisco company parses messy insurance documents - broker letters, property schedules, ACORD forms, loss runs - and turns them into structured, actionable data so professionals can focus on judgment instead of re-keying. It raised a $25M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in October 2025, roughly six months after a $5M seed, and supports customers writing over $15 billion in premiums across all 50 states.
Inscope
Inscope is a San Francisco-based, AI-native financial reporting platform that automates the manual, spreadsheet-and-email grind of preparing GAAP-compliant financial statements. Founded in 2023 by former controllers Mary Antony and Kelsey Gootnick alongside CTO Jared Tibshraeny, it uses large language models to generate statements, footnotes, cash flow statements and audit-ready documentation directly from ERP data - automating more than 60% of the preparation work for accounting firms and enterprise finance teams. The company raised a $14.5M Series A led by Norwest in February 2026, bringing total funding to $18.8M.
Stardust AI
Stardust AI is a San Francisco-founded, data-centric AI company that helps enterprises turn raw, messy, multimodal data into the high-quality datasets that machine-learning models actually need. Through its Rosetta auto-labeling platform, its MorningStar data engine and its COSMO dataset offerings, Stardust annotates and manages 2D/3D/4D data spanning images, video, point clouds, audio and text - with heavy expertise in autonomous driving and large language models. The company works with names like SAIC Motor, BYD, Geely, Bosch, ZF, Xiaomi and JD.com, and pitches a simple thesis for the AI era: whoever controls the data controls the model.
Sumble
Sumble is a San Francisco AI startup building a knowledge graph of the world's external company data. Founded by Kaggle creators Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, it crawls job boards, company sites, social media, and regulatory filings, then uses large language models to surface technographics, org charts, and active projects for go-to-market teams. It emerged from stealth in October 2025 with $38.5M in funding and covers roughly 2.6 million companies worldwide.
Deep Cogito
Deep Cogito is a San Francisco AI research company building open-source large language models with hybrid reasoning - the same model can answer instantly or stop to reason before responding. Founded in 2024 by former Google engineer Drishan Arora, the company trains its Cogito models with a method called Iterated Distillation and Amplification (IDA), which lets a model improve by learning from its own reasoning rather than from human labels. Its stated goal is general superintelligence, and its flagship 671B open model competes with the strongest open systems from DeepSeek and Meta.
Guide Labs
Guide Labs is a San Francisco AI research company building interpretable foundation models - large language and diffusion models that can reliably explain how they reach an answer, trace outputs back to their training data, and be steered without retraining. Founded in 2023 by machine-learning researcher Julius Adebayo and colleagues from the academic interpretability world, the company argues that the black-box status quo is a solvable engineering problem, not an unavoidable cost of scale. Its flagship open-source release, Steerling-8B, is pitched as the first large-scale inherently interpretable language model, and its Clarity platform packages interpretability tools for teams in regulated, high-stakes fields like lending, medicine, and drug discovery.
IP Author
IP Author is an AI-powered patent drafting and prosecution platform for corporate patent teams and IP law firms. Founded in 2023 and based in Fremont, California, it unifies invention disclosure, patent drafting, prior art search, and office action responses into a single generative-AI workspace. The company says its tools cut drafting time by 40-60%, generating full applications - claims, specifications, abstracts, and diagrams - in hours instead of days. Customers include Qualcomm, ResMed, Chevron, and Elmos Semiconductor.
Roe AI
Roe AI builds agentic AI that investigates fraud, disputes, and anti-money-laundering (AML) cases end to end - reading documents, images, websites, and structured data to produce cited evidence and audit-ready dispositions. Founded in 2024 by ex-Snowflake and ex-Meta engineers and backed by Gradient Ventures and Y Combinator, the company started as an AI-powered data warehouse for querying unstructured data with SQL and sharpened into a financial-crime investigation platform used by teams at Affirm, eBay, and a Global Systemically Important Bank.
Foundation EGI
Foundation EGI is an MIT CSAIL spinout building what it calls Engineering General Intelligence: a domain-specific, agentic AI platform purpose-built for industrial engineering and manufacturing. Instead of treating engineering as text, it encodes the rules of physics, geometry, materials, and manufacturing constraints into a domain-specific language, turning messy specs and CAD models into auditable, executable workflows for technical drawings, process planning, product catalogs, and multilingual documentation. The company raised an oversubscribed $23M Series A in July 2025, bringing total funding past $30M.
Implicit
Implicit (formerly Agolo, legally Ninoh, Inc.) is a New York-based AI company that turns a company's scattered manuals, SOPs, tickets and PDFs into a private 'knowledge engine.' Its KnowledgeOS platform builds enterprise knowledge graphs and AI Navigators that give support agents and customers expert-level, source-cited answers about complex products. The company pivoted from its original news-summarization roots into entity intelligence and product-expertise support, claiming roughly 3x the accuracy of generic LLMs with answers tied to a source to eliminate hallucinations.
Layer Health
Layer Health is a Boston-based healthcare AI company, spun out of MIT, that uses large language models to automate medical chart review. Its platform reasons over longitudinal patient records to answer complex clinical questions with evidence-based justifications, powering clinical registry automation, quality measurement, clinical pathways and real-world data abstraction for hospitals and health systems. Founded in 2023 and backed by a $21M Series A led by Define Ventures, the company counts health systems such as Intermountain Health, MultiCare and Froedtert among its partners.
Reflection AI
Reflection AI is a New York-based artificial intelligence lab founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou. It is building autonomous coding agents and open frontier language models, with the stated ambition of reaching superintelligence by first solving software engineering. Its flagship product, Asimov, is a code research and comprehension agent for large codebases. After raising $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation in October 2025, the company has positioned itself as an open, Western alternative to closed labs like OpenAI and Anthropic and to Chinese open-weight models like DeepSeek.
XLSCOUT
XLSCOUT is an AI-powered intellectual property and innovation platform that uses large language models and generative AI to compress patent work that used to take days into minutes. Spun out of patent-research firm TT Consultants and launched in 2020, its suite of LLM modules - Novelty Checker, Drafting, Invalidator, ClaimChart, PatDigger, TechScaper and the Ideacue ideation tool - helps R&D teams, corporations and law firms validate ideas, run prior art and invalidity searches, draft patents, map infringement and monetize portfolios. The platform is SOC 2 Type II certified, serves clients in more than 100 countries, and counts Mitsubishi, NTT, Osram and IIT Madras among its users.
Zenlytic
Zenlytic is a New York based AI analytics company behind Zoe, an AI data analyst that answers complex business questions in plain language and returns verifiable, source-cited results. By pairing large language models with a governed semantic layer, Zenlytic lets non-technical teams self-serve trustworthy analytics from warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery and Databricks, generating dashboards, presentations and models without a data team in the loop.
Imbue
Imbue is a San Francisco AI research lab building agents that can reason and code. Founded in 2021 as Generally Intelligent and renamed in 2023, the company is led by CEO Kanjun Qiu and CTO Josh Albrecht. After a $200M Series B that valued it above $1B, Imbue is focused on practical agent tools - most visibly Sculptor, a UI for running parallel coding agents safely in containers - guided by a mission to keep humans in control of powerful AI.
Pienso
Pienso is a no-code AI platform that lets domain experts - not just engineers - train, fine-tune, and deploy their own machine learning and large language models without writing a single line of code. Founded by MIT Media Lab alumni Birago Jones and Karthik Dinakar, Pienso keeps humans in the loop and data in the customer's control, with cloud or on-premise deployment for governments, media companies, and regulated enterprises.
Jasper
Jasper is an enterprise AI marketing platform that gives marketing teams a purpose-built workspace with 100+ specialized AI agents, proprietary Brand IQ and Marketing IQ technology layers, and content pipelines designed to produce on-brand content at scale. Founded in 2021 by Dave Rogenmoser, Chris Hull, and JP Morgan, Jasper grew from a simple GPT-3 frontend into a unicorn valued at $1.7 billion, serving over 100,000 customers including nearly 20% of the Fortune 500.
Cursor
Cursor is an AI-first code editor built by Anysphere, a San Francisco startup founded in 2022 by four MIT graduates. Originally a fork of Visual Studio Code, Cursor has evolved into a full agent-based development platform where autonomous AI handles everything from autocomplete to end-to-end feature building. With $2B+ in annualised revenue, over half the Fortune 500 as customers, and a valuation that reached $29.3B after its Series D in November 2025, Cursor has become the fastest-growing SaaS company ever from $1M to $500M ARR - turning the IDE from a code-writing tool into an AI orchestration layer.