multimodal-ai
(26)
Microsoft AI Bought a Startup’s Brain. Now It Has to Build Its Own.
Microsoft spent about $650 million to import a ready-made AI team, then gave it Copilot, Bing and an enormous distribution machine. Two years later, the wager is no longer about catching ChatGPT - it is about whether Microsoft can turn borrowed momentum into models, products and trust of its own.
OneReach.ai Wants to Be the Air-Traffic Control for Your AI Agents
Companies learned how to launch an AI agent. Now comes the expensive part: stopping a thousand of them from colliding. OneReach.ai is betting the durable business sits in orchestration, governance and the connective tissue between models, channels and old enterprise systems.
OpusClip Paid People to Use Its First Product. Then One Feature Found 5 Million Users
The livestreaming app stalled at roughly 200 users. Its clipping tool did the opposite - revealing a useful lesson about product-market fit, creator software and the limits of one-click editing.
DeweyLearn Put an AI Assessor in the Room - Now It Has to Earn the Expert's Trust
The New York startup moved beyond chatbot-style tutoring to judge what people actually do - from knife work to therapy practice. A $5 million Series A gives it room to prove that expert feedback can scale without becoming generic surveillance.
Brilliant Labs Keeps Rebuilding the Same $349 Bet: AI Glasses You Can Rewrite
The Singapore startup learned that putting AI in your sightline is easy to demo and hard to live with. Halo is its third attempt - thinner, longer-lasting, more private, and open enough for developers to make the glasses useful in ways the company has not imagined.
HyNote Built 20 Apps Before It Found the One Million-User Habit: Stop Taking Notes
The small Palo Alto team stopped treating transcription as the product. HyNote's wager is that the winner will own the whole trip from a whispered thought or messy PDF to an action item, quiz, slide deck or shareable page.
Shofo
Shofo is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator W26) building what it calls the world's largest indexed video library - a 'Common Crawl for video.' It continuously crawls billions of public short-form clips from platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, then runs them through a pipeline that sanitizes, deduplicates, segments and labels footage with object detection, activity recognition and reasoning annotations. Shofo sells custom, ready-to-train datasets to AI labs, delivering a request like '100K hours of cooking videos where someone is holding a pan' in days rather than months.
Pathos AI
Pathos AI is an AI-driven biotech company building what it describes as one of the largest multimodal foundation models in oncology. By combining millions of clinical, molecular, and imaging records with proprietary AI, Pathos aims to identify the right patients for a given therapy, design smarter adaptive clinical trials, and de-risk cancer drug development. Founded in 2020 by Eric Lefkofsky and Ryan Fukushima and led since 2025 by CEO Iker Huerga, the company raised a $365 million Series D that valued it at roughly $1.6 billion.
Kaliber Labs
Kaliber Labs is a San Francisco AI research foundry building software that captures rare human expertise - starting in the operating room - and turns it into scalable tools. Trained on one of the world's largest libraries of arthroscopic surgical video and guided by dozens of leading orthopedic surgeons, Kaliber's systems perceive anatomy in real time, automate surgical documentation, and give surgeons, staff, and patients AI that understands what is actually happening inside a procedure.
SightCall
SightCall is a San Francisco- and Paris-based enterprise software company that turns a customer's or technician's smartphone camera into a live support channel. Its cloud platform blends real-time WebRTC video, augmented-reality annotations, and multimodal generative AI so that a remote expert - or increasingly an AI agent - can see what someone in the field sees, guide them through a fix, and automatically document the session. Used by brands like Ford, Allianz, GE HealthCare, Deutsche Telekom and Lavazza, SightCall targets field service, insurance claims, customer service and healthcare, aiming to resolve problems on the first contact and cut unnecessary truck rolls.
Integral AI
Integral AI is a Japan-US startup building foundation world models - AI systems meant to learn, plan, and act in the real world the way people do, with an emphasis on energy efficiency and continuous, autonomous skill learning. Founded in 2021 by ex-Google AI leaders Jad Tarifi and Nima Asgharbeygi, the company positions its interactive world models as infrastructure for an AI-based economy, spanning robotics, universal simulators, and multimodal interfaces. In December 2025 it made headlines by claiming to have tested the world's first AGI-capable model, TOWA.
Meadow AI
Meadow AI is a Seattle-based multimodal AI platform that gives restaurants and retailers real-time visibility into their physical operations. By combining computer vision, natural language processing, and data from existing point-of-sale, labor, inventory, video, and audio systems, Meadow automates the manual 'secret shopper' audits that chains have long done by hand - continuously evaluating customer experiences and staff performance, then surfacing AI recommendations to lift revenue, tighten consistency, and reduce labor costs. The company emerged from stealth in November 2025 with $6M raised and more than $2.5M in contracted annual recurring revenue.
Neural Defend
Neural Defend is a New York and Delhi-based cybersecurity startup building multimodal deepfake detection for enterprises. Founded in 2024 by MIT- and Intel-affiliated researchers, its proprietary AI spots AI-generated faces, manipulated video, cloned voices, and forged documents in real time - delivered as developer-friendly APIs and SDKs, plus on-premises deployments for banks, fintechs, and government. The pitch: make catching a deepfake as easy as an API call.
Neuralzome Cybernetics
Neuralzome Cybernetics is a Bengaluru-based deeptech startup building teachable, no-code AI agents that let ordinary off-road vehicles drive themselves through messy, GPS-denied places like orchards, farms and job sites. Its flagship autonomy stack, NeuralPilot, fuses vision, SLAM and GPS with a layered safety system and learns from human demonstration, while its RedPill simulator trains robots on photorealistic digital twins before they ever touch dirt. Founded in 2023 by Mohan Sivam and Aditya Shriwastava, the company sells autonomy as a service to labor-intensive industries and raised $2.4M in pre-seed funding in August 2025 to expand into North America and Europe.
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.
Thoth AI
Thoth AI is a Singapore-headquartered global AI data solutions company that builds the high-quality datasets, evaluation frameworks, and human-in-the-loop operations that production AI systems depend on. Spanning 200+ languages and 100+ countries, it handles data collection and annotation across images, video, 3D point cloud, text, and audio, along with RLHF, model evaluation, content moderation, and multilingual customer experience for teams building LLMs, VLMs, multimodal systems, and applied AI like robotics.
Typeface
Typeface is an enterprise generative-AI platform that helps marketing teams plan, create, personalize, and launch on-brand content and campaigns at scale. Founded in 2022 by former Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis, it grounds AI in a company's brand guidelines, layouts, and audience data so output stays consistent and safe. Its flagship product, Typeface Arc, combines specialized marketing agents, a brand-aware knowledge graph, and collaborative workspaces to run the full content lifecycle. The company reached a $1 billion valuation in 2023 and counts brands like Asics, Johnson Controls, Sally Beauty, and Microsoft among its users.
Spiral
Spiral is a New York-based data infrastructure company building a database reimagined from the ground up for the AI era - what it calls the 'Third Age of Data,' when machines, not humans, are the primary consumers of data. Built on Vortex, an open-source columnar file format donated to the Linux Foundation, Spiral streams data directly from object storage into GPU memory, unifies governance across every data type from tiny embeddings to massive video, and aims to keep expensive GPUs saturated instead of idle. Founded by ex-Palantir and ex-Citadel engineers, it emerged from stealth in September 2025 with $22M in Seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst and Amplify Partners.
Vivodyne
Vivodyne is a biotech company that grows more than 20 types of lifelike human organ tissues in the lab, then uses robotic automation to dose, cultivate, and analyze more than 10,000 of them at a time. The vast human datasets it generates feed multimodal AI models that predict how new drugs will behave in people - before they ever reach a clinical trial. The pitch is blunt: roughly 95% of therapies that work in animal models fail in human trials, and Vivodyne wants to fix that gap with real human data instead of mice.
Centific
Centific is a Redmond, Washington-based AI and data company that calls itself the hidden infrastructure behind world-class AI models. Its AI Data Foundry combines a global network of 1.8 million-plus domain experts with platforms for data collection, annotation, RLHF, model evaluation, governance and multimodal orchestration, helping enterprises and frontier model labs move AI from experimentation to production. Founded in 2020 out of the former Pactera EDGE business, Centific is a recognized NVIDIA innovation partner and raised a $60M Series A led by Granite Asia in June 2025.
LanceDB
LanceDB builds the data backbone for multimodal AI. Its open-source Lance columnar format and lakehouse let teams store, search, and train on text, images, video and embeddings in one system - replacing the brittle stack of Parquet files, vector stores and feature pipelines that AI teams usually stitch together. Used by Midjourney, Runway, Character.AI, WeRide and others, LanceDB raised a $30M Series A in 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $41M.
Daily
Daily is a San Francisco developer platform for real-time voice, video, and AI. Founded in 2016 by Kwindla Hultman Kramer and Nina Kuruvilla, the company runs a global WebRTC mesh that powers video calling for products like Pitch, AppFolio, Kumospace, and HotDoc, and it created Pipecat - the open-source orchestration framework now used as the backbone for production voice agents at companies like NVIDIA, Cresta, and Epic.
ArteraAI
ArteraAI is a precision medicine company building multimodal AI tests that personalize cancer therapy. Its flagship ArteraAI Prostate Test is the first AI-enabled predictive and prognostic biomarker recommended in the NCCN Guidelines for localized prostate cancer, validated across five Phase 3 trials.
Coactive AI
Coactive AI is an enterprise multimodal application platform that turns unstructured video, image, and audio into searchable, time-aligned, taggable data - giving media, retail, and tech companies a way to actually see what is inside their content libraries without an army of human taggers.
Turing
Turing is a $2.2 billion AGI infrastructure company that bridges the global talent gap in AI development. Founded in 2018 by Stanford AI alumni Jonathan Siddharth and Vijay Krishnan, Turing operates across two core missions: supplying frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic with expert human talent for coding, STEM, and reasoning data; and building production-grade AI systems for Fortune 500 enterprises. With a network spanning 4 million developers across 140+ countries, a fine-tuning platform called ALAN, and $334 million raised in total funding, Turing has grown into one of the fastest-scaling companies at the intersection of talent and artificial intelligence.
TwelveLabs
TwelveLabs is a San Francisco-based AI company building video-native multimodal foundation models that give machines the ability to see, hear, and understand video the way humans do. Its flagship models - Marengo for embedding and retrieval and Pegasus for video-to-text generation - power enterprise applications in media, government, sports, and security, enabling precise semantic search, summarization, and insight extraction from video at scale. With 30,000+ developers on its platform and backing from NVIDIA, Databricks, Snowflake, and In-Q-Tel, TwelveLabs is becoming the standard infrastructure layer for video intelligence.