palo-alto-startup
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Shruti Gupta
Shruti Gupta is the founder and CEO of Zania, a Palo Alto startup building agentic AI 'teammates' that execute governance, risk, and compliance work end to end. Before founding Zania in 2023, she spent years inside security teams at Microsoft Identity, Airbnb, Instacart, and Brex, moving from founding security engineer to CISO. In September 2025 Zania raised an $18 million Series A led by NEA, backed by the Anthology Fund (Menlo Ventures and Anthropic) and a syndicate of operators from Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and PwC. Her pitch is simple: stop shipping compliance tools that organize work, and start shipping AI that does the work.
Cspeed
Cspeed is a Palo Alto optical semiconductor startup building silicon photonics and high-density III-V laser array technology to replace copper interconnects inside large-scale AI clusters. Founded in 2022 and led by serial semiconductor entrepreneur Sanjai Kohli, the company targets the data-movement bottlenecks that limit 'scale-up' AI infrastructure, aiming to deliver fiber-optic connectivity dense and cheap enough for high-volume datacenter deployment.
8Flow
8Flow is a Palo Alto-based enterprise software company building a Workflow Context Platform that maps how work actually gets done across systems like ServiceNow, Salesforce Service Cloud and Zendesk. By observing the micro-steps individual agents take to resolve tickets and complete tasks, 8Flow performs continuous process discovery and task mining, surfaces quantified automation opportunities, and produces implementation-ready blueprints for deploying AI agents. Founded in 2022 by ServiceNow and SkyGiraffe veterans Boaz Hecht, Josh Russ and Yev Goldin, the company has raised roughly $16.6M total, including a $10M Series A in 2025 backed by Caffeinated Capital, ServiceNow Ventures and Okta Ventures.
Blink Technologies, Inc.
Blink Technologies builds software-only eye-tracking and gaze-estimation technology that runs on the ordinary RGB cameras already in phones, laptops, cars, kiosks and CCTV - no special hardware, headset or dedicated sensor required. Using proprietary deep-learning models, Blink turns any camera-equipped device into a gaze-aware interface for touchless control, ad and retail analytics, driver-attention monitoring, authentication and 3D displays. Founded in 2018 with headquarters in Palo Alto and R&D in Haifa, Israel, the company raised a $14M Series A in 2021, bringing total funding to about $24M.
HOMMA Group, Inc.
HOMMA Group is a Palo Alto-based smart-home developer that builds residences with proprietary technology baked in from day one, rather than bolted on by the resident afterward. Founded in 2016 by former Sony and Rakuten executive Takeshi (Ted) Homma, the company designs the architecture, hardware, and software together so lighting, shades, thermostats, and door locks adapt to residents automatically. Its Cornerstone AI platform lets builders embed and remotely manage smart systems across multi-unit developments, with projects spanning Portland townhomes, a Boston high-rise, and a 30-unit Portland tower built with Mitsubishi's Diamond Realty Investments.
RISA Labs
RISA Labs is a Palo Alto healthtech company building an AI operating system for oncology. Its platform, BOSS (Business Operating System as a Service), decomposes the paperwork-heavy work of cancer care - prior authorization, benefits verification, eligibility checks, denial management - into micro-tasks handled by a network of AI agents, digital twins, and reinforcement learners that plug into EHRs and payer portals. Founded in 2024 by IIT Kanpur alumni Kshitij Jaggi and Kumar Shivang, RISA aims to cut the days-long administrative delays that keep cancer patients waiting for treatment.
Tacta Systems, Inc.
Tacta Systems is a Palo Alto robotics startup building 'Dextrous Intelligence' - a smart nervous system that combines proprietary software, hardware and AI to give robots human-level tactile skills and spatial awareness. Founded by serial hard-tech entrepreneur Andreas Bibl (whose previous company LuxVue was acquired by Apple), Tacta aims to let robots sense, adapt and manipulate the physical world with human-like precision and speed, automating factory work and grueling physical labor. The company emerged in 2025 with $75 million in seed and Series A funding.
TinyFish
TinyFish is a Palo Alto-based enterprise infrastructure company building web agents that let AI reliably navigate and act on the live web at scale. Its agents log in, fill forms, extract structured data, and complete multi-step workflows across thousands of sites at once - handling tasks like real-time hotel inventory aggregation, competitive price monitoring, and market intelligence. Founded in 2024 by Sudheesh Nair, Shuhao Zhang, and Keith Zhai, the company launched publicly in August 2025 with a $47M Series A led by ICONIQ, and counts Google, DoorDash, and Fortune 500 brands among its customers.
Yotascale
Yotascale is a Palo Alto-based cloud cost management and FinOps platform that helps enterprises allocate, optimize, budget and forecast their spend across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Kubernetes. Founded in 2015 by former PayPal platform-engineering head Asim Razzaq, the company takes an engineering-first approach to the 'spend attribution problem,' tying cloud costs back to the teams and services that generate them so engineers, finance and executives can share accountability. It is used by companies such as Zoom, Hulu, Okta and other Fortune 1000 firms, and has raised roughly $25 million to date.
Zania
Zania builds autonomous AI agents for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). Founded in 2023 by former CISO Shruti Gupta, the Palo Alto company deploys domain-specific 'AI teammates' that run third-party risk reviews, controls testing, evidence collection, security questionnaires, and continuous compliance across frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA - work it claims runs up to 30x faster at 90% lower cost with 94%+ accuracy. It raised an $18M Series A led by NEA in 2025.
Dazzle AI
Dazzle AI is a Palo Alto consumer-AI startup founded by former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer that aims to close the gap between what people want to do and what they can actually do with AI. Emerging from the assets of Mayer's earlier venture Sunshine, Dazzle is building a consumer-facing AI application - described as a next-generation personal assistant - and raised $8 million in seed funding in December 2025 at a $35 million post-money valuation, led by Forerunner's Kirsten Green.
Flair Labs
Flair Labs builds lifelike voice AI 'digital workers' for mortgage and real estate teams. Spun out of Stanford's AI lab and backed by Y Combinator, its agents answer, qualify, follow up with, and book borrowers across voice, SMS, and email around the clock, aiming to handle the repetitive conversational work that keeps loan officers off the phones and let humans focus on judgment, empathy, and expertise.
Ideaflow
Ideaflow is a Palo Alto-based AI company building an 'intelligence amplification' layer for knowledge work. Its flagship product is a notebook that augments your thinking as you type, letting people capture and stitch together fragments of information. The company has since expanded into team knowledge tools - Base, which surfaces context from Slack, meetings, and documents, and meeting intelligence - aiming to become an organization's collective memory. Founded around 2015 by MIT Media Lab designer Jacob Cole and Etherpad/Meteor veteran David Greenspan, it has raised roughly $11M in seed funding from First Round Capital, 8VC, StartX, Naval Ravikant, and Tim Draper.
Thor Dynamics
Thor Dynamics is a Palo Alto-based defense-tech startup building Laser Armor, an AI-powered directed-energy system that detects, tracks, and neutralizes hostile drones and drone swarms with a high-energy laser. Founded in 2024 by a team of MIT- and Wharton-trained operators and former U.S. Navy leadership, the company pairs up-to-20-kilowatt laser output with reinforcement-learning targeting and NVIDIA edge compute to deliver affordable, scalable counter-drone defense for critical infrastructure and the military.
Wald.ai
Wald.ai is a Palo Alto-based context intelligence company that lets enterprises use generative AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok without leaking sensitive data. Its context-aware DLP engine uses specialized small language models to detect and redact confidential information in real time, then restores it in the response, giving regulated industries a governed, single-pane way to adopt AI without blocking it. Founded in 2023 by Vinay Goel and Ritesh Ahuja, the company closed a $4M seed round in December 2024.
David Feinleib
David Feinleib is a serial entrepreneur, former venture capitalist, and author who is now Founder and CEO of It'sRapid.ai, a Palo Alto AI platform that turns product data and existing assets into finished commerce content for major brands. He has founded multiple companies acquired by EMC, HP, and Keynote Systems, sold Content Analytics to Syndigo in 2019, invested as a General Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, and written four books including 'Why Startups Fail' and 'Big Data Bootcamp.'
Peggy Chang
Peggy Chang is the co-founder and CEO of ActivityHero, the online marketplace where parents discover, compare and book summer camps, after-school classes and workshops for their kids. An MIT-trained engineer with a Stanford MBA, she spent more than 15 years building consumer software at Intuit's QuickBooks, Charles Schwab, Excite@Home, the Los Angeles Times new-media division and Walt Disney Imagineering before turning a personal frustration - it took her three months to enroll her daughter in gymnastics - into a company. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Palo Alto, ActivityHero now connects more than 4 million families with over 10,000 activity providers, and Chang frames its mission as both helping kids find their passions faster and helping parents (often mothers) stay in the workforce.
Sumit Agarwal
Sumit Agarwal is the CEO and co-founder of Ario, a Palo Alto AI assistant that takes aim at the 'invisible labor' of running a household - the school calendars, the returns, the meal planning. Before Ario he co-founded Shape Security, a fraud-prevention company F5 acquired for more than $1 billion. Earlier he was the youngest-ever Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon, a retired US Air Force major and one of the first officers in network warfare at Cyber Command, and ran mobile operations at Google. Ario raised $16 million in seed funding in June 2024 from Floodgate, Wing Venture Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and Moxxie.
Vinay Goel
Vinay Goel is the CEO and co-founder of Wald.ai, a Palo Alto startup building contextual data-loss protection for the age of generative AI. After more than 30 years in product and technology - a decade at Google leading Maps and Local, then top product roles at JLL, Kiavi, Check Point and Webroot - he co-founded Wald.ai in 2024 to solve the 'shadow AI' problem: employees feeding sensitive company data into ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Wald.ai redacts sensitive data inline, lets the AI answer, then restores the original context before the user sees it. He raised a $4M seed round in December 2024 and sits on the Forbes Technology Council.
Rhoda AI
Rhoda AI is a Palo Alto robotics company building foundation models that teach robots to act in the messy physical world by learning from internet-scale video instead of staged lab demos. Its FutureVision system - a Direct Video Action (DVA) model - watches an environment, predicts what happens next, and converts those predictions into motion in a closed loop that updates every few hundred milliseconds. Founded in 2024 and out of stealth in March 2026 with a $450M Series A at a $1.7B valuation, Rhoda targets high-variability manufacturing and logistics work.
Fourier
Fourier is a Palo Alto-based clean-energy company building modular, fully automated electrolyzers that produce green hydrogen on-site and on-demand. By borrowing architecture from the data center industry - racks of small, software-managed electrolyzer 'blades' running on reprogrammed mass-produced power supplies - Fourier aims to eliminate the costly, hazardous transportation and storage that inflate hydrogen prices, making clean hydrogen practical for heavy industry, transportation fuel, and distributed energy storage.
Nectar Social
Nectar Social is an AI-native 'social operating system' that helps consumer brands manage communities, listen across platforms, and turn social conversations into revenue. Founded in 2023 by former Meta sisters Misbah and Farah Uraizee, its autonomous Nectar Agent handles engagement, moderation, creator workflows, competitive intelligence, and commerce conversations across channels like Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit. The company has raised $42.6M total, including a $30M Series A in 2026 led by Menlo Ventures, and counts Liquid Death, Figma, e.l.f. Beauty, and Goop among its customers.
Ricursive Intelligence
Ricursive Intelligence is a Palo Alto frontier AI lab using artificial intelligence to compress the slow, expensive process of semiconductor design. Founded in late 2025 by Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, the co-creators of Google's AlphaChip, the company is building an end-to-end AI model that designs, verifies and closes silicon, aiming to create a recursive loop where AI designs better chips and those chips train better AI. It raised $335M across seed and Series A rounds, reaching a $4B valuation roughly two months after launch.
ScoreData Corporation
ScoreData Corporation is a Palo Alto-based AI/ML company that helps consumer-facing businesses turn legacy and external data into real-time predictive decisions. Its ScoreFast platform builds and continuously updates machine learning models with minimal manual work, powering omni-channel customer engagement, caller-to-agent mapping, fraud detection, churn management and cross-sell for financial services, insurance and healthcare contact centers.