• $10.7B was invested in AI startups this year in their seed, early-stage venture, or late-stage venture funding rounds.
  •  Over half, or 57.9% of all AI startup financing rounds where either seed or pre-seed, 21.2% are Series A, 11.8% are Series B, and all others comprise 9% of all funding rounds.
  • The median AI startup funding round generated $4M with the average being $14.6M and the maximum, $319M, obtained by Vacasa.

These and many other fascinating insights are from an analysis of AI startups’ funding rounds in 2019 using Crunchbase Pro research. AI startups who have had seed, early-stage venture or late-stage venture funding since December 31, 2018, and are U.S.-based are included in the analysis which is provided here. Crunchbase Pro found 499 startups meeting the search criteria as of today.

Top 25 AI Startups Who Have Raised The Most Money In 2019

1.   Vacasa – Raised $319M from a Series C round on October 29th, Vacasa is creating and using AI-driven tools to improve their customers’ experiences renting vacation homes around the world. Their AI strategies include improve every aspect of the customer’s lifecycle from pricing through scheduling post-stay cleans. The company manages a growing portfolio of more than 14,000 vacation homes in the U.S, Europe, Central, and South America, and South Africa.

2.   Samsara – Raised $300M from a Series F round on September 10th. Samsara is an IoT platform combining hardware, software, and cloud to bring real-time visibility, analytics, and AI to operations. Samsara’s portfolio of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions combine hardware, software, and cloud to bring real-time visibility, analytics, and AI to operations. Their core strengths include vehicle telematics, driver safety, mobile workflow and compliance, asset tracking, and industrial process controls all in an integrated, open, real-time platform.

3.   TripActions – Raised $250M from a Series D round on June 27th. TripActions is a business travel platform that combines the latest AI-driven personalization with inventory and 24×7 365 live human support to serve employees, finance leaders, and travel managers alike all while empowering organizations to seize travel as a strategic lever for growth.

4.   ThoughtSpot – Raised $248M from a Series E round on August 22nd. ThoughtSpot’s AI-Driven analytics platform enables business analyst to capitalize on the expertise and shared knowledge of experienced data scientists. With ThoughtSpot, business analysts can analyze data or automatically get trusted insights pushed to you with a single click. ThoughtSpot connects with any on-premise, cloud, big data, or desktop data source. Business Intelligence and Analytics teams have used ThoughtSpot to cut reporting backlogs by more than 90% and make more than 3 million decisions and counting.

5.     CloudMinds – Raised $186M from a Series B round on February 23rd. Founded in 2015, CloudMinds’ unique Cloud Robot Service Platform consists of Human Augmented Robotics Intelligence with Extreme Reality (HARIX), Secure virtual backbone network (VBN over 4G/5G), and Robot Control Unit (RCU). Designed by CloudMinds, XR-1 Robot is the first commercial humanoid service robot powered by our Smart Compliant Actuator (SCA) technology with precise and compliant grasping capability. Their AI Cloud Brain platform (HARIX) is designed enable robotic intelligence through secured network over 4G/5G. CloudMinds is focused on several core technologies, including Smart Vision, Smart Voice, Smart Motion and Human Augmentation. The following is an overview of their architecture:



6.   Icertis – Raised $115M from a Series E round on July 17th. Icertis is an enterprise contract management platform in the cloud that solves contract management problems using AI. Using advanced algorithms, Icertis helps their customers accelerate business cycles by increasing contract velocity, protecting against risk by ensuring regulatory and policy compliance and optimizing the commercial relationships by maximizing revenue and reducing costs. 3M, Airbus, Cognizant, Daimler, Microsoft, and Roche who relies on Icertis to manage 5.7 million contracts in 40+ languages across 90+ countries, are all customers. The following is an overview of the Icertis Contract Management Platform:



7.   SparkCognition – Raised $100M from a Series C round on October 8th. SparkCognition builds artificial intelligence systems focused on the needs of its customers in the aviation, cybersecurity, defense, Financial Services, manufacturing, maritime, and Utilities industries. SparkCognition offers four main products: DarwinTM, DeepArmor, SparkPredict, and DeepNLPTM. One of their most noteworthy products is DeepArmor, an AI-powered endpoint security solution that has trained on millions of malicious and benign files and provides industry-leading protection against a broad spectrum of threats. With millions of new malware variants showing up each month, DeepArmor uses AI to assess risk levels and thwart malware and break attempts. DeepArmor’s dashboard is shown below:


8.   Vectra AI – Raised $100M from a Series E round on June 10th. Vectra specializes in network detection and response – from cloud and data center workloads to user and IoT devices. Its Cognito platform accelerates threat detection and investigation using artificial intelligence to collect, store, and enrich network metadata with the right context to detect, hunt and investigate known and unknown threats in real time.

9.   Globality – Raised $100M from a Series D round on January 22nd. The January round enabled Globality to accelerate its growth through investment in its AI technology, increasing business capacity by hiring additional members of its engineering, product, and client teams, and expanding its Marketing and Sales programs. Through its AI-powered Platform, Globality is automating the procurement of B2B services and improving the RFP process. Globality efficiently matches companies with service providers that meet their specific needs, cutting the sourcing process from months to hours, and delivering savings of 20% or more for companies.

10. Black Sesame Technologies – Raised $100M from a Series B round on April 12th.  Black Sesame Technologies is an AI digital imaging technology firm provides solutions for image processing and computing images, as well as embedded sensing platforms. The firm specializes algorithms for smartphones, autonomous driving, and other consumer electronics. Its R & D teams are actively working on core algorithm development, ASIC design, software system, and ADAS engineering applications.

11. Scale – Raised $100M from a Series C round on August 5th. Scale accelerates the development of AI applications by helping computer vision teams generate high-quality ground truth data. Our advanced LiDAR, video, and image annotation APIs allow self-driving, drone, and robotics teams at companies like Waymo, OpenAI, Lyft, Zoox, Pinterest, and Airbnb focus on building differentiated models vs. labeling data. Scale’s greatest strength is their API for training data, providing access to human-powered data for a multitude of use cases.

12. AutoX – Raised $100M from a Series A round on September 16th. AutoX is a self-driving car startup that uses AI to fine-tune Location Based Services with camera-first autonomous driving technology. In July of this year, AutoX announced a partnership with NEVS, the Swedish holding company, and electric vehicle manufacturer that bought Saab’s assets out of bankruptcy, to deploy a robotaxi pilot service in Europe by the end of 2020.

13. DISCO – Raised $83M from a Series E round on January 24th. DISCO is a legal technology company that applies artificial intelligence and cloud computing to legal problems to help lawyers and legal teams improve legal outcomes for clients. Corporate legal departments, law firms, and government agencies around the world use DISCO as an ediscovery solution for compliance, disputes, and investigations. The company is looking to reinvent legal technology to automate and simplify complex and error-prone tasks that distract from practicing law.

14. QOMPLX – Raised $78.6M from a Series A round on July 23rd. QOMPLX makes it faster and easier for organizations to integrate disparate internal and external data sources across the enterprise via a unified analytics infrastructure that supports better decision-making using AI at scale. This enterprise data-fabric is called QOMPLX OS: an enterprise operating system that powers QOMPLX’s decision platforms in cybersecurity, insurance, and quantitative finance. The following is an example of how the QOMPLX OS automates data management while providing greater contextual intelligence to data:



15. Galileo Financial Technologies – Raised $77M from a Series A round on October 17th. Galileo’s APIs are used widely throughout the neobank, payments, gig economy, investing and SaaS market segments. As of September 2019, Galileo was managing over $26B in annual payments volume, a 130% increase over September 2018. Galileo’s latest round, a $77M investment led by venture capital firm Accel with participation from Qualtrics Co-Founder & CEO Ryan Smith. The company, which is already profitable and growing rapidly, plans to use the funds to accelerate growth, including expansion into Latin America, the UK and Europe, and for continued product expansion.

16. BlackThorn Therapeutics – Raised 76M from a Series B round on June 13th. BlackThorn Therapeutics, Inc., is a clinical-stage neurobehavioral health company pioneering the next generation of AI technologies to advance its pipeline of targeted therapeutics for treating brain disorders. The company has engineered PathFinder, a cloud-based computational psychiatry and data platform, to enable the collection, integration, and analysis of multimodal data at great speed and scale. BlackThorn applies its data-driven approaches to create an understanding of the core underlying pathophysiology of neurobehavioral disorders and uses these insights to generate objective neuromarkers, which support drug target identification, patient stratification and objective clinical trial endpoints.

17. Highspot – Raised $75M from a Series D round on December 3rd. Highspot is a sales enablement platform that relies on AI technologies to elevate and add value to companies’ conversations with their customers and drive strategic growth. The platform combines intelligent content management, training, contextual guidance, customer engagement, and actionable analytics. Revenue teams use Highspot to deliver a unified buying experience that increases revenue, customer satisfaction and retention. Highspot has attained a 90% average monthly recurring usage rate and has global support across 125 countries. It’s available on the Salesforce AppExchange, Microsoft Store, Google Play and Apple AppStore.

18. Moveworks – Raised $75M from a Series B round on November 11th. Moveworks is a cloud-based AI platform designed for large enterprises’ IT support and service desk challenges. Instead of just tracking issues, Moveworks uses advanced AI to solve IT support and service problems automatically, often with no human intervention. Customers include AutoDesk, Broadcom, Nutanix and many other Fortune 500 companies. Moveworks is backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

19. Reonomy – Raised $60M from a Series D round on November 7th. Reonomy is an AI-powered data platform for the commercial real estate industry. The goal of the company’s platform is to leverage big data, partnerships, and machine learning to connect the fragmented world of commercial real estate. Reonomy products enable individuals, teams, and companies to unlock new insights from property intelligence. By constantly aggregating and organizing up-to-the-minute marketplace data, Reonomy offer investors and brokers the opportunity to research nuanced property characteristics that indicate the likelihood of a future sale. Below is an example of an analysis of the San Francisco neighborhood using AI-based filtering technology:


20. Clari – Raised $60M from a Series D round on October 10th. Clari is a connected revenue operations platform that uses automation and AI to unlock all the activity data captured in key business systems such as marketing automation, CRM, email, calendar, phone, content management, and conversations. It automatically aligns that data to accounts and opportunities to deliver visibility, forecasting, and apply predictive insights, which results in more insight, less guesswork, and more predictable revenue. Clari helps companies by changing their revenue operations to be more connected, efficient, and predictable. Clari’s platform is used by hundreds of sales, marketing, and customer success teams at B2B companies such as Qualtrics, Lenovo, Adobe, Dropbox, and Okta to control pipeline, audit deals and accounts, forecast the business, and reduce churn. The following is an example of a Clari dashboard:


21. People.ai – Raised $60M from a Series C round on May 21st. People.ai is an artificial intelligence (AI) platform for enterprise revenue. People.ai helps sales, marketing, and customer success teams uncover every revenue opportunity from every customer by capturing all customer contacts, activity, and engagement to drive actionable insights across all revenue teams. People.ai enables sales leaders to be more effective at managing their teams and growing revenue by giving them a complete picture of sales activities and leveraging AI to deliver sales performance analytics, personalized coaching, one-on-one feedback, and pipeline reviews. The People.ai platform identifies and targets the buying group, and gives marketers a clear visualization of whom sales has spoken with, and which campaign has been successful in each opportunity. Using this information, marketers are able to build personas and deal models in order to better target their marketing efforts and get better campaign ROI. Customer success and services teams use People.ai to ensure they are engaging with the right people when the customer is handed off to them, but more importantly, these post-sales teams are constantly looking to align their effort and activities with the right opportunities and customers, tracking the true cost to support each customer. The following graphic illustrates the People.ai platform automatically capture all contact and customer activity data, dynamically update your CRM, and provide actionable intelligence to realize the full potential of customer-facing teams. The following graphic illustrates the People.ai platform:


22. Invoca – Raised $56M from a Series C round on October 17th. Invoca is an AI-powered call tracking and analytics platform that helps marketers drive inbound calls and turn them into sales. The platform delivers real-time call analytics to help marketers take informed actions based on data generated before and during a phone conversation. It also allows marketers to understand, in real-time, the factors affecting consumers’ intent to buy, like competitive promotional campaigns. Marketers can put the data to work directly in the platform by automating customer experience workflows during, before, and after each call. Invoca’s platform integrates with Google Marketing Platform, Facebook, Adobe Experience Cloud, and Salesforce Sales and Marketing Clouds. Invoca’s investors include Accel Partners, H.I.G. Growth Partners, Upfront Ventures, Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners, Salesforce Ventures, and Rincon Venture Partners. The following is an example of an Invoca dashboard used for measuring Google AdWords effectiveness:


23. Clinc – Raised $52M from a Series B round on May 20th.  Clinc is a conversational AI platform that enables enterprises to build “human-in-the-room” level, next-gen, virtual assistants. In contrast to a speech-to-text word matching algorithm, Clinc analyzes dozens of factors from the user’s input including wording, sentiment, intent, tone of voice, time of day, location, and relationships, and uses those factors to deliver an answer that represents a composite of knowledge extracted from its trained brain. Clinc’s underlying technology is based on state-of-the-art machine learning and deep neural networks (DNN)-as-a-service developed by computer science professors at the University of Michigan. Clinc is a standalone “trained brain” that has been given an initial deep knowledge of the financial and banking industry. Its machine learning capabilities enable it to expand its knowledge with every query and to then draw from that knowledge for each subsequent customer query.

24. Biz2Credit – Raised $52M from a Series D round on June 4th. Biz2Credit is a hub connecting small business owners with lenders and service providers, and seek solutions based on their online profiles. Biz2X uses a streamlined user interface, AI-driven analytics, and a customizable white label environment to help banks enhance their core services such as offering focused customer service, growing their portfolio, and increasing the use of their products. With enhanced loan management, servicing, risk analytics and a configurable customer journey, Biz2X is helping banks like these run their lending operations at scale.

25. Uniphore – Raised $51M from a Series C round on August 13th. Uniphore is a global Conversational AI technology company that offers a customer service platform that is powered by AI and automation technologies. The Company’s vision is to bridge the gap between people and machines through voice. Uniphore enables businesses globally to deliver transformational customer service by providing a platform of Conversational Analytics, Conversational Assistant, and Conversational Security that changes the way enterprises engage their consumers, build loyalty and realize efficiencies.

This article was originally published on forbes.com on Dec 22, 2019.