The age of automation is here.

A few decades ago, artificial intelligence was merely a pipedream. Technologies like self-driving cars and virtual assistants existed only in the realm of science fiction.

Today, cars run autonomously and computers can process complex patterns and big data.

What led you to this post is likely a search engine powered by AI.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have grown out of infancy and are spreading into all aspects of human life.

The pace of progress in artificial intelligence… is incredibly fast,” said Elon Musk, the father of Tesla and SpaceX, “Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast—it is growing at a pace close to exponential.

The global market for AI continues to receive enormous attention and interest in 2018. AI is predicted to be a key competitive differentiator for businesses over the next ten years.

According to Crunchbase, the number of VC deals in artificial intelligence in 2017 are estimated to be approximately 750, with nearly $5 billion in total capital invested. In 2016, this number was $3.4 billion, distributed among under 500 deals.

By leveraging the power of AI, businesses in healthcare, finance, education, and automotive – just to name a few – are able to innovate with more impact, transforming the world as we know it.

We’ve compiled a list of 10 AI startups to keep an eye on in 2018 and beyond.

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Category: Marketing
Funding To Date: 60.8M

Invoca is an AI startup that provides enterprises with inbound call marketing solutions.

Their Voice Marketing Cloud is a platform powered by AI, which gathers call intelligence to provide users with campaign attribution and data analytics. Marketers can gain insights into every call and determine which customers have higher expected rate of converting, helping contribute to improving their digital ROI.

In addition, their machine learning algorithm makes suggestions to marketers on campaign optimization across all channels and devices, allowing them to optimize the entire customer journey.

By embracing the power of AI, Invoca is providing marketers with a new approach to inbound marketing.

This startup has provided solutions to companies across multiple industries, including Samsung, Lenovo, SunTrust, and Frontier Communications.

Category: Marketing
Funding To Date: 28.1M is another AI startup that provides enterprise marketers with conversation intelligence technology. They help sales teams drive better conversion rates by automatically recording and analyzing sales calls, demos, and meetings.

According to, their AI technology can transcribe audio from interactions and measure not only keywords, but emotions throughout a conversation, too.

The intelligent platform then evaluates the effectiveness of sales conversations – from cold calls to closing calls – allowing sales representatives to improve customer interactions. It is also capable of combining team stats and industry benchmarks to make recommendations on best practices.

In 2017, the company raised $20 million in funding during their Series A round.

With rapid growth steered by a great company vision, is on its way to becoming a leader in the marketing automation industry.


Category: Marketing
Funding To Date: $8.6M

Founded in 2015, DemandJump is another startup tapping into the power of artificial intelligence.

Their customer acquisition platform, powered by artificial intelligence, provides businesses with actionable data to target their customers with precision. Their machine learning model gathers and analyzes competitive data to evaluate the effectiveness of traffic sources (website, search platforms, social media, etc.), enabling marketers to better identify opportunities and allocate their marketing spend more effectively.

Marketers are taking more data-driven approaches to their work. This puts DemandJump on pace for serious growth over the next 5+ years.

Obsidian Security

Category: Cybersecurity
Funding To Date: $9.5M

Obsidian Security is an early-stage technology company that lies at the intersection of cybersecurity, hybrid-cloud, and artificial intelligence.

The Southern California startup is led by former executives of Carbon Black and Cylance. They apply machine learning that enables user security and helps combat cyber threats across complex hybrid systems.

Business Insider called Obsidian’s AI platform a “standout product” in a saturated cybersecurity market.

Founded in 2017, the company has raised $9.5 million dollars in series A funding.

They are backed by Greylock Partners and were awarded CB Insight AI 100 in 2017.

Shift Technology

Category: Cybersecurity
Funding To Date: $39.8M

Shift Technology is a startup headquartered in Paris, France.

The company focuses on mitigating fraud through the SaaS solutions they offer to insurance companies.

Powered by mathematical models and machine learning algorithms, their software is capable of detecting suspicious behaviors and fraudulent activities in the insurance and ecommerce sectors.

By leveraging data science and integrating artificial intelligence, Shift Technology equips companies with the tools to tackle fraud challenges successfully.

In 2017, Shift Technology raised $28 million during series B funding, increasing their total amount of funding to $39.8 million.

Element AI

Category: Machine Learning Platform
Funding To Date: $102M

Based in Montreal, Element AI is a startup that brings academics and entrepreneurs together to implement an “AI-first” strategy.

The company resembles an AI incubator in a sense that they partner with large corporations and academic institutions to advance cutting-edge research and launch AI products that drive significant impact for businesses across multiple industries.

By embracing artificial intelligence, Element AI is able to provide solutions to problems in some of the world’s biggest organizations.

With a stellar founding team and a great mission, Element AI has attracted attention from many capital firms such as Intel Capital, Microsoft Ventures, and Data Collective.

In 2017, the Canadian startup closed their series A round with $102M.


Category: IT and Networks
Funding To Date: $92.9M

Moogsoft is a startup based in San Francisco, California.

The company developed an AI platform – known as AIOps – to enable enterprise ITOps and DevOps teams to become more agile.

Their machine learning algorithms help companies identify performance issues that affect their customers’ experience and then deliver insights that help teams manage problems.

By implementing cutting-edge AI technology, Moogsoft is transforming the way human operators tackle ops issues.

Founded in 2011, the company has raised a total of $92M in funding. Almost half of the amount raised in its series D round.


Category: Big Data
Funding To Date: $111.4M

DataRobot provides enterprises with a word-class machine learning platform, allowing data scientists of all skill levels to build and deploy predictive models more efficiently.

DataRobot’s platform uses parallel processing to train and evaluate thousands of models in R, Python, Spark MLlib, H2O, and other open source libraries. It searches through millions of possible combinations of algorithms, pre-processing steps, features, transformations, and tuning parameters to deliver the best prediction models.

Employing the power of AI, DataRobot is creating a revolution in the speed and economics of predictive analytics.

With their disruptive machine learning platform, we can expect DataRobot to be the next big thing in the tech industry.


Category: Big Data
Funding To Date: $74.3M

Algolia is a company that provides an innovative platform for building search features in apps and websites.

Using machine learning algorithms to build a powerful hosted search API, Algolia is making it possible for thousands of businesses to deliver fast and unique search experiences to their users while ensuring a highly-secured and compliant environment.

At the moment, Algolia’s search-as-a service platform is powering billions of queries for thousands of websites and mobile applications every month.

Their customers include Twitch, AngelList, Lacoste, ProductHunt, and many more.


Category: Big Data
Funding To Date: $124.3M

The secret to Trifacta’s AI technology lies in the combination of human-computer interaction, scalable data management, and machine learning, allowing them to expedite the data preparation process while also making it more intuitive.

Through enabling users to easily transform raw, complex data into structured formats for analysis, Trifacta helps enterprises enhance the value of their data resources.

Since 2012, tens of thousands of users at more than 8,000 companies, including leading brands like Deutsche Boerse, Google, Kaiser Permanente, New York Life and PepsiCo are using Trifacta’s market-leading data wrangling solutions.

With its breakthrough AI technology, Trifacta is getting a lot of attention from investors keen on tapping into AI.

The company recently raised $48M in its series D round, increasing their total amount of funding to $124.3M.

Tara AI

Category: Software Development
Funding To Date: $3M

Last but not least, a bonus shoutout to the growing Tara AI team.

Another promising enterprise AI startup to watch out for in 2018 is Tara AI.

Standing for Talent Acquisition Recruiting Automation, Tara AI is an end-to-end product development platform that leverages machine learning to automate the product management process.

Its AI-powered platform helps small businesses and enterprises deploy developers, scope projects, and manages workflow automatically, thereby transforming the product management process.

Founded in 2015, Tara AI has raised $3 million in investments from a number of notable venture capital firms and angel investors including Jaan Tallinn of Skype and Di-Ann Eisnor of Waze.

The company has been working with both startups and enterprises, including Cisco, Orange Telecom, and Ford, providing them a platform that can expedite their software development process.

With its innovative AI platform Tara Intelligence is set to be a disruptive force in the software development and product management space.

Tara AI in Action

Looking Ahead

Whether AI will spell “the end of human race” like Stephen Hawking predicted is unknown. For now it’s undoubtedly one of the biggest game changers in tech.

These 11 startups and other companies in the global AI ecosystem are the driving force of change that’ll shape the future of our world.

Prepare yourself for the Fifth Industrial Revolution. It’s coming.