12 Top AI Startups in the U.S.

Why Should You Work for an AI Startup?

The startup culture differs dramatically from traditional corporate culture. Startups have a greater sense of informality and flexibility and offer more chances to contribute and create, giving you higher visibility.

Startups typically offer more perks like stock options, greater independence, more responsibilities, better opportunities for learning, and more excitement overall. There also tends to be free food. After all, you’re getting in on the ground floor of a brand-new business, and you may even find yourself creating policies and procedures that future employees will have to follow!

The Artificial Intelligence field is still relatively new and growing fast, so it’s hardly surprising that it fits well with the startup business model. Startup culture is all about newness, excitement, innovation, and thinking outside the box, which dovetails nicely with Artificial Intelligence. 

However, in the interests of full disclosure, working for a startup has its downsides. Although startups usually give you flexible schedules, your workweek could easily exceed the traditional 40-hour workweek, sometimes including after-hours, weekends, and even holidays. Also, some startups offer free food not out of the goodness of their hearts but because they want employees to stay at their desks and not go out for breakfast, coffee, or lunch. 

Finally, startups are high-risk propositions. The company may take the business world by storm and be a smash hit, or it may collapse into failure and be tossed in the scrap heap of so many other defunct startups. Yours truly has worked for four different startups, and they all failed because the founders’ visions exceeded what the venture capitalists were willing to fund.

But if you’re cool with the risks and don’t mind working possibly long chaotic hours, go for it! The rewards can be well worth the risks.

So, let’s look at 12 of the top U.S.-based AI startups and pick out a good destination!

12 Top U.S.-Based AI Startups

1. Cruise Automation: If you’re interested in the idea of self-driving cars, this is the startup for you! Cruise is a self-driving automobile company developing the technology for existing cars and offering all-electric, self-driving ride services.
2. SoundHound: SoundHound uses speech recognition, voice searches, and other voice-enabled AI to let developers and business owners keep control over their brand image from anywhere. Their assistant app, Hound, incorporates their trademarked “Speech-to-Meaning” and “Deep Meaning Understanding” technologies, and Houndify, an AI platform, offers the world’s fastest speech recognition and voice search.
3. People.ai: People.ai harnesses the power of AI technology to build an enterprise revenue platform that enables marketing, sales, and customer service teams to give their customers the best experiences through the analysis of revenue opportunities.
4. Waymo: Waymo is another self-driving car company, starting as Google’s Self-Driving Car Project back in 2009. The company is perfecting the Waymo Driver, which emphasizes safety and accessibility.
5. Argo.ai: Yep, another self-driving car company! This concept is clearly a popular technological field. Argo.ai is developing the Argo Autonomy Platform, a self-driving platform that will be used by businesses and consumers alike. Argo.ai has partnered with Ford, Lyft, WalMart, and Volkswagen.
6.  Abnormal Security: Let's take a break from self-driving cars and focus on a very hot topic: security in today's IT world. Abnormal focuses on e-mail security, using AI to protect against many attacks such as malware, ransomware, phishing, social engineering, spam, internal account compromise, executive impersonation, supply chain compromise, and graymail.
7. SambaNova: SambaNova is a complete AI solutions provider specializing in big data analytics and machine learning platforms. They incorporate AI-based technology such as Natural Language Processing, High-Resolution Imaging, and Recommendation Systems into their Dataflow-as-a-Service product, designed to transform businesses.
8. DataRobot: Data science is a vast, rapidly growing field, and DataRobot has an automated machine learning platform that helps data scientists build and deploy accurate predictive models quickly and easily.
9. Riskified: Online businesses must deal with fraud every day. Riskified helps e-commerce by using machine learning models that pull from over one billion online transactions to halt fraud attacks, streamline the checkout process, and identify legitimate, genuine shoppers. They count Prada, Ticketmaster, and Trip.com among their customers.
10. Moveworks: Employee retention is a big issue today, considering how the pandemic has caused mass resignations, resulting in many businesses struggling with depleted staff. Moveworks has created an AI platform designed to improve a business's relationship with its staff by offering improved employee support in IT, HR, facilities issues, targeted employee communications, and finance issues.
11. Neuralink: If the idea of self-driving cars sounds like science fiction, wait until the day our brains can directly interface with computers! Neuralink’s mission is to boost the number of channels the brain can use to communicate with technology. Their initial goal is to help people with paralysis easily control computers and mobile devices, giving them more independence.
12. Stem: Energy prices (especially oil) are volatile and can be affected by anything from an oil-rig fire to a worldwide pandemic to an all-out war. Stem uses AI to automate energy cost savings and protect against rate increases. In addition, Stem offers services in many different energy-saving fields such as utility bill optimization, energy storage, sustainability, and commercial EV charging.

Are you an AI and Machine Learning enthusiast? If yes, the Post Graduate Program in AI and Machine Learning is a perfect fit for your career growth.

Do You Want to Learn About Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning?

If you’re psyched about the prospect of working for one of these exciting AI startups, but find yourself a bit light in the skills department, don’t worry; Simplilearn has you covered. Simplilearn’s AI and ML Bootcamp, held in collaboration with IBM and CalTech CTME, will make you an AI and ML expert.

The bootcamp covers the latest tools and technologies from the AI ecosystem, including masterclasses by Caltech faculty and IBM experts, along with hackathons and Ask Me Anything sessions hosted by IBM. In addition, you will learn key concepts like Statistics, Data Science with Python, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, NLP, and Reinforcement Learning.

According to Glassdoor, an AI Engineer can earn an annual average of $118,195. So check out Simplilearn today and get that AI career off to a great start!