The Top 5 AI startups to look out for in 2024

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Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Today we’re doing something a little different.

Everyone’s trying to find out which AI startups will be the next $100B+ companies which change the world, but there’s no room for all of them. 

Here’s a list of 5 of the most promising AI startups that we’d bet our money on and why we think they could take over (#1 is competing with Elon…).

Let’s get right into it 🫡

5. Eleven Labs

Eleven Labs is a dubbing AI software tool which is on a mission to make all spoken content available in any voice and any language.

🌩️The problem: Traditional methods of dubbing involve swapping original audio with a recording in another language. This can be expensive, (up to $100/minute) and take up to 2 weeks for just a 10 minute recording.

💡The solution: Eleven Labs has trained an AI model that preserves a voice across different languages. This gives a human-quality personalized voice with emotions, intonation and speaker performance.

Eleven Labs has already raised over $100M in funding and is being used by employees at 41%+ of Fortune 500 companies with insanely good feedback.

Their target audience is also pretty big & growing: Creators. The total estimated market for localization, translation and interpreting is about $24B.

The tech used at Eleven Labs can also be used for other use cases like education and gaming, making their potential market size a hell of a lot bigger…

To learn more about Eleven Labs 👉 click here.

4. Cognition Labs

Cognition Labs is on a mission to replace software engineers forever with “Devin”, the first ever fully functional AI software engineer.

A project manager can give Devin some requirements through plain english text, and Devin will respond instantly by creating a plan of action, writing the code, and running it.

This is revolutionary in the software engineering world, and could save companies hundreds of millions of dollars. It will also bring down barriers to entry for anyone building software.

Their team’s cracked, having participated in competitive programming at the IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics). Among the team, 10 are IOI gold medalists including all 3 founders!!

The startup has already raised over $175M with their latest round valuing the startup at $2B led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.

Devin still isn’t publicly available and is in the beta testing phase, but if it does work the way it’s meant to, this could be ground-breaking…

3. Wayve

Wayve is a self-driving AI startup aiming to make transportation more safe and sustainable forever.

They’re using embodied AI (physical AI) to build automated self-driving for everyone.

The opportunity for self-driving technology is massive and pretty obvious - there are hundreds of millions of cars in the world. Transportation is also very important and used in every society worldwide.

With self-driving there’s a business case and an access to data to make it possible: 

• Business case: Self-driving brings huge value to society in transportation - more people and goods can be transported in a more sustainable and effective way. 

• Access to data: Tens of millions of vehicles are produced every year that collect data and allow us to train systems that can understand the world.

The startup’s already raised $1.3B led by Softbank’s vision fund. Their last $1B raise was the largest ever funding round for an AI company in Europe…

The company has about 300 employees, and has already partnered with UK delivery fleets such as Asda and Ocado Group to start testing their tech.

If you want to learn more about Wayve 👉 here’s a piece I wrote.

2. Hebbia

Hebbia is dubbed as the “AI platform for knowledge work”. It uses the power of LLMs to automate workflows by breaking them down into understandable actions.

It’s essentially a productivity tool that has a suite of different LLM tools where ANYONE with no technical training whatsoever, can wrangle any technical documents to get any sort of output.

Users can use Hebbia to extract, structure, and analyze millions of documents AT SCALE using their gen-AI agents🤖.

Their product is already being used by 33%+ of the top 50 largest asset managers for due diligence, asset pricing and other research.

💰On 8 July 2024, Hebbia raised a $130M Series B at a $700M valuation led by Andreesen Horowitz, bringing their total raised to $160M making them already very close to unicorn status.

📈 They’ve done $13M in ARR profitably this year, up 15X over the last 18 months, and have driven 2% of OpenAI’s daily volume.

The founder believes that Hebbia will be the most important software product for the next 100 years, and says that they’re not settling for anything less.

For the full story on Hebbia 👉 check it out here.

1. Figure AI

Figure AI is an AI robotics company that creates general-purpose humanoid robots.

Here’s why I think it’s the #1 startup on this list that could be worth trillions one day.

Humanoid robots remove the need for unsafe and undesirable jobs - helping us humans live happier and better lives, and a market worth 50% of the world’s GDP ($42T). 

As these robots “join the workforce”, everywhere from factories to farmland, the cost of labor will go down until it becomes the same price as renting a robot. 

Here’s their business model (it’s pretty similar to the car market):

• CapEx model: Buying the asset (robot), which would have a certain number of depreciable lives. You’d also then also pay for different services and maintenance

• Operating model: A leasing model, where Figure charges a monthly fee for putting robots into manufacturing or warehousing related applications

According to the founder Brett Adcock, Figure “has the potential to positively impact humanity and to build the largest company on the planet”.

What’s even crazier is that it's not very hard to believe with his track record. 

Brett  previously founded Vettery, an online talent marketplace that sold for $110M in 2019. He’s also the founder of Archer (NYSE: ACHR), an aerospace company building electric aircrafts that went public at a $1.5B valuation.

Elon Musk is also predicting a humanoid robotics boom and is working on building humanoid robots at Tesla. 

He expects the ratio of humanoids to humans to “be greater than one-to-one”, and that one day Tesla’s robot business could be bigger than its cars.

For the full story on Figure 👉 check it out here.

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