I Called These AI Startups Early—Now They’re Worth Billions 🚀

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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. 💫 

Ever since I started Today in AI, I’ve written about every exciting AI startup I’ve seen, the ones I’d bet on if I had the money.

Here’s an update on the progress some of these AI startups have made since I’ve written about them.

p.s. The last startup on this list has almost 100xed in valuation since I first wrote about them… 👀

1. HeyGen AI

Last time I wrote about HeyGen was in March 2024, when I first started the newsletter.

At the time they:
✅ Raised a $5 million seed at a $75 million valuation
✅ Had just hit $18 million ARR
✅ Were in talks with Benchmark to raise at a $440 million valuation

Since, they’ve:
🚀 Raised a $60 million Series A at a $500 million valuation
📈 Hit $35M ARR (as of June 2024)
🌎 Over 40,000 paying business customers globally

Since I wrote about them, HeyGen has 6xed in valuation and more than doubled ARR. 🔥

If you don’t know what HeyGen is, it’s essentially an AI video generator designed to grow your business. 📹

They focus on helping you create content for things like training videos without a human needing to be in the video itself.

All you need is to input a script, and HeyGen’s avatars will do the talking. 🗣️

2. Cognition Labs 🧠

I first heard about Cognition when the Thiel Fellowship was announced. I thought what they were building was genuinely insane. 🤯

At the time their product ‘Devin’:

✅ Raised a $21 million Series A at a ~$350 million valuation
✅ Were pre-launch and had ZERO revenue
✅ Resolved 14% of Software Engineering issues on the Github SWE-benchmark

Since, they’ve:

🚀 Raised a $175 million Series A extension at a $2 billion valuation
💰 Publicly launched with their $500/month subscription in December 2024
⚡ Time to snapshot and first message have decreased from ~30s to ~15s and ~25s to ~10s
💼 Launched on Slack for dev teams and workspaces
🤝 Partnered with Microsoft to implement Devin into Azure

Since I wrote about them, Cognition has 5.7xed in valuation and has finally started generating revenue (undisclosed). 💵

If you haven’t heard of Cognition, you must be living under a rock. 🪨 They built ‘Devin’, the first ever fully functional AI software engineer that outperforms your average mid-level software developer.

It’s founded by 3 competitive programmers who all won gold medals at the IOI. They were all part of the Thiel Fellowship and are super impressive. 🏆

I still see the startup doing well in the near future, but not sure how it’ll hold up against Claude or ChatGPT’s coding capabilities long-term. 🤔

A ton of competitors like Cursor are popping up too, who are already doing super well (Cursor just hit $100M ARR).

👉 Check out my first post on Cognition here!

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3. Harvey AI

I first wrote about Harvey AI in April 2024, and they’ve done incredibly well since. 🚀

When I first wrote about them, Harvey had:
✅ $10 million in ARR by December 2023
✅ Raised an $80 million Series B at a $715 million valuation
✅ Had contracts with big companies like PwC and Phillips

Since, they’ve:
📈 Hit $50 million in ARR and are on track to hitting $100 million ARR in the next 8 months
💰 Raised a $300 million Series D at a $3 billion valuation
🌎 Expanded from 40 customers to 235 customers in 42 countries, including the majority of top 10 U.S. law firms.

Since I wrote about them, Harvey is on track to 10x ARR in under 2 years. They’ve also 4.2xed in valuation. 🔥

Harvey is the AI tool for legal work, helping law firms streamline research, analyze contracts, and draft documents, replacing a ton of work done by entry-level lawyers. 👨‍⚖️

What Harvey does really well is they hire domain experts (Expert lawyers) to help them prompt engineer their models. 💡

They continue to do well and I do see them dominating in the law industry valued at ~ $1 trillion globally. 💼

4. Perplexity

I first posted about Perplexity in March 2024 when they’d just raised their Series B.

At the time, they had:
✅ Just exceeded $10M ARR
✅ Just raised a $73.6M Series B at a $520M valuation
✅ Claimed to have 10 million monthly active users (MAUs)

Fast forward to today, they now have:
🚀 Over $50M in ARR (as of October 2024)
💰 Raised a $500 million Series D at a $9 billion valuation bringing their total raised to $665 million
📈 Over 15 million MAUs
🔍 Over 230 million search queries/month

Since I made the post about Perplexity, they’ve 17.3xed in valuation and had a 5x increase in ARR.

This has made Perplexity one of the fastest-growing startups on this list and definitely one to look out for. 👀

It's surprising how much their revenue model has improved having gone from $10M to $50M in ARR with only a 50% increase in MAUs. 🚀

If you haven`t heard of Perplexity before, its an AI-powered search engine offering a chatbot-like interface allowing people to search using natural language.

It gives you straight- to-the-point answers instead of a bunch of search results to go through like Google does, with sources to make sure it's legitimate.

Despite their insane growth, I do think part of it is hype that will not be sustainable. 🤷‍♂️

I’ve tried using Perplexity myself and it is good, I just always see myself going back to Google.

5. Mercor

I first wrote about Mercor as soon as the Thiel Fellowship came out in March 2024, and just thought both the idea and the team were super impressive.

I wrote about them a second time when they raised Series A at a $250M valuation.

At the time they had:
✅ Bootstrapped to 7 figures in revenue (~$1 million)
✅ Just raised a $3.6 million seed led by General Catalyst
✅ Had 100,000+ users

Today, they:
📈 Hit $50M in Annual Recurring Revenue growing at 40% month-over-month
💰 Raised a $75M Series B at a $2B valuation
✅ Have vetted over 300,000 applicants

The median age of their team is 22 years old… 😲

Assuming a conservative ~10% equity for the $3.6 million seed, they were valued at ~$36 million when I first wrote about them. 

They`re now a $2 billion company which means they`ve 55xed in valuation in under a year…  🔥

They've also 50xed in revenue and continue to be profitable. 💵

If you haven’t heard of Mercor, they’re a hiring platform that reviews resumes, conducts interviews, and matches people with the right jobs. All with AI… 🤖

👉 To find more about how Mercor works and operates, read my last post about them here!

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