AI is the hottest segment of the IT industry right now. As part of CRN’s Stellar Startups for 2025, here are 15 AI technology startups, founded in 2019 or later, that solution providers should be aware of.
Signs Of Intelligence
Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT generative AI tool in late 2022, artificial intelligence has been remaking the IT industry. Just about every IT vendor has raced to incorporate AI into their product portfolios and solution providers have sought ways to add AI products, services and expertise to their offerings.
Not surprisingly, AI has been a hot sector for startups. Some are creating the platforms for building and managing AI-based applications and services or infusing AI capabilities into existing software—such as tools for managed service providers. Some startups are providing security for new AI systems and large language models while others offer tools for managing the huge volumes of data AI systems need to operate.
All this means that AI presents a major opportunity for solution providers, MSPs and strategic service providers.
As part of CRN’s Stellar Startups for 2025, here are 15 AI technology startups, founded in 2019 or later, that solution providers should get to know. The following slides include lightly edited company and product descriptions provided by the startups.
AI Squared
Founded: 2021
Top Executive: Darren Kimura, CEO
AI Squared’s Unifi unified AI platform makes it easy to integrate data and AI insights into critical business applications with optimized model selection, governance, and feedback. It helps data teams overcome the complexities of integrating transformed data and machine learning insights, often caused by legacy platforms and complex workflows.
Unifi is a low-code platform designed to integrate insights from data and AI workloads directly into any web-based business application. Its core mission is to drive AI adoption and make data-driven decisions by providing a “superhighway” between business data, machine learning models, and critical applications.
AI Squared raised $13.8 million in Series A funding in April 2024.
Website: https://squared.ai/
Aviz Networks
Founded: 2022
Top Executive: Vishal Shukla, CEO
Aviz modernizes networking for the AI era with a full-stack, software-first platform: networking with SONiC and Cumulus, deep observability with packet brokers and service nodes, and the AI-powered Network Copilot. The company delivers multi-vendor freedom, predictable upgrades, 50-percent savings, and private AI automation across data center, edge, and GPU networks.
Aviz’s mainstay product is enterprise-grade SONiC, an open, community-driven NOS proven in hyperscalers and now enabling enterprises across industries. Delivered with partner ecosystems (Cisco, NVIDIA, Dell, and more), it provides standardized automation, observability, and AI Copilot. SONiC future-proofs data centers and AI fabrics as compute shifts from CPU to GPU.
Website: www.aviznetworks.com
Axelera AI
Founded: 2021
Top Executive: Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO
Axelera AI is a leading provider of AI hardware acceleration technology for generative AI and inference at the edge. The company’s Metis AI Platform brings AI to the edge and enables developers, designers, and enterprises to deploy cost-effective, high-performance AI at scale and deliver real business value.
The Metis AI Platform is a full-stack edge AI solution that brings powerful AI capabilities from the cloud to the edge. It combines Axelera AI’s Metis AIPU and Voyager SDK to enable real time, low-power, AI inference with ease of use and implementation.
Website: https://axelera.ai/
Bud Ecosystem
Founded: 2023
Top Executive: Jithin VG, CEO
Bud Ecosystem is an AI research and product company enabling production-ready GenAI deployments on commodity hardware for cost-efficient adoption without sacrificing performance. With Bud AI Foundry, the company’s all-in-one control panel, enterprises gain full control over deployment, infrastructure, compliance, and security, enabling organizations to focus on outcomes and accelerate AI transformation seamlessly.
Bud AI Foundry is an all-in-one control panel for Generative AI deployments, offering enterprises full control over performance, administration, compliance, and security. Powered by unique IPs like heterogeneous hardware parallelism and an environment-agnostic stack, it enables cost-efficient deployments on commodity hardware. Target customers include cloud service providers and large enterprises.
Website: https://budecosystem.com/
Bumblebee
Founded: 2025
Top Executive: Hexi Xiao, CEO
Bumblebee is an AI-powered “employee” for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that lives within the Microsoft Teams or Slack workspace. It interacts with PSA and RMM systems, automates SOPs, triages and enriches tickets, analyzes trends, retrieves policies, monitors SLAs, and streamlines operations. It’s highly configurable based on an MSP’s internal workflows.
Key features of Bumblebee include ticket triage, workflow automation, SLA monitoring, policy retrieval, and human-in-the-loop AI. Bumblebee targets MSPs seeking to boost technician productivity, reduce SLA breaches, and automate repetitive operational tasks.
Website: https://hirebumblebee.com/
DevRev
Founded: 2020
Top Executive: Dheeraj Pandey, CEO and Co-Founder
DevRev is an AI-native enterprise software company transforming how teams collaborate and support customers by unifying siloed data. Its platform uses patented technologies, Knowledge Graph and Airdrop, to connect structured and unstructured business data, from tickets and emails to product components and user history, into a living, searchable network.
AgentOS is DevRev’s AI-native platform built to unify customer support, product, and engineering. Powered by the company’s patented Knowledge Graph and Airdrop, it automates up to 85 percent of tickets, reduces SaaS costs by 40 percent, and delivers conversational AI that draws on company-wide context to act more like a helpful teammate.
Website: https://devrev.ai/
d-Matrix
Founded: 2019
Top Executive: Sid Sheth, CEO and Co-Founder
d-Matrix builds innovative compute systems for modern AI workloads, overcoming long-standing challenges in performance, efficiency, and scalability that have limited traditional AI chips. A pioneer in Digital In-Memory Computing (DIMC), d-Matrix delivers flexible, scalable AI hardware solutions purpose-built to accelerate generative AI inference for hyperscale and enterprise cloud deployments.
d-Matrix Corsair is an innovative AI compute system that delivers ultra-low latency batched inference for generative AI workloads at scale. Corsair is optimized for hyperscale and enterprise cloud deployments. It enables highly interactive, real-time use cases such as agentic AI, reasoning, and video generation.
Website: https://www.d-matrix.ai/
Glean
Founded: 2019
Top Executive: Arvind Jain, CEO and Founder
Glean is the work AI platform that combines enterprise search, an AI assistant, and powerful, customizable AI agents to help organizations and their employees find trusted answers, automate workflows, and take action — grounded in both internal company data and external knowledge from the web.
Built for enterprises of all sizes, Glean connects to company and web data with security, governance, and scalability at its core.
Website: www.glean.com
Hatz AI
Founded: 2023
Top Executive: Jimmy Hatzel, CEO and Co-Founder
Hatz develops an AI-powered business automation platform for SMBs and the managed service providers (MSPs) they rely on. The company’s secure AI platform, with SOC 2 Type 2 compliance at its core, empowers organizations to build, deploy and manage AI agents and workflows that turn complex manual processes into streamlined operations.
Website: https://hatz.ai/
Mechanized AI
Founded: 2023
Top Executive: Charles Wright, CEO
Mechanized AI delivers enterprise-ready AI solutions for application and infrastructure modernization. The company’s flagship mAI Modernize suite helps organizations transform legacy applications and virtualized infrastructure into cloud-native architectures. Mechanized AI focuses on reducing technical debt, migration risk and costs, empowering partners and enterprises across all industries.
Mechanized AI’s mAI Modernize suite accelerates legacy modernization with AI-powered tools like CodeMap, CodeGen, VMView, and VMShift. Designed for enterprises facing skyrocketing virtualization costs and code complexity, the platform enables automated discovery, refactoring, and VM-to-container migration, empowering IT leaders to modernize faster, reduce TCO, and unlock cloud-native innovation.
Website: https://www.mechanized.ai/
MSPbots
Founded: 2019
Top Executive: Daniel Wang, CEO
MSPbots markets a user-friendly, low-code/no-code platform, with customized widgets, dashboards and applications, that provide managed service providers with business intelligence and automation capabilities that help them make smarter decisions and streamline operations.
Website: https://www.mspbots.ai/
Simbian
Founded: 2023
Top Executive: Ambuj Kumar, CEO and Co-Founder
Simbian is on a mission to solve security for businesses using AI. Simbian offers AI agents that work like virtual employees and autonomously complete a variety of security tasks with increased precision and efficiency.
Simbian’s AI SOC Agent autonomously triages, investigates, and responds to alerts 24x7x365 from SIEMs, XDRs, and other sources of alerts by combining the best of Simbian’s security knowledge base and a client’s organizational knowledge.
Website: https://simbian.ai/
Tacilent.ai
Founded: 2024
Top Executive: Ron Johnson, CEO and Founder
Tacilent.ai is a B2B AI SaaS company transforming enterprise risk management. The company’s AI-native platform predicts, quantifies, and autonomously remediates risks across cyber, operational, financial, and supply chain domains, delivering actionable intelligence, measurable resilience, and significant cost savings for mid-to-large enterprises seeking to replace legacy tools.
Key features of the company’s product, Tacilent Risk AIQ, include real-time intelligence, dollar-based risk quantification, and proactive remediation. Tacilent’s target market is mid-to-large financial/manufacturing enterprises replacing legacy risk tools.
Website: https://www.tacilent.ai
Thread
Founded: 2022
Top Executive: Michael Evers, CEO
Thread develops an AI service-desk platform for MSPs that combines no-code AI agents, chat in Teams/Slack/desktop, and deep PSA integrations to automate intake, agentic triage, ticket workflows, and reporting — boosting technician capacity and customer experience.
Thread’s AI Service Desk is built specifically for managed service providers seeking efficiency and scalability.
Website: getthread.com
Torq
Founded: 2020
Top Executive: Ofer Smadari, CEO
Torq is a pioneer with its enterprise-grade security hyperautomation platform. The Torq system drives maximum value and efficiency from existing security investments. It supercharges security teams with powerful, easy-to-use workflows that reduce manual tasks so security teams can focus on higher-value strategic activities.
Torq’s enterprise-grade security hyperautomation platform unifies and automates the entire security infrastructure for protection and productivity. The platform automates enterprise security workflows, incorporating the world’s first GPT-AI-based analytics engine for intelligent incident analysis and response. Torq HyperSOC2o, part of Torq’s hyperautomation platform, automates 70 percent of manual investigations using AI, integrating OmniAgent with Torq Socrates.
Website: https://torq.io/
