Top 11 Cognitive API startups

Updated: Dec 16, 2025
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Cognitive API is a cloud toolkit that can be used by third-party developers to easily create artificial intelligence and cognitive computing-based applications to generate business value.
1
Runware
Country: UK | Funding: $66M
Runware provides an API platform that enables developers to integrate generative AI for creating and transforming images, video and audio content. The startup has its own AI inference infrastructure for open-source models and provides day-one access (meaning, as soon as a model is released, it can run on Runware) and competitive pricing. Costs are reduced thanks to the Sonic Inference Engine, which runs on custom-designed AI hardware. Optimized model loading and unloading allows the service to support over 400,000 models and deliver any of them for real-time inference. Runware also partners with third-party AI cloud service providers to automatically re-route workloads when memory capacity increases.
2
Cohere
Country: Canada | Funding: $1.7B
Cohere offers an API to add language processing to any system.
3
Megvii
Country: China | Funding: $1.4B
Megvii develops Face++ Cognitive Services - a platform offering computer vision technologies that enable your applications to read and understand the world better. Face++ allows you to easily add leading, deep learning-based image analysis recognition technologies into your applications, with simple and powerful APIs and SDKs.
4
SoundHound
Country: USA | Funding: $451M
SoundHound develops voice-enabled AI and conversational intelligence technologies. It provides Speech-to-Meaning engine and Deep Meaning Understanding technology that can be built in other services and devices. It also develops app for music recognition and voice assistant for search.
5
Clarifai
Country: USA | Funding: $100M
Clarifai is an artificial intelligence company that excels in visual recognition, solving real-world problems for businesses.
6
Speechmatics
Country: UK | Funding: $70.2M
Speechmatics provides automatic speech recognition technologies that can be used anywhere, by anyone, in any language.
7
aiOla
Country: Israel | Funding: $33M
Leading Enterprise Conversational AI: unmatched accuracy, jargon-specific ASR, Any Language, Accent or Acoustic Setting
8
CloudSight
Country: USA | Funding: $8M
CloudSight offers its computer vision API to developers who can utilize the same technology that is currently being used by Fortune 500 companies and major retailers.
9
Sighthound
Country: USA | Funding: $5.2M
Sighthound develops smart surveillance software powered by Computer Vision, provides computer vision cloud API for developers and Vision SDK, accelerating third-party products with proprietary deeply-learned computer vision technology
10
Trueface.ai
Country: USA | Funding: $5M
TrueFace.Ai is a platform of facial recognition APIs powered by deep learning. It provides on-premise & Cloud Solutions for Face Recognition & Identity Verification
11
NLP Cloud
Country: France
NLP production-ready API based on spaCy and HuggingFace transformers, for NER, sentiment-analysis, classification, summarization, question answering, and POS tagging. You can either use the pre-trained models or your own spaCy models.
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Siddhant Patel
Editor: Siddhant Patel
Siddhant Patel is a senior editor for AI-Startups. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web. Siddhant has a special interest in artificial intelligence and has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the industry. Siddhant graduated from the Indian Institute of Science (Bengaluru). When he’s not writing, Siddhant is also a developer and has a deep historical knowledge of the computer industry for the past 50 years. You can contact Siddhant at sidpatel(at)ai-startups(dot)pro