Top 29 Startups developing AI for search

Updated: Dec 13, 2025
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These startups use AI to create better text and image search engines. They also develop conversational search tools that provide better experience.
1
Atomic Canyon
Country: USA | Funding: $7M
Atomic Canyon uses artificial intelligence to improve efficiency and optmize operations of nuclear power plants. The company is developing Neutron, an AI search engine for searching billions of pages of nuclear documentation. Using the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) database and the world's fastest supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), it understands and processes nuclear terminology with unprecedented accuracy, interpreting complex documents to let executives make more informed data-driven decisions. Neutron is based on open-source AI model FERMI intended for sentence vector representations, specifically designed for nuclear data. Atomic Canyon is working in partnership with PG&E's Diablo Canyon power plant, the only remaining nuclear power plant in California.
2
Perplexity
Country: USA | Funding: $1.5B
Perplexity is developing an AI-powered search engine that leverages third-party large language models but own Web-crawler, website index and ranking algorithm. Through a conversational interface, Perplexity allows users to ask clarifying questions and receive contextual answers. All responses are accompanied by links to online sources to ensure transparency and verifiability. The company is also developing its own browser, Comet Assistant, which can answer questions based on the context of a webpage and browsing history, as well as perform agent tasks on websites (such as registering, ordering booking tickets, ordering a taxi, etc.). The company also provides search API and an enterprise version for searching internal knowledge. Perplexity regularly becomes the target of lawsuits for unauthorized use of content.
3
AlphaSense
Country: USA | Funding: $1.4B
AlphaSense is a market intelligence and search platform that uses artificial intelligence allowing professionals to make critical decisions.
4
Glean
Country: USA | Funding: $768.2M
Glean is developing the Work AI Platform, which consists of three modules: Glean Assistant, Glean Agents and Glean Search. Assistant is a personal assistant for employee that provides access to company knowledge, web data, and personal context, enabling faster, more informed decisions. Glean Agents is a system for creating, deploying, organizing and managing AI-powered agents. Agents can be created in conversation mode or using the visual mo-code builder. Its connectors automatically sync them with corporate data. Glean Search is an enterprise search that understands user's context and provides unified, secure access to corporate databases. Results are displayed in real time and respect permissions, so everyone sees only what they need.
5
Coveo
Country: Canada | Funding: $357.8M
Coveo provides cloud-based AI-powered search and recommendations.
6
Algolia
Country: France | Funding: $334.2M
A powerful hosted search engine API, Algolia provides product teams with the resources & tools they need to create fast, relevant search.
7
Mobvoi
Country: China | Funding: $264.9M
Mobvoi is an AI company that developed Chinese voice recognition, natural language processing, and vertical search technology in-house.
8
Hebbia
Country: USA | Funding: $161.1M
Hebbia's neural search lets you execute research 10X faster and 10X more accurately.
9
Pryon
Country: USA | Funding: $159.1M
Pryon is an AI company focused on enterprise knowledge management. It uses AI to index and analyze enterprise data
10
Twelve Labs
Country: South Korea | Funding: $107.1M
Twelve Labs is helping developers build programs that can see, listen, and understand the world as we do.
11
Brain Technologies
Country: USA | Funding: $101M
Brain Technologies is an AI company that develops a generative interface allowing software to be in sync with its users' intentions.
12
AnyClip
Country: Israel | Funding: $71M
AnyClip is a video analytics platform that provides media companies with tools to analyze and catalog their video libraries.
13
Daydream
Country: USA | Funding: $50M
Daydream focuses on providing personalized shopping results through generative AI, machine learning, and computer vision.
14
Deepset
Country: Germany | Funding: $45.6M
Next-level semantic search for enterprises fueled by latest NLP and open-source
15
You
Country: USA | Funding: $45M
You, a search engine that uses AI to understand search queries, rank the results and parse the queries into different languages (including programming languages).
16
Qdrant
Country: Germany | Funding: $37.8M
Оpen-source neural search engine making Deep Metric Learning practical to bring the applied AI to the next level.
17
Twiggle
Country: Israel | Funding: $35M
Twiggle is using the most advanced technologies in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing to power next generation e-commerce experiences. Twiggle's solutions are the only search technologies built on both human-like understanding of linguistic structure and a deep retail awareness — allowing your search engine to mimic how an experienced salesperson would (and should) behave.
18
ViSenze
Country: Singapore | Funding: $34M
ViSenze develops advanced visual search and image recognition solutions to help businesses in eCommerce, mCommerce and online advertising.
19
Exa
Country: USA | Funding: $22M
Exa is an AI research center that is reinventing the quest for AI.
20
Firecrawl
Country: USA | Funding: $14.5M
Firecrawl is an API service designed to transform URLs into clean markdown or structured data for easy integration with LLMs.
21
Pimloc
Country: UK | Funding: $14.3M
Pimloc's deep learning platform allows organisations to automatically ingest, detect, classify and protect diverse image and video content.
22
Nyris
Country: Germany | Funding: €12.2M
Nyris is an image search engine that is used as a software as a service.
23
Kaito
Country: USA | Funding: $10.8M
AI-powered search and recommendation engine for digital assets
24
Veridion
Country: Romania | Funding: $7.5M
Veridion uses machine learning to create profiles for businesses in any industry. The first of the company’s products is a business search engine that keeps over 40 million business profiles updated
25
Dexa
Country: USA | Funding: $6M
Dexa was created to address a bigger shift in how people consume material and search for things online.
26
ZeroEntropy
Country: USA | Funding: $4.7M
ZeroEntropy provides a sophisticated search API tailored for the analysis and retrieval of unstructured data.
27
MattoBoard
Country: USA | Funding: $2.6M
MattoBoard develops software designed to simplify the creative process for interior designers and provides 3D mood board and marketplace with AI-driven visual search and discovery tool.
28
Encore
Country: USA | Funding: $500K
Encore is a conversational search engine designed for online shopping, starting with secondhand products
29
Semantic Scholar
Country: USA
Semantic Scholar is an academic search engine from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. It too uses AI to search the academic literature and it is impressively fast.
  See also:
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