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This 12 months’s VB Innovation Showcase finalists shall be at VB Rework, June 24-25, in San Francisco. They are going to take to the stage as we delve into what’s really working in enterprise AI, from copilots to brokers.
Seven corporations have been chosen to showcase their generative AI merchandise or options which can be almost certainly to disrupt the enterprise.
These chosen to current will accomplish that in entrance of an invite-only viewers of 600 business decision-makers, and obtain direct suggestions from a panel of VC judges.
The 2025 Innovation Showcase finalists are:
CTGT
Based in 2024 by a staff of Stanford and College of California, San Diego researchers, San Francisco-based CTGT is an AI danger administration platform designed to change how enterprises deploy generative AI. Not like typical AI pipelines that require periodic offline updates, CTGT’s platform permits steady real-time monitoring and automatic refining of fashions in manufacturing, permitting AI methods to study and adapt inside stay environments with out ever going offline. This implies fashions enhance on the fly, closing the hole between improvement and deployment and guaranteeing most uptime and reliability for mission-critical AI purposes.
The corporate raised a seed $7.2 million spherical in February.
Catio
Palo Alto-based Catio is an AI-powered platform designed to help corporations in optimizing their tech stack structure. The platform is a copilot for technical leaders and groups, offering data-driven insights and proposals to guage, plan and evolve their know-how infrastructure. Catio tackles these challenges by offering steady structure design, strategic tech stack planning, correct analytics and analysis of architectures, and personalised suggestions for every enterprise’s distinctive wants, all powered by superior AI fashions and proprietary knowledge.
In March, Catio introduced $3 million in extra funding. That is along with the $4 million raised between 2023-2024.
Kumo
Mountain View-based Kumo AI is concentrated on democratizing AI, significantly within the realm of predictive analytics, by leveraging cutting-edge Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Relational Deep Studying (RDL). They intention to make it simpler for companies to construct and deploy extremely correct machine studying fashions immediately from their relational knowledge.
Kumo has raised $37 million in funding in two rounds. Their newest spherical was a $18 million Sequence B in September 2022.
Solo.io
Cambridge, Mass.-based Solo.io is a cloud-native software networking firm that gives options for connecting, securing and observing fashionable purposes, significantly these constructed on Kubernetes and microservices. Based in 2017, Solo.io goals to simplify the complexities of software networking in dynamic, multi-cloud environments. The corporate launched kagent – a first-of-its-kind cloud native framework that helps DevOps and platform engineers construct and run AI brokers in Kubernetes.
A $135 million sequence C funding spherical in 2021 introduced the corporate’s whole funding to $175 million. The corporate is valued at $1 billion.
Superduper.io
Berlin-based Superduper.io is an AI firm targeted on simplifying the mixing of AI fashions and workflows immediately inside current databases, eliminating the necessity for advanced knowledge pipelines and separate AI infrastructure. Their core providing is their Superduper Brokers, which allow non-technical customers to immediately reply even the trickiest questions on their knowledge, paperwork and methods – and to arrange AI employees for his or her duties – simply by chatting with ready-made AI brokers. All with out wrangling tough instruments, spreadsheets, dashboards and SQL or requiring assist from engineering and analysts.
Superduper.io has raised $1.75 million in one seed funding spherical. Notable traders embrace Hetz Ventures, session.vc and MongoDB. It was additionally a part of the Intel Ignite accelerator program.
Sutro
Oakland-based Sutro is an AI-powered no-code platform that enables customers to create full, production-ready cell and net purposes just by describing their concept in plain textual content. It goals to democratize software program improvement, making it accessible to people and companies with out coding experience.
Sutro was based in 2021 and has raised round $6 million throughout two early funding rounds in 2023-2024.
Qdrant
Berlin-based Qdrant is a high-performance, massive-scale Vector Database and Vector Search Engine designed for the subsequent technology of AI purposes. It’s inbuilt Rust, a language recognized for its security and efficiency, making it a dependable selection for demanding AI workloads.
Based in 2020, Qdrant has raised $37.8 million over three rounds of funding, the newest of which was a $28 million sequence A in January 2024.
Meet our Judging Panel
Emily Zhao, principal at Salesforce Ventures
Zhao is a principal at Salesforce Ventures targeted on AI/ML. She additionally spends time on developer tooling, cybersecurity, vertical SaaS, and well being tech. She joined Salesforce Ventures within the spring of 2022 and lately helped launch its $500 million generative AI fund. She has led a number of investments within the fund, together with Hugging Face, RunwayML, Anthropic, Cohere and others.
Earlier than becoming a member of Salesforce Ventures, Zhao was an investor at Avenir Progress Capital, a venture-growth fund based mostly in New York, the place she spent most of her time on vertical SaaS, well being tech and software software program. Earlier than Avenir, Emily was an affiliate within the Personal Fairness group at Blackstone and invested in company buyout transactions.
Matt Kraning, associate at Menlo Ventures
Kraning is certainly one of Menlo‘s latest companions. He’s targeted on investing in AI, enterprise SaaS, nationwide protection and cybersecurity.
He’s a deeply technical former founder and a confirmed firm builder with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, specializing in AI and large-scale computing. Earlier than Menlo, Kraning was the co-founder and CTO of Expanse, the place he helped outline the AI-driven assault floor administration class. He’s additionally suggested and invested in over 50 startups, together with unicorns like Peregrine and Astranis, and lately led a $12 million spherical for Wispr Movement.
Rebecca Li, funding director at Amex Ventures
Li is an Funding Director at Amex Ventures. She joined in 2024 to deal with enterprise software program investing, main early-stage investments in infrastructure software program, developer instruments, knowledge and AI.
Earlier than becoming a member of American Categorical, Li led fintech and software program enterprise investments at World Asset Capital. Her prior expertise consists of enterprise improvement and partnerships at Credit score Karma and know-how non-public fairness investing at GIC.
Come see at VB Rework
The entire pitches will happen on June 25 from 4:45 to five:30 p.m. PT. on the primary stage for our in-person attendees.
Presenters may have three minutes for his or her pitch, adopted by two minutes of suggestions from the judging panel. Awards shall be introduced in three classes: 1) almost certainly to succeed, 2) coolest know-how and three) finest presentation model.
Learn concerning the winners from VB Rework 2024: SambaNova, Instabase and Tabnine.
