Top 100 San Francisco Startups to Watch in 2026
San Francisco remains a key hub for technology startups, showing a clear concentration in artificial intelligence. The area is home to both long standing tech companies and a fresh crop of new ventures.
Industry leaders like OpenAI have raised funding as high as $78 billion. Other major players include Anthropic, which has secured $33.7 billion, and the payment processor Stripe.
Below is our list of 100 San Francisco startups worth keeping an eye on.
Failory's Top 10 Picks
Anthropic develops powerful and reliable AI models with a focus on safety and research. Their most well-known creation is Claude, a family of models used for everything from sophisticated dialogue to complex content creation.
| Year Founded | 2021 |
| Founders | Daniela Amodei, Dario Amodei, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Tom Brown |
| Funding Amount | $33.7B |
| Startup Size | Major Organization (1,001-5,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Series F |
| Top Investors | Menlo Ventures, TPG, General Catalyst, BlackRock, Insight Partners |
Perplexity built an AI answer engine to provide direct, conversational answers to user questions. Their platform combines large language models with real-time search to deliver accurate, up-to-date information complete with source citations.
| Year Founded | 2022 |
| Founders | Andy Konwinski, Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho |
| Funding Amount | $1.5B |
| Startup Size | Mid-Size Team (51-250) |
| Last Funding Status | Venture Round |
| Top Investors | NVIDIA, Accel, Bessemer Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, IVP |
OpenAI develops advanced AI models, including the popular conversational tool ChatGPT. The AI research and deployment company aims to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
| Year Founded | 2015 |
| Founders | Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Wojciech Zaremba |
| Funding Amount | $78B |
| Startup Size | Major Organization (1,001-5,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Venture Round |
| Top Investors | Andreessen Horowitz, TPG, NVIDIA, Citi, Khosla Ventures |
Stripe builds a suite of APIs that power online payment processing for internet businesses of all sizes. Their platform provides the financial infrastructure for companies to manage revenue, prevent fraud, and expand internationally.
| Year Founded | 2010 |
| Founders | John Collison |
| Funding Amount | $9.4B |
| Startup Size | Enterprise Organization (5,001+) |
| Last Funding Status | Secondary Market |
| Top Investors | Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Temasek Holdings, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital |
Anysphere operates as an applied research lab developing AI solutions like Cursor to automate the process of writing code. Their tools are designed to help software engineers build and manage applications more efficiently.
| Year Founded | 2022 |
| Founders | Aman Sanger, Arvid Lunnemark, Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif |
| Funding Amount | $3.4B |
| Startup Size | Mid-Size Team (51-250) |
| Last Funding Status | Series D |
| Top Investors | Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Google, NVIDIA, Benchmark, Thrive Capital, DST Global |
Cognition has developed Devin, the first AI software engineer capable of handling complex engineering tasks from start to finish. The applied AI lab focuses on building AI teammates that can reason and write code autonomously.
| Year Founded | 2023 |
| Founders | Scott Wu, Steven Hao, Walden Yan |
| Funding Amount | $896M |
| Startup Size | Mid-Size Team (51-250) |
| Last Funding Status | Series C |
| Top Investors | Pear VC, South Park Commons, Khosla Ventures, 8VC, Lux Capital |
Harness builds a software delivery platform that helps engineering and DevOps teams release applications into production. Their Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service solution automates the software lifecycle, allowing teams to ship code faster and more securely.
| Year Founded | 2017 |
| Founders | Jyoti Bansal, Rishi Singh, Rishi Singh |
| Funding Amount | $575M |
| Startup Size | Major Organization (1,001-5,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Debt Financing |
| Top Investors | Norwest Venture Partners, Gaingels, Menlo Ventures, Battery Ventures, IVP |
8. Databricks
Databricks developed a unified platform for data and AI that combines the features of data warehouses and data lakes. This lakehouse architecture allows data teams to collaborate on everything from business intelligence to machine learning projects in one place.
| Year Founded | 2013 |
| Founders | Ali Ghodsi, Andy Konwinski, Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Patrick Wendell, Reynold Xin |
| Funding Amount | $21.8B |
| Startup Size | Enterprise Organization (5,001+) |
| Last Funding Status | Venture Round |
| Top Investors | Franklin Templeton, Andreessen Horowitz, NVIDIA, Temasek Holdings, Gaingels |
Writer has built a full-stack generative AI platform that helps large organizations scale their content creation. The platform ensures all written material, from marketing copy to internal documents, remains secure and consistent with the company's unique brand voice.
| Year Founded | 2020 |
| Founders | May Habib, Waseem AlShikh |
| Funding Amount | $326M |
| Startup Size | Mid-Size Team (51-250) |
| Last Funding Status | Series C |
| Top Investors | Insight Partners, B Capital, Radical Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Workday Ventures |
10. Harvey
Harvey creates a generative AI platform tailored for elite law firms and in-house legal teams. Their system is designed to handle complex legal work, from research and analysis to drafting and document review.
| Year Founded | 2022 |
| Founders | Gabe Pereyra, Winston Weinberg |
| Funding Amount | $1B |
| Startup Size | Large Team (251-1,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Series F |
| Top Investors | Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI, Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Kleiner Perkins, Conviction, EQT Growth |
90 Additional San Francisco Startups Worth Following
Our top ten picks are just the start of the story. A huge number of new companies are focused on AI, and they've collectively raised billions to build their ideas.
You'll see some that are brand new and others that are already well on their way. Here are the other startups defining what's next for San Francisco.
| Startup | Industry | Year Founded | Amount Raised | Last Funding Round |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Mercor | AI | 2023 | $483.6M | Series C |
 BlockDAG | Crypto | 2023 | $420M | Initial Coin Offering |
 Nozomi Networks | Security | 2013 | $266M | Private Equity |
 Momentum | Enterprise | 2020 | $18M | Series A |
 Factory | AI | 2023 | $70M | Series B |
 6sense | AI | 2013 | $526M | Debt Financing |
 Juniper Square | Fintech | 2014 | $371M | Venture Round |
 Assort Health | AI | 2023 | $101.5M | Series B |
 Thinking Machines Lab | AI | 2025 | $2B | Seed |
 Sierra | AI | 2023 | $635M | Venture Round |
 Apollo.io | AI | 2015 | $251.3M | Series D |
 Exa | AI | 2021 | $107M | Series B |
 Strava | Media | 2009 | $151.9M | Debt Financing |
 TRM Labs | Data | 2018 | $149.9M | Series B |
 Distyl AI | AI | 2022 | $202M | Series B |
 Ambience Healthcare | AI | 2020 | $319.3M | Series C |
 Periodic Labs | AI | 2025 | $300M | Seed |
 Invisible Technologies | Data | 2015 | $107.9M | Venture Round |
 Aven | Media | 2019 | $252M | Series E |
 World | Crypto | 2019 | $379M | Undisclosed |
 Honeycomb | Cloud | 2016 | $146.9M | Series D |
 Kojo | Manufacturing | 2018 | $93.6M | Series C |
 Zip | Enterprise | 2020 | $371.3M | Series D |
 Higgsfield | AI | 2022 | $58M | Series A |
 Motive | AI | 2013 | $717.3M | Venture Round |
 CyberCube | Analytics | 2015 | $285M | Venture Round |
 Intercom | SaaS | 2011 | $240.8M | Series D |
 Motion | Analytics | 2019 | $73.3M | Series C |
 Aster | Healthcare | 2023 | $2.4M | Pre-Seed |
 Webflow | SaaS | 2013 | $334.9M | Series C |
 Baseten | AI | 2019 | $285M | Series D |
 Scale AI | AI | 2016 | $15.9B | Corporate Round |
 Burnt | AI | 2022 | $4.3M | Seed |
 Together AI | AI | 2022 | $533.5M | Series B |
 LangChain | AI | 2022 | $35M | Series A |
 Anything | AI | 2021 | $19.5M | Series A |
 Framework | Hardware | 2019 | $45M | Series A |
 Lakera | AI | 2021 | $30M | Series A |
 Slope | Retail | 2021 | $252.1M | Debt Financing |
 Innovaccer | Analytics | 2014 | $654.1M | Series F |
 Audioshake | AI | 2020 | $18.7M | Series A |
 Decagon | AI | 2023 | $231M | Series C |
 Career Karma | Education | 2018 | $51.9M | Series B |
 Kong | AI | 2017 | $344.1M | Series E |
 HappyRobot | Analytics | 2022 | $60.7M | Series B |
 Sentry | Infrastructure | 2012 | $217M | Series E |
 LambdaTest | Cloud | 2017 | $108M | Series D |
 Mesh | Crypto | 2020 | $124.5M | Venture Round |
 Twelve Labs | AI | 2021 | $107.1M | Venture Round |
 Greptile | Enterprise | 2023 | $30.4M | Series A |
 Recall.ai | AI | 2020 | $50.7M | Series B |
 Redis | Analytics | 2011 | $356.8M | Secondary Market |
 Cherry | Retail | 2017 | $94M | Series B |
 Medallion | Automation | 2020 | $128M | Series C |
 Tools For Humanity | AI | 2019 | $115M | Series C |
 Verily | Analytics | 2015 | $3.5B | Grant |
 Numeral | Enterprise | 2022 | $57.5M | Series B |
 Nova Credit | Fintech | 2016 | $124.4M | Series C |
 PostHog | Analytics | 2020 | $182.2M | Series E |
 Pylon | AI | 2022 | $51.3M | Series B |
 Coalition | Security | 2017 | $800M | Corporate Round |
 LMArena | AI | 2025 | $100M | Seed |
 Substack | Media | 2017 | $200.2M | Series C |
 EcoFlow Tech | Energy | 2016 | $114.4M | Product Crowdfunding |
 Stable | SaaS | 2019 | $1M | Series A |
 Unstoppable Domains | Crypto | 2018 | $72M | Series A |
 Jasper | AI | 2021 | $131M | Series A |
 Phantom | Crypto | 2021 | $268M | Series C |
 Fieldguide | Fintech | 2020 | $50M | Series B |
 Laurel | AI | 2016 | $155.7M | Series C |
 Hex Technologies | Analytics | 2019 | $171.5M | Series C |
 ClassDojo | Education | 2011 | $191.1M | Venture Round |
 Daymark Health | Healthcare | 2022 | $57.5M | Series A |
 Deepgram | AI | 2015 | $85.9M | Series B |
 Miro | Enterprise | 2011 | $476.3M | Series C |
 Cartography Biosciences | Biotech | 2020 | $124M | Series B |
 Sonic | Crypto | 2020 | $16M | Venture Round |
 Zed Industries | Marketing | 2021 | $47.5M | Series B |
 Atomic | Retail | 2020 | $55.1M | Venture Round |
 Firecrawl | AI | 2022 | $14.5M | Series A |
 Domino Data Lab | Analytics | 2013 | $223.6M | Venture Round |
 Gusto | Fintech | 2011 | $746.1M | Venture Round |
 Vanta | AI | 2018 | $503M | Series D |
 Armis | Enterprise | 2015 | $837M | Secondary Market |
 Flutterwave | Fintech | 2016 | $474.5M | Secondary Market |
 WorkWhile | Education | 2019 | $39.5M | Series B |
 Watershed | Cloud | 2019 | $239M | Series C |
 Incode Technologies | Security | 2015 | $257.1M | Series B |
 Varo Bank | Media | 2015 | $1.1B | Series G |
 Automattic | Media | 2005 | $985.9M | Series E |
