All year long, TechCrunch covers startups, everything from unicorns to tiny seed-stage launches. We are, in many ways, the startup experts.
To create this list, organized alphabetically, we looked back through our year’s worth of coverage for startups that stood out to us. They have fascinating new technologies, business models, or founder stories, or are pushing an industry forward in exciting ways.
You’ll note that OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, and other big AI model makers and newsmakers (like Perplexity), are not named on this list. While these companies are among the most disruptive of the year — and possibly of a lifetime — we focused on those startups that aren’t as well-known or highly watched.
The following chart lists all the startups we covered. Scroll down to read more about each one.
| A-B | Abridge | Agility Robotics | Anysphere | Apex | Beta Technologies |
| B-C | Black Forest Labs | Bloom Money | By Rotation | Cdial | Covariant |
| C-E | Cyera | /dev/agents | ElevenLabs | Emergence | Etched |
| E-H | Exa | Fervo Energy | GPTZero | Helsing | Hermeus |
| I-L | Impulse Space | Island | Joco | KoBold Metals | Letta |
| M-P | Magic | Moonvalley | Nodal | Oura | Pair Team |
| P | Physics Wallah | Polymarket | Poolside | Profound | PromiseBio |
| R-S | Roon | Salva Health | Saronic | Sila | Slice |
| S-W | Spawning | Spoor | Tennibot | Varda Space | Waabi |
| W-Z | Wayve | Whisper Aero | Wiz | Xona Space Systems | Zap Energy |
| Z | Zepto |
Abridge
HQ location: Pittsburgh
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $464 million
Examples of VC backers: Union Square Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, IVP
What the startup does: Uses AI to transcribe doctor-patient interactions and generates medical notes for electronic health records (EHR).
Why it’s disruptive: While many companies are developing AI medical scribes, Abridge is one of the field’s leading and most highly valued players thanks in large part to the company’s integration with Epic, an EHR used by most large health systems in the U.S.
Agility Robotics
HQ location: Corvallis, Oregon
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $178 million
Examples of VC backers: Playground Global, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, DCVC
What the startup does: Makes humanoid robots
Why it’s disruptive: Humanoid robots are still largely promises and pilots. Creating robots that walk, grasp, and carry objects of various sizes turns out to be a harder engineering problem to solve than to imagine. But Agility signed a formal deal in June with logistics giant GXO to supply robots-as-a-service to a Spanx factory. It also hired Peggy Johnson as CEO this year — she’s the former CEO of Magic Leap and an ex-executive at Microsoft and Qualcomm.
Anysphere
HQ location: San Francisco, California
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $60 million
Examples of VC backers: Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI Startup Fund, Thrive Capital
What the startup does: Develops an AI-powered coding assistant called Cursor.
Why it’s disruptive: Lots of companies are making AI tools to help with coding (like Poolside and Magic on this list), but Cursor is for now the most popular and fastest growing among the bunch.
Apex
HQ location: Los Angeles, California
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $122 million
Examples of VC backers: Andreessen Horowitz, Shield Capital
What the startup does: Builds a line of off-the-shelf satellite buses
Why it’s disruptive: Satellite bus manufacturing has been highly bespoke, with high prices and long lead times, until now. Apex’s line of off-the-shelf satellite buses — that is, the main body of the satellite that hosts power, wiring, chips, etc. — means that more companies can access space without having to worry about developing their own satellite bus in-house. The company had a successful first mission earlier this year and has since announced a $95 million capital raise and a deal with Anduril.
Beta Technologies
HQ location: South Burlington, Vermont
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $1.5 billion
Examples of VC backers: Qatar Investment Authority, The Rise Fund, Fidelity Management & Research, The Climate Pledge
What the startup does: Builds electric aircraft for carrying passengers, goods, medical equipment, etc. Offers charging equipment for electric aircraft and training programs for pilots.
Why it’s disruptive: Beta Technologies has quietly grown its presence in the electric aircraft space, but it’s no less impressive for not making flashy announcements every month. The company not only has secured buyers for its electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) and conventional takeoff and landing (eCTOL) vehicles across logistics, air taxi, and the military, but it has also set up an eVTOL charging network that competitors pay to use.
Black Forest Labs
HQ Location: Freiburg, Germany
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $31 million
Examples of VC backers: Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Stuttgart VC Mätch.vc; Nvidia’s Timo Aila, Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, Y Combinator’s Garry Tan
What the startup does: Has an AI image generator
Why it’s disruptive: While there are plenty of AI image generators, this one has an interesting pedigree and high-profile customer. Elon Musk’s xAI is using Black Forest’s Flux.1 text-to-image model to power image generation in its free-wheeling Grok chatbot. The founding team are the researchers who created Stability AI.
Bloom Money
HQ Location: London, England
Funding to date (per PitchBook): $1.37 million
Examples of VC backers: Angel investor June Angelides and January Ventures
What the startup does: Bloom Money digitized the ROSCA system, which is a common savings method (albeit by various names) used by ethnic communities around the world that do not trust banking institutions, especially as they immigrate to the West.
Why it’s disruptive: A “rotating savings and credit association” (ROSCA) is a group of people who save and borrow together. Bloom is a clever example of blending a cultural tradition with fintech technology. This app also offers resources that help immigrants learn more about building financial health in the U.K.
By Rotation
HQ Location: London, England
Funding to date (per PitchBook): $3.5 million
Examples of VC backers: Closed Loop Partners, June Angelides
What the startup does: Fashion clothing rental business that also serves as a networking app
Why it’s disruptive: By Rotation is bringing together a fashion community that the rental apps of yesteryear never quite did. With names like Helen Mirren and Ellie Goulding using it, it makes sustainability cool. By partnering with Airbnb to offer wedding rental clothes or with the non-alcoholic beverage line of Spencer Matthews from “Made in Chelsea,” By Rotation has become more than a business: It’s a lifestyle.
Cdial
HQ Location: Lagos, Nigeria
Funding to date (per PitchBook): N/A
Examples of VC backers: Google for Startups
What the startup does: Makes a chatbox that can speak and understand nearly all African languages and dialects
Why it’s disruptive: There are thousands of languages and dialects in Africa, and the mainstream language models, currently made mostly in the Western world, are not able to fully support or capture all their nuances. Cdial hails itself as the “world’s first multi-lingual voice-first large language model fine-tuned for African languages and context.” This type of innovation helps to ensure that the rest of the world — not just the Eurocentric one — has access to the foundational tools necessary for the AI revolution.
Covariant
HQ location: Berkeley, California
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $245.39 million
Examples of VC backers: Radical Ventures, Index Ventures
What the startup does: Builds an LLM model for production robots
Why it’s disruptive: Normally it’s a bad sign when a startup’s founders leave. But in Covariant’s case, it signed a large agreement with Amazon to outfit warehouses when Amazon poached them — a tactic that’s been called a reverse acquihire. Covariant’s tech is helping warehouse robots work more intelligently.
Cyera
HQ location: New York, New York
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $760 million
Examples of VC backers: Sequoia, Accel, Sapphire, Cyberstarts
What the startup does: Uses AI to help organizations understand the location and movement of all the data in their networks.
Why it’s disruptive: Cybersecurity and AI go hand in hand these days, and Israeli startup Cyera, with R&D in Tel Aviv, is one of the startups making a mark in the field. Its platform helps defend against new frontiers like the development of large language models.
/dev/agents
HQ location: San Francisco, California
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $56 million
Examples of VC backers: Index Ventures, CapitalG
What the startup does: Builds an operating system for AI agents
Why it’s disruptive: /dev/agents founders argue that a dedicated operating system designed for AI agents could unlock their full potential, just as iOS and Android provided the foundation for the mobile app revolution. It helps, of course, that people who started this company were some of the original minds behind Android.
ElevenLabs
HQ location: New York, New York
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $103 million
Examples of VC backers: Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross
What the startup does: Generates synthetic voice narration and dubbing into other languages
Why it’s disruptive: Although a number of companies are able to create synthetic voices, ElevenLabs stands out for its ability to clone the speech of specific humans.
Emergence
Location: New York, New York
Funding raised to date (per TechCrunch): $97.2 million
Examples of VC backers: Learn Capital
What the startup does: AI agent knowledge workers
Why it’s disruptive: Emergence claims to be building a system that can perform many of the tasks typically handled by knowledge workers, in part by routing these tasks to first- and third-party generative AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o. The startup’s founders include Satya Nitta, the former head of global AI solutions at IBM’s research organization.
Etched
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $120 million
Examples of VC backers: Two Sigma Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, Kyle Vogt, Peter Thiel
What the startup does: Makes a chip specifically designed to run AI models
Why it’s disruptive: Only two years old, Etched was founded by a pair of Harvard dropouts who wanted to create a chip that could run only one type of AI model: transformers. That might sound like a risky venture. But transformers are the dominant type of AI model by far (at least for now), powering apps from OpenAI’s video generator Sora to Anthropic’s chatbot Claude.
Exa
HQ location: San Francisco
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $22 million
Examples of VC backers: Lightspeed, Nvidia’s NVentures, Y Combinator
What the startup does: Provides a search engine for AI apps
Why it’s disruptive: While there’s no shortage of AI search engines for humans, Exa is building an internet search engine for the AI apps and agents themselves — who can’t just fire up Google and type. Ultimately, the team is trying to create the next Google, using AI to build better search.
Fervo Energy
HQ location: Houston, Texas
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $421.5 million
Examples of VC backers: BHP Ventures, Bill Gates, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, DCVC, Masayoshi Son, Richard Branson
What the startup does: Repurposes oil and gas drilling technologies to produce clean power
Why it’s disruptive: Fervo Energy takes fracking techniques from the oil and gas sector and uses them to drill wells that harness geothermal power in more places for less money. Tech companies, which have seen their power demand soar as a result of AI, have taken note: Google’s data centers in Nevada are now partially powered by a 3.5-megawatt power plant that Fervo developed. The company raised $244 million this year to pursue a 2-gigawatt project in Utah consisting of around 320 wells. Drill, baby, drill.
GPTZero
HQ location: Princeton, New Jersey
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $13.5 million
Examples of VC backers: Footwork, Reach Capital, Alt Capital, Uncork Capital
What the startup does: Makes an LLM AI-generated detection app used by schools, journalists, other enterprises
Why it’s disruptive: As humans turn to AI to do their writing and their videos and photo illustrations, the need to determine if something was AI generated, plagiarized, or created by a human is rising. GPTZero is leading the way for a tech solution to a tech-created problem. It launched out of Princeton and was profitable before raising a dime.
Helsing
Location: Munich, Germany
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $828.4 million
Examples of VC backers: Daniel Ek, Saab AB, Accel, Lightspeed, Greenoaks
What the startup does: Provides AI software to process defense system information from drones, other weapons
Why it’s disruptive: Helsing has won deals with Airbus SE and defense ministries in Germany and Ukraine. While the U.S. has a growing cadre of powerful defense tech startups, few other European defense startups have managed to get to Helsing’s scale.
Hermeus
HQ location: Atlanta, Georgia
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $222.49 million
Examples of VC backers: Founders Fund, In-Q-Tel, RTX Ventures
What the startup does: Builds hypersonic aircraft for commercial and defense uses
Why it’s disruptive: From 90 flights from New York to Paris, to high-speed military drones that are extremely difficult to intercept, the government is obsessed with hypersonic capabilities. Hermeus is a top startup in the area, breaking ground this year on a hypersonic testing facility in Jacksonville, Florida.
Impulse Space
HQ location: Redondo Beach, California
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $225 million
Examples of VC backers: Founders Fund, Lux Capital, RTX Ventures
What the startup does: Develops a line of orbital transfer vehicles for last-mile payload delivery and transfers to low Earth orbit, medium Earth orbit, geosynchronous and beyond
Why it’s disruptive: Impulse, founded by SpaceX’s former CTO of propulsion, is allowing companies to truly take advantage of the cost savings unlocked by cheap launch with its last-mile payload delivery. The startup is also opening up faraway orbits at cheaper prices with its GEO ride-share service. It landed major contracts with the Space Force and closed a $150 million funding round this year alone.
Island
HQ location: Dallas, Texas
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $550 million
Examples of VC backers: Coatue, Sequoia Capital, Citi Ventures
What the startup does: Creates a secure enterprise browser
Why it’s disruptive: Island may be the most valuable startup you have never heard of, with a $3 billion valuation as of April. Island is showing the software world that even when a market seems completely owned by the biggest players (Google, Microsoft), a newcomer can come in with a new twist — enterprise-controlled security — and command investment and gain customers.
Joco
HQ location: New York, New York
Funding raised to date (per TechCrunch): $7.5 million
Examples of VC backers: Shock Ventures, Automotive Ventures, Columbia Business School’s Lang Fund
What the startup does: Provides a network of docked e-bikes for last-mile delivery
Why it’s disruptive: Joco almost died several times since launching in 2021. First when the NYC DOT sued it for stepping onto Citi Bike’s turf. Then when its erstwhile partners — quick-commerce startups like Jokr — perished. But through heads-down execution and customer obsession, Joco’s founders managed to turn Joco into a profitable business and expand into new verticals, like e-bike battery charging cabinets.
HQ location: Berkeley, California
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $895 million
Examples of VC backers: Andreessen Horowitz, BHP Ventures, Bill Gates, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Equinor Ventures, Jeff Bezos
What the startup does: Uses AI to find critical minerals for the energy transition
Why it’s disruptive: Mining is a risky business. Companies spend millions looking for new ore deposits. KoBold uses AI to search for signs of critical minerals. The gamble appears to have paid off: The company announced this year that it had discovered one of the largest copper deposits of all time, and it has raised nearly $500 million to exploit it.
Letta
HQ location: Berkeley, California
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $10 million
Examples of VC backers: Felicis, Jeff Dean, Clem Delangue
What the startup does: Makes MemGPT, offers AI systems memory for LLMs
Why it’s disruptive: MemGPT solves a pernicious problem for LLMs, which are stateless in their native form, meaning they don’t store historical data in long-term memory. The AI development world was so thirsty for a solution that the team’s open source project, MemGPT, went viral before it was even launched when someone shared their paper before their GitHub went live.
Magic
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding raised to date (per Crunchbase): $465.1 million
Examples of VC backers: CapitalG, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Eric Schmidt
What the startup does: Creates AI models to generate code and automate a range of software development tasks
Why it’s disruptive: Lots of tools automate dev work, including GitHub Copilot. But one of Magic’s innovations lies in its models’ ultra-long context windows. The startup claims its latest model, LTM-2-mini, has a 100 million-token context window, meaning it can analyze up to around 10 million lines of code in one go.
Moonvalley
Location: Los Angeles, California
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $70 million
Examples of VC backers: Y Combinator, Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures
What the startup does: Builds a generative AI video generator
Why it’s disruptive: Most generative AI companies train models on public data, some of which is invariably copyrighted. Moonvalley claims it’s one of the few using exclusively licensed data from creators who’ve “opted in.” The startup is training a series of video generators that it plans to release in the coming months, alongside tools aimed at brands and creative agencies.
Nodal
HQ location: New York, New York
Funding raised to date (per company): $12.7 million
Examples of VC backers: NFX, Liquid 2 Ventures, Amplo
What the startup does: Connects prospective parents with vetted surrogates.
Why it’s disruptive: Nodal is building a tech alternative to surrogacy matching agencies for prospective parents interested in having a child through a surrogate. It promises to be more transparent for prospective parents, faster, and less costly than going through an agency, it says.
Oura
HQ location: Oulu, Finland
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $776.15 million
Examples of VC backers: Forerunner Ventures, Dexcom, Block, Marc Benioff
What the startup does: Makes a health and fitness tracker ring
Why it’s disruptive: Oura is proving that a lot of health tech can be fit into a ring. Last month, glucose device maker Dexcom invested $75 million, paving the way for the ring to eventually track blood sugar, in addition to the sleep and activity tracking it currently provides. It also this year acquired enterprise health-tracking startup Sparta Science, its third acquisition in two years.
Pair Team
HQ location: San Francisco, California
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $23 million
Examples of VC backers: 8VC, 1984 Ventures, Kapor Capital
What the startup does: Connects underserved communities to high-quality physical, mental, and social services
Why it’s disruptive: Pair Team has cracked the code on helping local organizations better help underserved communities without spending more money out of their own pockets. Pair Team helps these organizations offer these resources covered by Medicaid. Pair Team is a truly novel and cost-effective approach to helping some of the most vulnerable populations.
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Physics Wallah
HQ location: Noida, India
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $310 million
VC backers: GSV Ventures, WestBridge Capital, Lightspeed
What the startup does: Provides affordable learning courses
Why it’s disruptive: In a year rocked by edtech setbacks globally, but especially in India, where we saw Byju’s erase much of the $22 billion in value it created in a decade, edtech startup Physics Wallah has continued to grow. It offers annual courses to high school students and those preparing for competitive entrance exams, for less than $50. It also raised a $210 million round this year, more than doubling its valuation at a time when its rivals are struggling to survive.
Polymarket
HQ location: New York, New York
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $111.20 million
Examples of VC backers: Founders Fund, 1confirmation, Dragonfly
What the startup does: Provides a prediction marketplace
Why it’s disruptive: Polymarket blew up during the election, with almost $3.7 billion bet on the election between President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. The FBI has since raided the home of Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan and taken his electronic devices. But Coplan doesn’t seem to think that will halt his company’s momentum: “New phone, who dis?” Coplan tweeted shortly after the raid.
Poolside
HQ Location: Paris, France
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $626 million
Examples of VC backers: Bain, Redpoint, SoftBank, In-Q-Tel, DST, eBay
What the startup does: Makes an AI coding platform
Why it’s disruptive: Poolside is part of the massive wave of AI development coming out of Paris. Having AI to assist in the writing and maintenance of code has emerged as a bubble within the bigger bubble of generative AI, with investors pouring hundreds of millions of dollars in. Poolside is among those getting a lot of attention (and money) because it picked up early traction with customers and it has impressive founders: The CEO is the former CTO of GitHub and the CTO is considered a genius in building developer tools.
Profound
HQ location: New York, New York
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $3.5 million
Examples of VC backers: Khosla Ventures, Saga, South Park Commons
What the startup does: Provides AI search analytics
Why it’s disruptive: As AI becomes an increasing factor in what appears at the top of online search results, brands that have spent years perfecting their SEO strategy will have to adjust. Profound’s platform lets companies compare how they show up in traditional search versus AI search and why. Profound seems to have emerged from stealth at the right time to capitalize on this new market opportunity as the young company is already working with large branding agencies and companies like Indeed and MongoDB.
PromiseBio
HQ location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $8.3 million
Examples of VC backers: Awz Ventures
What the startup does: Focuses on precision medicine for autoimmune diseases
Why it’s disruptive: PromiseBio’s cloud-based AI platform can check proteins for more than 200 different post-translational modifications (PTMs) at once. The ability to check for these modifications at scale allows precision medicine in the treatment of autoimmune diseases for the first time. The company’s tech is doing for autoimmune diseases what CRISPR did for cancer treatment.
Roon
HQ location: New York, New York
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $22.5 million
Examples of VC backers: Forerunner Ventures, Sequoia Capital, FirstMark Capital
What the startup does: Creates a network of video-based Q&As by doctors on thousands of health issues
Why it’s disruptive: High-quality, clinically accurate information on complex health conditions is often hard to find online. Roon aims to be the most detailed and reliable online medical content source for patients and caregivers; a new take on general searches (known as Dr. Google) or the health websites of yesterday like WebMD.
Salva Health
HQ location: Bogota, Colombia
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): N/A
Examples of VC backers: ImpactAssets, NTT DATA Foundation
What the startup does: Creates a portable device to detect breast cancer early
Why it’s disruptive: Many people, especially in rural or developing nations, do not have access to expensive mammogram equipment for routine screenings. This small device can travel with a doctor. It measures tissue density and output results to a phone, tablet, or computer. Abnormal results can then be investigated further. Salva Health was the winner of the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 Battlefield.
Saronic Technologies
HQ location: Austin, Texas
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $245 million
Examples of VC backers: 8VC, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners
What the startup does: Builds autonomous ships for defense purposes
Why it’s disruptive: Saronic already has five prototypes for unmanned ships in development and raised a massive $175 million Series B this year, crowning it one of the newest defense tech unicorns.
Sila
HQ location: Alameda, California
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $1.31 billion
Examples of VC backers: Sutter Hill Ventures, T. Rowe Price Group, Bessemer Venture Partners
What the startup does: Produces next-generation battery chemistry
Why it’s disruptive: Sila has found a way to replace the graphite in a lithium-ion battery’s anode with silicone, a material that can be produced anywhere rather than mined and processed in specific regions. And, more importantly, Sila has figured out the recipe to scale its battery chemistry. With its upcoming facility in Moses Lake, Washington, the company is getting close to putting its battery tech into over a million vehicles.
Slice
HQ location: Bengaluru, India
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $387 million
VC backers: Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Blume Ventures
What the startup does: Slice is a fintech bank.
Why it’s disruptive: Slice, which initially offered a credit card-like product to consumers in India, recently merged with North East Small Finance Bank to become a bank. It’s the first and only Indian startup to become a bank.
Spawning
HQ Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $3 million
Examples of VC backers: True Ventures, Noise DAO, Abhay Parasnis
What the startup does: Allows creators to opt out of the training datasets for several art-generating AI models
Why it’s disruptive: Co-founders Jordan Meyer and Mathew Dryhurst are leading an effort to grant artists more control over how their art is used in the generative AI era with their Have I Been Trained? website. And their startup is behind Source.Plus, a project to curate “non-infringing” media for AI model training.
Spoor
HQ location: Oslo, Norway
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $6.59 million
Examples of VC backers: Superorganism, Futurum Ventures, Farmhouse Capital
What the startup does: Uses AI to track and detect birds at wind farms
Why it’s disruptive: The global wind farm market is estimated to be worth $97 billion this year and is expected to keep growing. Local bird populations and aviation migration patterns play a big role in where wind farms can be built. Spoor’s tech can help speed up the process of scouting out new locations for wind farms, which helps bring more wind farms onto the grid with less harm to biodiversity.
Tennibot
HQ Location: Auburn, Alabama
Funding to date (per PitchBook): Around $200,000
Examples of VC backers: 10x Venture Partners, Scott Dorsey
What the startup does: Makes a robot that picks up tennis balls
Why it’s disruptive: This product is a perfect example of technology addressing a pain point that not many people would have thought to fix. This machine is like a little tennis ball Roomba, relieving humans of a tedious task that is especially difficult in the heat. The company is also an example of the opportunity for more innovation and disruption in the world of consumer sports.
Varda Space
HQ location: El Segundo, California
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $146.02 million
Examples of VC backers: Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Caffeinated Capital
What the startup does: In-space pharmaceutical manufacturing
Why it’s disruptive: There’s been promising research about the impact of zero-gravity environments on certain drug components, but it’s been near impossible to commercialize. Varda capitalizes on SpaceX’s and Rocket Lab’s low-cost ride-share launches to make the case that in-space pharmaceutical manufacturing can now be very, very lucrative. The company hit a major milestone earlier this year: It successfully formulated the HIV medicine ritonavir in space.
Waabi
HQ location: Toronto, Canada
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $282.71 million
Examples of VC backers: Ikea, Khosla Ventures, Nvidia, Porsche Automobil Holding, G2 Venture Partners, Uber
What the startup does: Develops a generative AI-powered autonomous trucking platform
Why it’s disruptive: Founder Raquel Urtasun is an AI pioneer who previously served as chief scientist at Uber ATG before launching Waabi in 2021. Waabi’s generative AI promises to reason as a human would, meaning the system would need much less data and compute power to learn how to make decisions. Urtasun has also said this approach can be extrapolated to other autonomy use cases, like robotics.
Wayve
HQ location: London, England
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $1.32 billion
Examples of VC backers: Microsoft, Nvidia, SoftBank Group, Uber, Eclipse Ventures, Baillie Gifford
What the startup does: Develops autonomous driving software
Why it’s disruptive: Wayve is shaping up to be a Tesla challenger with its self-learning, rather than rules-based, approach to autonomous driving. Like Tesla, Wayve’s technology doesn’t rely on lidar sensors to view the world around it; it uses only cameras and radar. Unlike Tesla, Wayve intends to sell its AI to other automakers that want to onboard hands-off, eyes-off driving features. Wayve recently secured backing and a partnership with Uber that might see Wayve-powered self-driving vehicles on the Uber network.
Whisper Aero
HQ location: Crossville, Tennessee
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $41.04 million
Examples of VC backers: Menlo Ventures, EVE Atlas, Capricorn’s Technology Impact Fund
What the startup does: Develops an ultra-quiet electric propulsor that can be scaled up to drones and aircraft and down to leaf blowers
Why it’s disruptive: Technologies like drones and electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft will need to be quiet in order to scale into populated areas. Whisper’s answer is a super-quiet, clean electric propulsion system called WhisperDrive. The company has R&D partnerships with NASA and announced a deal with tool and hardware giant Stanley Black & Decker to bring the WhisperDrive tech to its products.
Wiz
HQ location: New York, New York
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $1.8 billion
Examples of VC backers: Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Insight Partners
What the startup does: The single unified platform handles all things cloud computing security.
Why it’s disruptive: Wiz shocked the industry in July when it turned down a $23 billion acquisition offer from Google, months after it raised $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation, proving to other startups the power to say no. When its competitor Crowdstrike froze the world by pushing a faulty update that crashed Windows, Wiz’s decision to remain independent seemed to be validated.
Xona Space Systems
HQ location: San Mateo, California
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $42.02 million
Examples of VC backers: Seraphim Space, Lockheed Martin Ventures, MaC Venture Capital
What the startup does: Builds a satellite navigation system that is a more accurate alternative to GPS
Why it’s disruptive: The next generation of technology will need more accurate navigation systems — this is true for commercial and civil/defense. The company raised a $19 million Series A this year ahead of the launch of its first production satellite next summer.
Zap Energy
HQ location: Everett, Washington
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $326.6 million
Examples of VC backers: Addition, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Chevron, DCVC, Emerson Collective, Lowercarbon Capital, Shell Ventures
What the startup does: Provides fusion power without magnets
Why it’s disruptive: One of fusion power’s biggest challenges is confining superheated plasma long enough to generate power, and most companies use expensive magnets to accomplish the task. Zap is instead pursuing an approach known as sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch. The startup raised $130 million this year and built a prototype called Century, which sends a lightning bolt of electricity through a stream of plasma, which then generates its own magnetic field. At commercial scale, it should spark a fusion reaction powerful enough to produce power, something CEO Benj Conway said should happen in the early 2030s.
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Zepto
HQ location: Mumbai, India
Funding raised to date (per PitchBook): $1.95 billion
VC backers: Nexus, StepStone, Lightspeed, Avra, General Catalyst
What the startup does: Operates an eponymous quick-commerce platform, delivering groceries to customers in multiple Indian cities in 10 minutes.
Why it’s disruptive: Even as India already has two formidable food-delivery startups and multiple e-commerce and grocery firms, two Stanford dropouts proved that quick commerce can work in India and scaled it to more than $1 billion in annualized sales in just 29 months. They also raised more than $1.3 billion in 2024.