Top Artificial Intelligence Startups in San Francisco, CA

What are we building? Software was supposed to help us. Instead, it swallowed the working day. Everywhere you look people are buried under the burden of software. We are starting with automating email, turning it from a burden into a powerful competitive edge for people who grow businesses and build a reputation in their inbox. Think real estate, consultants, recruiters - people who spend hours on emails, scheduling, and follow ups. Unlike other startups, we're a pure-play applied AI company and not a SaaS company with AI features hastily bolted on. We use the best techniques (fine-tuned open-source models, tool use, and retrieval-augmented generation), and as a result, users send 53% of the email drafts we generate. How has it been going? From $1M to $25M ARR in the last 10 months, making us the fastest growing startup ever in the UK. We are backed by top-tier investors including: Marc Benioff (Founder of Salesforce), Harry Stebbings (Founder of 20VC), Douwe Kiela (Founder/CEO Contextual AI/Creator of RAG), David Singleton (Former CTO of Stripe), Des Traynor (CTO Intercom), Madrona (First Investors in Amazon/Snowflake). What do we value? We're very intentional about adding new people. We believe a small team of exceptional people working hard at a problem they care about will always outperform a larger, more unfocused team. That means you'll need to bring an intensity to this role that might not be expected at other companies but it also means you'll be fast-tracked into roles with greater responsibilities far earlier.

Mercor partners with leading AI labs and enterprises to train frontier models using human expertise. With a talent network of more than 30,000 people across hundreds of domains, Mercor is building a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. While computing power and engineering talent have advanced rapidly, AI models can only improve when they learn from real human expertise across disciplines like law, medicine, coding, and finance. Mercor bridges this gap by connecting top professionals with frontier AI labs, enabling them to share insights, provide expert feedback, and shape the reasoning capabilities of next-generation models. Backed by $350 million in Series C funding led by Felicis, with Benchmark, General Catalyst, and Robinhood Ventures, Mercor is now valued at $10 billion. At its core, Mercor’s culture thrives on impact, agility, and growth. Mercor powers its teams to build at the frontier of technology.

GoodGoblin.ai is the ultimate "Admissions Operating System" designed to democratize elite college guidance. We believe expert mentorship shouldn't be a luxury for the few, so we built a data-driven platform that levels the playing field for every student. Our Four Pillars of Success Our platform guides students through the entire journey—from freshman strategy to senior year submission:   Architect (Grades 9–11): Builds a multi-year roadmap and identifies "profile gaps" early on.   Strategist (Grades 10–12): Uses data to find the perfect mix of "Reach," "Target," and "Safety" schools.   Editor (Grades 11–12): Provides 24/7 AI narrative coaching with instant feedback on clarity, story, and structure.   Analyst (Grade 12): Performs a final holistic audit to calculate real-time acceptance probabilities before you hit submit. Why It Matters Proven Results: Our users see a 31% boost in admission odds, with 97% of students securing a spot at a Top-30 university.   Radical Transparency: We show students exactly why an essay works using the same metrics admissions officers use.   Engineering Precision: We turn "guessing" into "optimizing" by analyzing millions of data points from successful applicants.   Join us in our mission to make the path to a dream university predictable, affordable, and stress-free for over 50,000 students worldwide.

Coastal Carbon is a seed-funded startup on a mission to create positive impact through earth observation and AI. Founded at the University of Waterloo by a team of PhDs and engineers, we’re backed by some of the best AI and climate tech investors like HF0, Inovia Capital and Propeller Ventures, angels like James Tamplin (cofounder Firebase) and Sid Gorham (cofounder OpenTable, Granular), and partners like Amazon AWS and the United Nations. We’re building multimodal foundation models for the natural world. We believe there’s more to the world than the internet + more to intelligence than memorizing the internet. Our models are trained on satellite remote sensing and real world ground truth data, and are used by our customers in nature conservation, carbon dioxide removal, and government to protect and positively impact our increasingly changing world. Our ultimate goal is to build AGI of the natural world.

EliseAI is an AI startup transforming complex healthcare and housing systems. By deeply integrating into workflows and automating operations, it makes them efficient and cuts costs for all. Its platform supports medical practices with patient scheduling, intake and front-desk operations and helps property managers handle leasing, maintenance and resident engagement. EliseAI replaces fragmented tools with one integrated system that reduces manual work and improves accessibility and experience for residents and patients alike. The company is based in New York with teams in San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. To learn more, visit eliseai.com/careers.

Exploring intelligence that transcends Mental Efficiency (Physical Efficiency/Performance). By C.Monitor (monitoring brain wave-neuro-heart-blood), AI IoT. & Neuroscience.

We’re living in a time of polycrisis. Not one problem, but myriad entangled, global problems: climate collapse, social fragmentation, runaway technologies. The systems meant to sustain life are accelerating its breakdown. The old ways—isolation, extraction, and short-term gain—are collapsing under their own weight. They will not carry us forward. But something else is stirring. A deeper possibility. A different logic. Humanity needs to meet this moment, not with band-aid solutions, but with systemic transformation. We need innovation more than ever, but it must be life-aligned. For that, we need a radical shift in how we think, relate, and create. That's what the Flourishing Systems Foundation was designed to catalyze.

How It Works: Clients interact over text with in-house coaches and get non-stop support to improve their nutrition, exercise and lifestyle habits: agreeing weekly goals, asking questions anytime, getting feedback on progress and discussing pain points. Our coaches provide proven behavioural support which can’t be automated. Our tech automates key coaching practices to streamline human time and to ensure remaining human tasks can be performed by more affordable, Fitmate-certified coaches. Each coach can thereby superscale a client base who otherwise can’t afford this service, whilst providing personalized support & accountability never experienced before. Outcome: Fitmate clients pay 80% less to access behaviour change support provided by human coaches, are 8x more likely to retain and 2x more likely to lose weight compared to weight loss apps and similar.