Top Artificial Intelligence Startups in San Francisco, CA

Custom small models trained for specialized use cases powered by scalable infrastructure

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.

Traba is building a world where the global supply chain operates at peak efficiency. We connect industrial businesses with reliable workers to fill open shifts and empower both businesses and workers to reach their full productivity and potential.

Tasklet is building the AI platform companies use to run their business on agents. Our customers describe an outcome in plain English, and Tasklet gets the work done—across SaaS tools, APIs, browsers, files, spreadsheets, and internal systems. Agents can respond immediately or run business processes in the cloud 24×7 on a schedule or in response to events. Every Tasklet agent gets its own cloud computers, filesystem, database, and browser. Tasklet agents are built to do real work at real companies where many people are involved in each function. Teams share agents, knowledge, connections, and conversations, while administrators control access, behavior, and spend. Tasklet users can choose among models and delegate work to faster, cheaper ones—giving companies one flexible platform instead of a growing pile of disconnected AI seats. We compete with ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork. OpenAI and Anthropic have their own models, massive funding, and existing distribution. We have a small, exceptional team, the freedom to use the best AI tech from any vendor, and a laser focus on the problems of real-world businesses where making agents simple, trustworthy, and easy to control matters just as much as making them intelligent. The labs will define what intelligence can do, but Tasklet will define how businesses put that intelligence to work.

Cracken is a fast-growing Silicon Valley-based startup built by elite nation-state and commercial operators who defended critical cyber infrastructure during the war in Ukraine, researched AI and cybersecurity at MIT and Kyiv Polytechnic, and led teams at Apple, Google, Palo Alto Networks, HackerOne, DIU, Comcast, HP, and more. We tame Cracken, an AI Agent for Cybersecurity with human-in-the-loop. Our flagship product, is an agentic AI copilot drastically scaling cyber assessments for enterprises and governments.

Calibratr is an embedded recruiting partner for high-growth startups. We're a team of recruiters, founders, and operators who've scaled teams from first hire to series B and beyond. We embed directly as an extension of your in-house team. We offer full-cycle embedded recruiting and retained sourcing powered by our experience, workflows and AI agents.

Your voice agent's whole bill on one ledger. Inside Vapi, Retell, LiveKit, Pipecat & Bland, or fully BYOK.

At Robylon, we’re redefining how businesses handle customer support with AI-powered automation. Our platform seamlessly integrates across Tickets/Emails, Chats, Social, and Voice, enabling companies to: ✅ Automate over 80% of customer queries ✅ Accelerate resolution times by 90%+ ✅ Cut support costs by 30%+ We believe in outcomes, not just promises—so we only charge per resolved query. ?