Top Tech Startups in California, US in 2026

Hey, we’re Deepgram! We’re an AI speech platform whose mission is to make every voice heard and understood. Our end-to-end deep neural network is revolutionizing the speech-to-text market and taking on the big guys. We’re redefining what companies can do with voice by offering a platform with AI architectural advantage, not legacy tech retrofitted with AI. Deepgram delivers highly accurate, actually usable transcription, right out of the box – or you can train a model for even greater accuracy on the unique words that matter to you. ✅ Live-stream or pre-recorded ✅ On-prem or in the cloud ✅ Scalable and affordable ✅ Dozens of languages and use case models ✅ Features like diarization, summarization, language/topic detection, and more. We’ve raised over $86 million and have been recognized as an Inc. Best Workplace (2021 and 2022), a Forbes Top 50 AI Company to Watch (2021), and a CB Insights Top 100 AI Startup (2021), among others. Come join our revolution to unlock the power of voice technology for everyone. We want to hear what you’ve got to say! An NVIDIA partner and Y Combinator company

Away is a modern lifestyle brand creating thoughtful products designed to transform travel. Since our launch in February 2016, we have become one of the fastest growing consumer brands in the world. We have sold millions of travel products, grown from a team of four to over 250, expanded shipping to nearly 40 countries, opened seven stores across two countries, and launched several new products and experiences that are inspiring more people to travel the world. And we know that’s just the beginning! In just over three years, we have already been twice named one of Fast Company’s “World’s Most Innovative Companies,” one of TIME’s “50 Most Genius Companies,” one of LinkedIn's "Top Startups,"​ and a Forbes “Next Billion Dollar Startup.” We have also raised more than $156M in total equity funding to fuel our next phase of growth.

Domino powers model-driven business for the world’s most advanced enterprises, including over 20% of the Fortune 100. Our Enterprise MLOps platform speeds up the development and deployment of data science work while increasing collaboration and governance, to scale data science into a competitive advantage. Our platform enables thousands of data scientists to develop better medicines, grow more productive crops, adapt risk models to major economic shifts, build better cars, improve customer support, or simply recommend the best purchase to make at the right time. Domino is backed by leading venture capital firms: Sequoia Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Coatue Management, Dell Technologies Capital, Highland Capital Partners, In-Q-Tel, and Zetta Venture Partners.

Candid is redefining oral health by using modern technology to help deliver human-focused care. With a commitment to creating the best outcomes, Candid inspires confidence and promotes wellbeing. We believe that high-quality orthodontics should be affordable and accessible, and we’re pioneering an innovative approach to diagnosing, treating, and monitoring cases remotely. Our team is a group of startup veterans with experience across healthcare, hospitality, tech, and finance at companies such as Lyft, BCG, Airbnb, Blackstone, and Clover Health.

Product.ai is building the verification layer for AI commerce. We are not a startup pitch. We are a profitable company that has been verifying commerce data at scale for over a decade. No venture capital. No board. 100% founder-owned. Product.ai operates more like a special forces team than a traditional company. Every team member is an Axiomatic Engineer — an autonomous operator who extracts their mission from the company strategy, not from a manager's task list. We do not hire for well-roundedness. We hire for spikes: the innate talents that produce non-linear output when amplified by the right systems.

Most backends were designed for a world where humans read every line of code before it shipped. Today, though, software is being written by developers and their agents together. Codebases are growing faster than any team can review them and the assumptions that used to hold everything together are quietly eroding. Convex was built to solve that. Convex is a reactive backend platform where correctness is the default, for humans and agents alike. Transactions are ACID so concurrent writes never corrupt data, everything is TypeScript end to end so a hallucinated field name is a build error not a production incident, and sync and caching are automatic so there's no glue code to subtly rot. The guarantees engineers used to enforce by reading every line, the platform enforces instead. We're a small, in-person team in San Francisco who care deeply about what we're building and who we're building it with. Application demands are changing faster than the infrastructure underneath them, and defining what the right platform looks like for this new world is still the domain of very talented humans. We want you to be one of them.

Moloco was founded in 2013 by a team of machine learning and software engineers with expertise from Google, Oracle, Twitter, and Facebook. With its headquarters in Redwood City, California, Moloco has 15 offices across the US, UK, Korea, China, Japan, India, Europe, and Singapore.

Nova Credit is a credit infrastructure and analytics company that enables businesses to grow responsibly through alternative credit data. As a Consumer Reporting Agency (CRA), Nova Credit leverages its unique data infrastructure, compliance framework, and credit expertise to help lenders fill critical gaps in traditional credit analytics. The company transforms the fragmented universe of consumer financial data into compliant, actionable risk insights through a comprehensive platform designed to increase conversion through expanded coverage, speed, and reliability. Leading organizations, including HSBC, RBC, SoFi, Scotiabank, Appfolio, and Yardi, work with Nova Credit to make smarter credit decisions through cash flow underwriting with Cash Atlas™, quickly verify income with Income Navigator, and reach new-to-country consumers with Credit Passport®. Learn more at novacredit.com or reach out to [email protected]

Stripe is a software platform for starting and running internet businesses. Millions of businesses rely on Stripe’s software tools to accept payments, expand globally, and manage their businesses online. Stripe has been at the forefront of expanding internet commerce, powering new business models, and supporting the latest platforms, from marketplaces to mobile commerce sites. We believe that growing the GDP of the internet is a problem rooted in code and design, not finance. Stripe is built for developers, makers, and creators. We work on solving the hard technical problems necessary to build global economic infrastructure—from designing highly reliable systems to developing advanced machine learning algorithms to prevent fraud.

Klaviyo (NYSE: KVYO) is the B2C CRM. Powered by its built-in data platform and AI, Klaviyo combines marketing automation, analytics, and customer service into one unified solution, making it easy for businesses to know their customers and grow faster. Klaviyo (CLAY-vee-oh) helps over 183,000 brands like Mattel, Glossier, Daily Harvest, and Liquid Death deliver 1:1 experiences at scale, improve efficiency, and drive revenue.