AI Startups to Watch in 2025

PLUS: Qwen has released its most capable coding model yet

Author

Barsee
23 Jul

Together with

Howdy. It’s Barsee again.

Happy Wednesday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley.

Today’s climb through the Valley reveals:

  • Qwen has released its most capable coding model yet

  • Proton is launching a privacy-focused AI chatbot

  • AI Startups to Watch in 2025

  • Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

GUIDDE

Image: Guidde

Tired of explaining the same thing over and over again to your colleagues?

It’s time to delegate that work to AI. Guidde is a GPT-powered tool that helps you explain the most complex tasks in seconds with AI-generated documentation.

  • Share or embed your guide anywhere

  • Turn boring documentation into stunning visual guides

  • Save valuable time by creating video documentation 11x faster

Simply click capture on the browser extension and the app will automatically generate step-by-step video guides complete with visuals, voiceover and call to action.

The best part? The extension is 100% free

*This is sponsored

PEAK OF THE DAY

AI Startups to Watch in 2025

Image Source: 1X Technologies

Every year, new startups pull to the forefront of their industry through exciting innovation, tech, and industry-disrupting business models. I have rounded up the top AI startups of 2025 that AI enthusiasts and aspiring entrepreneurs should follow.

  • Anysphere (Cursor) - Makes Cursor, an AI-native code editor that writes, refactors, and explains entire programs inside VS Code.

  • Moonshot AI (Kimi AI) - Builds Kimi, a long-context Chinese LLM chatbot and open-source models like Kimi K2.

  • Physical Intelligence (Pi) - Building π0, the first generalist robot foundation model that learns any manipulation task from a single 5-minute human demo.

  • Thinking Machines - Mira Murati’s new $10 B company whose agents autonomously close finance month-end books and re-forecast budgets.

  • Isomorphic Labs - DeepMind spin-out designing first AI-generated drug candidates now entering human trials.

  • DeepSeek AI - Open-source lab releasing large language and math models (DeepSeek-Coder, DeepSeek-Math).

  • ElevenLabs - API and web app that turns text into ultra-realistic cloned voices in 32 languages.

  • Cognition Labs - Created Devin, an autonomous “AI software engineer” agent that writes and tests code end-to-end. Also bought Windsurf recently.

  • Perplexity AI - Search engine that answers questions with live web citations and follow-up queries. They recently launched Comet browser to take on Google Chrome.

  • Anthropic - Safety-focused lab behind Claude, a constitutional-AI chatbot designed to be helpful and harmless.

  • Mistral AI - French team releasing open-weights LLMs (Mistral-7B, Mixtral-8x7B) and cloud APIs.

  • xAI - Elon Musk’s company running the Grok chatbot inside X/Twitter and training frontier models.

  • io Products (acquired by OpenAI) - Jony Ive’s hardware studio acquired by OpenAI to co-design a dedicated ChatGPT consumer device.

  • Meta “Superintelligence Labs” Spin-outs - Three stealth teams spun out with Llama-4 weights to build vertical alignment and reasoning tools.

  • InWorld AI - SDK that adds LLM-powered, memory-enabled NPCs to video-game engines.

  • World Labs - Fei-Fei Li’s company developing Large World Models that generate and edit 3-D scenes from images or text.

  • Surge AI - Managed workforce that creates human-labeled datasets for RLHF and model evaluation.

  • Synthesia - Browser studio that converts text scripts into presenter-led videos using AI avatars.

  • Factory AI - “Droid” agents that review code, write tests, and manage releases inside Slack and Jira.

  • SandboxAQ - Quantum-classical software running live portfolio-risk models for large asset managers.

  • Runway – Gen-3 Alpha turns text or images into short, production-ready video clips for filmmakers.

  • Gemini Robotics (DeepMind) - DeepMind’s on-device policy model that lets factory robots learn new tasks from ~50 demonstrations.

  • 1X Technologies - Humanoid robot platforms natively running LLMs for everyday generalization.

  • Unitree Robotics - Manufactures low-cost quadruped and humanoid robots for research and light industry.

  • Manas AI - Cancer-focused drug-discovery platform screening billions of molecules with AI.

  • Safe Superintelligence - Ilya Sutskever’s lab focused solely on building safe artificial general intelligence.

  • Clay - Automated outbound-sales platform that scrapes data and writes personalized emails at scale.

  • Scrunch AI - “SEO for LLMs” dashboard that tells brands how to appear correctly in ChatGPT, Claude, and voice-assistant answers.

  • Shield AI – Hivemind software enabling GPS-denied drone swarms to fly autonomously for defense missions.

  • Silurian - Stealth team releasing planetary-scale simulation models that predict global crop yields and supply-chain shocks 30 days ahead.

THROUGH THE VALLEY

Image Source: Qwen

It’s a large Mixture-of-Experts model with 480 billion parameters, but only 35 billion are used at a time. It can handle really long inputs—256,000 tokens by default, and up to 1 million with some extra setup. It scores well on coding tasks like SWE-bench-Verified. Qwen also shared a command-line tool called Qwen Code. It’s a fork of Gemini Code, with some changes to help it work better with Qwen3-Coder. It supports function calls and fits nicely into existing developer tools.

Proton, the company behind Proton Mail, has launched Lumo, a privacy-focused AI assistant designed to keep user data secure. Lumo can summarize documents, write emails, generate code, and more, with all data stored locally on user devices and protected by zero-access encryption. This means only users can view their content, and Proton can’t share it with advertisers, governments, or use it for AI training. Powered by open-source models like Mistral and Nvidia’s OpenHands, Lumo offers a safer alternative to ChatGPT and Gemini. It’s available now on web and mobile, with a free tier and a $12.99/month premium plan.

A new startup called Decart is rethinking how we use AI to edit videos. Instead of endlessly generating and tweaking prompts, its upcoming platform, Mirage, lets you transform livestreams and videos in real-time. Described as the “first ever World Transformation Model,” Mirage can instantly reshape your surroundings with styles like “anime,” “Versailles Palace,” or even custom prompts like “cubist painting.” It works by generating each frame based on the last, making it faster than traditional diffusion methods. In the future, this tech could let you watch sports in a cyberpunk world or give your favorite games entirely new themes.

Amazon is moving deeper into AI wearables with its acquisition of Bee, a startup that makes a $50 Fitbit-like bracelet and an Apple Watch app designed to listen to conversations and create reminders or to-do lists. Bee, which raised $7 million last year, pitches itself as a “personal, ambient intelligence” and plans to evolve into a “cloud phone” that mirrors users’ devices. While Bee claims strong privacy features (like no audio storage and user data deletion), it’s unclear if these policies will remain under Amazon, which has faced criticism in the past over Ring camera data sharing.

TRENDING TOOLS

  • Ash - The first AI designed for therapy

  • Pimeyes - Search the internet using a face photo to find matching images across public websites

  • Lumo - A privacy-first AI built by Proton, where every conversation is confidential

  • Qwen3 - Alibaba’s newly updated SOTA open-source model

THINK PIECES / BRAIN BOOST

THE VALLEY GEMS

What’s trending on social today:

1/ A FLUX Kontext LoRA that transforms Google Earth screenshots into realistic drone photography

2/ A student appears to have recently developed an air/water transmedium drone

3/ AI 2027 depicts a possible future where artificial intelligence radically transforms the world in just a few intense years

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY

Thank you for reading today’s edition. That’s all for today’s issue.

💡 Help me get better and suggest new ideas at [email protected] or @heyBarsee

👍️ New reader? Subscribe here

Thanks for being here.

REACH 100K+ READERS

Acquire new customers and drive revenue by partnering with us

Sponsor AI Valley and reach over 100,000+ entrepreneurs, founders, software engineers, investors, etc.

If you’re interested in sponsoring us, email [email protected] with the subject “AI Valley Ads”.