Startups all over the globe are changing the tech world with innovations and new user experiences. We’ve made a shortlist of players we considered the most significant in startup news in August.
Artificial Intelligence
Inworld AI
Country: USA
Founded date: 2021
The Inworld team provides an AI-powered platform for creating interactive virtual characters for a truly immersive user experience. The user describes the character in natural language without code: name, age, appearance, goals and motivations, manner of speech, knowledge, voice and much more. For example: “Alex, 24 years old, DigitalMara Java developer, has three years of work experience, has a cat and likes playing video games in his free time.”
The Inworld team has also given serious thought to providing a secure user experience. The platform algorithm recognizes and blocks hateful and violent speech, sexual content and messages that promote self-harm.
It was selected as one of six companies to join the 2022 Disney Accelerator program. And it has just closed a $50 million Series A funding round.
Investors consider Inworld to be a future key player in the metaverse and gaming market. But the potential scope of its technology could be much wider, with applications to the fields of entertainment, sales, marketing, training and education.
Anyscale
Country: USA
Founded date: 2019
Anyscale is an AI startup that developed an open-source Python framework, Ray, to run distributed computing projects. Ray has two elements: a universal serverless computer application programming interface and an expanded ecosystem of libraries. The focus is on making processes easier and less resource-consuming.
Anyscale has added $99 million to a previous Series C funding round.
The company continues to develop its products. In the Ray Summit, it introduced new innovations in Ray 2.0 and Anyscale’s managed Ray compute platform. In collaboration with Microsoft and ByteDance, the company came up with KubeRay for managing Ray clusters on Kubernetes.
Digital health
Alma
Country: USA
Founded date: 2018
Alma provides a membership-based platform for independent mental health care therapists, which solves issues involving insurance acceptance. By joining Alma, professionals get access to teletherapy software, including scheduling, billing, and note-taking, and a community of professionals, with education and training options.
Clients also benefit; they can fill out an online form, based on their type of insurance, and receive personalized recommendations for therapists that fit their needs.
At the moment, the platform is onboarding 8,000 professionals. And its network is spreading to 27 states. Alma has agreements with companies such as Cigna, CVS Health Corp. and UnitedHealth Group Inc.
Alma has closed a $130 million Series D funding round. The company plans to invest in expanding the network and adding new features such as billing options and practice tools
Human resources
HIBOB
Country: Israel
Founded date: 2015
HiBob provides businesses with an agile HR system that goes beyond core HR and onboarding functions, to add functions related to talent management, workforce planning, and compensation management. For now, HiBob is available in 166 countries and 13 languages, has 7 offices in various countries and supports 2500 brands with its services.
The company closed a $150 million Series D funding round and attained a place on the 2022 Forbes Cloud 100 list, a ranking of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world.
HiBob has recently announced integration with Remote, which helps employers find talent worldwide. This integration will deliver one-way data synchronization for customers of both platforms. Employee information from HiBob will transfer automatically to the Remote platform, simplifying the candidate search process worldwide.
Elder Care
GUBBE
Country: Finland
Founded date: 2018
Gubbe provides services for elderly people and their families, aiming to support a happy and active old age. The platform connects young people to elderly people who need help with housework, staying active, transportation, technology lessons and much more.
The aim is to fight loneliness among elderly people, which is harmful to health, while creating new jobs for young people. A Gubbe subscription connects seniors needing accompaniment with young people, and preferably someone they have something in common with.
Gubbe appeared in a WIRED article listing “The Hottest Startups in Europe” two years in a row. Recently they have raised €4 million on a seed stage. Now the team is expanding to the UK, bringing care to older Brits.
Business Intelligence
Celonis
Country: Germany
Founded date: 2011
Celonis provides an execution management system that helps companies run business processes, such as analytics, planning and automation, using data and intelligence. The company’s system uses a unique set of “process mining” tools to find and fix process problems inside of enterprise systems that are hidden at first sight.
The company claims to have more than 2,500 enterprise global deployments and has graduated more than 100,000 “practitioners” from its certification program in the Celonis Academic Alliance.
Celonis was named #11 on the 2022 Forbes Cloud 100 list, and has been on the list for four years in a row. The company recently raised an additional $1 billion in funding and announced a partnership with WalkMe, a provider of Digital Adoption Platforms. The idea behind this collaboration is to combine products to accelerate digital transformation and reach new levels of business performance.
Bonus
Midjourney
Midjourney is a team of enthusiasts who aim to expand human imaginative powers with the support of Artificial Intelligence. AI art is becoming more and more popular. It can be used for entertainment, sales and marketing, for books and comics and pure art.
Recently the team has expanded third-party server support for the bot. So now Midjourney can work on any server, with up to 30,000 users.
Any person can go to Discord, describe an idea to the Midjourney bot and wait for an artwork to appear. The first 25 works are free; then a paid subscription is needed.
We present the DigitalMara gallery.
