The Omdena “Impact Tech Startups Series” comprises game-changing startups, stories, and thought-leadership pieces from leading impact ventures solving real-world problems.

Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the power to change our world as we know it. In the past years, venture capital firms have invested over 4 billion U.S. dollars into AI-driven startups between 2016 and 2020, many of which are based in the United States.  

However, VC capital alone is by far not the only and most important metric to track. 

Why should you work for an impact-driven AI startup?

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly commonplace, you might wonder if it’s time to jump ship from your traditional job and join an impact-driven startup driving positive change. 

There are multiple factors to consider, including business model, product/service focus, social impact, and company values. 

Working at one of these businesses could be right up your alley if you want to make a difference in society.

How many AI startups are in the US?

The number of US AI companies has doubled since 2017. According to Tracxn Technologies Limited, as of the first quarter of 2022, there are 12,378 Artificial Intelligence startups in the United States.

Top AI stmacartups in the USA in 2023

Here are 22 US-based AI companies creating solutions for a better tomorrow; ranging from climate change to healthcare, to cleantech, and more social impact areas.

1. Climate AI

ClimateAI, one of the top 10 AI companies in the USA, seeks to protect lives, livelihoods, and nature by bringing climate intelligence and agronomics into the age of machine learning for entire supply chains. They are a team of passionate, hardworking scientists, engineers, and agriculture entrepreneurs who all believe that climate change is the most critical problem of our generation.

Country: United States

Founders: Himanshu Gupta, Max Evans

Founded: Dec 2017

Funding: $16.2M

Applications or projects: 

Processors and packers: Understand the long-term suitability of a crop of interest across various locations. Identify optimal sourcing locations (domestic & international). Balance climate risk across your portfolio — geographic diversification is not risk diversification. Improve farm management operations.

Seed, input, and chemical companies: Understand the long-term suitability of a crop of interest across multiple locations. Identify optimal areas for production and R&D. Breed with certainty, and avoid underperformance. The current and past climate is no longer representative of the future—breed for the appropriate environment in your focus markets.

Agriculture Finance: Reduce portfolio level risk – geographic diversification is not climate risk diversification. Climate-optimize in-season production to bolster resilience and outperform the market. Invest in climate-proof locations. Understand in season extreme weather risk with implications for loan portfolios with asset-level resolution

Retailers, Co-ops, Crop Advisors: Leverage seasonal forecasts for optimal farm management recommendations: seed selection, sow date, harvest timing, crop inputs (fertilizer, pesticide, fungicide), etc. Prioritize equipment usage across the territory of interest. Pest and disease pressure forecasting. Forecast demand for climate-driven products in key markets.

2. Ferrum Health

Ferrum Health is a developer of an enterprise IT and AI patient safety platform for health systems. Ferrum Health provides artificial intelligence (AI) technology platform for health system executives to prevent medical errors across their patient population. It serves as a safety net that uses AI algorithms to assist quality teams in the peer.

Country: United States

Founders: Ken Ko, Pelu Tran

Founded: 2017

Funding: $9M

Applications or projects: 

Ferrum’s AI Hubs – Seamlessly integrating clinical imaging and administrative data, Ferrum’s AI Hubs enable health systems to validate and deploy the right AI applications for their patients.

3. I-Ally

I-Ally enables millennial family caregivers to live healthy, fulfilling lives by providing access to curated resources and support that fulfill their unique needs.

Country: United States

Founders: Lucinda Koza

Founded: Feb 4, 2020

Funding: $20K

Applications or projects:

I-Ally app for millennial family caregivers. The app helps millennial family caregivers save time, reduce stress, and enable informed decision-making by providing the services and support necessary to fulfill their unique needs.

4. TAMP

Upskilling Doctors in Digital Health Innovation. Doctor Digital Upskilling in the CMEmarket enables doctors through an integrated Digital Innovation Upskilling Program and Digital Health Innovation Platform. TAMP products and services are currently accessible by over 90,000 doctors, including 9600 surgeons.

Country: United States

Founders: Aditya Tallapragada, David A. Hall, Fion Liao

Founded: Nov 22, 2019

Funding: $820K

Applications or projects: 

Digital Health Innovation Service + Technology Platform – Enable doctors through Co-Developed, Doctor-Innovator-Facilitator led, Digital Innovation Upskilling Programs (DIUP). Engage patients through Customized Corporate Digital Employee Wellness Programs EWP. It was powered by AI + IoT Digital Health (Wearables). Adopt digital Tech through Trusted Market Network built on the Blockchain & Value-Based Care. Innovate digital health through Doctor Led Co-Designed/Co-Created Innovation Programs.

5. Cobalt Water Global

Cobalt Water Global, Inc is helping to decarbonize the global water industry and provide smarter and more sustainable water management with AI/ML solutions.   

Country: United States

Founders: Jose Porro

Founded: February 28, 2020

Funding: $120K

Applications or projects: 

TotalWATER AI: N2ORisk DSS – The N2ORisk DSS is providing innovative carbon reduction by reducing N2O emissions from wastewater treatment plants. It uses AI to combine expert knowledge on N2O and machine learning to quickly quantify emissions, optimize the treatment process and eliminate N2O, a powerful greenhouse gas: 300 times more potent than CO2. 

6. Aila Health

Aila Health is a virtual, precision health clinic for the 50M Americans living with autoimmune diseases (75% of whom are women). Their data-driven platform seamlessly ingests patient data to help integrative care teams deliver personalized, multi-specialty care in a scalable way to improve outcomes while reducing costs.

Country: United States

Founders: Naren Nagarajappa, Rory Stanton

Founded: 2020

Funding: Pre-Seed

Applications or projects: 

The Aila Health App helps chronic illness patients track and manage their conditions in one place. The HIPAA compliant app integrates and stores all health information, tracks health progress, delivers personalized health information and wellness recommendations based on unique lifestyles, and enables patients to communicate with other patients in the Aila community.

7. Juvo

Juvo, one of the top 10 ai companies in the USA, was founded with an overarching vision: to establish financial identities for the billions of people worldwide who are creditworthy yet financially excluded. In partnership with mobile network operators, Juvo’s proprietary Identity Scoring technology uses data science, machine learning, and game mechanics to create an identity-based relationship with anonymous prepaid users, opening access to otherwise unavailable mobile financial services.

Country: United States

Founders: Steve Polsky

Founded: Mar 25, 2014

Funding: $59.3M

Applications or projects:

Solutions for Mobile Operators – By partnering with operators in 27 countries on four continents, Juvo is highly experienced at generating lending decisions using mobile subscriber data. We use data science and machine learning to find the patterns that make data predictive.

Solutions for Financial Institutions – Increasing the Market for Financial Services. Juvo builds highly predictive Financial Identities through mobile network operator billing, usage, and airtime lending data. Lenders can apply those insights to target qualified leads, screen applicants, and optimize loan portfolio management.

8. GoodUnited

GoodUnited, one of the top us ai companies, helps nonprofits increase Facebook fundraiser donations, emails, and retention without lifting a finger. With GoodUnited’s Managed Service, non-profits can now leverage the power of Facebook Fundraisers without adding to staff workload. 

Country: United States

Founders: Jeremy Berman, Nick Black

Founded: 2014

Funding: $1.8M

Applications or projects:

GoodUnited Appreciate – Give Facebook Fundraisers the Recognition They Deserve. GoodUnited offers a turnkey solution that empowers people to thank every birthday fundraiser personally with minimal employee time and effort.

GoodUnited Activate – Inspire New Supporters In Authentic Virtual Events with Challenges on Facebook. GoodUnited recreates the in-person peer-to-peer fundraising event experience by cultivating that day-of-event camaraderie online in communities.

GoodUnited Cultivate – Cultivate Tomorrow’s Donors, Today.

9. MemoryWell

Everyone has a story; let us help you capture it. With MemoryWell+, you can build a collaborative timeline around that story, adding photos, videos, letters, and documents. MemoryWell is a digital platform for storytelling that brings the skills of professional writers to the challenge of helping elders tell their life stories.

Country: United States

Founders: Jay Newton-Small

Founded: 2016

Funding: $3.5M

Applications or projects:

MemoryWell onboarding-engagement – MemoryWell provides human-to-human engagement that resolves these problems with skillful conversation, relationship building, and education. 

10. Ricult

Ricult is a US-based award-winning Social Enterprise founded by MIT alums that enables farmers to pull themselves out of poverty while tapping a multi-billion dollar market. It has created an integrated digital platform that addresses the end-to-end needs of smallholder farmers in developing countries. Ricult currently operates in Thailand and Pakistan.

Country: United States

Founders: Aukrit Unahalekhaka, Gabriel Torres, Jonathan Stoller, Usman Javaid

Founded: Oct 11, 2015

Funding: $6.5M

Applications or projects:

Ricult Farmer App – Ricult Farmer App gives farmers free access to weather data, farm advisory, farm health via satellite imagery, farm measurement tool, etc. 

RicultX – RicultX helps mills, banks, input companies, and much more manage yield, sourcing, field activities, and risks with our analytics and machine learning models.

11. TrialJectory

TrialJectory is an AI-based clinical trial-matching platform that uses self-reported clinical information to facilitate the clinical trial search and enrollment by cancer patients and their physicians. The Company partners with all health industry sectors to revolutionize the trial recruitment process, reducing operational costs and expediting drugs’ time to market.

Country: United States

Founders: Avital Gaziel, Noam Geva, Tzvia Bader

Founded: Dec 2017

Funding: $27.7M

Applications or projects:

TrialJectory Patient Match Optimizer – TrialJectory’s Patient Match Optimizer allows Pharma to monitor, track and analyze the barriers keeping cancer patients from enrolling in clinical trials. By accessing the backend of their award-winning patented AI-powered trial matching platform, Pharma can take action on real-world, real-time patient data to improve trial operations and design, streamlining the patient’s path to enrollment.

Empower Your Cancer Patients with AI – TrialJectory’s artificial intelligence technology empowers cancer patients and oncologists to find the most relevant clinical trials in just a few minutes. TrialJectory AI analyzes all recruiting trial protocols on clinicaltrials.gov and matches patients based on the trial’s full eligibility criteria and the patient’s responses to a dynamic questionnaire about their condition and personal preferences.

12. Woebot Health

Woebot Health is the world’s first mental health ally for people and businesses, with products that put personal growth in people’s hands, wherever they are. Their behavioral health platform combines sophisticated AI, decades of clinically-proven therapeutic research, and an engaging relational agent called Woebot, which form the foundation for delivering continuous care via purely digital, empathic, and personalized apps that are easy to talk about to and fit right into people’s lives.

Country: United States

Founders: Alison Darcy

Founded: May 2017

Funding: $123.3M

Applications or projects:

Woebot App – A friendly self-care expert. Woebot can help think through situations with step-by-step guidance from Woebot using tools from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Learn about yourself with intelligent mood tracking. Master skills to reduce stress and live happier through over 100+ evidence-based stories from our clinical team.

13. Socially Determined

Socially Determined is the social risk analytics company for organizations committed to addressing the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH). 

Country: United States

Founders: Anthony Beverina, Ryan Bosch, Trenor Williams

Founded: Jan 22, 2017

Funding: $11.1M

Applications or projects:

SocialScape® – quantifies social risk factors and analyzes the impact of these factors on health and business metrics. Its social risk experts provide advisory services to translate these insights into actionable solutions with measurable benefits.

14. Nexleaf Analytics

Nexleaf Analytics is a non-profit technology company. Nexleaf builds, scales, and supports wireless sensor devices and data analytics tools to improve global public health and the environment. They have seen how access to meaningful real-time data enables responsive interventions, including mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation, self-correction, and accountability, resulting in verifiable impact. 

Country: United States

Founders: Martin Lukac, Nithya Ramanathan

Founded: 2009

Funding: $580K

Applications or projects:

Vaccine Program – Building resiliency in global health systems is essential to eradicating life-threatening diseases, providing actionable data insights to improve the efficacy, reliability, and sustainability in the hardest-to-reach places.

Clean Cooking Program – Enabling a successful long-term energy transition with household data. Uncover insights that will enable all households to transition to clean cooking. We are committed to tackling complex questions, testing new solutions, and working alongside our partners to guide the adoption of clean cooking solutions for everyone, everywhere.

Medical Equipment Program – Reliable medical equipment is critical to delivering life-saving care. Safeguarding the availability, quality, and functionality in under-resourced health facilities.

15. Insightin Technology

Insightin Technology offers web application and software development services. Insightin Health helps healthcare payers eliminate data silos and deliver highly satisfying consumer-centric experiences.

Country: United States

Founders: Enam Noor

Founded: 2001

Funding: $12M

Applications or projects:

inGAGE™ – SaaS platform – is the industry-leading solution for quickly creating a connected data ecosystem. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, inGAGE™ leverages the totality of the connected data in real-time to produce insights that drive Next Best Action (NBA) recommendations to solve pressing healthcare challenges. inGAGE™ allows healthcare payers to deliver lifetime member value, driving growth and increasing plant profitability.

16. StormSensor

StormSensor offers a stormwater management solution that automates inspections, data monitoring, and reporting workflows.

Country: United States

Founders: Anya Stettler, Erin Rothman

Founded: Aug 2015

Funding: $13.5M

Applications or projects:

TERRAPIN® CLOUD-BASED SOFTWARE – Map and time-series data views. Correlated real-time weather data. Real-time alerts for flow events affecting your system. Real-time tracking of battery life and connectivity. Unlimited logins: make sharing easy by providing administrative or read-only access to a total number of partners.

NETWORKED SCUTE® SENSORS – Ultrasonic depth sensor. Ultrasonic doppler velocity sensor. Wireless data transmission every 5 minutes via machineQ’s LoRa network.

StormSensor Network Packages – Designed and priced to be deployed in networks. Access data and insights through the Terrapin® dashboard 24/7. All-in-one, fully scalable, turnkey solution. Easy to deploy.

17. CancerIQ

CancerIQ provides a precision prevention platform that empowers healthcare providers to engage patients, stratify risk and ensure adherence with the latest evidence-based strategies to get ahead of cancer. It offers a robust content library of evidence-based guidelines and risk models to help providers interpret data and navigate patients to the appropriate genetic testing, screening, or treatment interventions.

Country: United States

Founders: Feyi Olopade, Haibo Lu, Moe Alkhafaji, Olufunmilayo Olopade

Founded: 2013

Funding: $20M

Applications or projects:

CancerIQ’s Screening Toolkit and Navigator – Stay a Step Ahead of Hereditary Cancer. With CancerIQ’s Screening Toolkit and Navigator platform, one can identify patients with high-risk factors as part of routine care.

CancerIQ Self-Assessment and Specialist – Get Rid of Admin Days for Good The CancerIQ Self-Assessment and Specialist platforms provide everything we need to offer an enhanced cancer risk assessment experience.

CancerIQ High-Risk Program and Manager – Manage High-Risk Patients Over Time. With the CancerIQ High-Risk Program and Manager, providers can improve long-term outcomes for high-risk patients.

18. YogiFi

YogiFi, an innovative flagship product of Wellnesys, has revolutionized how yoga sessions are delivered at home through an interactive and immersive experience. YogiFi’s patented posture tracking technology tracks postures provides real-time feedback and correlates body vitals to measure the effectiveness of sessions before and after practice.

Country: United States

Founders: Muralidhar Somisetty, Sankar Dasiga, Vinod Ajjarapu. 

Founded: Oct 2018

Funding: $1.5M

Applications or projects:

Yogifi Mat – innovative exercise mat with privacy enabled practice (no-camera, non-intrusive solution), guided yoga classes, guided bodyweight exercises, activity tracking, posture detection (for select asanas and conditioning), rep counting (for special exercises), activity history, gamification, comes with a rechargeable battery. 

19. Subtle Medical

Subtle Medical is a healthcare technology company that provides AI-powered medical imaging. Its products, SubtlePET and SubtleMR, are FDA Cleared and CE Marked AI product that enhances images in PET and MR exams aimed at faster & safer workflow.

Country: United States

Founders: Enhao Gong, Greg Zaharchuk

Founded: Aug 1, 2017

Funding: $21.9M

Applications or projects:

SubtleMR™ – Reduces image noise for the entire body, including but not limited to the head, spine, neck, abdomen, pelvis, prostate, breast, and musculoskeletal regions of the body, and increases image sharpness for head MRI.

SubtlePET™ – Uses denoising to improve the image quality of low count PET exams conducted in up to 25% of the original scan time.

20. Activeloop

Activeloop believes that Software 2.0 needs Data 2.0. Our open-source library Hub is one of the fastest-growing libraries on GitHub, enabling data science teams to collaborate at scale and easily connect CV datasets to ML models. Activeloop’s stack is used by Google, Waymo, Red Cross, and others.

Country: United States

Founders: Davit Buniatyan, Jason Ge, Sergiy Popovych

Founded: 2018

Funding: $6.1M

Applications or projects:

Drones and Satellite Imagery – Process Drones and Satellite Imagery Data for Computer Vision. Easy to store and efficiently process aerial imaging data of any size and structure, including geospatial data.

Self-Driving Cars & Robotics – Self-Driving Cars & Robotics Data for Computer Vision. Store and build data pipelines collected from autonomous cars and IoT devices using our best-in-class ingestion and preprocessing technologies.

Biomedical Data Science – X-Ray, DICOM, Microscopy Images. Store and build data pipelines collected from biomedical images, including microscopy, MRI, or X-ray.

21. Rezilient Health

Rezilient Health bridges the convenience of telehealth with the broad scope of in-person care by offering neighborhood hubs where families can get virtual access to their doctor and physical exams, labs, and imaging.

Country: United States

Founders: Danish Nagda, Jeff Gamble

Founded: Feb 2016

Funding: $4.7M

Applications or projects:

Rezilient Concierge Primary Care – Same-day and next-day appointments. There are three ways to see your doctor: CloudClinic, at-home telehealth, and 24/7 messaging. A dedicated Care Concierge to manage appointments, labs, and referrals. Unlimited arrangements for one annual membership fee. 

22. UrbanFootprint

UrbanFootprint is the world’s first and arguably one of the biggest ai companies in US urban intelligence industry — a comprehensive urban, climate, and community resilience data system that serves mission-critical insights to the institutions that are rebuilding, financing, and ensuring the world’s physical and social infrastructure. UrbanFootprint’s data and web-based geospatial software unifies previously siloed climate, environmental, urban, and socio-economic data and helps governments, utilities, financial institutions, and urban planners answer fundamental resource questions — where to invest, where to deploy resources, and where to optimize for risk, return, resilience, and community.

Country: United States

Founders: Joe Distefano, Peter Calthorpe

Founded: 2014

Funding: $43M

Applications or projects:

Government and CBOs ensure that assistance and emergency aid get to those who need it most.

Energy – Prioritize grid investments and boost energy efficiency.

https://urbanfootprint.com/solutions/energy/

Finance – Understand risk across your portfolio and deep dive into individual assets.

Proposals – Craft winning bids in record time with best-in-class design tools.

Existing Conditions – Jump starts existing conditions assessments for any U.S location.

Location Analytics – Evaluate and select new sites with the best location data available.

Conclusion

We can expect to see many more startups using AI in innovative ways as time goes on. 

However, for now, here are the top 22 US startups using AI for good. 

The next big thing might be just around the corner!

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