Ten AI infrastructure companies have been named in CB Insights’ 2025 Future Tech Hotshots, recognized among the startups most poised to make an outsized impact in the coming years.

This underscores how AI infrastructure has become the focal point for investor and businesses alike, driven by surging demand for scalable and efficient AI platforms that can power next-generation applications.

The Future Tech Hotshots 2025, released in October, showcases 45 emerging companies most likely to achieve major impact and strong exits over the next five to ten years. The list is based on CB Insights proprietary data and Mosaic Score, which assesses a company’s health, growth, and success potential, alongside criteria such as commercial maturity, business relationships, and funding.

This year’s list reveals that AI infrastructure has emerged as the industry’s defining priority. In particular, a clear emphasis is being put on agentic AI, reflected in the inclusion of startups like Coval, an AI agent testing platform, Questflow, a multi-agent orchestration platform, and Syncari, an agentic master data management platform.

These ventures are building the foundational tools to develop and embed AI into workflows, enabling the next wave of autonomous, high-performance applications reshaping how businesses operate.

Ori

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in London, Ori is a leading AI infrastructure provider, offering AI compute resource and services to large corporates, enterprises and fast-growth AI scaleups. It combines graphics processing unit (GPU) compute with a flexible software layer that optimizes resource utilization, enabling teams to build and scale AI workloads efficiently. Its AI-native infrastructure is designed to meet the demands of large-scale AI model training, inference, and deployment while prioritizing scalability, flexibility, and efficiency across industries.

Ori has presence in over 20 locations, predominantly across North America and Europe. In February, it secured strategic investment from Wa’ed Ventures to fuel expansion in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East. Its localization in Saudi Arabia will kick off with the launch of a regional subsidiary based in Riyadh.

Ori has a commercial maturity score of 3 out of 5, indicating that it is in the deployment stage with growing commercial distribution. Its Mosaic Score has increased by 352 points over the past year to now 806 out of 1,000.

Starcloud

Founded in 2024 and headquartered in the US, Starcloud is developing GPU compute clusters in low Earth orbit, providing high-performance AI compute for a wide range of applications. The company aims to revolutionize AI training and large-scale computing capabilities, leveraging space’s energy resources and cooling efficiencies.

Starcloud recently launched the first Nvidia H100 to space. The company raised a US$21 million Seed round at the end of 2024 to enable the launch of multiple satellites.

Backed by Y Combinator, In-Q-Tel, NFX, and others, Starcloud will launch a demonstrator mission in late 2025 featuring GPUs 100 times more powerful than any previously flown in orbit, with a full micro data center scheduled for 2026.

Starcloud has a commercial maturity score of 2 out of 5, and is still in the validating stage as it continues testing and refining its product.  It has a Mosaic score of 792 out of 1,000, growing 58 points over the past year.

Syncari

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in the US, Syncari claims it is the first agentic master data management (MDM) platform built for the AI era. The platform unifies, governs, and synchronizes data in real-time, creating structured, trusted, and AI-ready pipelines for large language models (LLMs), copilots, and autonomous agents. By eliminating silos and operationalizing trust at scale, it empowers organizations to accelerate intelligent decision-making and unlock the full potential of their data.

Syncari’s key capabilities include a AI-native architecture with semantic layers and continuous data quality, patented multi-directional synchronization for real-time governance, 50 times faster development than traditional MDM, and over 100 smart connectors, software development kits (SDKs), application programming interfaces (APIs), and webhooks for seamless enterprise integration.

Syncari says it supports Fortune 1,000 enterprises across technology, financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing, and claims its platform has more than two trillion data operations under management.

In September, it closed a Series B funding round.

Syncari has a commercial maturity score of 3 out of 5 and is in the deployment stage, with growing commercial distribution. It has a Mosaic Score of 790 out of 1,000, growing 308 points over the past year.

Questflow

Founded in 2022 and headquartered in the US, Questflow is an orchestration layer for the emerging multi-agent economy. The company’s core innovation, the Multi-Agent Orchestration Protocol (MAOP), allows users to seamlessly coordinate multiple AI agents to communicate, automate tasks for humans, and transact with one another in real time on-chain with built-in human oversight for critical decisions.

The technology supports task orchestration by enabling AI agent swarms to execute complex, multi-step tasks across platforms, decentralized applications (dApps) and protocols, and token orchestration by enabling agent-to-agent micropayments via on-chain agent wallets.

Questflow has gained early traction, being featured by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Cohere, and MongoDB, and being selected by Google for Startups. It was also named Product of the Day on Product Hunt following its launch. In July, it raised US$6.5 million in a Seed funding round to expand ecosystem incentives and prepare MAOP for broader developer adoption.

Questflow has a commercial maturity score of 3 out of 5 and is in the deployment stage, with growing commercial distribution. It has a Mosaic Score of 776 out of 1,000, growing 236 points over the past year.

Delphi

Founded in 2022 and headquartered in the US, Delphi is a digital cloning platform designed to bridge the gap between personalized mentorship and scalable communication. The platform enables experts, including authors, coaches, CEOs, and thought leaders, to clone their unique thought processes, communication styles, knowledge, voice, and expertise. It supports multiple communication mediums, including text, voice, and now video, providing a versatile solution for personal digital replication.

Delphi, which raised in July a US$16 million Series A, has a commercial maturity score of 2 out of 5. It is still in the validation stage, and currently testing and redefining its product. The startup has a Mosaic Score of 770 out of 1,000, growing 169 points over the past year.

Exa

Founded in 2021 and headquartered in the US, Exa is an AI research lab redesigning search for the AI age.

Exa trains embedding models, using the same technology behind ChatGPT, to convert web pages into lists of numbers known as embeddings. The result is a technology that packs the power of LLMs into the search process itself, making search smarter than keyword approaches like Google.

So far, thousands of companies and developers have integrated Exa, from AI writing assistants helping students cite relevant papers, and venture capital (VC) firms sourcing highly specific startups, to AI research teams at companies like Databricks assembling large, high quality training datasets.

Exa raised US$85 million in a Series B in September at a US$700 million valuation. The startup has a commercial maturity of 2 out of 5 and is still in the validation stage, currently testing and redefining its product. It has a Mosaic Score of 767 out of 1,000, adding 100 points over the past year.

Finwave Semiconductor

Founded in 2012 and originating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Finwave Semiconductor is a fabless semiconductor company. It develops advanced Gallium Nitride on Silicon (GaN-on-Si) transistor technology for applications ranging from RF communications and 5G and 6G mobile infrastructure to medical devices and cloud computing, producing 3D GaN transistors, enhancement-mode PAs, and high-power RF switches on silicon wafers.

Finwave Semiconductor raised US$8.2 million in May, bringing its total raised to about US$33 million, to accelerate commercialization of GaN-on-Si for high-power RF applications.

The company has a commercial maturity score of 3 out of 5 and is in the deployment stage, with growing commercial distribution. It has a Mosaic Score of 744 out of 1,000, adding 116 points over the past year.

Coval

Founded in 2024 and headquartered in the US, Coval provides simulation and evaluation infrastructure for voice and chat AI companies building production-ready autonomous agents. Using simulation and evaluation techniques inspired by the autonomous vehicle industry, Coval improves test coverage, speeds development, and validates consistent agent performance, helping companies to not just create agents that delight customers, but to deploy them faster and with absolute confidence in their performance.

Coval has a commercial maturity score of 3 out of 5 and is in the deployment stage, with growing commercial distribution. It has a Mosaic Score of 743 out of 1,000, adding 87 points over the past year.

Scintil Photonics

Scintil Photonics is a global leader in integrated Photonic System-on-Chip (PSoC) solutions for AI factories.

Using its proprietary heterogeneous integration process, SHIP, Scintil Photonics enables high-performance optical interconnects, meeting the power and bandwidth demands of large-scale GPU clusters enabled by the next generation of co-packaged optics (CPO).

Its product LEAF Light is a single-chip, DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing)-native light engine for high-density optical connectivity.

Scintil Photonics’ solutions are purpose-built to meet the high-bandwidth, low-latency, and high-density demands for next-generation AI infrastructure, delivering the scale, efficiency, and performance required for tomorrow’s most powerful GPU clusters.

Headquartered in Grenoble, France, with North American operations, Scintil Photonics is expanding globally to support the evolving needs of AI infrastructure. In September, it raised US$58 million to expand hiring in France and internationally, including the US, accelerate production, and deepen its international presence.

Rhino Federated Computing

Founded in 2020 and based in Boston with a research and development (R&D) center in Tel Aviv, Rhino Federated Computing has built the trusted end-to-end tech stack for federated AI in regulated industries. It enables data-driven collaboration across institutional and geographic boundaries, allowing enterprises to safely scale AI and analytics across increasingly large networks.

Rhino Federated Computing is already powering major use cases, including enabling federated generative AI (genAI) capabilities in the biopharmaceutical industry, supporting healthcare organizations in building data harmonization and federated collaboration infrastructure, and helping financial institutions combat fraud and financial crime.

The company raised a US$15 million Series A in May to scale its capabilities across more customers and regulated sectors.

It has a commercial maturity score of 3 out of 5 and is in the deployment stage, with growing commercial distribution. It has a Mosaic Score of 708 out of 1,000, down 37 points over the past year.

Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Switzerland, based on image by Frolopiaton Palm via Freepik