Announcing our 2025 VB Transform Innovation Showcase finalists

This 12 months’s VB Innovation Showcase finalists might be at VB Transform, June 24-25, in San Francisco. They’ll take to the stage as we delve into what’s truly working in enterprise AI, from copilots to brokers. 

Seven corporations have been chosen to showcase their generative AI merchandise or options which might be most definitely to disrupt the enterprise.

These chosen to current will accomplish that in entrance of an invite-only viewers of 600 business decision-makers, and obtain direct suggestions from a panel of VC judges.

The 2025 Innovation Showcase finalists are:

CTGT

Based in 2024 by a crew of Stanford and College of California, San Diego researchers, San Francisco-based CTGT is an AI threat administration platform designed to change how enterprises deploy generative AI. Not like typical AI pipelines that require periodic offline updates, CTGT’s platform permits steady real-time monitoring and automatic refining of fashions in manufacturing, permitting AI techniques to be taught and adapt inside reside environments with out ever going offline. This implies fashions enhance on the fly, closing the hole between improvement and deployment and making certain most uptime and reliability for mission-critical AI functions.

The corporate raised a seed $7.2 million round in February.

Catio

Palo Alto-based Catio is an AI-powered platform designed to help corporations in optimizing their tech stack structure. The platform is a copilot for technical leaders and groups, offering data-driven insights and suggestions to guage, plan and evolve their know-how infrastructure. Catio tackles these challenges by offering steady structure design, strategic tech stack planning, correct analytics and analysis of architectures, and customized suggestions for every enterprise’s distinctive wants, all powered by superior AI fashions and proprietary information.

In March, Catio introduced $3 million in further funding. That is along with the $4 million raised between 2023-2024.

Kumo

Mountain View-based Kumo AI is targeted on democratizing AI, significantly within the realm of predictive analytics, by leveraging cutting-edge Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Relational Deep Studying (RDL). They intention to make it simpler for companies to construct and deploy extremely correct machine studying fashions immediately from their relational information.

Kumo has raised $37 million in funding in two rounds. Their newest spherical was a $18 million Collection B in September 2022.

Solo.io

Cambridge, Mass.-based Solo.io is a cloud-native software networking firm that gives options for connecting, securing and observing fashionable functions, significantly these constructed on Kubernetes and microservices. Based in 2017, Solo.io goals to simplify the complexities of software networking in dynamic, multi-cloud environments.

A $135 million collection C funding spherical in 2021 introduced the corporate’s whole funding to $175 million. The corporate is valued at $1 billion.

Superduper.io

Tel Aviv-based Superduper.io is an AI firm centered on simplifying the combination of AI fashions and workflows immediately inside current databases, eliminating the necessity for advanced information pipelines and separate AI infrastructure. Their core providing is a Python-based open-source framework that enables companies to construct and deploy customized AI functions and brokers immediately on their information, wherever it resides.

Superduper.io has raised $1.75 million throughout two seed funding rounds. Notable buyers embrace Hetz Ventures, session.vc and MongoDB. It was additionally a part of the Intel Ignite accelerator program.

Sutro

Oakland-based Sutro is an AI-powered no-code platform that enables customers to create full, production-ready cellular and net functions just by describing their thought in plain textual content. It goals to democratize software program improvement, making it accessible to people and companies with out coding experience.

Sutro was based in 2021 and has raised round $6 million throughout two early funding rounds in 2023-2024.

Qdrant

Berlin-based Qdrant is a high-performance, massive-scale Vector Database and Vector Search Engine designed for the following era of AI functions. It’s inbuilt Rust, a language identified for its security and efficiency, making it a dependable alternative for demanding AI workloads.

Based in 2020, Qdrant has raised $37.8 million over three rounds of funding, the most recent of which was a $28 million collection A in January 2024.

Meet our Judging Panel

Emily Zhao, principal at Salesforce Ventures

Zhao is a principal at Salesforce Ventures centered on AI/ML. She additionally spends time on developer tooling, cybersecurity, vertical SaaS, and well being tech. She joined Salesforce Ventures within the spring of 2022 and lately helped launch its $500 million generative AI fund. She has led a number of investments within the fund, together with Hugging Face, RunwayML, Anthropic, Cohere and others.

Earlier than becoming a member of Salesforce Ventures, Zhao was an investor at Avenir Development Capital, a venture-growth fund primarily based in New York, the place she spent most of her time on vertical SaaS, well being tech and software software program. Earlier than Avenir, Emily was an affiliate within the Non-public Fairness group at Blackstone and invested in company buyout transactions.

Matt Kraning, associate at Menlo Ventures

Kraning is considered one of Menlo‘s latest companions. He’s centered on investing in AI, enterprise SaaS, nationwide protection and cybersecurity.

He’s a deeply technical former founder and a confirmed firm builder with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, specializing in AI and large-scale computing. Earlier than Menlo, Kraning was the co-founder and CTO of Expanse, the place he helped outline the AI-driven assault floor administration class. He’s additionally suggested and invested in over 50 startups, together with unicorns like Peregrine and Astranis, and lately led a $12 million spherical for Wispr Movement.

Rebecca Li, funding director at Amex Ventures

Li is an Funding Director at Amex Ventures. She joined in 2024 to concentrate on enterprise software program investing, main early-stage investments in infrastructure software program, developer instruments, information and AI.

Earlier than becoming a member of American Specific, Li led fintech and software program enterprise investments at International Asset Capital. Her prior expertise contains enterprise improvement and partnerships at Credit score Karma and know-how non-public fairness investing at GIC.

Come see at VB Rework

The entire pitches will happen on June 25 from 4:45 to five:30 p.m. PT. on the main stage for our in-person attendees.

Presenters can have three minutes for his or her pitch, adopted by two minutes of suggestions from the judging panel. Awards might be offered in three classes: 1) most definitely to succeed, 2) coolest know-how and three) greatest presentation fashion.

Learn concerning the winners from VB Rework 2024: SambaNova, Instabase and Tabnine.