4 AI-powered consulting startups to watch into 2026
AI is transforming the consulting industry with new tech startups in Silicon Valley.
These startups aim to help companies manage data and optimize technology using AI.
These four companies have collectively raised over $300 million.
AI is upending a business that hasn’t changed in generations.
Over the past year, a new wave of consulting tech startups has emerged in Silicon Valley. These companies are helping clients manage their data, make better decisions, and optimize their technology, all through the use of AI.
While some on the list are not shy about their ambitions to eventually take a slice of business from the Big Four or the MBB, others are looking to complement the established players’ work.
Business Insider asked a handful of investors to identify a few of the most promising startups to watch in this emerging category of consulting tech. Here are four AI-powered consulting startups to watch, according to five investors who are backing them.
PromptQL
Tanmai Gopal, CEO of PromptQL.Bonfire Partners
Total funding: $136 million
What it does:
PromptQL is an enterprise platform that aims to automate some of the work of a typical consultant, like surfacing insights and generating reports. It helps clients build custom AI analysts by integrating their internal data with the foundation models they already use.
Once deployed, these AI analysts can perform tasks typically handled by data scientists or engineers — and continuously learn and adapt to their environments over time.
PromptQL also offers access to its team of expert engineers, who help companies operate their AI analysts and shape broader AI transformation strategies — at a rate of $900 an hour.
Tanmai Gopal, PromptQL’s CEO and founder, told Business Insider that the platform’s “killer feature” has been its capacity to provide “AI accuracy at scale without requiring messy data to be prepped or moved elsewhere.”
Why it’s good:
“For us, the bet here is simple: there’s an overconfidence crisis in AI,” Gaurav Gupta, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, told Business Insider. “We believe 95% of AI companies will fail, and history will show that hallucinations were a major reason why. We think PromptQL is best positioned to solve this for enterprises.”
Aily Labs
Aily Labs, founder and CEO, Bianca Anghelina.Ruder Finn
Total funding: $101 million
What it does:
Founded in 2020 by former Novartis executive Bianca Anghelina, Aily Labs builds an AI-powered “decision intelligence” platform designed to help Fortune 500 companies make decisions by consolidating data.
“I experienced firsthand how decisions are slowed down because of siloed data,” Anghelina said. Traditional corporate decision-making is often delayed by “processes that take weeks or months” and “data owned by different functions” without “one source of truth,” she said.
Aily’s “AI brain” aims to tackle these challenges by combining off-the-shelf and proprietary large language models, with data, to surface insights and recommendations “in a matter of minutes rather than weeks,” she said.
Unlike typical consulting firms, Aily isn’t focused on one-off projects, but on embedding “an always-on AI brain” into a company’s operations, she said.
Why it’s good:
“Everyone’s capturing information, but the question is: how are we actually using it to drive better decisions and efficiency?” Pegah Ebrahimi, the cofounder and managing partner at FPV Ventures, which led Aily’s latest $80 million funding round, told Business Insider.
Aily is like an “executive partner that surfaces the top insights and risks relevant to your specific role — whether you’re head of supply chain in Brazil or head of sales for North America,” he added.
Profound
Profound founders James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs.Profound
Total funding: $58.5 million
What it does:
In the AI era, companies are no longer agonizing about search engine optimization; they’re fretting about how to get mentioned in generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
GEO, also known as generative engine optimization, is the process of optimizing content to boost its visibility in AI-driven searches.
Profound helps companies manage their geo strategy, including how they’re mentioned in generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT. They also advise on how agents interface with a company’s website and digital content, and analyze real-time search data to understand how consumers are working with generative AI chatbots.
Why it’s good:
Thomson Nguyen, cofounder and managing partner at Saga Ventures — which invested in Profound’s Series B round — told Business Insider by email that chief marketing officers at companies once hired brand consultants and marketing consultants to run focus groups to research and understand how their brand ranked among competitors.
Now, Profound offers a way to automate that work, Nguyen said.
Max Altman, another cofounder and managing partner at Saga, told Business Insider by email that “Profound is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room, and clear category leader.”
Dialogue
Dialogue AI
Total funding: $6 million
What it does:
Dialogue AI, an AI-powered market research platform, aims to speed up the way companies conduct research — from designing studies and recruiting participants, to conducting interviews.
The company was founded by Benjamin Lo, Justin Hoang, and Hubert Chen — all of whom overlapped at Nextdoor, a social networking platform for neighborhoods.
The aim is to cut the turnaround time of a typical market research study from weeks to just a day, Lo previously told Business Insider.
“Maybe you’re a designer or an engineer or a consultant, and you can basically conduct research independently with best practices. I think that’s one of our visions — can we almost democratize market research?” Hoang previously told Business Insider.
Why it’s good:
“Market research as we know it is ripe for disruption,” Faraz Fatemi, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, which lead Dialogue’s seed round, said in a press release announcing its new funding.
“Dialogue understands that teams across an organization, not just researchers, need fast, meaningful insights to do their jobs well. What they’ve built is both technically impressive and deeply thoughtful: a way to talk to customers at scale, without sacrificing depth or quality.”
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