The Top 13 Startups to Watch in 2023

A cramped workspace, limited resources, and a small team birthing groundbreaking ideas—that has been the traditional definition of a startup. 

But the picture looks entirely different today. 

In 2023, startups are synonymous with disruption. Driven by innovation and backed by multiple rounds of funding, these companies focus on solving a problem statement with a never-done-before approach. 

From sustainability to Web3, startups are paving the way for a new era of entrepreneurship—and we're here for it. There's no shortage of such ventures either, with the United States claiming to have the highest number of startups (over 77,000).

We did our research about the best startups in 2023, and here's our round-up.

1. Divisional

Country: Canada

Funding: Undisclosed

Employees: 1-10

Divisional was created by Trevor Sookraj, an accomplished marketer and entrepreneur. Divisional offers fractional employment solutions to growing businesses and startups in the tech space, helping companies find marketers who aren't freelancing full-time or looking to switch jobs, but are looking for additional work and are an exact fit for the company's tactical requirements.

Divisional has grown significantly in the past year or so, driven by the popularity in remote employment, allowing companies to tap into talent without committing to a full-time hire.

Book a consult today to start growing your business.

2. Wega Labs

‍Country: India

Funding: $180K in pre-seed 

Employees: 1-10

Wega Labs is building a Web3 gaming studio designing mobile games using sustainable economics in the Web3 ecosystem. Their goal is to create a decentralized avenue for buying in-game assets and give players complete ownership of these digital assets. These games are also linked to crypto wallets for safely storing any assets users buy within the game. 

One of Wega Labs’ first games, Cricinshots, is a strategy game designed to let players enjoy and earn through their skills. It redefines the game of cricket by placing it in a hypothetical intergalactic setting with different rules. 

The company also plans to launch more games to take gaming to the next level with near-real economic gameplay.

3. Verifiable

‍Country: United States

‍Funding: $20 million over 3 rounds

Employees: 11-50

Verifiable is a data engine built to help users verify and authenticate licenses in real-time. The API caters to both healthcare providers and payers, like government organizations. It's an end-to-end solution for screening, licensing, and managing multiple providers within a single network to maximize compliance. 

On a mission to make healthcare more efficient and risk-free, the API-first platform offers a robust infrastructure for data management within the healthcare industry. It's one of the best startups in 2023, with a fast growth trajectory and the backing of big names like Tiger Global and Y Combinator. 

4. Openlayer

‍Country: United States

Funding: Unknown

Employees: 1-10

Openlayer is a testing and debugging platform for machine learning models. It detects bugs and reveals errors in any ML model to support intelligent decision-making for model retraining. It debugs your models using sophisticated automatic error clustering mechanisms and explainability techniques. 

The platform also allows you to retrain models using synthetic data and boost the system performance to design production-ready models. Users can easily fix data deficiencies with its cleaning and relabeling capabilities. 

The collaborative platform also tracks all models and datasets, increasing team productivity. You can compare different models, manage all versions, and compare the performance of each model.

5. Return  

‍Country: United States

Funding: $1.1 million in pre-seed round

Employees: 1-10

Return is a Baltimore-based SaaS startup for sales and marketing teams. The tool analyzes the documents or the content shared with the leads you’ve closed and identifies exactly which documents convinced the prospect to sign the deal. Put simply, it measures the effectiveness of your sales/marketing collateral and the various content marketing tools you use. 

The company’s founders lived the problems they’re attempting to solve with this product—not knowing the impact of your sales and marketing content. As one of the best startups to work for, the company empowers salespeople to evaluate the quality of every document and give prospects the right resources, nudging them toward a buying decision.  

6. Funnel 

‍Country: Sweden

Funding: $133.8 million over 5 rounds

Employees: 250-500

Funnel is a reporting and analytics solution for all things marketing. While marketers already have hundreds of tools for different use cases, Funnel solves a unique problem: tracking performance across every channel on a centralized platform. 

Teams can integrate the tool with over 500 data sources, like a data warehouse, Google Data Studio, a business intelligence tool, and more. It stores, organizes, and evaluates this data to create a unified hub for testing your performance and visualizing the results. 

It’s a no-code tool with advanced automation capabilities and high-end security features to keep your data safe.

7. OpenAI

‍Country: United States

Funding:  $11 billion over 6 rounds 

Employees: 250-500

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research lab working toward building nuanced AI tools. It's the brainchild of some of the biggest names in the tech world, including Peter Thiel, Jessica Livingston, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others.

While it started as a non-profit organization, the company transitioned to a for-profit organization in 2019 and has raised six rounds of funding since then. It’s well-known for developing sophisticated natural language models GPT-3 and GPT-4. The company also became wildly famous with the launch of its AI chatbot, ChatGPT. 

The company currently has a multi-year deal with Microsoft, estimated to be around $10 billion. 

8. Linguix

‍Country: United States

Funding: $1 million in pre-seed round

Employees: 11-50

Linguix is an AI-powered writing tool designed to make writing error-free and grammatically accurate. The platform uses machine learning and natural language programming algorithms to detect mistakes in your writing and offer correct solutions. 

Linguix’s founder from Russia struggled to write grammatically correct sentences and developed this app to solve this pain point for everyone sharing his struggles. 

With a year-on-year growth of 50%, the company is on its way to revolutionizing the language barrier problem and is among the best startups to work for in 2023. It aims to empower non-native English speakers and help them use the language effectively in all forms of communication. 

9. Moov

‍Country: United States

Funding: $77.5 million over 3 rounds

Employees: 11-50

Moov is a full-stack, cloud-native platform pioneering a new payment infrastructure for a borderless world. Recognized as a money movement innovator, the startup has differentiated itself in the financial sector with its modular and end-to-end payment solution. So, users can build customized systems for all things money—like acquisition, ledger, disbursement, and issues. 

Backed by top VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Visa, the company has made a mark for itself in a competitive space. Its unique infrastructure allows users to automate and streamline payments effortlessly. 

10. Moveworks

‍Country: United States

Funding: $305 million over 3 rounds

Employees: 500-1000

Moveworks is a conversational AI platform for eliminating friction in workplaces. This enterprise solution offers 24/7 support for any problem within seconds. It has an in-built Intelligence Engine to automate problem-solving and knowledge-sharing for delivering a seamless employee experience. 

Employees can ask the Moveworks bot any question and receive a response in seconds. The tool supports multiple languages and integrates with several tools in categories like ITSM, messaging, knowledge management, and others.

What makes it one of the best startups in 2023 is the goal of helping employees realize their full potential by creating a hassle-free and productive environment. It's positioned itself as a people-first solution to offer just-in-time knowledge and answer any queries exactly when needed. 

11. Bubble 

‍Country: United States

Funding: $106.3 million over 3 rounds

Employees: 100-250

Bubble is rethinking web development with its point-and-click programming tool. It requires no coding knowledge and works entirely on a visual programming language. Available for web and mobile app development, it allows users to host their apps on the cloud. 

The company is on a mission to break the boundaries between building and using technology. The platform offers a more user-friendly and easier programming solution to design tools using templates and more.

12. Nuro

‍Country: United States

Funding: $2.1 billion over 6 rounds

Employees: 1000-5000

Nuro is a tech startup building self-driving robots for making deliveries, transporting goods, and completing basic errands. This autonomous delivery solution uses electric vehicles to support local sellers through fast, secure, and affordable deliveries. 

As one of the best startups to work for, the company is building a safer and healthier planet by leveraging robotics technology to deliver goods seamlessly. Having raised over $2 billion in multiple funding rounds, the company has partnered with leading brands like Domino's, Uber Eats, FedEx, and Walmart. 

13. Confluera

‍Country: United States

Funding: $29 million over 3 rounds

Employees: 11-50

Confluera is an autonomous security platform built to protect users from cyber attacks. This startup builds robust security infrastructure to safeguard corporate data and ramp up security operations. It maximizes operational efficiency and reduces delays due to server outages or cyber threats. 

It uses threat detection mechanisms to track and stop cyberattacks in real time. By putting cybersecurity on auto-pilot, the platform also saves companies more time and cuts the cost of repairing the damages from an attack. 

Startups Continue to Lead the Way in Innovation

That's a wrap on our list of the best startups to watch in 2023. It's no surprise that startups are taking the world by storm because of their groundbreaking and unique solutions to any problem. 

At Divisional, we’re helping these early-stage startups fast-track their growth with a team of fractional growth marketers. We build a dedicated team of experts to take over your entire growth strategy, eliminating the hassle of hiring and managing in-house talent. 

‍Ready to accelerate your growth? Talk to us and see how we can do the heavy lifting for you.