Best Natural Language Processing Companies in California, United States
The 127 best Natural Language Processing companies in California, United States in 2026, ranked by funding and momentum. Funding, investors, founders, valuation, tech stack and live signals. Top: Inflection.
Ranked: Best Natural Language Processing companies in California
| # | Company | Disclosed funding | Last round | Employees | Founded | Founder | Tech stack | Patents & IP focus | Recent signals |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Inflection 🦄 Provider of emotionally intelligent artificial intelligence for personal and enterprise use | $1.5B | 35 mo ago | 35 35 → 87 (+149%) · sector median +33% | 2022 | Reid Hoffman Co-Founder | Framer SitesReactPostHog+12 | — | 1 job opening |
| 2 | Poolside 🦄 Developer of artificial intelligence models and systems for software engineering | $626M | 20 mo ago | — | 2023 | Jason Warner Co-Founder & Co-CEO | TurbopackSentryZendesk+14 | — | 3 launchs · 1 award |
| 3 | Meltwater Cloud based suite of marketing solutions | $340M | 30 mo ago | 3 | 2001 | Jorn Lyseggen Co-Founder | PrismicAtlassian Jira Issue CollectorZendesk+30 | — | — |
| 4 | Primer AI based text summarization and contextualization software tool | $237M | 36 mo ago | 194 194 → 118 (-39%) · sector median +33% | 2015 | Diwakar Awasthi CEO | WordPressApple iCloud MailGoogle Workspace+34 | — | — |
| 5 | SoundHound 🦄 Provider of cloud and AI-based sound recognition solutions for multiple applications | $191M | 27 mo ago | 201 | 2005 | Majid Emami Co-Founder | DrupalApple iCloud MailGoogle Workspace+38 | 442 patents Patents concentrated in computing, sensing & instrumentation | — |
| 6 | Sobot Contact center solution provider | $191M | 52 mo ago | — | 2014 | Yi Xu Co-Founder & CEO | Node.jsSvelteVue.js+12 | — | — |
| 7 | Suki Developer of an AI assistant for clinical documentation and reasoning 80AI top 18%Funding top 19%Innovation top 20%Patents top 24% All 14 signals ▾AItop 18% Fundingtop 19% Innovationtop 20% Patentstop 24% Techtop 28% Moattop 28% Producttop 29% Growthtop 36% Newstop 39% Talenttop 41% Partnerstop 45% Marketbottom 49% Globalbottom 42% Customersbottom 10% AI: Classified as an AI company · Holds AI/ML patents (G06N-family CPC) Funding: Raised $165M across 5 rounds · 5 rounds over 9 yrs (0.6/yr) rank vs industry peers · Fliar Intelligence Index 80/100 | $165M | 16 mo ago | 45 | 2017 | Punit Soni Co-Founder & CEO | WordPressMySQLPHP+20 | 62 patents AI-powered speech-to-text and contextual note generation for clinical documentation | 3 partnerships |
| 8 | AssemblyAI Provider of speech to text solutions | $115M | 30 mo ago | 39 | 2017 | Dylan Fox Founder & CEO | WebflowSentryZendesk+23 | — | 1 launch · 1 partnership |
| 9 | Augment Developer of an AI teammate for logistics and knowledge management 57AI top 8%Funding top 21%Growth top 35%Talent top 38% All 10 signals ▾AItop 8% Fundingtop 21% Growthtop 35% Talenttop 38% Moattop 42% Techtop 49% Globalbottom 44% Patentsbottom 39% Innovationbottom 36% Marketbottom 35% AI: Classified as an agentic-AI company Funding: Raised $110M across 2 rounds · 2 rounds over 1 yrs (2.0/yr) rank vs industry peers · Fliar Intelligence Index 57/100 | $110M | 9 mo ago | — | 2024 | Harish Abbott Co-Founder & CEO | Framer SitesApple iCloud MailReact+21 | 2 patents Bio-signal stress monitoring and AI-driven conversational analytics for health and CRM | 1 launch |
| 10 | AppZen Provider of AI-powered software for expense auditing and accounts payable 76Funding top 19%AI top 20%Moat top 31%Growth top 33% All 12 signals ▾Fundingtop 19% AItop 20% Moattop 31% Growthtop 33% Producttop 34% Innovationtop 37% Talenttop 38% Newstop 41% Patentstop 42% Markettop 46% Techbottom 47% Globalbottom 45% Funding: Raised $103M across 6 rounds · 6 rounds over 11 yrs (0.5/yr) AI: Classified as an agentic-AI company · Holds AI/ML patents (G06N-family CPC) rank vs industry peers · Fliar Intelligence Index 76/100 | $103M | 8 mo ago | 141 | 2012 | Kunal Verma Co-Founder and CTO | HubSpot CMS HubAmazon Web ServicesMicrosoft Clarity+21 | 7 patents AI-powered invoice/expense automation with fraud detection and line-item image-text matching | 3 launchs |
| 11 | Yellow.ai Provider of an AI platform for automating customer and employee service | $102M | 58 mo ago | 469 469 → 860 (+83%) · sector median +33% | 2016 | Raghu Ravinutala Co-Founder & CEO | WordPress Block EditorWordPressApple iCloud Mail+32 | — | — |
| 12 | Chorus.ai Conversational intelligence platform for sales | $100M | 70 mo ago | 90 | 2015 | Russell Levy Co-Founder & CTO | Apple iCloud MailJavaEnvoy+17 | 37 patents Disinfection/decontamination hardware and gas-sensing technologies for hygiene and safety applications | — |
| 13 | Lilt Provider of cloud-based machine translation tools and services | $93M | 19 mo ago | 59 | 2015 | Spence Green Co-Founder & CEO | SanitySentryZendesk+34 | 14 patents AI-powered machine translation workflow with neural word alignment and in-browser collaborative editing | 1 partnership |
| 14 | Syllable Provider of an AI-based digital assistant for healthcare communication system | $86M | 49 mo ago | 46 | 2016 | Sarel Jooste Co-Founder | Apple iCloud MailGoogle WorkspaceNode.js+12 | — | — |
| 15 | Vectara Provider of a platform for building governed, grounded, auditable AI agents | $74M | 23 mo ago | 48 | 2020 | Tallat Shafaat Co-Founder & CEO | SanityApple iCloud MailGoogle Workspace+33 | 2 patents AI-driven cross-lingual multimedia information retrieval and query optimization | 1 launch · 1 partnership · 1 award |
| 16 | Rasa Developer of a platform for building and deploying AI agent solutions | $71M | 28 mo ago | 26 | 2016 | Alexander Weidauer Co-Founder | WebflowApple iCloud MailGoogle Workspace+29 | — | — |
| 17 | Otter.ai Developer of an AI meeting agent providing transcription and summarization | $70M | 63 mo ago | 125 | 2016 | Yun Fu Co-Founder & CTO | Amazon WebstoreWebflowSentry+33 | 34 patents Real-time AI transcription, summarization, and context-aware meeting capture technologies. | — |
| 18 | rabbit Developer of an AI agent designed to automate digital tasks | $65M | 27 mo ago | 6 | 2020 | Dan Ferris Co-Founder & CSO | ShopifyApple iCloud MailNode.js+22 | 33 patents Networked voice-enabled user interfaces for product and service interaction | — |
| 19 | Inbenta AI-based self-service platform with chatbots and NLP search | $60M | 41 mo ago | 7 | 2005 | — | WordPressApple iCloud MailMicrosoft 365+26 | — | — |
| 20 | Promptu Provider of voice recognition and natural language understanding technology | $53M | 207 mo ago | 10 | 2000 | — | — | — | — |
| 21 | unitQ Cloud and AI based user feedback analytics platform | $41M | 57 mo ago | 45 45 → 60 (+33%) · sector median +33% | 2018 | Christian Wiklund Co-Founder & CEO | ContentfulApple iCloud MailGoogle Workspace+30 | — | 2 awards |
| 22 | Voiceflow Provider of a platform to build and scale AI agent solutions | $38M | 34 mo ago | 73 | 2018 | Andrewe Lawrence Co-Founder | WebflowSentryZendesk+28 | — | — |
| 23 | VoiceBase Provider of call center analytics solutions | $32M | 125 mo ago | 28 | 2010 | Walter Bachtiger Co-Founder & CEO | WordPressMySQLPHP+31 | 6 patents Speech transcription, analytics, and anonymization platform for audio media content | — |
| 24 | LynxCare Provider of real-world data infrastructure and insights for healthcare and life sciences | $26M | 48 mo ago | 50 | 2015 | Dries Hens Co-Founder | WebflowSentryWistia+26 | — | 3 job openings |
| 25 | DB CyberTech AI-based predictive data loss prevention solution provider | $22M | 138 mo ago | 10 | 2012 | — | — | 3 patents Network traffic analysis and structured data extraction for cybersecurity monitoring | — |
| 26 | TalkIQ Cloud based platform offering speech analytics solutions | $21M | 105 mo ago | 148 | 2014 | — | — | 3 patents Assessing and scoring conversational AI call quality using speech analytics | — |
| 27 | Skai Provider of an omnichannel platform for commerce media that centralizes data and optimizes marketing… | $20M | 146 mo ago | 637 | 2006 | Nir Cohen Co-Founder & CTO | WordPress Block EditorWordPressApple iCloud Mail+27 | 17 patents Access control, identity management, and distributed graph database orchestration platforms | 1 partnership · 1 award |
| 28 | BabbleLabs Provider of speech enhancement technologies for enterprises | $18M | 84 mo ago | 15 | 2018 | — | — | 13 patents AI-driven audio and radio signal enhancement with speaker group identification for communications | — |
| 29 | MindMeld Conversational AI platform for deep-domain voice interfaces and chatbots | $15M | 138 mo ago | 37,497 | 2011 | Timothy Tuttle CEO and Founder | VarnishGitHub PagesAmazon Web Services+7 | 5 patents Real-time multimodal conversational AI and collaborative communication interfaces | — |
| 30 | AppOrchid Provider of AI-based applications for IoT devices | $14M | 25 mo ago | 129 129 → 159 (+23%) · sector median +33% | 2013 | Krishna Kumar Founder & CEO | Webflow EcommerceWebflowcore-js+15 | — | 1 partnership |
| 31 | Ross Intelligence AI powered legal research platform | $13M | 104 mo ago | — | 2014 | Jimoh Ovbiagele Co-Founder | — | — | — |
| 32 | Archetype AI Platform developing physical AI | $13M | 7 mo ago | — | 2023 | Nick Gillian Co-Founder | WebflowGSAPFancyBox+20 | 9 patents AI-powered multimodal content generation, sensor data compression, and IoT device detection/control | 2 launchs · 1 award |
| 33 | Sybill AI Developer of an AI sales assistant platform for revenue teams | $13M | 26 mo ago | 33 | 2020 | Mehak Aggarwal Co-Founder | SentryAtlassian StatuspageApple iCloud Mail+33 | — | — |
| 34 | Diffbot AI-powered web data extraction and knowledge graph solutions | $12M | 124 mo ago | 27 27 → 31 (+15%) · sector median +33% | — | Michael Tung Founder & CEO | Facebook LoginBootstrapNginx+20 | — | — |
| 35 | Intento Provider of AI-driven language translation and localization platform for enterprises | $12M | 8 mo ago | 80 | 2013 | Grigory Sapunov Co-Founder & CTO | WordPressMySQLPHP+39 | 7 patents Semantic intent-driven API organization and management platform | — |
| 36 | Recruit Bot Provider of an AI-powered platform to streamline and improve talent acquisition | $11M | 31 mo ago | 14 14 → 11 (-21%) · sector median +33% | 2017 | — | WordPressMySQLPHP+32 | — | — |
| 37 | Passage AI Provides a chatbot development platform | $10M | 84 mo ago | 32 | 2016 | — | — | — | — |
| 38 | Omneky Provider of AI-powered platform for ad creation, management, and optimization | $10M | 43 mo ago | 50 | 2018 | Hikari Senju Founder & CEO | WebflowThree.jsStripe+24 | — | — |
| 39 | FileTrail Provider of information governance and management software | $10M | 53 mo ago | 41 | 2000 | — | — | — | — |
| 40 | Sensible Platform leveraging natural language processing to extract data from multiple documents | $8M | 42 mo ago | 11 | 2020 | Josh Lewis Co-Founder & CEO | WebflowAmazon ALBAmazon Web Services+26 | 6 patents Electrical cable connectors and sheet handling/measurement devices for mailing and printing systems. | — |
| 41 | Gnani.ai Provider of AI-powered voice and chat automation platform for enterprises | $8M | 2 mo ago | 119 119 → 265 (+123%) · sector median +33% | 2016 | Ganesh Gopalan Co-Founder & CEO | WordPressApple iCloud MailMicrosoft 365+42 | — | 1 job opening · 3 internships · 2 launchs |
| 42 | Cognizer Developer of NLP platform for enterprises | $6M | 64 mo ago | 40 | 2018 | Jack Porter Co-Founder & CEO | WordPressMySQLPHP+37 | 15 patents Deep learning NLP for entity extraction, semantic frames, and document comparison | — |
| 43 | Peritus Provider of an AI-based virtual assistant for IT operations | $5M | 56 mo ago | 4 | 2017 | Santhosh Srinivasan Co-Founder | — | 3 patents AI-driven automated configuration and management of complex IT infrastructure via knowledge graphs | — |
| 44 | Refuel Provider of a platform using LLMs to transform enterprise data | $5M | 36 mo ago | 6 | 2021 | Nihit Desai Co-Founder & CTO | — | — | — |
| 45 | Willow Voice Provider of AI-powered voice dictation software for all applications | $5M | 7 mo ago | — | 2024 | Ian Ye Co-Founder | Framer SitesReactTikTok Pixel+18 | — | 3 launchs |
| 46 | Akto Platform offering API security solution | $4M | 43 mo ago | 10 | 2022 | Ankush Jain Co-Founder & CTO | Framer SitesYouTubeReact+22 | — | — |
| 47 | Vocode Provider of AI-based voice interfaces | $3M | 28 mo ago | 4 | 2023 | Kian Hooshmand Co-Founder | Node.jsKaTeXRadix UI+13 | — | — |
| 48 | Alltius Agentic AI platform for financial services | $2M | 41 mo ago | 13 13 → 22 (+69%) · sector median +33% | 2022 | Vibhanshu Abhishek Co-Founder | WebflowZohoAmazon Web Services+14 | — | — |
| 49 | Infrrd Provides machine learning based solutions for enterprises | $2M | 9 mo ago | 228 | 2015 | — | WebflowCart FunctionalityAmazon Web Services+24 | 20 patents AI-powered document and image analysis: data extraction, entity verification, and model optimization. | — |
| 50 | Retell Developer of an AI voice agent platform for call automation | $500K | 21 mo ago | — | 2023 | Todd Li Co-Founder | Webflow EcommerceWebflowApple iCloud Mail+27 | — | 2 launchs · 4 partnerships |
Top 12 Natural Language Processing companies in California
#1
Series D · San Jose, California · founded 2012 · 141 employees$102.5Mraised▾
Provider of AI-powered software for expense auditing and accounts payable. The company offers autonomous accounts payable, email management, and global e-invoicing compliance. It provides automated auditing for expense reports and corporate card programs. The AI platform offers low-code automation, pre-built application library, and integration with existing systems. The company's solutions address fraud detection, operational expenditure reduction, and regulatory compliance.
- Sep 2025Series D$180M
- Sep 2019Series C$50M
- Oct 2018Series B$35M
- Nov 2017Series A$13M
#2
Series A · San Francisco, California · founded 2024$110Mraised▾
Developer of an AI teammate for logistics and knowledge management. The AI teammate handles tasks such as calling, emailing, and logging into systems. It extracts and retains knowledge from communications, building a knowledge base. The AI teammate integrates with existing communication channels and adapts to business needs. It assists sales teams, improves margins, boosts productivity, and speeds up invoicing.
- Sep 2025Series A$85M
- Mar 2025Seed$25M
#3
Series B · Covina, California · founded 2016 · 119 employees$7.7Mraised▾
Provider of AI-powered voice and chat automation platform for enterprises. The platform offers tools for building agentic AI agents, speech-to-text conversion, and real-time translation. It provides features such as voice biometrics, call analytics, and automated quality assurance. The platform supports omnichannel automation, multilingual capabilities, and integration with various enterprise systems.
- Mar 2026Series B$10M
- Jul 2024Series A$4M
- Mar 2022Series A$832.2K
- Aug 2021Series A$1.2M
#4
Poolside 🦄Series B · San Francisco, California · founded 2023$626Mraised▾
Developer of artificial intelligence models and systems for software engineering. It builds models purpose-built to excel at software engineering. It allows models to learn through trial and error, navigating ambiguity to discover solutions. The intelligence understands architecture, development processes, and how software reflects business. It delivers intelligence that integrates across the entire development ecosystem.
- Oct 2024Series B$500M
- Aug 2023Series A$100M
- May 2023Seed$26M
#5
Series D · Redwood City, California · founded 2017 · 45 employees$165Mraised▾
Developer of an AI assistant for clinical documentation and reasoning. The AI solution captures patient conversations to generate notes, instructions, and orders. It adapts to clinician workflows, streamlining documentation across care settings. The platform integrates with major EHRs and health technology applications. It offers capabilities spanning pre-charting, documentation, and clinical decision support.
- Jan 2025Series D—
- Oct 2024Series D$70M
- Dec 2021Series C$55M
- Mar 2020Series B$20M
#6
Series A · Palo Alto, California · founded 2023$13Mraised▾
Platform developing physical AI. Its model can perceive and reason about the physical world by fusing multimodal sensor data and natural language. The platforms approach involves sensor fusion, integrating information from multiple sensor modalities like radars, cameras, accelerometers, and more to analyze unstructured sensor data and uncover hidden patterns of behavior.
- Nov 2025Series A$35M
- Apr 2024Seed$13M
#7
Series A · Berkeley, California · founded 2013 · 80 employees$12.3Mraised▾
Provider of AI-driven language translation and localization platform for enterprises. The platform automates localization across various touchpoints using AI agents and machine translation. It delivers consistent language experiences for customers and employees. The platform integrates with existing localization, document management, and customer support systems.
- Sep 2025Series A$3.9M
- May 2023Series A$8M
- Jul 2020Seed$3M
- Dec 2018Seed$1.3M
#8
Series C · Palo Alto, California · founded 2015 · 59 employees$93.1Mraised▾
Provider of cloud-based machine translation tools and services. It comes with features such as auto-suggest based on previously translated segments and an intelligent pre-translation feature with smart tag placement that does not require editing segments anymore. They also offer a real-time adaptive translation API that provides multiple suggestions, incremental domain adaptations, sub-segment matching, and word alignments.
- Nov 2024Series C$45.4M
- Apr 2022Series C$55.5M
- May 2020Series B$25M
- Dec 2019Series B$25M
#9
Seed · San Francisco, California · founded 2024$5Mraised▾
Provider of AI-powered voice dictation software for all applications. This software offers fast and accurate speech-to-text conversion, adapting to individual speaking styles and automatically correcting errors and formatting text. It supports multiple languages and works seamlessly across various platforms and applications, eliminating the need for copying and pasting. The software prioritizes user privacy with end-to-end encryption. Custom dictionaries can be added to increase accuracy. Background noise is filtered to ensure clear transcription, even in quiet environments.
- Nov 2025Seed$4.5M
- Jun 2025Seed$500K
#10
Acquired · Palo Alto, California · founded 2022 · 35 employees$1.5Braised▾
Provider of emotionally intelligent artificial intelligence for personal and enterprise use. The company powers Pi, a conversational AI chatbot available on multiple devices, alongside API and enterprise offerings. AI develops human-centered AI focused on empathetic, conversational models like Pi, a personal intelligence chatbot designed for emotional support and interactive dialogue. It emphasizes transforming interactions from transactional to relational through advanced large language models.
- Jun 2023Series E$1.3B
- Apr 2022Series D$225M
#11
Series A · Palo Alto, California · founded 2020 · 48 employees$73.5Mraised▾
Provider of a platform for building governed, grounded, auditable AI agents. The platform supports context-relevant retrieval using advanced context-engineering techniques. It natively supports multimodal data and complex documents, enabling agents to reason across text, tables, and images. The platform provides governance that detects and corrects hallucinations, ensuring agents operate reliably. It scales to support growth across multiple use cases.
- Jul 2024Series A$25M
- May 2023Seed$28.5M
- Oct 2022Seed$20M
#12
Acquired · San Francisco, California · founded 2001 · 3 employees$340Mraised▾
Cloud based suite of marketing solutions. It is an online intelligence platform that offers social media monitoring, tracking, and analytics for businesses. It offers media, social, and consumer trends datasets to analyze and generate insights. The platform offers social listening tool to capture brand mention and understand customers through social data. Features include social media management, analytics, influencer marketing, and more.
- Dec 2023Post IPO$65M
- Mar 2019Conventional Debt$175M
- Feb 2017Conventional Debt$60M
- Aug 2014Conventional Debt$40M
Funding & investor landscape
Notable founders
Market landscape — 10 sub-themes by coverage
Share of Natural Language Processing coverage by sub-theme.
Regulatory-risk over time flat
Funding & growth over time
funding flat · growth flat
How research on Nlp in California is moving
A read on the academic research around Nlp in California — which themes are gaining ground, the institutions and researchers driving them, and how the tone is shifting. Based on 381 papers.
UC Berkeley, USC, and UCLA lead California's NLP research—dominated by topic modeling and multimodal ML with an optimistic tone (169 breakthroughs vs. 64 concerns), accelerating sharply post-2020.
- University of California, Berkeley86
- University of Southern California51
- University of California, Los Angeles44
- California University of Pennsylvania29
- University of California, Irvine29
- Semantics (computer science)1→10
- Feature (linguistics)2→8
- Generative grammar2→8
- Language model1→7
- Representation (politics)3→8
- Context (archaeology)1→4
- Task (project management)1→4
- Set (abstract data type)1→4
- Language model1→3
- Scalability1→3
- Quality (philosophy)1→4
- Natural language1→4
- Context (archaeology)1→3
Common questions
Riya reads income statements for fun. She covers the real money in a sector — revenue, growth, who actually earns — and never met a vague claim she didn't want a number for.