AI Startups to Watch (Sep 23): Snorkel, Cyera & Firecrawl
AI startups to watch on Sep 23, 2026: Snorkel triples to $3.5B, Cyera adds $400M from Goldman, Mirendil jumps 5x, and Firecrawl banks $75M.
The AI startups to watch today are selling the things everybody else needs: training data, agent security, web access, and clinical workflows. Five companies moved serious money in the last 24 hours. Yesterday's startups digest covered agents and infrastructure; today the numbers got much bigger.
Snorkel AI triples its valuation to $3.5B
Snorkel AI is a data-development company that builds the training and evaluation data frontier labs use to improve models. It started as a Stanford research project in 2019 and is led by co-founder and CEO Alex Ratner. Its bet is that the bottleneck in AI is no longer compute but the quality of reinforcement-learning data. Source: TechCrunch Source: Unite.AI
- Round: $350 million Series E at a $3.5 billion valuation, announced September 22, 2026.
- Lead investors: Insight and S32, with Third Point, March, Blumberg, Allegis, Standard VC and Frontline joining.
- Valuation: $3.5 billion, up from $1.3 billion in May 2025. Total raised before this round was $237 million.
Ratner said Snorkel's data-as-a-service product, launched under a year ago, grew more than 18x and crossed a $375 million annualized revenue run rate this week. Snorkel is now selling into frontier labs, hyperscalers, and US government agencies.
Why it is disruptive: if reinforcement-learning data decides which model wins, the vendor that supplies it has leverage over every lab. Snorkel competes with Scale AI, Surge AI, and Mercor.
Cyera adds $400M from Goldman Sachs at $12B+
Cyera is a data security posture management company, the category that finds and protects sensitive data wherever it lives. Founded in 2021 by Israeli security veterans Yotam Segev and Tamar Bar-Ilan, it is now based in New York. Source: WSJ Source: Pulse 2.0
- Round: $400 million from Goldman Sachs Alternatives Growth Equity, an extension of the Series G led by Evolution Equity in June 2026.
- Valuation: above $12 billion.
The capital targets one problem: AI agents hold credentials, call APIs, and act for users, multiplying the identities a security team must govern. Cyera has moved into that gap by acquiring Oasis Security and shipping agent-focused products for customers including Paramount and Chipotle.
Why it is disruptive: agents need machine identities the way employees need logins, and most enterprises have no inventory of them.
Mirendil: ex-Anthropic founders in talks at a $5B valuation
Mirendil is a self-improving-AI startup founded in December 2025 by Behnam Neyshabur and Harsh Mehta, both senior researchers who left Anthropic's research organization. Source: Bloomberg Source: Value Add VC
- Round: in talks to raise up to $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation, with Kleiner Perkins in discussions to lead and Andreessen Horowitz participating. Nothing has closed.
- Prior round: $200 million seed at a $1 billion valuation three months ago, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins alongside Nvidia.
- Disclosed product revenue: none.
That last line is the point: a 5x markup in one quarter, led by the same two firms that priced the seed, is existing investors marking their own book.
Why it is disruptive: if Mirendil can automate parts of AI research, it changes the cost structure of every lab.
Firecrawl raises $75M and launches Alexandria
Firecrawl is a web scraping and search API built for AI agents. It started as an internal tool at Mendable, a Y Combinator-backed chatbot startup, to solve a problem every agent developer hits: the open web is hostile to machine readers. Source: SiliconANGLE Source: SiliconReport
- Round: $75 million Series B led by Los Angeles-based Smash Ventures.
- Participants: Y Combinator, Altos Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Freestyle, and Offline Ventures.
- Valuation: not disclosed.
Alongside the raise, Firecrawl launched Alexandria, a cloud service that bundles web extraction with curated datasets and third-party feeds, including tens of millions of scientific paper abstracts and programming documentation. It says much of the round will fund licensing more third-party data.
Why it is disruptive: every agent needs clean, current web data, and publishers are increasingly unwilling to hand it over for free. If Firecrawl turns data licensing into a product, it becomes the toll booth between the web and the agent economy, competing with Exa, Tavily, and legacy scraping providers.
Heidi Health raises $340M for clinical AI agents
Heidi Health is a Melbourne-based clinical AI company founded by practising physician Dr Thomas Kelly. It began as an AI medical scribe and is now pushing agentic workflows into hospital and clinic systems, past transcriptions into referrals, coding and admin. Source: SiliconANGLE Source: The Australian
- Round: $340 million in new funding.
- Valuation: $900 million, described by Australian coverage as a A$1 billion milestone.
- Prior round: $65 million, October 2025.
Why it is disruptive: scribing is becoming a commodity feature inside larger clinical platforms. Heidi is betting that clinician trust and health-system integrations are worth more than the notes themselves, the same land-grab Microsoft and Abridge are running.
Startup Snapshot
| Startup | What They Do | Latest Round | Valuation | Key Differentiator |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Snorkel AI | AI training and eval data | $350M Series E | $3.5B | $375M revenue run rate, 18x growth |
| Cyera | Data security for AI agents | $400M extension | $12B+ | Agent identity and data governance |
| Mirendil | Self-improving AI research | Up to $1B in talks | $5B (reported) | Ex-Anthropic founders, no revenue yet |
| Firecrawl | Agent web scraping | $75M Series B | Undisclosed | Alexandria licensed data platform |
| Heidi Health | Clinical AI agents | $340M | $900M | Clinician trust, health system integrations |
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the top AI startups to watch today?
Snorkel AI, Cyera, Mirendil, Firecrawl, and Heidi Health are the top AI startups to watch today, based on funding announced in the last 24 hours. Snorkel tripled its valuation to $3.5 billion, Cyera raised $400 million from Goldman Sachs at over $12 billion, and Mirendil is in talks at a reported $5 billion.
Why did Snorkel AI's valuation triple?
Snorkel AI tripled its valuation because its data-as-a-service business grew more than 18x in under a year, reaching a $375 million annualized revenue run rate, according to CEO Alex Ratner. Insight and S32 led the $350 million Series E at a $3.5 billion valuation, up from $1.3 billion in May 2025.
What is Mirendil and why is it worth $5 billion?
Mirendil is a self-improving-AI startup founded in December 2025 by two former Anthropic researchers, Behnam Neyshabur and Harsh Mehta. Bloomberg reported it is in talks to raise up to $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation, up from a $1 billion seed three months earlier, with no disclosed product revenue.
Bottom Line
The money today went to companies that own inputs rather than outputs: the data models train on, the identities agents authenticate with, the pages agents read, and the workflow clinicians use. If the model layer keeps cutting prices, that is where margin has to live. More coverage in the AI startups archive.
Related reading
Deeper context from the archive on the companies and technologies in this story:
- Starcloud's .3B orbital data centers, a 1B inference chip bet, and robot models that learn from a single demo: AI Startups to Watch for August 23, 2026
- AI Startups to Watch - August 14, 2026
- AI Startups to Watch (Sep 28): Instinct, Tekever & OpenEvidence
- AI Startups to Watch (Sep 27): Numeral, Baselayer & Confido
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