AI Startups to Watch (Sep 25): Higgsfield, PrismML & Dextr
AI startups news for September 25, 2026: Higgsfield nears a $1B run rate, PrismML runs 1-bit models on smart glasses, and Dextr AI automates hotel front desks.
An AI video company told Bloomberg it is pacing toward a billion dollars of annualized revenue on a 60-engineer team. A Caltech spinout put a one-bit model on smart glasses. A 20-person startup is selling hotel front desks by the month. Today's AI startups news is about young companies attacking cost lines incumbents treat as fixed.
The Day's Bigger Story
Higgsfield says it is pacing toward $1 billion in annualized revenue
Higgsfield is a generative video and advertising platform founded in October 2023 by CEO Alex Mashrabov, the former head of generative AI at Snap, with Yerzat Dulat and Mahi de Silva. On Sept 24 the company told Bloomberg it is on track for more than $1 billion in annualized revenue, defined as four weeks of revenue multiplied by 13, with contracted business customer revenue up tenfold since June.
It reports more than 32 million users, about 1 million paying subscribers and customers at 390 of the Fortune 500, with subscription revenue falling from over 90% of the total to just over 60% as usage-based billing grows. That is roughly $5 million of revenue per engineer on a team of about 60, which has been cash flow positive for two months.
Its last round was $400 million in August 2026 led by DST Global at a $5.4 billion valuation, taking total funding to about $538 million. The disruption sits with production houses and agencies: Higgsfield says a 15-person team shipped a 95 minute film for under $500,000, the business model AI video rivals such as Runway are still trying to prove. Source: Bloomberg Source: Tech in Asia
The Rounds
PrismML runs a 1-bit model on Qualcomm smart glasses
PrismML is a Caltech spinout founded in 2025 by professor Babak Hassibi with Sahin Lale, Omead Pooladzandi and Reza Sadri. It compresses language models to ternary weights of minus one, zero and plus one, which shrinks them roughly four to ten times at close to full benchmark parity, and ships the weights openly under Apache 2.0.
At Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit on Sept 23, covered by TechCrunch the next day, Qualcomm demonstrated PrismML's 1-bit Bonsai 2B vision-language model running locally on Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 smart glasses. Its Bonsai 2 27B release on Sept 17 squeezed Alibaba's Qwen3.8-27B from about 54GB down to 5.95GB. Funding stands at a $16.25 million seed led by Khosla Ventures with Cerberus Ventures and Caltech, with no valuation disclosed.
The bet is that removing the cloud inference tax attacks both proprietary labs and the data center capex thesis, while Qualcomm gets useful on-device AI without buying a cloud. Source: TechCrunch Cerberus Ventures
Dextr AI exits stealth with $6.7M to automate hotel front desks
Dextr AI is a San Francisco hospitality agent company founded in July 2025 by CEO Sajid Shariff, a hotel operator, and CTO Scott Arnold, a former engineering lead at Meta. It came out of stealth on Sept 24 with a $6.7 million seed led by Elevation Capital with Foundation Capital, its first institutional money and no disclosed valuation.
Its agents wire into legacy property management systems and phone hardware, with roughly 20 staff and more than 1 million guest interactions a month across franchised Hilton, Wyndham, Best Western and IHG properties. The company says one hotel processes $100,000 to $300,000 a month of bookings through its voice agent and claims 49x ROI.
It targets labor rather than software licenses: automating late check-in is pitched at removing an overnight front desk, which it values at $70,000 to $80,000 a year per property. That puts it against staffing agencies and legacy PMS vendors, with India named as the next market. Source: Crunchbase News
Wealthcome raises 15 million euros to put AI over wealth data
Wealthcome is a Bordeaux wealth management software company founded in 2022 by CEO Cyprien Delmeule. On Sept 24 it announced a 15 million euro Series B, about $17 million, led by Breega with existing investor BlackFin Capital Partners, eighteen months after a 7 million euro Series A.
It serves about 800 firms and more than 6,000 professional users, and its differentiator is connectivity: real-time links to roughly 90% of financial institutions, which turns client, portfolio and compliance data into the context layer for its AI assistant, Binom. It is now pushing upmarket from advisory firms into banks and insurers, against Harvest, Europe's wealth software leader with about 4,600 clients and roughly 120 million euros of revenue. Source: Dealroom
Qingxing raises a second round in three months for quantum-inspired models
Qingxing Heterogeneous Computing is a Beijing company founded in 2021 by Yu Teng, who studied computer science at Tsinghua, with CTO Ma Xindian. It builds quantum-inspired models trained with simulated quantum methods and then run on ordinary GPUs.
It closed a Series A+ on Sept 25, its second round in three months, bringing cumulative funding across the A and A+ to about 100 million yuan, roughly $14.9 million. Investors include Jinkai Capital, Anhui High-Tech Investment, Daode Investment and the Jingdong Group founder as an angel, with no single lead named. Its RiverONE model has 1.9 billion parameters, claims at least 95% of the performance of NVIDIA's Ising Calibration 1 on quantum calibration chart tasks with under a tenth of the parameters, and has chip adaptation work underway with Biren Technology and MetaX. Source: The Quantum Insider Source: 36Kr
Startup Snapshot
| Startup | What They Do | Latest Round | Valuation | Key Differentiator |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Higgsfield | Generative video and ads | $400M Series B, DST Global | $5.4B | $1B run rate, 60 engineers |
| PrismML | 1-bit model compression | $16.25M seed, Khosla | Undisclosed | Ternary weights, open Apache 2.0 |
| Dextr AI | Hotel voice agents | $6.7M seed, Elevation | Undisclosed | Replaces the overnight front desk |
| Wealthcome | Wealth management AI | EUR 15M Series B, Breega | Undisclosed | Data links to 90% of banks |
| Qingxing | Quantum-inspired models | ~RMB 100M Series A+ | Undisclosed | Runs on Chinese GPUs |
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the top AI startups to watch today?
Higgsfield, PrismML, Dextr AI and Wealthcome are the AI startups to watch on September 25, 2026. Higgsfield says it is pacing toward $1 billion in annualized revenue, PrismML is running one-bit models on Qualcomm smart glasses, Dextr AI raised $6.7 million to automate hotel front desks, and Wealthcome raised 15 million euros.
Why is Higgsfield's $1 billion run rate important?
It shows generative video has moved from demo to recurring revenue faster than almost any other AI category. Higgsfield reports more than 32 million users, about 1 million paying subscribers and customers at 390 of the Fortune 500, all on a team of roughly 60 people, which is why the number matters more than the valuation.
Why did PrismML put its model on smart glasses?
PrismML's ternary compression runs a usable vision-language model locally on Snapdragon AR1 hardware, which removes the cloud inference cost entirely. Its Bonsai 2 27B release cut Qwen3.8-27B from about 54GB to 5.95GB, and Khosla Ventures led its $16.25 million seed.
Bottom Line
The through line today is cost displacement, not capability: Higgsfield replacing production budgets, PrismML replacing cloud inference, Dextr AI replacing an overnight shift, Wealthcome replacing a competitor's data moat. Watch which of these converts a cost story into renewals. Yesterday's edition and the full AI Startups archive have every round we covered this month.
Related reading
If this story matters to you, these earlier editions cover the same ground in more detail:
- AI Startups to Watch (Sep 19): EVAS, Factory & PrismML
- 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 (Oct 3): Volantis, CScale & GMI Cloud
- AI Startups to Watch (Oct 2): PaleBlueDot, Photon & Halluminate
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