However, there are a number of emerging, under-the-radar vendors focused on making AI systems easier to deploy, manage, and leverage within organizations.
This list highlights 10 hidden gems in the AI industry that are worth watching in 2026. While none of these companies are household names yet, they are all gaining popularity in healthcare, data governance, and business operations.
1. The basset hound
Baseten is a San Francisco-based ML infrastructure company focused on high-performance model inference at scale. Baseten’s platform enables enterprises to deploy open-source, custom and refined AI models on an infrastructure optimized for powerful inference.
Using advanced hardware from Google Cloud and Nvidia, the platform recently achieved significant performance improvements, including a 225% cost savings for high-volume processing and a 25% speed increase for speed-sensitive tasks. Baseten makes it practical for companies to deploy powerful AI models in real-world applications, such as voice assistants, search tools, and automated workflows, without breaking the bank.
2. Modal Labs Inc.
Modal Labs Inc. is a developer-focused infrastructure company that simplifies building and deploying data, AI, and machine learning applications. The company offers a serverless platform designed to handle technical complexity by managing everything from custom files to container runtimes, allowing developers to scale thousands of CPUs or GPUs with just a few lines of code.
Modal serves a wide range of use cases, including generative AI inference, LLM refinement, computational biotechnology, and media processing. By prioritizing developer experience, Modal removes the infrastructure barrier, allowing companies to deliver AI and data applications faster without the need for deep infrastructure expertise.
3. Any shell
Anyscale is the company behind Ray, an open-source framework for distributed computing that has become essential for AI development companies like OpenAI, Uber, and Spotify. The company commercializes Ray through a fully managed platform built on Ray that allows developers to scale ML applications from their laptops to production without the need for distributed systems expertise.
The company recently announced its partnership with Microsoft to bring Anyscale to Azure as a first-party service, making it easier for enterprises to build and deploy AI applications within Azure’s secure infrastructure.
4. Shorten
Abridge is an AI company that turns healthcare conversations into actionable insights for doctors and patients.
The platform listens to provider-patient conversations and automatically generates clinical documentation while integrating the Epic EHR, saving providers an average of two hours per day. In 2025, Abridge expanded beyond transcription to include revenue cycle intelligence, checking and validating billing codes in real time to reduce administrative costs for healthcare providers.
Abridge recently launched Abridge for Nurses, recognized by TIME as one of the best inventions of the year, which automatically captures nursing documentation, reducing administrative burden so nurses can focus on patient care.
5. Weapon
Cresta is an AI company that aims to transform the way contact centers work by combining people and AI to improve customer conversations. The company helps companies like Carmax, Hilton and Cox Communications save time and costs while delivering consistent, compliant customer experiences that drive revenue growth.
Cresta recently launched Agent Operations Centers, a centralized command hub that gives supervisors real-time visibility into both human and AI-led conversations using intervention tools. The platform introduces a new role for AI supervisors, allowing human experts to guide AI agent conversations to quickly resolve issues and improve customer experiences.
6. eGain
eGain is a publicly traded software company that helps businesses simplify customer service and support across multiple channels, including web, mobile and social media. The company offers cloud-based solutions that combine knowledge management with AI capabilities, enabling faster and more consistent responses to customer queries rather than relying on automated responses.
eGain serves industries such as financial, retail and telecom through products such as AI Agent, AI Knowledge Hub and Conversation Hub, allowing enterprises to minimize support costs while increasing customer satisfaction. The company offers SaaS subscriptions, professional services and support to help businesses deliver consistent, personalized customer experiences.
7. Enjoy
Immuta is a data security company that helps organizations share sensitive data securely at scale.
The platform identifies sensitive data, enforces security policies, and monitors data usage across your infrastructure. Immuta enables data teams to streamline operations and simplify governance by automating access controls and policy enforcement, so teams don’t have to manually restrict data or implement ad hoc security measures.
Backed by investors from leading data companies such as Databricks and Snowflake, Immuta helps organizations get more value from their data while maintaining compliance and security.
8. Hidden layer
HiddenLayer is a Gartner recognized AI security company that protects agentic, generative and predictive AI applications throughout their lifecycle. The platform protects AI applications from monitoring the supply chain to running automated security tests to identify potential vulnerabilities.
Founded by cybersecurity and machine learning veterans, HiddenLayer uses patented technology and leading adversarial AI research to help companies manage risk, ensure compliance, and safely deploy AI at scale. HiddenLayer is backed by strategic investors including Microsoft’s Venture Fund, IBM Ventures and Capital One Ventures.
9. Innodata
Innodata is a global data engineering company that has quietly built deep expertise over 35 years. The company helps solve critical data engineering challenges and has become a trusted partner for seven of the largest technology companies as they improve their AI systems.
Innodata provides specialized data services, including annotation, transformation, curation and intelligent automation, designed for generative and traditional AI applications. The company offers services for securely labeling complex and sensitive data for model training, converting unstructured information into structured formats, and maintaining accurate databases.
PagerDuty is a digital operations management company trusted by 30,000 organizations and 68% of the Fortune 100 to detect and respond to critical issues. The enterprise platform orchestrates incident response across teams, including developers and engineers, security and customer success.
PagerDuty provides services such as incident management, AIOps for alert optimization, automation tools, and AI agents to help businesses manage critical work and operate more efficiently. The platform integrates seamlessly with more than 700 popular tools, including Slack, AWS, and Microsoft Teams, allowing teams to easily integrate PagerDuty into their existing workflows.
For more insight into how AI is expected to shape enterprise IT in the coming year, see eWeek’s AI predictions for 2026.
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