Day: November 7, 2025

• AI is transforming the consulting industry with new tech startups in Silicon Valley.
• These startups aim to help companies manage data and optimize technology using AI.
• These four companies have collectively raised over $300 million.

AI is upending a business that hasn’t changed in generations.

Over the past year, a new wave of consulting tech startups has emerged in Silicon Valley. These companies are helping clients manage their data, make better decisions, and optimize their technology, all through the use of AI.

While some on the list are not shy about their ambitions to eventually take a slice of business from the Big Four or the MBB, others are looking to complement the established players’ work.

Business Insider asked a handful of investors to identify a few of the most promising startups to watch in this emerging category of consulting tech. Here are four AI-powered consulting startups to watch, according to five investors who are backing them.

PromptQL

Total funding: $136 million

What it does:

PromptQL is an enterprise platform that aims to automate some of the work of a typical consultant, like surfacing insights and generating reports. It helps clients build custom AI analysts by integrating their internal data with the foundation models they already use.

Once deployed, these AI analysts can perform tasks typically handled by data scientists or engineers — and continuously learn and adapt to their environments over time.

PromptQL also offers access to its team of expert engineers, who help companies operate their AI analysts and shape broader AI transformation strategies — at a rate of $900 an hour.

Tanmai Gopal, PromptQL’s CEO and founder, told Business Insider that the platform’s “killer feature” has been its capacity to provide “AI accuracy at scale without requiring messy data to be prepped or moved elsewhere.”

Why it’s good:

“For us, the bet here is simple: there’s an overconfidence crisis in AI,” Gaurav Gupta, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, told Business Insider. “We believe 95% of AI companies will fail, and history will show that hallucinations were a major reason why. We think PromptQL is best positioned to solve this for enterprises.”

Aily Labs

Total funding: $101 million

What it does:

Founded in 2020 by former Novartis executive Bianca Anghelina, Aily Labs builds an AI-powered “decision intelligence” platform designed to help Fortune 500 companies make decisions by consolidating data.

“I experienced firsthand how decisions are slowed down because of siloed data,” Anghelina said. Traditional corporate decision-making is often delayed by “processes that take weeks or months” and “data owned by different functions” without “one source of truth,” she said.

Aily’s “AI brain” aims to tackle these challenges by combining off-the-shelf and proprietary large language models, with data, to surface insights and recommendations “in a matter of minutes rather than weeks,” she said.

Unlike typical consulting firms, Aily isn’t focused on one-off projects, but on embedding “an always-on AI brain” into a company’s operations, she said.

Why it’s good:

“Everyone’s capturing information, but the question is: how are we actually using it to drive better decisions and efficiency?” Pegah Ebrahimi, the cofounder and managing partner at FPV Ventures, which led Aily’s latest $80 million funding round, told Business Insider.

Aily is like an “executive partner that surfaces the top insights and risks relevant to your specific role — whether you’re head of supply chain in Brazil or head of sales for North America,” he added.

Profound

Total funding: $58.5 million

What it does:

In the AI era, companies are no longer agonizing about search engine optimization; they’re fretting about how to get mentioned in generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT.

GEO, also known as generative engine optimization, is the process of optimizing content to boost its visibility in AI-driven searches.

Profound helps companies manage their geo strategy, including how they’re mentioned in generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT. They also advise on how agents interface with a company’s website and digital content, and analyze real-time search data to understand how consumers are working with generative AI chatbots.

Why it’s good:

Thomson Nguyen, cofounder and managing partner at Saga Ventures — which invested in Profound’s Series B round — told Business Insider by email that chief marketing officers at companies once hired brand consultants and marketing consultants to run focus groups to research and understand how their brand ranked among competitors.

Now, Profound offers a way to automate that work, Nguyen said.

Max Altman, another cofounder and managing partner at Saga, told Business Insider by email that “Profound is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room, and clear category leader.”

Dialogue

Total funding: $6 million

What it does:

Dialogue AI, an AI-powered market research platform, aims to speed up the way companies conduct research — from designing studies and recruiting participants, to conducting interviews.

The company was founded by Benjamin Lo, Justin Hoang, and Hubert Chen — all of whom overlapped at Nextdoor, a social networking platform for neighborhoods.

The aim is to cut the turnaround time of a typical market research study from weeks to just a day, Lo previously told Business Insider.

“Maybe you’re a designer or an engineer or a consultant, and you can basically conduct research independently with best practices. I think that’s one of our visions — can we almost democratize market research?” Hoang previously told Business Insider.

Why it’s good:

“Market research as we know it is ripe for disruption,” Faraz Fatemi, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, which lead Dialogue’s seed round, said in a press release announcing its new funding.

“Dialogue understands that teams across an organization, not just researchers, need fast, meaningful insights to do their jobs well. What they’ve built is both technically impressive and deeply thoughtful: a way to talk to customers at scale, without sacrificing depth or quality.”

• Elon Musk secured a pay package worth up to $1 trillion if he achieves certain milestones.
• Employees who earn more typical salaries can employ some of the approaches he used.
• Workers can leverage their worth and negotiate higher pay by aligning incentives with performance.

When it comes to earning a living, you might want to be more like Elon.

There are some strategy lessons to be learned from the world’s richest man, who just won a pay package worth up to $1 trillion at Tesla — even for those of us whose paychecks come with fewer zeros.

Of course, most people can’t go work at their rocket company if their promotion or job offer doesn’t come through. However, a scaled-down version of some of the methods Musk and the Tesla board used could work for mere mortals.

It comes down to knowing your worth, framing a pay agreement as a win-win, and, if you can, treating a compensation discussion as a negotiation, not just a plea for more money, career advisors told Business Insider.

Know your worth

To start, workers need to understand their leverage. In a lackluster job market, you might not feel like you have much to bargain with. Yet if you have an offer from another employer or some other option that would let you walk away, you have latitude, said Alan Stein, CEO of Kadima Careers, which offers coaching for getting six-figure jobs.

“If you understand what your plan B is, then that gives you a lot of power,” he said.

A viable backup plan — sometimes called a BATNA, or a best alternative to a negotiated agreement — can mean you’re asking for something from a position of strength, Stein said.

Your leverage could just be that you’re invaluable to your employer. If that’s you, then your boss might recognize that things would fall apart if you leave. It’s what employers often refer to as “key person risk,” said John Gates, founder of Salary Coach, which helps executives negotiate their pay.

“As you get to the point where there’s only one of you in a company, that’s when the elbow room appears,” he said.

That’s similar to how many, including Tesla’s board, appear to view Musk, who has a stable of companies to which he could decamp if he were to leave Tesla. “He’s a unique rainmaker within Tesla,” Gates said.

On Thursday, Tesla shareholders voted to award Musk $1 trillion in compensation if he meets a series of goals.

The opposite holds true as well: If you’re one of many workers doing something similar, Gates said, your bargaining chip is likely going to be smaller.

Watch how you flex

Even if you are your company’s golden goose or you have a shiny new offer from a competitor, it’s not necessarily advisable to walk into your boss’s office and flaunt it, he said. Most people aren’t Musk, after all.

Gates said there is a danger, however, in showing an offer to your employer because it signals that you’re poised to leave.

“The average executive would be running a tremendous risk with that approach,” he said. “It brings your loyalty into question.”

Gates said that a better way would be to say something like, “I’ve had several calls from headhunters or other companies interested in my background. The numbers that they’re throwing at me are kind of surprising, but I really like working here.” Then, he said, you can make clear that the offers are becoming a distraction and that you’d like to discuss your compensation.

Get paid if you perform

Musk’s new compensation plan is directly tied to numerous milestones, including his ability to boost Tesla’s valuation from about $1.5 trillion to $8.5 trillion by 2035 and deliver 20 million vehicles and one million Optimus robots.

Similarly, if you’re negotiating a job offer or a pay bump, you can ask to tie some of that to a specific goal. It’s a way to align incentives, Gates said, so that “everybody’s making more money together.”

Being able to say, “I contributed to this,” or “I made this happen,” makes it easier to say, “This is why I’m worth what I’m asking for,” said Patrice Lindo, CEO of Career Nomad, a platform that helps professionals navigate career changes.

Your compensation goes beyond your paycheck, and so can the discussions you have with your employer. Like Musk, who has been seeking to get paid through awards in Tesla shares, you can ask for things like company stock, a signing bonus, added vacation time, or even a deferred start date, Lindo said.

By regularly documenting your successes, it’s easier to talk about them when it comes time to discuss your pay, she said. Lindo encourages workers to keep notes on their accomplishments — what she calls a “value tracker” — so that they can keep score. Then, when it’s time to sit down with your boss to go over your performance and pay, you have the evidence you need, Lindo said.

After all, she said, “Every raise that you get is a referendum on how well you branded your impact.”

Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.