Top 10 Startups in San Francisco You Should Know in 2026

San Francisco has always been the place where billion-dollar ideas are born. But in 2026, the city is operating on a completely different level. The top startups in San Francisco are not just building apps. They are building the backbone of the next decade. From AI that writes its own code to self-driving cars logging millions of real trips, the momentum here is hard to overstate.

Growth List data shows San Francisco startups raised $111.7 billion in just the first three quarters of 2025 alone. Already a record. And 2026 pushed that figure even higher. The city pulls in over 50% of all global AI funding, holds the world’s highest startup density at 6,263 startups per 100,000 residents, and is home to more unicorns than any other city on earth.

Here are the 10 startups in San Francisco every investor, founder, and curious person needs to know right now.

OpenAI — The Company That Started the AI Race

Let’s be honest. No list of top startups in San Francisco starts anywhere other than here. OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022 and, in doing so, kicked off the most consequential technology shift in a generation. Since then, it has become the fastest-growing commercial company in history.

In March 2026, OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank, and Andreessen Horowitz all backed it. The company generates roughly $2 billion in revenue every single month. That is $24 billion annualized. Enterprise customers now make up more than 40% of that number. Its coding tool Codex serves over 2 million weekly users and is growing 70% month over month.

And here is the kicker. OpenAI has filed confidentially with the SEC for an IPO targeting a valuation of up to $1 trillion. If that happens, it will be the most watched public market event in living memory.

Anthropic — Building AI That Is Safe and Reliable

Here is something most people missed. In May 2026, Anthropic became the most valuable private AI company in the world. It surpassed OpenAI. Its Series H round closed at $65 billion in funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital.

Founded in 2021 by Dario and Daniela Amodei along with other former OpenAI researchers, Anthropic built its entire identity around one idea: AI that is safe, reliable, and honest. Its Claude family of models is the top choice for enterprise customers who need accuracy over flash. The kind of organizations that cannot afford a wrong answer.

The revenue growth is genuinely hard to believe. Anthropic went from $1 billion in annualized revenue at the start of 2025 to $47 billion by May 2026. Over 1,000 companies now spend more than $1 million annually with Anthropic. Two years ago, that number was a dozen. Claude is also the only frontier AI model available on all three major cloud platforms: AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. That matters more than most people realize.

Waymo — The Self-Driving Car Startup Taking Over City Roads

The reality is, most people still treat autonomous driving like a science project. Waymo is not interested in that conversation anymore. The San Francisco-based company, originally spun out of Alphabet, logged 15 million autonomous trips in 2025. That is three times the year before. Its vehicles run commercially in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin.

In February 2026, Waymo raised $16 billion in new funding at a $126 billion post-money valuation. For context, that is more than double its October 2024 valuation of $45 billion. The round was led by Alphabet, alongside Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, Silver Lake, and Tiger Global.

Waymo’s own data says its vehicles achieve 82 to 90% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers. And the company plans to expand to 11 new US cities in 2026, including Dallas, Miami, and Washington D.C., plus London as its first international market. Goldman Sachs projects the US robotaxi market will hit $48 billion by 2035. Waymo is not just in that race. It is running laps.

Stripe — The Payment Startup Powering Millions of Businesses Online

Stripe does not need an introduction to anyone who has built a product. But the numbers from 2025 are worth stopping to look at. The company processed $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025. That is roughly 1.6% of global GDP. Up 34% from the year before.

As of February 2026, Stripe’s valuation reached $159 billion through a secondary share transaction, making it one of the four most valuable private startups in the world. Ninety percent of Dow Jones companies use Stripe. Eighty percent of the Nasdaq 100. Over 5 million businesses worldwide. The Collison brothers, Patrick and John, built something that is now practically invisible infrastructure for global commerce.

So where is the IPO? That is the question everyone asks. And Stripe’s management has been consistent: going public is not in their top 20 priorities right now. They processed $1.9 trillion privately. They are profitable. Why rush? Stripe Billing alone surpassed a $500 million revenue run rate in early 2025 and is on track to hit $1 billion in 2026. The company is betting its next chapter on AI and stablecoins. Time will tell if that bet pays off.

Rippling — One Platform to Run HR, IT, and Finance Together

Every founder I know has complained about the same thing at some point: too many tools, too many logins, too much time spent on things that are not the actual business. Rippling is Parker Conrad’s answer to that problem.

Founded in 2016, the San Francisco startup lets companies manage payroll, benefits, devices, apps, and expenses from one single place. Not five platforms. One. When a new employee joins, Rippling sets up their payroll, laptop, Slack, benefits, and corporate card in under 90 seconds. That is not a marketing claim. That is their actual product demo.

The company raised $200 million in a Series F in 2024 at a $13.5 billion valuation, backed by Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Y Combinator, and Sequoia. Total funding has crossed $1.2 billion. But honestly, the valuation is almost a secondary story. The real story is that every fast-growing company in San Francisco eventually runs into the same HR and IT chaos, and Rippling is the first product that actually solves it properly. That is a durable business.

Perplexity AI — The Search Engine That Answers Like a Human

Here is what makes Perplexity interesting. It did not just build another AI chatbot. It asked a different question: what if search actually gave you an answer instead of ten blue links? Founded in 2022, Perplexity built an answer engine that gives direct, cited, real-time responses. And people are staying.

By early 2026, the company reached a valuation of approximately $21.2 billion after completing its Series E-6 round. Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, SoftBank, and Accel are all in. The platform serves 45 million monthly active users, processes 780 million monthly search queries, and has hit approximately $200 million in annualized revenue. Management is targeting $656 million by end of 2026.

And then in February 2026, Perplexity made a move that surprised a lot of people. It dropped its advertising model entirely and went subscription-first. Pro plans at $20 per month. The reasoning was simple: ads create conflicts of interest in a product built around trust. That is a hard call to make when you are trying to grow. But the 85% retention rate suggests the bet is working. Users are not sampling Perplexity. They are switching to it.

Sierra — How This Startup Is Changing Customer Service With AI

Let’s be real about customer service. Most of it is broken. Long wait times, agents who cannot access the right data, resolution rates that embarrass everyone involved. Sierra is the San Francisco AI startup trying to fix that at scale.

Founded in 2023 by Bret Taylor, former Salesforce Co-CEO and OpenAI board chair, and Clay Bavor, former Google Labs lead, Sierra builds AI agents that handle customer interactions from start to finish. Voice, chat, text. The full interaction. Not a deflection bot. An agent that actually resolves the issue.

In May 2026, Sierra raised a $950 million Series E led by Tiger Global and GV at a post-money valuation of $15.8 billion. Total capital raised now exceeds $1.585 billion. The company hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue in just seven quarters after launching, which is among the fastest ramps in enterprise software history. By February 2026, it had crossed $150 million in ARR. Sierra’s clients include more than 40% of the Fortune 50. At Singtel, Sierra’s agents resolved over 70% of issues autonomously. At Cigna, patient authentication time dropped 80%. Those are not demo numbers. Those are live production results.

Cognition (Devin) — Meet the AI That Can Write Code on Its Own

This one is hard to wrap your head around the first time you see it. Cognition makes Devin, described as the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer. Not a code suggestion tool. Not a copilot. An AI that takes a task, plans the architecture, writes the code, runs the tests, fixes the bugs, and ships the pull request. Without a human involved in each step.

In May 2026, Cognition raised over $1 billion at a $26 billion post-money valuation, led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC, with Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital joining the round. Devin went from $1 million in ARR in September 2024 to $492 million in annualized revenue by May 2026. That is a 13x increase in a single year. Enterprise usage grew 50% month over month for six straight months.

Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, NASA, Citi, and the U.S. Army and Navy are all customers. And Cognition has disclosed that over 89% of its own internal code is now written by Devin. After acquiring Windsurf earlier in 2026, Cognition now holds both the leading autonomous coding agent and one of the most widely used AI-native IDEs in the world. That combination is hard to compete with.

Retro Biosciences — The Startup Trying to Make Humans Live Longer

Not every top startup in San Francisco is building software. Retro Biosciences is working on something much harder. The mission is to add 10 healthy years to the average human lifespan. Not theoretically. Actually.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman personally funded its $180 million seed round. The company raised additional capital in May 2026 at a $1.8 billion valuation. Retro is pursuing multiple scientific pathways, including in vivo gene therapies, cell replacement therapies, and methods to stimulate younger, healthier cells in aging tissues.

The company is running its first clinical trial right now, testing a pill designed to help the body clear protein aggregates in Alzheimer’s patients. CEO Joe Betts-LaCroix reported no dose-limiting toxicities so far, with initial trial data expected around August 2026. Few companies in the world are working on anything this consequential. And very few have the funding and the scientific credibility to actually pull it off. Retro might.

Chime — The Startup Making Banking Simple and Fee-Free

The premise behind Chime is almost embarrassingly simple. No monthly fees. No minimum balance. Get your direct deposit up to two days early. That is it. And yet that pitch built one of the largest fintech user bases in the United States.

Founded in 2013 by Chris Britt and Ryan King, Chime went after a customer segment that traditional banks treated as a cost center: people who do not carry a lot of money and do not want to pay to access what they have. Chime earns revenue primarily through interchange fees when customers use their card. No hidden charges. No fine print traps.

Chime went public in 2025, one of the most closely watched fintech IPOs in recent memory. And the broader shift it represents, younger, mobile-first users choosing app-based banking over legacy institutions, is not slowing down. If anything, it is accelerating. The bank branch is not coming back. Chime already knew that.

Top 10 Startups in San Francisco — Reviews and Ratings (2026)

Ratings and reviews tell you something a press release never will. The person who actually uses the product, works inside the company, or depends on the service every day — that person is worth listening to more than any investor deck. This article pulls together real ratings from Trustpilot, G2, Glassdoor, Reddit, LinkedIn, and other platforms to give you an honest look at where the top startups in San Francisco actually stand with real users in 2026.

Some of these companies have extraordinary products. Some have genuinely broken support. Most have both. Here is what the numbers actually say.

Ratings Overview Table

Company	Trustpilot	G2	Glassdoor	Source Notes
OpenAI	1.3/5	4.7/5	4.1/5	1,019 Trustpilot reviews; 2,293 G2 reviews
Anthropic	1.4/5	4.6/5	4.4/5	251 Trustpilot reviews; 283 G2 reviews; 222 Glassdoor reviews
Waymo	Not listed	Not listed	4.0/5	476 Glassdoor reviews
Stripe	1.7/5	4.4/5	3.7/5	17,224 Trustpilot reviews; 1,501 Glassdoor reviews
Rippling	4.6/5	4.8/5	Not listed	2,132 Trustpilot reviews; 10,900+ G2 reviews
Perplexity AI	1.6/5	4.7/5	Not listed	673 Trustpilot reviews; G2 Winter 2026 report
Sierra	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	Early-stage; limited public review data
Cognition (Devin)	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	Enterprise-focused; limited public review data
Retro Biosciences	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	Pre-commercial; no public consumer reviews
Chime	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	12,826 Trustpilot reviews; NerdWallet 2026 winner

OpenAI — Review

Here is the kicker with OpenAI. On G2, it holds a 4.7 out of 5 from 2,293 verified business users. On Glassdoor, employees rate it 4.1 out of 5 with 74% saying they would recommend it to a friend. Strong numbers for a company moving at the pace it is moving.

But flip to Trustpilot and the picture changes fast. 1.3 out of 5 from over a thousand consumer reviews. The complaints are consistent: billing errors, forced model switches nobody asked for, and customer support that is essentially a wall. One reviewer described paying $200 per month and being told they were using too much. Another wrote that company employees were publicly mocking paying customers on social media. That is not a support failure. That is a culture signal.

The reality is, this split tells you exactly where OpenAI is right now. Enterprise customers with proper account management love it. Everyday users who hit a problem and need a human find nothing. And Reddit tracks closer to Trustpilot than G2. Threads on r/ChatGPT are full of frustration about being pushed off preferred models, pricing confusion, and a company that feels like it has moved on from the users who built it.

74% of employees still say the business outlook is positive. The research culture rates highly internally. But the consumer experience has gaps that a $852 billion valuation makes harder to excuse.

Anthropic — Review

Anthropic has the most interesting ratings profile of any top startup in San Francisco right now. On Glassdoor, it holds 4.4 out of 5 overall. 95% employee recommendation rate. 93% CEO approval. Both among the highest in AI. Compensation is rated 4.8 out of 5, the highest score across 118 companies tracked by Jobs by Culture. Engineers earn $300,000 to $490,000 in total comp.

On G2, Claude holds 4.6 out of 5 from 283 verified business reviews. Users consistently praise accuracy and reliability for high-stakes enterprise tasks.

But Trustpilot lands at 1.4 out of 5 from 251 consumer reviews. The pattern mirrors OpenAI almost exactly: unauthorized charges, billing loops, AI-only support with no human escalation, customers unable to recover money for documented errors. One paying customer, building their company on Anthropic’s API, filed a formal complaint with India’s National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal after 12 days of AI chatbot responses and zero human contact.

So here is the honest read. Anthropic is a world-class place to work and a genuinely strong enterprise product. The consumer support infrastructure has not kept pace with the company’s growth. For a company that markets itself on safety and trust, that gap is not small. And people are noticing.

Waymo — Review

Waymo does not have a traditional consumer review profile on Trustpilot or G2. It is not a product you buy in a store. But on Glassdoor, it holds 4.0 out of 5 from 476 employee reviews. 69% say they would recommend it to a friend.

Employee reviews describe a strong technical culture, genuinely brilliant colleagues, and work that feels meaningful. The concerns that surface are slower career advancement on certain teams and compensation that lags behind pure AI labs. One reviewer called it “an incredibly mission-driven and interesting place to be.” Another flagged that top talent is being pulled toward LLM companies, which is forcing Waymo to compete harder on pay.

On Reddit, rider experience is mostly positive in the cities where Waymo actually operates. San Francisco and Phoenix users talk about the novelty wearing off quickly — and then realizing they actually prefer it. Nobody is going to make a wrong turn because of road rage. The standing complaint is wait times during peak hours.

The Blind platform, which ranks companies on a composite of compensation, mission, and work-life balance, places Waymo at 3.9 out of 5. That puts it in the same range as Apple, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike. Not bad company.

Stripe — Review

Stripe has one of the sharpest ratings splits of any San Francisco startup on this list. On G2, it holds 4.4 out of 5 for its payments product. Developers consistently praise the documentation, global reach, and clean dashboard. On Glassdoor, 3.7 out of 5 from 1,501 employee reviews, with 60% recommending it. Work-life balance scores 3.2. That signals real pressure internally.

And on Trustpilot, 1.7 out of 5 from over 17,000 reviews. That sample size matters. The complaints are serious. Sudden payout holds with no advance notice. Rolling reserves that freeze cash for 60 days. Account suspensions with no explanation. For a small business where cash flow is the difference between making payroll and not, those experiences are not inconveniences. They are business-ending events.

But here is the thing. Most of the 5 million businesses running on Stripe are not writing reviews on Trustpilot. The loudest voices on consumer review sites are people who had a bad experience. The G2 reviews come from business users who deliberately evaluated Stripe against alternatives and chose it. Both groups are being honest about different parts of the same product.

LinkedIn perception among developers skews positive. Stripe’s engineering reputation is genuinely strong. But the 60% recommendation rate on Glassdoor is one of the lower figures among major San Francisco startups, and posts about the 2025 layoff round generated real concern about internal stability.

Rippling — Review

Rippling is the clear standout on this list for verified platform ratings. 4.8 out of 5 on G2 from over 10,900 reviews. 4.6 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 2,132 reviews. A+ from the BBB. 4.6 on Google Play from over 2,800 reviews. Across every platform where business users review software, Rippling consistently lands near the top of the HR and payroll category.

And it is not just the score. “Ease of use” appears in nearly 7,000 of 11,877 G2 reviews. That is not a coincidence. One verified Gartner Peer Insights reviewer said automated onboarding workflows cut their administrative time by over 80%. For distributed teams managing payroll across multiple countries, the consolidation alone is worth the price of entry.

The consistent complaints are pricing opacity and setup complexity. Rippling does not publish a rate card. You need a sales call to get a quote. The modular structure means costs climb fast once you add the features you actually need. Some SMB users have found the payroll module painful to configure and moved off. But for the 50 to 500 employee range, the sentiment is strong and the numbers back it up.

Perplexity AI — Review

Perplexity AI has the clearest platform split of any consumer-facing startup in San Francisco right now. On G2, it holds 4.7 out of 5 with reviewers praising fast answers, a clean interface, and source citations that make research actually trustworthy. On Product Hunt, 4.8 out of 5 from users who actively chose it and made it a daily habit.

On Trustpilot, 1.6 out of 5. The complaints are almost entirely about billing. Unexpected charges. Annual subscriptions that are nearly impossible to cancel. Features promised at signup were removed mid-term without notice. Customer support that routes everything through an AI agent with no human behind it. One EU customer documented a 30-day loop of automated responses while trying to claim a mandatory refund under EU consumer law.

The divide is stark. Use Perplexity as a research tool and never hit a billing problem, and you will give it 5 stars. Hit a payment issue and need help, and you will find nothing on the other end. The product is genuinely excellent. The support is not. That is a fixable problem. But it has not been fixed.

Reddit threads on Perplexity live exactly in this tension. Enthusiastic daily users share workflows alongside subscribers who feel burned and want others to know.

Sierra — Review

Let’s be straight about Sierra’s review profile. It does not have one. Not in the public sense. No meaningful Trustpilot presence. No G2 page with real volume. No Glassdoor data worth citing. And that is completely consistent with how Sierra goes to market. This is not a product you sign up for on a website. It is sold into Fortune 50 companies through enterprise contracts that take months to close.

What does exist is case study data from live deployments. At Singtel, Sierra’s agents resolved over 70% of customer issues autonomously. At Cigna, patient authentication time dropped 80%. Over 40% of the Fortune 50 are customers. Those are the closest thing to a public rating that Sierra has. LinkedIn sentiment from enterprise AI buyers and practitioners is broadly positive, particularly around the results data Sierra publishes from real production environments.

Cognition (Devin) — Review

Same story as Sierra. Cognition is enterprise-facing, and its review profile reflects that reality. No Trustpilot. No Glassdoor page with meaningful data. But the product has generated real discussion on LinkedIn, GitHub forums, and developer communities where people who work with code actually talk.

The honest read from developers who have used Devin in enterprise settings is nuanced. For well-scoped tasks, it is genuinely impressive. Repetitive engineering work, boilerplate, straightforward implementation — Devin handles these with minimal supervision. For complex multi-system architectures, human oversight is still necessary. That is not a failure. That is exactly what you would expect from any technology at this point in its development.

So what is the most credible rating available? The fact that Goldman Sachs, NASA, Mercedes-Benz, and the U.S. Army and Navy are all paying customers. And that Cognition itself runs 89% of its own internal code through Devin. That is either the most confident product endorsement in the industry or the most expensive experiment. Given the revenue trajectory, it looks like the former.

Retro Biosciences — Review

Retro Biosciences has no consumer review profile. Full stop. It is a clinical-stage biotech company running its first human trial. You cannot sign up, download an app, or leave a star rating. None of those categories apply yet.

What you can actually evaluate is scientific credibility and the seriousness of the backing. Sam Altman personally funded the $180 million seed round. The company raised additional capital in May 2026 at a $1.8 billion valuation. CEO Joe Betts-LaCroix has reported no dose-limiting toxicities in the Alzheimer’s trial so far, with initial data expected around August 2026.

Scientific community reception on LinkedIn and in longevity research circles is cautious but genuinely interested. The consensus is that the science is credible, the team is serious, and the money is real. Nobody expects fast results. That is just not how biology works. And anyone who tells you otherwise has not spent much time near a clinical trial.

Chime — Review

Chime has one of the largest review sample sizes of any company on this list. Over 12,826 Trustpilot reviews. 104 verified reviews on Capterra. In 2026, Chime won NerdWallet’s annual award for best overall checking account and best online banking experience. That is not a small recognition.

The positive reviews are consistent. No fees. SpotMe overdraft coverage up to $200. Early direct deposit. A mobile app rated highly on both iOS and Android. One long-term Trustpilot user noted five years with Chime and reaching the full $200 SpotMe limit, calling it something no traditional bank would offer. Reddit users regularly recommend Chime to anyone moving away from big bank fees for the first time.

But the negatives are serious too. The BBB has documented over 7,600 complaints against Chime, with 2,300 closed in the last 12 months alone. Account closures with funds inaccessible. Fraud disputes are taking weeks with no movement. Phone support is unreachable during emergencies. NerdWallet actually lowered Chime’s score by 0.5 stars specifically because of its disproportionately high CFPB complaint volume.

The pattern is familiar. When it works, it is better than any traditional bank. When something goes wrong, there are no branches, limited human support, and a process that can feel designed to wear you out. That is a real risk worth knowing before you make it your primary account.

Why These San Francisco Startups Are Worth Watching in 2026

The top startups in San Francisco in 2026 are extraordinary builders. The reviews make clear they are not all extraordinary operators. Not yet. Several of the most celebrated companies on this list have consumer support gaps that the data exposes plainly.

But the reviews also show something worth holding onto. The products are genuinely useful. The G2 scores for OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Rippling reflect real users getting real value every single day. The Glassdoor scores reflect companies where talented people still want to show up and believe in what they are building.

The gap between product quality and support quality is solvable. It always is. These companies have the capital, the talent, and strong enough reasons to fix it. Watch which ones actually do. That will tell you more about their long-term trajectory than any valuation number ever could.

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