We vet more than 1,000 AI startups every year for Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs in search of true partners that can help us address pressing challenges and discover new market opportunities. This fall, eight emerged with clearly distinguishable AI tools for enterprise impact.
Some are focused on the infrastructure and data architecture that enable AI. Others are advancing the tools and evaluation systems that make AI more reliable, and the governance and security layers that make it safer.
They’re also helping us better understand how AI is reshaping the customer experience: how people discover brands online, how intellectual property can be protected in new digital environments, and how personalization can be made more dynamic and intuitive across every touchpoint.
With extensive experience working with other Fortune 100 enterprises and raising an average of $90 million in venture capital funding from top investors like Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Race Ventures, Google, Sequoia, and more; we’re excited to announce the next cohort of companies working across Comcast NBCUniversal to unlock the next great business opportunity in some of our core focus areas.
Tooling to Make AI Work for Everyone
AI’s full potential can’t be realized if its tools only serve one part of the enterprise. Technical teams need reliable frameworks for building, testing, and monitoring AI agents. Non-technical teams, meanwhile, need intuitive interfaces that let them create and adapt AI-driven workflows without writing a line of code.
The fall cohort includes startups making AI work for all types of teams. Replit makes it possible for anyone in the enterprise to create and host applications, AI agents, and automations entirely through natural language, no coding required. LangChain, on the other hand, empowers technical teams to build and manage production-grade AI agents, covering the full agent lifecycle, from development to orchestration to monitoring.
Evaluating & Safeguarding AI Systems
As enterprises deploy AI more widely, evaluation infrastructure has become the safeguard that keeps systems accountable. Continuous feedback loops, observability, and human-in-the-loop review are essential to ensure that AI outputs remain transparent, reliable, and aligned with business intent. Companies need to answer critical questions in real time: Are agents performing as expected? Are they hallucinating? And most importantly, are they operating in a secure, compliant way?
That’s where Openlayer stood out. Its platform helps enterprises evaluate, monitor, and govern AI systems throughout their lifecycle, ensuring performance, reliability, and compliance at scale.
AI Marketing and Search
As people increasingly turn to AI models for answers instead of traditional search engines, brand visibility is no longer defined by search rankings, it’s determined by how and whether AI mentions you at all. For marketing and communications teams, that shift creates a new challenge: ensuring their brands remain discoverable, accurately represented, and competitive within AI-generated outputs.
Two startups in this fall’s accelerator are tackling that head-on. Bluefish AI helps enterprises understand and influence how their brands appear across AI platforms, giving them visibility into how they’re being portrayed — and the tools to improve it. Profound provides an AI-powered platform that analyzes where, how, and why brands are mentioned in generative outputs, delivering actionable insights to optimize exposure and performance.
Auxia’s AI-powered marketing platform transforms first-party data into personalized customer journeys, automating months of data science work and delivering insights that drive real-time growth — at scale.
IP Security & Protection
As generative AI opens new opportunities, it also brings a wave of new risks. In today’s digital ecosystem, content and products can be created, cloned, and distributed faster than ever. Safeguarding a company’s brand, voice, and assets, online and offline, requires stronger authentication, detection, and enforcement systems.
That’s where Podqi is excelling. Its AI-driven IP protection platform automates the detection and enforcement of infringements across e-commerce, advertising, and domain environments. By scanning the internet for unauthorized monetization and taking swift action to enforce rights, Podqi helps enterprises maintain brand integrity, prevent misuse, and sustain trust.
Data Enablement
Despite enterprises having incredible access to data, they’re often trapped in silos, locked within individual departments and difficult to discover, query, or act upon. The result is slower experimentation, fragmented insights, and limited visibility into the full business picture.
We sought startups making information easier to access, analyze, and trust, enabling faster experimentation and safer automation. Collate, for example, stood out for its agentic data intelligence platform that automates workflows and unifies collaboration across data teams. By orchestrating AI agents and human workspaces on top of Open Metadata, Collate helps large organizations make their data discoverable, coordinated, and AI-ready.
A Unique Opportunity
This impressive cohort of AI companies is now working directly with teams across Comcast, NBCUniversal and Sky, gaining direct connections to decision-makers, opportunities to showcase their capabilities through pilots, and hands-on support navigating legal, privacy, and security processes.
