Eight Application AI Outliers Building Beyond the AI Hype

Runway

Endeavor Entrepreneurs pop up everywhere, in every industry and market. But every now and then, one goes somewhere never seen before. In 2022, that was Hollywood.

The company behind the silver-screen splash was AI video startup Runway, whose generative technology was used in the Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once. “It was cutting things out better than my human eye was, and it gave me a clean mat that I could use for other things,” explained visual effects artist Evan Halleck. “Rotoscoping, in my opinion, has been a very slow and painful process. So, it was nice to automate things.”

Since then, Runway has contributed to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, partnered with Lionsgate, and launched an AI film festival, proving definitively that AI and human creativity can walk hand in hand. And the company is kicking entrepreneurial goals, too, starting 2026 with a $315M Series E that nearly doubled its current valuation to $5.3B — a round that included Endeavor Catalyst.

Founder Cristóbal Valenzuela became an Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2025, and the same year, Runway became part of a group of specialized Outliers — the annual program celebrating and supporting Endeavor’s top 10% best-in-class companies — working not just with the foundations of AI, but the application layer.

“The foundational models of AI require billions in investment, and largely, they come from China and Silicon Valley. But in emerging markets, we can see really creative applications of AI for real-world use cases that target challenges in our daily lives,” she adds.

These companies are looking beyond the AI foundational boom to explore the solutions-oriented, everyday AI use cases that will transform our lives.

Replit

The great democratizing ability of AI is clearly visible in Replit, which has emerged as a leader in the “vibe coding” space: Where people work with an AI assistant to generate, debug, and build applications, rather than writing code line-by-line. Founded in 2016 by Jordanian programmers Amjad Masad, Faris Masad, and designer Haya Odeh, Replit’s AI platform offers software creation for everyone, not just programmers.

Replit allows users to simply describe the Android and iOS mobile app they want, and then sit back while Replit builds it. Cutting-edge technology has helped Replit stay ahead of the curve, including when in 2024, it became one of the earliest companies to introduce an AI agent capable of not just writing code, but deploying software applications. Last month, Replit reached a $9B valuation just six months after reaching $3B, following a $400M funding round led by Georgian Partners and including participation from Endeavor Catalyst.

Founders Amjad and Haya became Endeavor Entrepreneurs in 2026, and Replit was chosen as an Outlier the same year.

ElevenLabs

The leading name in the voice AI industry originated from frustration: Polish co-founders and high school friends Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski were sick of the bad dubbing that translated international movies into Polish, with one actor delivering every character’s dialogue in a bored monotone. Beginning as a research company in 2022, ElevenLabs set out to create realistic, human voice models that could beat the old robotic clichés. 

ElevenLabs’ voice models have been used by online publications to read articles aloud, by film studios to tap into foreign markets, and even by US Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton to deliver speeches after losing her voice. Mati and Piotr became Endeavor Entrepreneurs in 2024, and ElevenLabs was chosen as an Outlier for the first time the same year. 

2026 has already been a busy year for the company: they recently announced a major partnership with German giant Deutsche Telekom to build AI services like translation directly into user calls, and a continuation of their enterprise partnership with Google Cloud. We’ll only see more use cases as voice AI expands — particularly thanks to ElevenLabs’ most recent $500M Series D, which brought the company to an $11B valuation.

Fal

As AI spreads, so too do its challenges. Image models like ByteDance’s Seedance, Google’s Veo, Kling, and Black Forest Labs have seen spikes of growth and popularity, but they remain constrained by computation limits. It takes 100 times as much compute to process an image as to process a text prompt, and 100,000 times as much compute to process a video. 

Founded in 2021, Fal originally planned to scale compute for the programming language Python. But the company spotted the challenges facing video and image AI early, and moved to become a generative-media cloud platform, providing developers and enterprises with access to over 600 leading generative models, as well as fast, flexible, and scalable access to the compute resources required to run these models. In 2025, the company’s foresight paid off: revenue grew 60 times over, and they announced a $125M Series C valuing the company at $1.5B. Co-founder Gorkem Yurtseven, originally from Türkiye, became an Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2026, and Fal was chosen as a 2026 Outlier.

Genesys AI

A true Elsewhere entrepreneur, Genesys AI founder Andreas Skorski was born to Polish parents, grew up in Germany, and eventually moved to Dubai. Andreas saw an opportunity — using the core automation technology, he could expand his AI models to offer price optimization and marketplace matching.

He pivoted the company into Genesys AI, a B2B model that connects distributors, multi-brand stores, and brands to Walmart, Amazon, and other major online marketplaces, all fully automated via AI. Launched in 2023 and already profitable, Genesys AI went from single-digit millions in annual revenue in its first year to growing by more than 14x in 2024, and closed the year with a successful Series A+ funding round of $10M. In 2025, Andreas became an Endeavor Entrepreneur — after quite a journey! — and Genesys AI qualified as an Outlier the same year.

MagicSchool

Adeel Khan believes in the power of teaching. A lifelong educator, he worked as an assistant principal and principal in the US for years before taking a sabbatical. After a year’s adventures outside of the classroom, he returned to work as Managing Director of Schools in Denver’s DSST Public Schools in November 2022 — the same month ChatGPT launched. Adeel knew immediately that this would change education for good. He also knew it had to be handled the right way.

MagicSchool, a verticalized AI platform for students, teachers, and administrators, is the company Adeel founded in response. The product features workflows for teachers that range from writing lesson plans to building specialized programs for students with special needs, as well as AI tools for students that are safe, compliant, moderated, and aligned to a school or district’s policies and curriculum. In just two years, the company raised $65M and expanded their base to 5.5 million educators and 13,000 schools and districts globally. Along the way, they’re using AI to its full educational potential: already, MagicSchool has shown a 28% improvement in literacy scores in Colorado’s Aurora Public Schools. 

Adeel became an Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2025 and MagicSchool became an Outlier for the first time in 2026.

Holywater

Much like Silicon Valley and China’s overrepresentation in the entrepreneurial landscape, entertainment tends to come from a few big global hubs: Hollywood, Bollywood, UK. AI is changing this — as one company based in Kyiv proves.

Led by founders Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov — who became Endeavor Entrepreneurs in 2025 — Holywater is an AI-first entertainment company that creates, produces, and scales mobile-native story franchises, sometimes describing itself as a “mobile-first Netflix.” 

The company combines in-house creative teams with proprietary AI tools to develop original IP from digital books to vertical video series. Serving a growing global appetite for mobile-first, short-form content, Holywater generates hundreds of thousands of dollars per month from AI-generated video alone, with a total user base of 85 million. Backed by Fox, Holywater started 2026 with a $22M funding round led by Horizon Capital, with strategic participation from Wheelhouse and our own Endeavor Catalyst. The company became an Outlier for the first time this year.

Advance Intelligence Group

With its AI-native financial and data platform, Advance Intelligence Group is tackling South-East Asia’s stark credit gap. Seventy percent of South-East Asia’s population remain unbanked or underbanked because they lack the formal financial history required by traditional institutions. Conventional credit scoring can’t effectively bridge the gap between the economic potential of millions of consumers and financial institutions’ security and regulatory requirements.

Advance Intelligence Group offers AI-driven risk assessments and credit solutions to serve both sides of the gap. For enterprises, the company’s data platform ADVANCE.AI focuses on identity verification and risk tools, while underbanked customers gain access to Atome Financial with its buy-now, pay-later and credit solutions. 

Originally based in Indonesia and Singapore, Advance Intelligence Group announced a $75M funding round in 2025 to support expansion in the Philippines as it tackles banking issues across the region. One of the freshest faces in Endeavor’s portfolio, co-founder, Group Chairman, and CEO Jefferson Lanjie Chen became an Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2026 — and Advance Intelligence Group was selected as an Outlier the same year.

Discover the full class of companies building the future from Elsewhere. Meet the 2026 Endeavor Outliers class.