AI Company List (1300 companies), Top 50 companies by valuation and my preferences - July 2023

An interim report - still a WIP

Jul 10, 2023

Attached is a list of 1300 AI companies and 900 AI investors:

GitHub - this one will stay the most updated

Google Docs - i’ll update this and airtable every week with changes from the GH file

I will try to make this a “living document”, but I make no promises. Doing all of this while working on my own software is painful and probably impossible to do comprehensively.

Top 50 by Valuation

1 Microsoft
2 Google
3 Tesla
4 AWS
5 Nvidia
6 Meta
7 Baidu
8 OpenAI
9 Palantir
10 Databricks
11 Cruise
12 Waymo
13 iFlyTek
14 Nice
15 SenseTime
16 Pony.ai
17 Nuro
18 Scale
19 Gong
20 Datarobot
21 SambaNova
22 UBTech Robotics
23 Anthropic
24 ThoughtSpot
25 Inflection AI
26 Cerebras
27 Dataminr
28 MEGVII
29 Dataiku
30 C3
31 4Paradigm
32 SymphonyAI
33 Stability AI
34 Momenta
35 GraphCore
36 Shield AI
37 Uniphore (Jacada)
38 Moveworks
39 Cohere
40 Hugging Face
41 Xiaoice (fka Bombax)
42 Squirrel AI Learning
43 Skydio
44 EightFold AI
45 Jasper
46 Builder.ai
47 Runway
48 K Health
49 Enflame
50 Ada.cx (Toronto)

My AI “Top 50”

These are the 50 most interesting companies in AI, according to me. They don’t straddle any specific sub-sector.

Big Data and hosted data science platforms have existed for some time. Is that AI? Of course. But it isn’t part of the LLM wave, exactly. If you’re only looking for the most recent companies, you’ll have to wait until I’m done with the 1300 companies and sort by their founding date. This list reflects my personal interests only.

#50 - AI21, Aleph Alpha, Mistral
#49 - Datagen
#48 - EightFold AI
#47 - Runway
#46 - Synthesis AI
#45 - Snorkel AI
#44 - Anyscale
#43 - Moveworks
#42 - Playground.ai
#41 - Inworld
#40 - Tecton
#39 - ExpressSteuer
#38 - OpenSpace
#37 - Daloopa
#36 - Roboflow
#35 - Synthesia
#34 - MEGVII
#33 - SenseTime
#32 - Weights and Biases
#31 - ShieldAI
#30 - Cerebras
#29 - OctoML
#28 - iFlyTek
#27 - D-ID.ai (see #25)
#26 - Two Platforms

Cool deepfake/video generation stuff. There are many of these. See Alethea AI and many others.

#25 - The Applied AI Company

Nuts and bolts real-world applications of GPT

#24 - Replicate

Could very well be the place we launch simple models from.

#23 - Generally Intelligent

Crazy little thinktank. Probably NGMI but high-risk/high-reward.

#22 - Landing AI

Good real-world application by Andrew Ng.

#21 - Perplexity AI

Really smart search engine. One of the few GPT+ products that is fun to use.

#20 - Pinecone, Chroma, Weaviate

There are many vector stores. MongoDB and Oracle should buy them and run hosted solutions. This is an essential part of the new AI stack, but is also like oxygen/water: hard to monetize.

#19 - Harvey AI

Replacing the lawyer is a goal of mine as well. I haven’t tried this product and have heard great things as well as just good things.

Similar: Spellbook and many, many others trying to do this.

#18 - Parametrix AI

This is some bat shit crazy Chinese company that is doing some of the kind of stuff I want to do.

#17 - Keen Technologies

This mystery company is just tinkering. I am curious if they have more than one programmer (not that it would change my opinion). A good dark horse for AGI (hopefully in a .wad file).

#16 - Skydio
Autonomous drone pureplay. Might as well say Anduril, but no guns or missiles on these bad boys (as far as I know).

#15 - Palantir
Big data enterprise shit. They are executing.

Not ranking: C4

#14 - Inflection AI

I am bearish, but I can’t deny these guys are delivering. They have a more ambitious roadmap than they’re telling the public. Will watch curiously.

#13 - Eleven Labs

Best in show, but very expensive, TTS. Will they continue? Will Big Tech crush them? GCP’s voice product sucks in comparison and this will probably remain the case as the bigger companies can’t focus on one thing specifically.

Similar: Play.ht

#12 - Replit
Replit is on a mission to make the best programming assistant. I don’t think their rivals have the same singular dedication. It’s also amazing to see how much this platform has matured outside of AI - it’s not the old jsfiddle-style web IDE anymore - it is actually closer to AWS. Many companies are making code copilots: also check out Magic.dev.

#11 - Scale

The Enterprise needs labeling. I don’t care that much about this stuff but must tip my hat.
Similar companies I am not ranking: Surge

#10 - Hugging Face

We’re seeing HF become the new Github. Their mix of home-grown (but open-sourced) innovation and community innovation is inspiring.

#9 - Midjourney

The rapid success and evolution of Midjourney is a testament to what can be done in this space. Thinking outside of the box is critical: a photo-generator bot on Discord wouldn’t have been my first guess at a Top 10 AI company, but that’s the point. It will be interesting what the future will bring from MJ.

#8 - Tesla

Musk has the opportunity to create one of the most meaningful advances in history. But Musk’s track record of sometimes not delivering and often delivering late make me wonder if FSD is really coming. I certainly wouldn’t bet against him: he tends to finish in the winner’s circle. But with Karpathy leaving, I wonder what is really going on at Tesla FSD. I think Optimus is a LARP, for what it’s worth.

Similar companies I am not ranking: Cruise, Waymo

#7 - Google

It’s a sad day when a tiny company runs circles around you. This embarrassment is a function of functionaries like corporate communications, legal, HR and government policy stopping the progress of products. Losing people like Shazeer means Google needs a new CEO. This is the greatest bag fumbling of all time.

But, all may not be lost. The company that gave you AlphaGo may just redeem itself with Gemini. I expect this will not happen. Whether its GCP or even ads, Google has frustrating customer experience and can not successfully launch products. The only answer that can avoid the inevitable path to IBM is a deep restructuring, and probably a founder comeback.

#6 - Nvidia

This ranking excludes or limits the value of hardware. Just on a software basis, Nvidia ranks highly because it has a lot of motivation to create a robust software ecosystem surrounding CUDA. We’re seeing more strong tooling and applications coming from Nvidia which drives more demands for their chips.

#5 - UBTech Robotics

This is the robot company to follow. Holy humanoids.

#4 - Microsoft

Microsoft gets a lot of credit for sewing up the OpenAI deal. The problem is we’re not exactly sure how much Microsoft is going to get out of it. At the very least, making Office better is good enough to rank them here.

Nevertheless, libraries like LoRa show that the dinosaur can still tap dance. It will be interesting to see if OpenAI and Microsoft are like the nuclei of an H2 atom: they won’t get too close, but they won’t get too far apart.

#3 - Meta

Don’t duck the Zuck. As maintainers of Pytorch, leakers of Llama, home of LeCun and planners of AGI, Meta ranks third for me. Meta needs to unleash the product potential of its research, which is the same problem plaguing Google. This is corporate blocking-and-tackling: regional offices should be motivated and autonomous, releasing their own products. Zuck should have a desk within FAIR that he sits at daily.

Instead, talent is quitting and launching their own startups. The notion that Llama had to be leaked instead of properly released tells you how much corporate communications and regulatory affairs is controlling tech companies. I think if anyone understands that the balance of power has to shift to product, it’s Zuckerberg. Zuck has been in the crisis seat a dozen times: he doesn’t fear the media anymore. The rebrand and management changes give me conviction we’re going to see a new, AI-focused Meta soon. Zuck knows Meta’s survival depends on it.

#2 - CharacterAI

From the inventor of the Transformer, we have the next Disney. Character must watch its flank as it attempts becomes the biggest media company of all time. Scale issues, NSFW and many other threats circle what I think is the most interesting company in this space.

#1 - OpenAI

OpenAI has a good chance at becoming a $1T company given its talent and management. The current product is epochal in significance, but that is not what makes a valuable company. The ability to attract and retain talent, put out better products, faster than the competition is paramount. OpenAI is doing it and will likely continue towards AGI.

In the next edition, I’ll go through my “Top 50 AI Investors”.

Hope this helps, email me feedback, propose changes, etc. at martin@martinshkreli.com