What are the hottest use cases for AI, and what business activities are most likely to be disrupted by AI?
One way to gauge that is to look at which application providers have entered the year with the most momentum: these aren’t the big foundational model players like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, or Anthropic, but companies that offer solutions for specific (and sometimes very specific) enterprise or consumer activities.
Below, we present 24 companies to watch in 2024, including 15 “must-know” leaders who are already winning customer support and market traction, and nine “emerging disruptors” that are garnering investor attention and market recognition in this rapidly evolving space. (For more details on our selections, see the “Methodology” section.)
Application providers on the list include Glean, which offers an AI-powered search engine for a company's internal documents; Writer, which helps create consistent marketing and other documents based on a company's brand standards and guidelines; and Synthesia, which creates human-like avatars for training, customer service, marketing and other uses.
Other companies on the list focus on industry-specific solutions, such as Harvey, an AI tool developed for law firms and corporate legal departments, and Hippocratic, an AI model trained specifically for the highly regulated healthcare industry.
methodology
To select the 24 companies to watch in 2024, we used a data-driven evaluation, including year of founding, funding, investor reputation, market recognition, and number of employees at the end of 2023. The total funding amounts listed above are as of May 1, 2024.
We considered the following companies as leaders to watch:
- It has raised at least $75 million to date or is self-funded
- At least one major investor is involved
- Featured in at least two major market maps, “best of” lists, or other publications
- The number of employees is 25 or more, and the employee number has increased by 20% or more compared to the previous year.
As emerging disruptive innovation companies, we considered companies that:
- Established in 2021 or later
- At least $20 million has been raised so far
- At least one major investor is involved
- Featured in at least one major market map, “best of” list, or other publication
Funding and series data was obtained from Crunchbase.
