Illustration: Sebastian Onufzak
Last year, Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, predicted that the artificial intelligence revolution would one day create one-employee companies valued at $1 billion.companies forbesThe 6th annual AI 50 shows that the most promising startups in the space are heading in that direction, although they have a long way to go to reach that prediction.
There are only three companies on the list with more than 1,000 employees: defense technology provider Anduril Industries, data analytics company Databricks, and AI model developer OpenAI. This year's list is dominated by new entrants with small employee numbers, 28 of which debuted on his AI 50 and are part of the nascent new economy developing around the AI boom. Masu.
About one-third of new entrants have enjoyed significant business traction in the past year selling the infrastructure needed for AI applications. Examples include Pinecone's database software valued at $750 million, LangChain's AI app builder ($200 million), and AssemblyAI's voice recognition. Plugins ($300 million). Most of the other newbies demonstrated early promise in applying AI to real-world use cases. Consider the example of Abridge, which is developing an AI medical scribe. To date, his business value is $850 million. Sierra's customer service chatbot is also reportedly worth nearly $1 billion. At his final valuation of $10 billion, Notion went all out to bring the latest advances in generative AI to its productivity suite.
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Collectively, this year's AI 50 winners demonstrate that as venture funding floods into AI, great companies can raise huge sums of money at a leaner scale and younger age than ever before.
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2024 AI 50 Highest Rated Companies
While startups in other sectors, such as cryptocurrencies and fintech, are still trying to recover from the market downturn, AI is booming. Of the 47 companies on the AI 50 that either disclose their valuations or have valuations known through data provider PitchBook, 20 are valued at more than $1 billion. Three most valuable companies – OpenAI ($86 billion), Databricks ($43 billion), Anthropic ($18.4 billion) forbes Reported) – All prices have increased in the past 12 months.
The very high valuations of humanoid robot maker Figure AI ($2.6 billion) and AI data hub Hugging Face ($4.5 billion) are in the growth stage, even as markets in other sectors dry up. It's further evidence that AI companies don't seem to be having trouble raising capital. Part of the reason is that top AI startups are attracting investment beyond traditional late-stage venture funds. Jeff Bezos was one of Figure's new investors in March 2024, and Hugging Face raised funding from Amazon, Google, Nvidia and other industry heavyweights last August. Microsoft is backing model companies OpenAI and Mistral, and Amazon and Google are investing in Anthropic. Companies on the 2024 AI 50 have raised a total of $34.7 billion, up from $27.2 billion on last year's list.
AI 50 Number of returnees, 2023 and 2024
But it's also true that while new entrants in the early AI 50s are, on average, raising more capital than before, they're also doing it with fewer employees. We're not talking about layoffs. The most promising newcomers accomplish more with fewer employees. Even though all returnees included in the 2023 list reported an increase in employees, the overall average number of employees decreased by 3% from 357 to 347. The median number decreased by 41% from 150 to 89 patients.
Even the largest AI 50 companies by number of employees are many times smaller and more agile than their incumbents. OpenAI, which competes directly with Google, accounts for less than 1% of the search giant's employee base. “This is a great example of how startups can actually win in the AI race, and even beat or challenge incumbents,” Buehler said.
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Interactive: Where will the 2024 AI 50 be headquartered?
One of the standout companies debuting this year is Mistral AI, a one-year-old startup whose valuation has soared to $2 billion, according to PitchBook, with a strategy to build a rival to OpenAI in Europe. Named after the sunny winds that blow from the French Alps into the Mediterranean Sea, the Paris-based startup's founders hail from Google and Meta's AI labs. Mistral is just one of his eight AI 50 companies headquartered in Europe, up from his two in 2023, his first year. forbes We have expanded eligibility for AI 50 from North America to the rest of the world.
Europe's top AI startups come from all over the continent. Mistral's French compatriot Photoroom is developing an image editor. Dutch company Cradle is working to discover complex proteins that could form the basis of future medicines. and London-based Eleven Labs, the voice cloning software he built into a billion-dollar company. That's no coincidence. Google-owned AI lab DeepMind is based in London, and its graduates, as well as Google's other operations on the continent, are behind the creation of startups such as Cradle, Eleven Labs, and Mistral. Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere (valued at $3 billion, according to PitchBook) and another former Googler, will open their first London office in 2022. , recently set up another residence in London.
Buehler said. forbes Sequoia conducted research unrelated to AI 50 and found that Europe has a 30% higher concentration of AI experts per capita than the United States. Particularly big hubs are in London, Paris and Zurich, he said, adding: “Europe is seeing an increasing number of promising AI companies.”
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