The companies building it

Anthropic

Safety-first frontier AI research lab

VC-backed

Builds reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. Maker of Claude.

Stage

Series D

Raised

$18B

Last round

$4.0B

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Perplexity

Answer engine for the web

VC-backed

Conversational search grounded in real-time sources.

Stage

Series C

Raised

$1.0B

Last round

$500M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Cursor

The AI-first code editor

YC S22

Built on VS Code, with inline editing, chat, and autonomous agents.

Stage

Series B

Raised

$173M

Last round

$105M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Mistral AI

Open and efficient frontier models, from Paris

VC-backed

European AI lab shipping open-weight and commercial LLMs.

Stage

Series B

Raised

$1.1B

Last round

$640M

HQ

Paris, France

Cognition

Building Devin, the autonomous software engineer

VC-backed

Agentic coding platform that plans, writes, and ships.

Stage

Series B

Raised

$196M

Last round

$175M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Runway

Creative tools for the age of generative video

TechCrunch

Frontier video models (Gen-3) and an end-to-end studio for creators.

Stage

Series D

Raised

$536M

Last round

$308M

HQ

New York, NY

Character.AI

Personalized AI companions at scale

TechCrunch

Consumer platform for character-driven conversations.

Stage

Acquired

Raised

$193M

Last round

$150M

HQ

Menlo Park, CA

Harvey

Domain-specific AI for elite law firms

VC-backed

Copilot for attorneys — drafting, research, and diligence.

Stage

Series C

Raised

$506M

Last round

$300M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Glean

AI-powered workplace search

VC-backed

Unified enterprise search and AI assistant across work apps.

Stage

Growth

Raised

$606M

Last round

$260M

HQ

Palo Alto, CA

Pika Labs

Idea-to-video, in a moment

TechCrunch

Generative video for everyday storytelling.

Stage

Series B

Raised

$135M

Last round

$80M

HQ

Palo Alto, CA

Groq

LPUs for real-time inference

VC-backed

Custom language-processing silicon delivering record throughput.

Stage

Series D

Raised

$1.0B

Last round

$640M

HQ

Mountain View, CA

LangChain

The framework for LLM-native applications

VC-backed

Open-source orchestration plus LangSmith eval and observability.

Stage

Series A

Raised

$35M

Last round

$25M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Together AI

The cloud for open-source AI

VC-backed

Training and serving infrastructure tuned for open models.

Stage

Series B

Raised

$229M

Last round

$106M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Suno

Generative music, for anyone

TechCrunch

Text-to-song model producing full vocal tracks in seconds.

Stage

Series B

Raised

$125M

Last round

$125M

HQ

Cambridge, MA

ElevenLabs

Voice AI for the creative stack

VC-backed

High-fidelity TTS, dubbing, and voice cloning.

Stage

Series C

Raised

$281M

Last round

$180M

HQ

London, UK

Sakana AI

Nature-inspired foundation models, from Tokyo

VC-backed

Research lab exploring evolutionary and collective intelligence methods.

Stage

Series A

Raised

$214M

Last round

$214M

HQ

Tokyo, Japan

Hebbia

Agentic knowledge work for analysts

VC-backed

Retrieval and reasoning on unstructured financial and legal documents.

Stage

Series B

Raised

$161M

Last round

$130M

HQ

New York, NY

Decagon

AI agents for customer support

YC

End-to-end autonomous support for consumer and fintech brands.

Stage

Series B

Raised

$100M

Last round

$65M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Scale AI

Data foundry for AI

YC S16

Labeled training data, RLHF, and evaluation for frontier model labs and enterprises.

Stage

Growth

Raised

$1.6B

Last round

$1.0B

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Replit

AI-native collaborative coding

YC W18

Browser IDE with Replit Agent — an AI that builds, deploys, and iterates on full apps.

Stage

Series B

Raised

$222M

Last round

$97M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Cresta

Real-time AI for the contact center

YC S17

Agent assist and coaching for sales and support teams, grounded in conversation intelligence.

Stage

Series D

Raised

$271M

Last round

$125M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Exa

The search engine built for AI

YC S21

Neural search API (formerly Metaphor) tuned for agents and retrieval pipelines.

Stage

Series A

Raised

$22M

Last round

$17M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Browserbase

Headless browsers for AI agents

YC S24

Managed browser infrastructure and Stagehand SDK for web-native agents.

Stage

Series B

Raised

$66M

Last round

$40M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Baseten

The inference platform for AI-native products

YC W19

Serverless model serving, autoscaling, and Truss — an open-source packaging format.

Stage

Series C

Raised

$135M

Last round

$75M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Humanloop

The LLM evals and prompt engineering platform

YC S20

Collaboration layer for product teams shipping with LLMs — prompts, evals, observability.

Stage

Seed

Raised

$5.5M

Last round

$5.5M

HQ

London, UK

Vercept

Agents that operate your desktop

YC S24

General-purpose computer-use agents built on frontier multimodal models.

Stage

Seed

Raised

$16M

Last round

$16M

HQ

Seattle, WA

Wordware

A notebook-native IDE for AI

YC W24

Build, deploy, and share AI agents as natural-language documents.

Stage

Seed

Raised

$30M

Last round

$30M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Supermemory

A second brain for AI agents

YC W25

Hosted long-term memory API for LLM products — semantic recall plus knowledge graphs.

Stage

Seed

Raised

$3.0M

Last round

$3.0M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Julius AI

ChatGPT for your data

YC W23

Natural-language data analysis, chart generation, and forecasting on spreadsheets.

Stage

Seed

Raised

$10M

Last round

$10M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Patched

Open-source agents for code review and maintenance

YC S24

Workflow agents that triage, patch, and document code changes across repos.

Stage

Seed

Raised

$1.0M

Last round

$1.0M

HQ

Singapore

Cartesia

Real-time multimodal foundation models

VC-backed

State-space models powering low-latency voice and streaming applications.

Stage

Series A

Raised

$91M

Last round

$64M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

11x

AI digital workers for go-to-market

YC W24

Autonomous SDRs and field reps that prospect, message, and book meetings end-to-end.

Stage

Series B

Raised

$74M

Last round

$50M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Sierra

Conversational AI for consumer brands

VC-backed

Bret Taylor's post-Salesforce company — an agent platform grounded in company policy.

Stage

Series B

Raised

$285M

Last round

$175M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Physical Intelligence

General-purpose foundation models for robots

VC-backed

Training large behavior models (π-series) that transfer across robots and tasks.

Stage

Series B

Raised

$470M

Last round

$400M

HQ

San Francisco, CA

xAI

Understanding the true nature of the universe

VC-backed

Elon Musk's AI lab — Grok frontier models and the Colossus training cluster.

Stage

Series C

Raised

$12B

Last round

$6.0B

HQ

San Francisco Bay Area, CA

Figure

Humanoid robots for commercial work

VC-backed

Full-stack humanoid hardware and AI for manufacturing and logistics.

Stage

Series C

Raised

$854M

Last round

$675M

HQ

Sunnyvale, CA

Writer

The full-stack generative AI platform for enterprises

VC-backed

In-house Palmyra models plus a knowledge-graph-backed workspace for large teams.

Stage

Series C

Raised

$326M

Last round

$200M

HQ

San Francisco, CA