In recent months, with the release of ChatGPT and a series of image generators, artificial intelligence has taken over the mainstream of the era. Papers written by robots and images of popes in down jackets have skyrocketed interest in it and extended AI beyond Silicon Valley labs and startup offices, driving a series of new AI businesses.
The 50 companies on the list in 2023 received a total of $27.2 billion in financing. While a significant portion of that funding was raised in the past year, notably Microsoft's $10 billion investment in OpenAI, many of the companies on the list were already developing with AI long before the current "AI gold rush."
For years, stalwarts like Scale AI have been providing AI gold diggers with picks and shovels — and especially important manpower — to help bring tools like ChatGPT from concept to reality. AlphaSense and Vectra AI have also been in operation for more than a decade, while Databricks, the largest company on the list, has more than 5,000 employees.
At the same time, a group of fledgling startups have capitalized on the investor frenzy to form sizable businesses. While other venture capital sectors have suffered market pullbacks, the field of artificial intelligence is booming. Companies like Adept, Anthropic and Coherence have already received hundreds of millions of dollars in investment just two years after they were founded. Midjourney and Surge AI, on the other hand, have also quickly amassed an impressive customer base without financing a penny from outside.
This year was also the first time we expanded the AI 50 list to companies outside of North America, with Forbes receiving nearly 800 applications. The selection process consists of a quantitative algorithm and a qualitative panel of judges to judge their business prospects and technical applications of artificial intelligence. In addition, our list aims to promote a fairer startup ecosystem and therefore encourages companies to share data on the diversity of their workforce, but the AI industry still has much to do in this regard: only 12 companies have female co-founders, 5 of whom serve as CEOs. There are 8 companies whose founders are black or Latino.
In the few cases where companies did not voluntarily disclose information, Forbes used data provided by PitchBook and Crunchbase.
The AI 50 is worth paying attention to as a new entrant to the list
Adept
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO：David Luan
Areas of Focus: AI model development
The unicorn startup is working on a digital assistant that can help you do all the clicking, typing, and scrolling of the mouse. Its AI model is designed to translate a text command (such as "find a house within my budget" or "create an income statement" into an action performed by a computer without requiring you to lift a finger. Backed by strategic investors Microsoft and NVIDIA, Adept announced a total of $415 million in financing.
Insitro
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO：Daphne Koller
Focus area: drug development
In 1995, Daphne Koller became the first professor of machine learning in Stanford's computer science department. At the time, the term "artificial intelligence" was banned because previous hype cycles had disappointed investors. Today, she is using machine learning to analyze established patterns in human genes and cells to discover promising new drugs. Most novel treatments fail the FDA's approval process, and developing these therapies can cost billions of dollars and years. Koller said her five-year-old startup with a $2.4 billion valuation could help pharmaceutical companies avoid such costly failures.
Runway
Headquarters location: New York
CEO:Cristóbal Valenzuela
Areas of Focus: Image and Video Editing
Think of it as an easy-to-use Adobe built for artists. That's what Runway, valued at $500 million, is building with its suite of 30 AI tools. The app can generate images and videos from just a few words and can dynamically change their visual style. Runway's tools were used to build visual effects for scenes in the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won seven Academy awards, including Best Picture.
Synthesia
Headquarters: London
CEO：Victor Riparbelli
Areas of Focus: Composite video creation
Make videos in 120 languages. All you have to do is write a script (or have another AI program write one for you), pick one of the 100 composite avatars, and in the blink of an eye, the video is ready. In 2017, a team of four academics and entrepreneurs founded Synthesia, which has raised $66.5 million from investors such as Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures and Mark Cuban. Big companies like Reuters and Accenture are among its 35,000 clients.
Here is the full list of Forbes' 2023 AI 50.
Reporter| Rashi Shrivastava, Heather Newman, Lauren Orsini
Edit| Elisabeth Brier
Disclosure: The 2023 Forbes AI 50 list includes companies that have received investment from Sequoia, which also helped create the list. Sequoia publicly disclosed its investments in Clari, Glean, Gong, Hugging Face, Ironclad and Neeva; Meritech is not an investor in any of the companies on this list.