The world of artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving, with a number of cutting-edge companies leading the way in AI research and development in 2024. From Neuralink's ambitious goal of creating a device that allows for the uploading and downloading of thoughts and memories to OpenAI's pursuit of building safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence, these companies are making significant progress in some of the most sought-after areas of AI. Boston Dynamics is pushing the boundaries of robotics design with its dynamic, highly mobile robots, while Anthropic focuses on developing reliable and interpretable AI systems. DeepMind is revolutionising the field of deep learning, and Vicarious is working towards building a new type of AI that can learn and reason like humans. These companies are driving innovation and shaping the future of AI, making them ones to watch in 2024.

Keep reading to learn more about these innovative companies and stay in the loop about the developments in the world of AI.

Neuralink

Neuralink was founded in 2016 by Elon Musk and a team of scientists and engineers with the goal of developing technology to treat brain diseases and eventually enhance human capabilities. The company is inspired by the science fiction concept of a "neural lace," which is a digital layer implanted in the brain that allows for a symbiotic relationship with artificial intelligence.

The long-term vision for Neuralink is to create a device that allows for the uploading and downloading of thoughts and memories, as well as addressing brain injuries and restoring lost cognitive abilities through the use of a chip. While the company is currently focused on treating brain diseases in the short term, it ultimately aims to achieve a future where humans can seamlessly merge with artificial intelligence.

• Website: neuralink.com

• Location: Fremont, California, United States

• Year founded: 2016

• Funding: $638M

• Founders: Elon Musk 

• Number of employees: 389

‍

OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory dedicated to developing friendly AI that will benefit humanity as a whole. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of notable figures, including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel, who pledged over $1 billion to the venture. OpenAI is headquartered in San Francisco and is committed to openly collaborating with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research available to the public.

OpenAI's ultimate goal is to create artificial general intelligence (AGI), which refers to highly autonomous systems that are capable of outperforming humans in most economically valuable work. In order to achieve this, OpenAI will work towards directly building safe and beneficial AGI and will also consider their mission accomplished if their work helps others achieve the same outcome.

• Website: openai.com

• Location: San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US

• Year founded: 2015

• Funding: $11.3B

• Founders: 
Sam Altman
Ilya Sutskever
Greg Brockman
Wojciech Zaremba
Elon Musk
John Schulman

• Number of employees: 770

‍

Boston Dynamics

Boston Dynamics is an engineering and robotics design company that has become well-known for developing a series of dynamic, highly mobile robots. Some of their most popular robots include BigDog, Spot, Atlas, and Handle. In 2019, they made Spot commercially available, making it the first of their robots to be sold to the general public.

They have also expressed their intent to commercialise other robots, including Handle. The company was founded in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. In December 2020, it was acquired by the Hyundai Motor Group, and the acquisition was completed in June 2021.

Boston Dynamics' mission is to create robots that can enrich people's lives by approximating the mobility, dexterity, and agility of humans and animals. They see their work on robots as the next step in the evolution of building machines to reduce danger, repetition, and physically demanding work.

• Website: bostondynamics.com

• Location: Greater Boston Area, East Coast, New England

• Year founded: 1992

• Funding: $921M (acquired)

• Founders: Marc Raibert

• Number of employees: 664

‍

Midjourney

Midjourney is an independent research lab and AI company that has developed an AI-powered image generation tool. The tool is primarily accessed through a Discord bot and allows users to generate a set of images based on a provided prompt. It has gained popularity among artists for rapid prototyping of artistic concepts and in the advertising industry for content creation and ideation. Midjourney has three subscription tiers: Basic, Standard, and Pro, offering varying degrees of GPU time and features​.

The company has also implemented advanced content moderation systems, allowing for nuanced interpretation of user prompts while preventing the generation of contentious images. Despite its success, Midjourney has faced legal challenges, with artists filing a copyright infringement lawsuit against the company, alleging unauthorized use of images for AI training. Overall, Midjourney represents a significant evolution in AI-powered creativity and content generation, while also highlighting the ongoing challenges related to copyright, content moderation, and ethical AI use​.

• Website: midjourney.com

• Location: San Francisco, California, United States

• Year founded: 2022

• Funding: Self funded

• Founders: David Holz

• Number of employees: 11-50

‍

Deepmind

DeepMind is a London-based artificial intelligence company that was acquired by Google in 2014. It is known for its research and development in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and has made significant contributions to the advancement of these technologies. Some of the notable achievements of DeepMind include the development of AlphaGo, the first computer program to defeat a human professional player at the board game Go, and the development of AlphaZero, a general-purpose artificial intelligence that can learn to play a wide variety of games and other tasks from scratch, without any prior knowledge or data.

DeepMind has also developed a number of AI-powered applications and products, including an AI system that can recognise and classify objects in images and video and a voice recognition system that can transcribe and understand spoken language.

• Website: deepmind.com

• Location: London, England, United Kingdom

• Year founded: 2010

• Funding: $700M (estimated)

• Founders:
Demis Hassabis
Shane Legg
Mustafa Suleyman

• Number of employees: 1,528

‍

Anthropic

Anthropic is a company that focuses on AI safety and research, working to develop reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. They are primarily focused on research at this time, with a broad range of interests, including natural language, human feedback, scaling laws, reinforcement learning, code generation, and interpretability.

Anthropic values collaboration and seeks to involve a wide range of experts in determining their research direction, including researchers, engineers, societal impact experts, and policy analysts. They also prioritise the evaluation of potential societal impacts and strive for a combination of top-down and bottom-up research planning. They seek to collaborate with other labs and researchers in order to advance the understanding of these systems.

• Website: anthropic.com

• Location: San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US

• Year founded: 2021

• Funding: $3.3B

• Founders: Dario Amodei

• Number of employees: 300

Figure AI

Figure, established by Brett Adcock (founder of multi-million valued startups Archer Aviation and Veteri) in 2022, focuses on creating versatile humanoid robots, delving into an innovative niche. Initially a bootstrapped venture, Brett personally managed the company's finances. The journey took a significant turn in 2023 when Figure secured $70 million in its Series A funding round, marking a pivotal moment for the company.

Figure's core mission revolves around addressing the substantial job vacancies by introducing highly advanced humanoid workers. The United States faces a considerable deficit, with 10 million job openings, particularly in essential sectors like warehouses and retail. This is exacerbated by only 6 million available workers, and the number is steadily declining.

To tackle this challenge, Figure envisions humanoid workers capable of intelligent thinking, learning, and collaborating safely with human counterparts. Brett, in an interview, expressed his ambitious goal of launching 10 billion humanoid robots in the coming decades, aiming for accessibility comparable to cars and smartphones.

• Website: https://www.figure.ai/

• Location: Sunnyvale California

• Year founded: 2022

• Funding: $75M

• Founders: Brett Adcock

• Number of employees: 50

Darktrace

Darktrace is a cybersecurity company that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect and respond to cyber threats in real-time. Its products are designed to protect organisations against a wide range of cyber threats, including malware, ransomware, and advanced persistent threats.

Darktrace's technology is based on the concept of "immune system" defence, which uses machine learning algorithms to learn the normal behaviour patterns of an organisation's networks and devices. This allows the system to identify and alert on unusual activity that may indicate a cyber threat. The company's products also include a range of response options, such as blocking malicious traffic, isolating infected devices, and providing forensic analysis to help organisations understand the full extent of a cyber attack and take appropriate action.

In addition to its core products, Darktrace also offers a range of professional services, including incident response, threat hunting, and threat intelligence. These services are designed to help organisations strengthen their cyber defences and effectively respond to cyber-attacks.

• Website: darktrace.com

• Location: St John's Innovation Park, Cowley Road, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire CB4 0DS, GB

• Year founded: 2013

• Funding: $230.5M

• Founders: Poppy Gustafsson

• Number of employees: 2,481

‍

MindBridge

MindBridge is a company that provides a range of financial audit and analysis software solutions. Its products are designed to help businesses and organisations improve the accuracy and efficiency of their financial processes, including the detection of fraudulent activity. Some of the products offered by MindBridge include:

• MindBridge Ai Auditor: A cloud-based tool that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help auditors identify unusual patterns and anomalies in financial data, enabling them to detect potential fraud and errors.
• MindBridge Ai Tax: A software solution that uses AI to automate tax compliance tasks, including the preparation of tax returns, the calculation of tax liability, and the identification of tax credits and deductions.
• MindBridge Ai Insights: A tool that uses AI to analyse financial data and provide insights and recommendations to help businesses improve their financial performance.
• A wide range of businesses and organisations, including accounting firms, financial institutions, and government agencies, uses MindBridge's software.

• Website: mindbridge.ai

• Location: 1730 St Laurent Blvd, Suite 540, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 5L1

• Year founded: 2015

• Funding: $98M

• Founders: Solon Angel

• Number of employees: 187

‍

BigML

BigML is a cloud-based machine learning platform that provides a range of tools and services for building, evaluating, and deploying machine learning models. It offers a user-friendly interface and a wide range of features that make it easy to use machine learning in a variety of applications, including predictive modelling, classification, clustering, and anomaly detection.

BigML provides a range of machine learning algorithms, including decision trees, ensembles, logistic regression, and deep learning, and allows users to work with data in a variety of formats, including CSV, JSON, and SQL. The platform also offers integrations with other tools and services, such as Python, R, and Jupyter, and provides resources and support for users to learn about machine learning and get started with the platform.

• Website: bigml.com

• Location: 2851 NW 9th, Suite D, Conifer Plaza Building, Corvallis, OR 97330, US

• Year founded: 2011

• Funding: $4.4M

• Founders: Francisco J Martin 

• Number of employees: 40

‍

Meta AI

Meta AI is an artificial intelligence laboratory that belongs to Meta Platforms Inc. (formerly known as Facebook, Inc.). Meta AI intends to develop various forms of artificial intelligence, improving augmented and artificial reality technologies.

Meta AI is an academic research laboratory focused on generating knowledge for the AI community. This is in contrast to Facebook's Applied Machine Learning (AML) team, which focuses on practical applications of its products. Meta AI started as Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) with locations in the Menlo Park, California headquarters, London, United Kingdom, and a new laboratory in Manhattan.

FAIR was officially announced in September 2013. It was directed by New York University's Yann LeCun, a deep learning Professor and Turing Award winner. Working with NYU's Center for Data Science, FAIR's initial goal was to research data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. FAIR's goal was "to understand intelligence, to discover its fundamental principles, and to make machines significantly more intelligent". Research at FAIR pioneered the technology that led to face recognition, tagging in photographs and personalised feed recommendations.

Meta AI's goal is to advance AI in Infrastructure, Natural Language Processing, Generative AI, Vision, Human-Computer Interaction, and many other areas. This will enable the community to build safe and responsible solutions to address some of the world's greatest challenges.

• Website: ai.facebook.com

• Location: Menlo Park, California

• Year founded: 2015

• Funding: $108 B

• Founders: Yann LeCun, Mark Zuckerberg, Rob Fergus

• Number of employees: 10,001+ 

Google Brain

Google Brain is a deep learning artificial intelligence research team under the umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. It was formed in 2011 and combines open-ended machine learning research with information systems and large-scale computing resources.

The team has created tools such as TensorFlow, which allows for neural networks to be used by the public, with multiple internal AI research projects. The team aims to create research opportunities in machine learning and natural language processing.

Google Brain has contributed to a number of projects, including image enhancement, Google Translate, and speech recognition. It has also designed an experiment showing that neural networks are capable of learning secure symmetric encryption. Google Brain is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

• Website: research.google/teams/brain

• Location: Mountain View, California

• Year founded: 2011

• Funding: $57 M

• Founders: Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado and Andrew Ng

• Number of employees: 3,500

‍

Hanson Robotics

Hanson Robotics is a Hong Kong-based engineering and robotics company known for developing human-like robots with artificial intelligence for various applications, including entertainment, healthcare, and research. The company's robots, including Sophia, BINA48, and Albert HUBO, are designed with a patented elastomer skin called Frubber that mimics the feel and flexibility of human skin. Hanson Robotics' robots are designed to mimic human appearance and are known for their expressive facial features and ability to mimic human expressions.

The company's most well-known robot, Sophia, has gained global media attention and has been featured in numerous press interviews and on television shows. The company's focus is on building robots that can replicate the look of humans.

• Website: hansonrobotics.com

• Location: Hong Kong Science Park, G02A-2, G/F Photonics Centre, Phase One , Hong Kong Science Park, Pak Shek Kok New Territories, HK

• Year founded: 2013

• Funding: $2.6B

• Founders: David Hanson

• Number of employees: 55

‍

Numenta

Numenta is a technology company that focuses on developing machine learning algorithms and software based on principles of the brain's neocortex. The company's research centres on Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM), a theory of the brain's neocortex that provides a computational framework for understanding how the brain processes and stores information.

Numenta has developed a number of products based on HTM, including software for anomaly detection and prediction applications, and has published numerous research papers and articles on HTM and related topics. Numenta's goal is to understand the human brain and how it creates intelligence and to apply these principles to enable machine intelligence.

The company was founded in 2005 by Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Dileep George, and has developed a framework called the Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence for understanding the neocortex and its functions. Numenta is focused on commercialising its brain-based AI technology.

• Website: numenta.com

• Location: 889 Winslow Street, 4th Floor, Redwood City, CA 94063

• Year founded: 2005

• Funding: $23.6M

• Founders: Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky

• Number of employees: 23

As we can see, the future of AI is bright with companies like Neuralink, OpenAI, Boston Dynamics, Anthropic, DeepMind, and Vicarious leading the charge in the field. These innovative companies are driving progress in AI research and development and shaping the direction that the field will take in the future. Whether it be Neuralink's goal of merging humans with AI or OpenAI's pursuit of artificial general intelligence, these companies are pushing the boundaries of what is possible and paving the way for a new era of artificial intelligence. Be sure to keep an eye on these cutting-edge AI technology companies as they continue to make waves in the industry in the coming years.

Viz.ai

The timely delivery of stroke care is critical to preventing severe outcomes. Studies show that a vast majority of patients face severe consequences without prompt diagnosis and treatment. Viz.ai, a healthcare AI firm established by Chris Mansi and David Golan in 2016., targets this issue. Using FDA-approved AI technology, the company streamlines stroke care, reducing delays between crucial treatments and patient care.

Having secured FDA approval in 2018, Viz.ai launched its software for commercial use. Notable innovations include Viz LVO, which identifies potential Large Vessel Occlusion (LVO) cases, and Viz VIEW, a DICOM viewer offering advanced image viewing capabilities for various medical scans.

Additionally, Viz CTP utilizes AI to analyze perfusion images, generating detailed maps for medical assessments. With significant funding of $292 million, the company now caters its solutions to various medical institutions and hospital networks, such as the Swedish Health System in Denver and Mount Sinai Health System in NYC.

• Website: https://www.viz.ai/

• Location: San Francisco, CA

• Year founded: 2016

• Funding: $292M

• Founders: Chris Mansi and David Golan

• Number of employees: 200-500

Nvidia

Essentially a computing hardware manufacturing and technology company, NVIDIA offers an array of AI solutions tailored for diverse industries and enterprise needs. Their advanced AI platform provides robust capabilities for data science and AI applications. Additionally, NVIDIA caters to various industries by delivering specialized AI solutions designed to optimize processes and drive innovation.

Their deep learning and AI solutions are aimed at empowering businesses with cutting-edge technology, leveraging GPUs and software ecosystems. Nvidia offers a comprehensive suite of AI solutions tailored for enterprises seeking high-performance computing and streamlined AI workflows. The NVIDIA DGX™ Cloud serves as an all-encompassing AI training service, granting immediate access to a dedicated supercomputer within leading clouds.

It facilitates multi-node training at scale, easily accessible through a web browser, catering to the intensive computational needs of AI training processes. NVIDIA AI Enterprise forms the software layer of their AI platform, optimizing the entire AI workflow. This software accelerates the data science pipeline and simplifies the development and deployment of AI solutions, ensuring a seamless and efficient process from conception to production.

Additionally, Nvidia presents the power of NVIDIA AI Foundations, offering cloud-based services specialized in customizing and operating AI models for text, visual media, and biology-based generative AI.

• Website: https://www.nvidia.com/en-in/ai-data-science/

• Location: Santa Clara, CA

• Year founded: 1993

• Funding: unknown (and self-funded)

• Founders: Jensen Huang
Curtis Priem
Chris Malachowsky

• Number of employees: 26,196

Inflection

Inflection AI is a pioneering machine learning startup focused on enhancing human-computer interaction through AI-driven solutions. The company is dedicated to revolutionizing how people engage with technology, aiming to address challenges individuals encounter while interacting with computers.

Found just an year back with a small team of just 30 people, the company is already valued between $3B and $4B, and has already raised $1.5B of investment, backed by giants like Microsoft, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt, Nvidia, etc.

The company operates as an AI studio, employing a multidisciplinary team to create and refine AI solutions that resonate with users. Their flagship product, Pi, is an AI-based chatbot designed to assist users in various capacities. Pi's functionalities include answering queries, offering subject matter expertise, and providing emotional support.

Inflection AI's primary offering revolves around a personal AI designed to cater to individual needs, harnessing AI technology to facilitate seamless and intuitive interactions between users and machines. Moreover, this technology is so accessible to the consumers that it's also available as android and iOS applications, on Play store and App store.

• Website: https://inflection.ai/

• Location: Palo Alto, California

• Year founded: 2022

• Funding: $1.5B

• Founders: Mustafa Suleyman

• Number of employees: 30

Databricks

Databricks is a prominent data intelligence platform leveraging generative AI to power data-driven decision-making. Developed as a web-based platform for Spark, it offers automated cluster management and facilitates analytics using IPython-style notebooks.

It serves as a collaborative workspace for data teams, providing a unified environment to handle data engineering, data science, and analytics tasks. Databricks integrates with various data sources and allows for scalable data processing and analysis, aiding in the creation of machine learning models and streamlining workflows.

The platform's focus extends to the concept of a "Lakehouse," blending the best attributes of data lakes and data warehouses. It aims to combine the flexibility of data lakes with the reliability and performance of data warehouses, referred to as the "Lakehouse platform."

In a notable move during the bustling AI landscape of 2023, Databricks made waves by acquiring MosaicML, a startup aiding businesses in crafting personalized AI models, for $1.3 billion in June. This strategic step distinguishes the No. 2 Cloud 100 company from No. 1 OpenAI, which generates revenue by providing access to its GPT-4 model.

Databricks' strategy of focusing on tailored, smaller-scale models aligns with its flagship data concept termed "lakehouse," allowing customers to store and analyze raw data efficiently. Over 10,000 firms, including Adobe, Shell, and USPS, leverage Databricks' solutions to develop analytics and machine learning tools. The company concluded its fiscal year in January 2023 with a robust revenue of $1B.

Founded by seven UC Berkeley academics—Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, Patrick Wendell, Reynold Xin, Andy Konwinski, and Ion Soica—Databricks boasts a valuation surpassing $43B.

• Website: www.databricks.com/

• Location: San Francisco, California

• Year founded: 2013

• Funding: $4B

• Founders: Ali Ghodsi

• Number of employees: 5500

Hugging Face

Hugging Face is an AI-focused company that specializes in developing open-source tools and platforms for machine learning applications[4]. It operates as a community-driven platform where individuals collaborate on building models, datasets, and applications for machine learning[3]. The company aims to democratize machine learning by making it accessible and user-friendly.

It provides a collaborative Machine Learning Collaboration Platform, enabling the building, training, and deployment of machine learning models and datasets in a collaborative environment. Additionally, Hugging Face offers the Model Hub, serving as a centralized space for hosting, accessing, and sharing diverse machine learning models and datasets created by the community.

Another critical aspect is Compute Access, granting entry to essential compute resources for AI projects, simplifying the execution of machine learning tasks. In August 2023, the startup made a significant milestone with a Series D round, amassing $235 million from investors such as Salesforce and NVIDIA.

• Website: huggingface.co

• Location: Manhattan, New York City

• Year founded: 2016

• Funding: $396M

• Founders: Clément Delangue (CEO)
Julien Chaumond (CTO)
Thomas Wolf (CSO)

• Number of employees: 200-500

CoHere

CoHere is an AI platform focused on empowering enterprises with large language models (LLMs) for building robust applications in text-based tasks like comprehension, search, and conversational interfaces. The platform offers world-class LLMs designed to cater to enterprise needs, enabling advanced capabilities in understanding context and generating meaningful conversations within applications.

CoHere's AI technology targets businesses, providing them with tools to create powerful and secure applications leveraging natural language processing capabilities for enhanced user experiences and efficient text-based interactions.

Their flagship product, Coral, serves as a conversational AI toolkit empowering enterprises to develop RAG-enabled (retrieval-augmented generation) knowledge assistants for both employees and customers. Coral enhances response accuracy by dynamically integrating relevant information using RAG, ensuring precise and minimally hallucinated answers based on extensive data searches.

Another core product, Embed, represents CoHere's leading text representation language model. It significantly refines search accuracy, RAG capabilities, classification, and clustering, particularly excelling in handling noisy real-world datasets by understanding data intricacies. Embed's prowess lies in enabling semantic search, improving retrieval-augmented generation, facilitating clustering for text archives, and enhancing text classification through its robust embedding performance.

Additionally, CoHere's Command model, renowned for its dynamic text generation, stands out in following user commands for practical business applications. Command is continually evolving, trained specifically for business-centric functions like summarization, copywriting, dialog, and question answering, with a relentless focus on security, privacy, and responsible AI practices.

Lastly, CoHere recently raised its Series C funding round at a $2.2B valuation.

• Website: https://cohere.com/

• Location: Toronto, CA

• Year founded: 2019

• Funding: $435M

• Founders: Aidan Gomez

• Number of employees: 200-500

Anduril Industries

Anduril Industries specializes in developing cutting-edge defense technology solutions tailored for security and defense purposes. Among its prominent offerings are Ghost, an autonomous small unmanned aerial system (sUAS) optimized for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. Complementing this is Sentry, a hardware system focused on enhancing border security and surveillance, employing advanced sensor technologies and AI-driven capabilities.

Additionally, Anduril provides CounterUAS solutions aimed at countering unmanned aerial system threats by detecting, identifying, and mitigating potential risks posed by drones. These products, alongside others such as Menace, ALTIUS, Anvil, Dust, WISP, and Dive-LD, contribute comprehensively to security awareness, surveillance, and defense across diverse domains. By integrating hardware and software, Anduril emphasizes security, intelligence gathering, and protection in various defense contexts.

The company disclosed securing a significant $1.48 billion in Series E funding, propelling its valuation to $8.48 billion—an impressive surge from its previous valuation in June 2021. With these funds, Anduril is set to expedite its research and development endeavors, aiming to introduce state-of-the-art defense capabilities to the market. Additionally, the company intends to fortify and expand its existing business collaborations with the US Department of Defense, as well as strengthen partnerships with US allies and associates.

• Website: https://www.anduril.com/

• Location: Costa Mesa, California

• Year founded: 2017

• Funding: $2.4B

• Founders: Brian Schimpf

• Number of employees: 1600

Shield AI

Shield AI is an American aerospace and defense technology company renowned for developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence-powered systems, specifically AI pilots, for military applications. Shield AI's co-founder, Brandon Tseng, drew from his Navy SEAL experience to recognize critical situations where intelligent autonomy could have been pivotal for saving lives.

This firsthand understanding prompted Tseng to contemplate the future military landscape in 2030 and the indispensable role of autonomy within it. Their flagship product, Hivemind, stands as an AI pilot that facilitates autonomous operations of swarms of drones and aircraft even without GPS, communication, or human pilots.

This innovative technology is geared towards enabling unmanned systems to function independently in challenging environments, enhancing military capabilities. Additionally, Shield AI's contributions extend to the field of device-first fraud prevention and risk intelligence, providing businesses with tools powered by advanced AI and device fingerprinting to combat online fraud and build trust.

The company recently closed its Series F investment round of $200M at a valuation of $2.7B.

• Website: https://shield.ai/

• Location: San Diego, California

• Year founded: 2015

• Funding: $828M

• Founders: Brandon Tseng

• Number of employees: 500-1,000

Tesla

Tesla, founded by Elon Musk and others in 2003, is renowned for revolutionizing the automotive industry with electric vehicles (EVs) and advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). Tesla is a pioneer in AI-driven technology, applying it extensively in various domains. Their AI efforts are particularly evident in their autonomous driving systems, robotics, and innovative AI applications in vehicles and other products.

Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has emphasized the significant role of advanced AI in Tesla's self-driving technology, envisioning a future where AI-backed systems enable autonomous vehicles on a large scale. Additionally, Tesla unveiled a humanoid robot, the Tesla Bot, during their AI Day in 2021, showcasing their ambitions to integrate AI into robotics. This robot was highlighted for its capabilities and improvements, demonstrated in videos shared by Elon Musk.

Tesla's AI infrastructure centers on neural networks for driving decisions, backed by the Dojo Chip for network training and the FSD Chip for onboard AI in vehicles. The Tesla Bot showcases AI advancements beyond driving tasks. The broader Dojo System encompasses AI training infrastructure for efficient learning. Tesla's autonomy algorithms interpret sensor data, evolving through machine learning. Code foundations and evaluation infrastructure ensure robustness and continuous improvement of their AI technologies. These elements underscore Tesla's dedication to advancing AI for driving and non-driving applications.

• Website: https://www.tesla.com/AI

• Location: Austin, Texas

• Year founded: 2003

• Funding: Self-funded -($97B Revenue in 2023)

• Founders: Elon Musk, Martin Eberhard, JB Straubel, Marc Tarpenning, Ian Wright

• Number of employees: 127,855

Vectra AI

Vectra AI is a cybersecurity company specializing in AI-driven solutions for detecting, investigating, and responding to cyber threats in real-time. Their platform utilizes AI to identify and tackle advanced cyber attacks by providing threat detection, incident investigations, and response capabilities. Founded in San Jose, California, Vectra uses AI-powered network intrusion detection to safeguard businesses from evolving cyber threats.

They've garnered significant funding, totaling $352.69 million, and have a presence across 12 locations with a workforce of 5 employees. Vectra's aim is to stop advanced attacks by leveraging AI to recognize and mitigate threats promptly. Lastly, the company is also in the Forbs AI 50 list.

• Website: https://www.vectra.ai/

• Location: San Jose, California

• Year founded: 2012

• Funding: $340M

• Founders: Hitesh Sheth

• Number of employees: 600+

Insitro

Insitro is a pioneering biotech company revolutionizing drug discovery and development by amalgamating machine learning, biology, and high-throughput technologies. Established with a mission to expedite drug development for patients in need, Insitro employs data-driven methodologies to identify potential drug candidates.

Their approach leverages machine learning algorithms to analyze biological data, thereby predicting potential drug targets and optimizing the drug development process. By integrating computational analysis with biological insights, Insitro aims to streamline drug discovery, bringing novel therapies to market more efficiently.

The company's core focus lies in transforming the traditional drug discovery landscape by minimizing the time and cost involved in bringing new drugs to market. Insitro's proprietary platform utilizes cutting-edge technology to create comprehensive models that simulate various disease conditions, allowing for more precise and targeted drug design.

• Website: https://www.insitro.com/

• Location: San Francisco, California

• Year founded: 2018

• Funding: $640M

• Founders: Daphne Koller

• Number of employees: 230

Runway

Runway AI is an innovative platform focusing on advancing creativity through artificial intelligence tools and models. This platform specializes in multimodal AI systems that enable novel creative tools for various applications, including filmmaking, image generation, and text manipulation. Their Gen-2 AI model, introduced in 2023, showcased capabilities to swiftly transform images into videos, marking significant advancements in generative AI technology.

The company has been a recipient of notable funding, securing $141 million in a Series C round to support the development of generative AI tools tailored for content creators. Established in 2022, Runway AI Film Festival celebrates artists embracing AI techniques in filmmaking, providing a platform for showcasing their work. The company already had a revenue of $16M in 2023, which was almost 4x its revenue in 2022.

• Website: https://runwayml.com/

• Location: New York

• Year founded: 2022

• Funding: $237M

• Founders: Cristóbal Valenzuela

• Number of employees: 44