AI is the hottest space to be in right now, and people continue to be amazed by the capabilities of products like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. Tech Giants like Google and Microsoft are all-in on the technology, and are coming up with AI launches every week. But much of the growth in the AI space is coming from scrappy startups. These startups have small teams, but have quickly managed to create products that are both pathbreaking and popular. Many of these startups have raised serious amounts of money, and are quite valuable — as per a CB Insights report, there are as many as 11 AI-focused companies that are worth more than $1 billion. These AI unicorns are changing the face of the industry, and perhaps the future of computing as a whole. These are the most valuable AI companies in the world.
The most valuable AI companies
1.OpenAI
Valuation: $29 billion
OpenAI, founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and others, and is the most recognizable AI company at the moment. OpenAI has made significant strides in natural language processing and reinforcement learning. One of OpenAI’s most notable products is GPT-3, the third iteration of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer language model, which has garnered widespread acclaim for its astonishing language generation capabilities, and was followed up with the even more powerful GPT-4. OpenAI has truly arrived on the world stage, and CEO Sam Altman now rubs shoulders with global leaders. OpenAI is currently the highest valued AI company in the world, and is worth $29 billion.
2. Anthropic AI
Valuation: $4.4 billion
Anthropic AI was founded in 2021 by two former OpenAI employees, siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei. The duo had quit OpenAI in 2019 over differences in the direction the company was taking, especially around its closeness with Microsoft. Anthropic is best known for its LLM Claude, which is a high-quality LLM that competes with GPT-4 and Google Bard. Anthropic is currently the second most valuable AI company in the world with a valuation of $4.4 billion.
3. Cohere
Valuation: $2 billion
Cohere was founded 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst. Gomez, incidentally, is one of the authors of the Attention is all you need paper, which had introduced the concept of the transformer, and had largely brought about the current generative AI revolution. Cohere builds AI models that can understand and summarize text. It is currently valued at $2 billion, making it the third most valuable AI company in the world at this point.
4. Hugging Face
Valuation: $2 billion
Hugging Face might not sound like the name of one of the world’s most valuable AI companies, but the company had started off as a messaging app for young people. It has since pivoted, and become the go-to repository for storing AI models and datasets — Hugging Face hosts models from all top companies including Google, Meta and Microsoft, and thousands of models from AI enthusiasts across the world. Hugging Face also has its own libraries for building AI models, including the popular transformers library. It is currently valued at $2 billion, making it the fourth most valuable AI company in the world.
5. Runway ML
Valuation: $1.5 billion
Runway ML was founded by Cristóbal Valenzuela, Anastasis Germanidis, and Alejandro Matamala with a goal to democratize machine learning. The company is most famous for its video generation models including Gen-1 and Gen-2, which people have been using to make AI-generated videos of everything from animated short films to movie trailers. Runway has managed to establish itself as perhaps the best AI video generation tool out there, and is among the world’s highest valued AI comapnies with a valuation of $1.5 billion.
6. Jasper AI
Valuation: $1.5 billion
Jasper had been one of the earliest movers in the AI content creation space. Founded in early 2021, Jasper AI helped people write AI-generated content. It claimed this helped writers save time, and improve their efficiency. Jasper has several big-name customers, including Sports Illustrated which use its content creation tools. But the introduction of several free LLMs which produce high-quality text appears to have created some competition for Jasper, and it has recently laid off employees. Nevertheless, Jasper is still one of the most valuable AI companies in the world with a valuation of $1.5 billion.
7. Replit
Valuation: $1.2 billion
Replit isn’t a technically an AI company — it provides an online IDE for developers to write code. But it’s been early on the AI bandwagon. Replit has built a coding AI assistant, and has also tied up with Google to help it compete with Microsoft, which owns GitHub and has launched Github Copilot. Replit is currently worth $1.2 billion, and is among the highest valued AI startups in the world.
8. Inflection AI
Valutation: 1.2 billion
Inflection AI was founded in 2022 by Linkedin founder Reid Hoffman, Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, who was the Principal Scientist at Deepmind. Inflection AI has built a chatbot named Pi, which competes with chatbots including GPT-4, Google Bard, and Claude. Inflection AI is currently valued at $1.2 billion, making it the 8th highest valued AI startup in the world.
9. Adept
Valuation: $1 billion
Adept is co-founded by Ash Vaswani and Niki Parmar, two of the authors of the Attention is all you need paper. After coming up with the transformer, Vaswani and Parmar left Google, and co-founded Adept with David Luan. Adept says it’s building a machine learning model that can interact with everything on a computer — its first model, the ACT 1, is a model that aims to use every software tool, API and website that exists. While its product isn’t yet open to the public, Adept is already worth $1 billion, putting it in the list of the world’s most valuable AI companies.
10. Character.ai
Valuation: $1 billion
Character.ai is the third startup on this list which is co-founded by an author of the seminal “Attention is all you need” paper. Founded by Noam Shazeer, Character.ai builds chatbots, but differentiates itself from competition by giving those chatbots specific personalities — so it has chatbots that are friendly, no-nonsense, and so on. Character.ai is worth $1 billion, making it one of the most valuable AI companies in the world.
11. Stability.ai
Valuation: $1 billion
Stability AI is the company behind the Stable Diffusion model, which is open-source and creates high-quality AI-generated images. Founded by Emad Mostaque, Stability AI has now also released a new version of Stable Diffusion named SDXL, and its text generation model, StableBeluga currently sits at the top of the Huggingface open LLM leaderboard. Stability.ai has run into some controversy, though — Forbes has accused CEO Emad Mostaque of overstating some of his personal and professional accomplishments, and his of wife using company money towards personal expenses. Mostaque has vehemently denied those claims, and Stability.ai remains one of the world’s highest valued AI companies with a valuation of $1 billion.
