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					Founders		Known for
DeepSeek	$52B	2023	General-purpose models — Math, Open source, Open weights	High-Flyer	Liang Wenfeng	Hangzhou China	Spun out of the quant fund High-Flyer; open-weight frontier models trained at a fraction of the compute cost US labs disclose.
Prometheus	$41B	2025	Physical AI & robotics	Amazon, Xaira Therapeutics, Stanford, Foresite Labs, GRAIL, UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Verily, Google	Vik Bajaj, Jeff Bezos	San Francisco United States	Jeff Bezos' return to an operating role; AI for the physical economy.
SSI (Safe Superintelligence)	$32B	2024	General-purpose models	U. Toronto, Google, OpenAI, Apple, Stanford	Daniel Gross, Daniel Levy, Ilya Sutskever	Palo Alto United States	A straight-shot lab pursuing safe superintelligence, operating in total secrecy.
Reflection AI	$25B	2024	General-purpose models — Open weights, Sovereign AI	DeepMind, Claire AI, University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, UCL	Ioannis Antonoglou, Misha Laskin	New York United States	American open-weights frontier models, built by ex-DeepMind researchers.
Skild AI	>$14B	2023	Physical AI & robotics — Academic spinout, Robot foundation models	UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Meta (FAIR), Allen Institute for AI, U. Maryland	Abhinav Gupta, Deepak Pathak	Pittsburgh United States	Robot foundation models out of Carnegie Mellon.
Mistral AI	~$14B	2023	General-purpose models — Agents, On-device, Open weights, Sovereign AI	DeepMind, Université Paris-Saclay, Meta (FAIR), Sorbonne Université, École des Ponts	Timothée Lacroix, Guillaume Lample, Arthur Mensch	Paris France	Europe's frontier lab; Apache-licensed open-weight models alongside proprietary ones, positioned as a sovereign alternative to the US labs.
Thinking Machines Lab	$12B	2025	General-purpose models — Open source, Open weights, Training infra / tooling	OpenAI, Leap Motion, Tesla, Anthropic, UC Berkeley, Google, Affirm, Indiana University, Meta (FAIR)	Luke Metz, Mira Murati, John Schulman, Andrew Tulloch, Lilian Weng, Barret Zoph	San Francisco United States	A research and product company building AI systems that are more understandable, customisable and capable.
Poolside	$12B *	2023	Coding — Agents, Open weights	GitHub, Heroku, Canonical, Athenian, source{d}, Tyba	Eiso Kant, Jason Warner	San Francisco United States	Founded by GitHub's former CTO; builds frontier foundation models purpose-built for software development.
Physical Intelligence	>$11B *	2024	Physical AI & robotics — Open source, Open weights, Robot foundation models	UC Berkeley, Google, DeepMind, Stanford, Stripe, Microsoft, Anduril, Tesla	Adnan Esmail, Chelsea Finn, Lachy Groom, Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter, Sergey Levine, Quan Vuong	San Francisco United States	General-purpose robot policies from the Stanford/Berkeley/Google robotics world.
StepFun	~$10B	2023	General-purpose models — Multimodal, Open weights	Microsoft, Nanyang Technological University, Google, ByteDance, UC Santa Barbara	Jiao Binxing, Jiang Daxin, Zhu Yibo	Shanghai China	The Step model series; unwound its VIE structure to file in Hong Kong.
Cohere	~$7B	2019	Applied — Agents, Multimodal, Open weights, Sovereign AI	Google, University of Oxford, FOR.ai	Nick Frosst, Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang	Toronto Canada	Enterprise LLMs sold on private deployment; the Command and Aya model families and the North agent platform. Announced a merger with Germany's Aleph Alpha in 2026.
Periodic Labs	~$7B *	2025	AI for math & science — Materials	OpenAI, Google, DeepMind	Ekin Doğuş Çubuk, Liam Fedus	San Francisco United States	Autonomous labs for materials discovery; ex-OpenAI VP of Post-Training and ex-Google Brain/DeepMind materials lead.
Hark	$6B	2025	Applied — Agents	Archer Aviation, Figure AI	Brett Adcock	San Jose United States	Personalised multimodal AI and bespoke hardware designed as a new interface to computing.
Runway	$5.3B	2018	Generative media & voice — Multimodal, Video	Chartbeat	Anastasis Germanidis, Alejandro Matamala, Cristóbal Valenzuela	New York United States	Generative video for film and production, from Gen-1 to Gen-4.5; a co-author of the latent diffusion work behind Stable Diffusion.
Ineffable Intelligence	$5.1B	2026	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Continual learning	Flying Fish Partners, J.P. Morgan, onsemi, Tesla, Microsoft, DeepMind, Google, Fundamental, Isomorphic Labs, InstaDeep	Chris Apps, Wojciech Marian Czarnecki, Lasse Espeholt, Heather Gorham, Alex Laterre, Junhyuk Oh, David Silver	London United Kingdom	David Silver's lab building reinforcement-learning "superlearners" that learn from experience rather than human data.
World Labs	~$5B *	2024	World models & simulation — Multimodal	Google, Stanford, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Caltech, Meta (FAIR), U. Michigan, Epic Games, Amazon, U. Tübingen, UC Berkeley	Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, Fei-Fei Li, Ben Mildenhall	San Francisco United States	Spatial intelligence and 3D world generation, from the creator of ImageNet.
River AI	<$5B *	2026	Applied — Training infra / tooling	DeepMind, OpenAI, xAI, Apple, Meta (FAIR), AMD, Qualcomm, Tesla	Igor Babuschkin, Aaron Rogers, Dmytro "Dima" Soboliev, Ievgen Soboliev	Palo Alto United States	Personal AI agents that learn from and are controlled by their users, built on an end-to-end stack spanning training, models, products and on-device hardware.
Zyphra	>$5B *	2021	General-purpose models — Open source, Open weights	Cambridge Quantum Computing, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IBM, Xerion Advanced Battery Corp., Conjecture, University of Oxford, Edinburgh, Apple, Xilinx, Qualcomm, Johns Hopkins University	Tomás Figliolia, Danny Martinelli, Beren Millidge, Krithik Puthalath	San Francisco United States	Outsized results from small models; the Zamba and Zaya (ZAYA1) stack.
Recursive Superintelligence	$4.65B	2025	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Agents	Salesforce, Stanford, Other startups, DeepMind, UCL, Inceptive, Google, Moscow State, Intel, OpenAI, UC Berkeley, Meta (FAIR), Carnegie Mellon, University of British Columbia, Uber, Michigan State	Jeff Clune, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Tim Rocktäschel, Tim Shi, Richard Socher, Yuandong Tian, Josh Tobin, Caiming Xiong	San Francisco United States	Self-improving AI; raised $500M+ within four months of founding.
AMI Labs	~$4.5B	2025	World models & simulation	Meta (FAIR), Other startups, DeepMind, NYU, HKUST, Columbia, McGill	Pascale Fung, Alexandre LeBrun, Yann LeCun, Michael Rabbat, Laurent Solly, Saining Xie	Paris France	LeCun's post-Meta bet on world models over LLMs.
Unconventional AI	$4.5B	2025	Compute & chips	Databricks, MosaicML, Intel, Nervana Systems, Qualcomm, Chipletz, Google, Atheros, MIT, Microsoft, Stanford	Sara Achour, Michael Carbin, MeeLan Lee, Naveen Rao	San Francisco United States	Serial hardware founder (Nervana→Intel, MosaicML→Databricks) building analog AI chips for biology-scale efficiency.
humans&	$4.48B	2026	General-purpose models	xAI, Stanford, Notbad AI, HSLABS, Google, Silicon Graphics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, U. Michigan, Anthropic, Defense Innovation Unit, Microsoft, White House / NSC, MIT, OpenAI, Meta (FAIR), DeepMind, Uber	Noah Goodman, Georges Harik, Yuchen He, Andi Peng, Eric Zelikman	San Francisco United States	Human-centric frontier lab founded by alumni of xAI, OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and Stanford; $480M seed within months of founding.
Core Automation	~$4B *	2026	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Continual learning	OpenAI, DeepMind, Google, Anthropic	Rohan Anil, Anmol Gulati, Joanne Jang, Jerry Tworek, Julia Villagra	San Francisco United States	Ex-OpenAI VP building “the world's most automated AI lab”.
Inflection AI	~$4B	2022	Applied	DeepMind, Google, University of Oxford, Other startups, Greylock	Reid Hoffman, Karén Simonyan, Mustafa Suleyman	Palo Alto United States	The Pi assistant, then a 2024 Microsoft reverse acquihire of its co-founders and much of its team; rebuilt since as an enterprise AI company.
Luma AI	~$4B	2021	Generative media & voice — Agents, Video	Apple, Circle Medical, UC Berkeley, Codeplay Software	Amit Jain, Alberto Taiuti, Alex Yu	Palo Alto United States	Dream Machine and the Ray video-model family; evolved from neural rendering and smartphone 3D capture into generative video.
Ricursive Intelligence	$4B	2025	Compute & chips	Google, DeepMind, Anthropic, Stanford	Anna Goldie, Azalia Mirhoseini	Palo Alto United States	The researchers behind AI-designed chip floorplanning, now doing it commercially.
Decart	~$4B	2023	World models & simulation — Video	Technion, Unit 8200	Dean Leitersdorf, Moshe Shalev	Tel Aviv Israel	Real-time generative world models — Oasis and Mirage.
Chai Discovery	$3.8B	2024	AI for math & science — Drug discovery, Open weights	Meta (FAIR), OpenAI, Absci, Stripe, VantAI, University of Chicago, Aqemia	Jacques Boitreaud, Jack Dent, Matthew McPartlon, Joshua Meier	San Francisco United States	OpenAI-backed; Chai-1 structure prediction and Chai-2 de novo antibody design, used by Pfizer, Lilly and Novartis.
Isomorphic Labs	Not independently valued	2021	AI for math & science — Drug discovery	DeepMind	Demis Hassabis	London United Kingdom	Alphabet’s AI drug-discovery company, building predictive and generative models beyond AlphaFold.
Xaira Therapeutics	Undisclosed	2023	AI for math & science — Drug discovery	Stanford, Genentech, Rockefeller, UCSF, UCL, U. Washington, Meta (FAIR), Carnegie Mellon, Foresite Labs, GRAIL, UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Verily, Google	Vik Bajaj, David Baker, Hetu Kamisetty, Marc Tessier-Lavigne	South San Francisco United States	An AI-native drug-discovery company combining model research, data generation and therapeutic development.
Black Forest Labs	$3.25B	2024	Generative media & voice — Multimodal, Open weights, Video	Stability AI, LMU Munich, Runway, Heidelberg University	Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser, Dominik Lorenz, Robin Rombach	Freiburg Germany	The Stable Diffusion authors' lab; the FLUX family of image models, part of it Apache-licensed, now extending into video and robot manipulation.
Genesis AI	~$3B *	2025	Physical AI & robotics — Robot foundation models	Carnegie Mellon, Mistral, Skild AI	Théophile Gervet, Zhou Xian	Paris France	Robotics foundation models (the GENE series) on a proprietary physics-simulation engine; a Franco-American team out of CMU, Mistral and Skild AI.
Galbot	>$3B	2023	Physical AI & robotics — Humanoid, Robot foundation models	Peking University, Stanford, ABB	Wang He, Yao Tengzhou	Beijing China	Embodied foundation models and autonomous retail stores; over $900M raised.
Baichuan AI	~$2.9B	2023	Applied — Agents	Sogou, Other startups, Tsinghua	Ru Liyun, Wang Xiaochuan	Beijing China	Sogou's founder; shifted strategic focus from the general-purpose LLM race toward AI-for-healthcare, while continuing to develop its base model series.
Sakana AI	$2.65B	2023	General-purpose models — Sovereign AI	Google, Stability AI, U. Tokyo, Goldman Sachs, Mercari	David Ha, Ren Ito, Llion Jones	Tokyo Japan	Japan's first AI unicorn, co-founded by a Transformer co-author; nature-inspired model merging and AI for science, betting on sample efficiency over raw compute.
CuspAI	~$2.6B	2024	AI for math & science — Materials	Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Other startups, Caltech, U. Amsterdam, Utrecht, U. Toronto, CIFAR, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Scyfer, UC Irvine	Chad Edwards, Max Welling	Cambridge United Kingdom	AI materials-discovery platform — expanding from carbon capture into semiconductors, batteries, coatings and catalysts.
General Intuition	$2.3B	2025	World models & simulation — Video	Medal, University of Geneva, Ubisoft, Edinburgh, Dataiku	Eloi Alonso, Adam Jelley, Vincent Micheli, Pim de Witte	New York United States	Action and world models trained on gameplay video to perceive, predict and act in virtual and physical environments.
Liquid AI	>$2B	2023	General-purpose models — Academic spinout, On-device, Open weights	MIT, Cornell, Dartmouth College, The Vanguard Group, TU Wien, Infineon Technologies, ISTA (Austria), Themis AI	Alexander Amini, Ramin Hasani, Mathias Lechner, Daniela Rus	Cambridge, MA United States	MIT CSAIL spinout; liquid neural networks for on-device inference.
Simile	$2B	2025	World models & simulation	Stanford, MIT, Meta (FAIR), UC Berkeley, Valence, Hebbia	Michael Bernstein, Percy Liang, Joon Sung Park, Lainie Yallen	Palo Alto United States	The Stanford generative-agents lineage, commercialised.
Aleph Alpha	~$2B *	2019	Applied — Multimodal, Sovereign AI	Apple, Pallas Ludens, Deloitte	Jonas Andrulis, Samuel Weinbach	Heidelberg Germany	Europe's early frontier lab, from the Luminous models to PhariaAI — a sovereign AI platform built for government, defence and regulated industry.
Generalist AI	$2B	2024	Physical AI & robotics — Robot foundation models	DeepMind, MIT, Princeton, Broad Institute, Boston Dynamics	Andrew Barry, Pete Florence, Andy Zeng	San Mateo United States	GEN-0 and GEN-1, embodied foundation models pretrained from scratch on hundreds of thousands of hours of raw physical interaction collected with handheld grippers rather than in simulation; the DeepMind robotics researchers behind PaLM-E and RT-2, selling cross-embodiment robot intelligence rather than robots.
Rhoda AI	$1.7B	2024	Physical AI & robotics — Robot foundation models	Other startups, Stanford, MIT, University of British Columbia, UT Austin, Meta (FAIR)	Eric Chan, Changan Chen, Jagdeep Singh, Gordon Wetzstein, Andrew Wooten	San Francisco United States	Serial founder Jagdeep Singh's robotics startup; FutureVision, a video-pretrained foundation model ('Direct Video-Action') that predicts the next frames of a scene and converts them into motor commands, driving a bimanual manipulation platform on factory lines.
Axiom Math	>$1.6B	2025	AI for math & science — Math, Open source	Stanford, Meta (FAIR), Baidu, Shazam, Intel, Sun Microsystems, UC Davis	Carina Hong, Shubho Sengupta	Palo Alto United States	AxiomProver, an AI system for mathematical research that generates formally verified Lean proofs.
Flapping Airplanes	$1.5B	2025	General-purpose models	Stanford, Prod, Thiel Fellowship, Neuralink, Chess.com	Aidan Smith, Asher Spector, Ben Spector	San Francisco United States	A research lab pursuing radically more data-efficient AI, especially in data-constrained fields such as robotics and science.
Magic	~$1.5B *	2022	Coding	Meta (FAIR), Other startups	Sebastian De Ro, Eric Steinberger	San Francisco United States	AI models for software development, including ultra-long-context systems.
Sarvam AI	$1.5B	2023	General-purpose models — Open weights, Sovereign AI, Voice	UIDAI / Aadhaar, Other startups, Carnegie Mellon, Microsoft, IBM, IIT Madras	Pratyush Kumar, Vivek Raghavan	Bengaluru India	Foundation models and speech built for Indian languages; selected under the IndiaAI Mission to build an indigenous foundational model.
Harmonic	$1.45B	2023	AI for math & science — Math	Other startups, Stanford, Helm.ai, Quora	Tudor Achim, Vlad Tenev	Palo Alto United States	Co-founded by Robinhood's Vlad Tenev (chairman) and CEO Tudor Achim, building formally verified mathematical superintelligence (the Aristotle model).
AI21 Labs	$1.4B	2017	Applied — Open weights	Other startups, Stanford, Google, Mobileye, Hebrew University	Ori Goshen, Amnon Shashua, Yoav Shoham	Tel Aviv Israel	The original Israeli LLM company, predating the current wave by five years; its Jamba models pair Mamba state-space layers with transformer blocks for long context at lower memory cost.
Fundamental	~$1.4B	2024	Applied — Tabular / structured data	Bridgewater Associates, J.P. Morgan, Other startups, DeepMind, Imperial College London, Greenfield Partners	Jeremy Fraenkel, Marta Garnelo, Gabriel Suissa	San Francisco United States	NEXUS, a deterministic large tabular model pretrained on billions of enterprise spreadsheets and database tables, aimed at fraud detection, pricing and forecasting rather than free-text generation.
Lila Sciences	>$1.3B	2023	AI for math & science — Agents, Drug discovery, Materials	MIT, Other startups, WashU	Noubar Afeyan, Molly Gibson, Geoffrey von Maltzahn	Cambridge, MA United States	Flagship Pioneering's scientific superintelligence venture: the Lila Iris reasoning model driving AI Science Factory autonomous labs, which have closed the loop across hundreds of thousands of experiments spanning antibodies, genetic medicines, catalysts and coatings.
Deepgram	$1.3B	2015	Generative media & voice — Agents, Voice	U. Michigan, UC Davis	Noah Shutty, Scott Stephenson, Adam Sypniewski	San Francisco United States	Founded by Michigan particle physicists who repurposed dark-matter waveform analysis for speech; the Nova speech-to-text models and a voice-agent stack sold as enterprise API infrastructure.
Goodfire	$1.25B	2024	AI safety & interpretability	Other startups, DeepMind, Imperial College London	Dan Balsam, Eric Ho, Tom McGrath	San Francisco United States	One of the first companies built entirely around mechanistic interpretability; Ember, an API for inspecting and steering model internals.
Prime Intellect	$1B	2024	Compute & chips — Agents, Open source, Open weights, Training infra / tooling	Molecule, Bunch, Aleph Alpha, VitaDAO	Johannes Hagemann, Vincent Weisser	San Francisco United States	Aggregated compute plus a training, sandbox and inference stack, sold on the pitch that any company can be its own lab; ships the INTELLECT open-weight models and an open RL toolchain.
Discovery Loop	Undisclosed	2026	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning	Google, DeepMind, U. Washington, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley	Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, Oriol Vinyals	Palo Alto United States	Three of the most-cited researchers in AI and two of the most-cited in distributed systems. Search, Spanner, MoE, distillation, Chinchilla laws and more. Now working on automating the scientific method.
Aaru	$1B *	2024	World models & simulation	MIT	Cameron Fink, John Kessler, Ned Koh	New York United States	AI-built populations and worlds that simulate how groups respond to new products, policies and other changed conditions.
Ndea	Undisclosed	2025	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning	Google, ARC Prize Foundation, Zapier	François Chollet, Mike Knoop	San Francisco United States	Keras and Zapier founders betting on program synthesis over scaling.
Imbue	>$1B	2022	Applied — Agents, Open source	Dropbox, Other startups	Josh Albrecht, Kanjun Qiu	San Francisco United States	Agent lab building Sculptor, a sandboxed environment for running coding agents in parallel, alongside other tools.
doubleAI	>$1B *	2023	General-purpose models	Mobileye, Hebrew University, AI21 Labs, Caltech, Google	Gal Beniamini, Yoav Levine, Shai Shalev-Shwartz, Or Sharir, Amnon Shashua, Noam Wies	Tel Aviv Israel	A once-stealth lab pursuing 'Artificial Expert Intelligence' — deep domain-expert AI rather than AGI — now public with its first system, WarpSpeed, for GPU kernel optimisation.
Reka	$1B	2022	Physical AI & robotics — Multimodal	DeepMind, Baidu, Carnegie Mellon, University of Oxford, Meta (FAIR), University of the Basque Country, Google, Nanyang Technological University	Mikel Artetxe, Cyprien de Masson d'Autume, Qi Liu, Yi Tay, Dani Yogatama	San Francisco United States	Models for physical-world intelligence: reasoning, simulation and action across robots, wearables, media and edge devices.
Arcee AI	>$1B *	2023	Applied — Open source, Open weights, Training infra / tooling	Hugging Face, Roboflow, Tecton	Brian Benedict, Mark McQuade, Jacob Solawetz	Miami United States	Small enterprise language models; absorbed mergekit (created by Charles Goddard, now Arcee's Chief of Frontier Research) via a 2024 merger.
Mirendil	$1B	2026	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning	Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, xAI, Twitter, OpenAI, Prod	Harsh Mehta, Behnam Neyshabur, Tara Rezaei, Shayan Salehian	San Francisco United States	Founded by ex-Anthropic researchers Behnam Neyshabur and Harsh Mehta, building self-improving AI for scientific R&D; backed by a16z and Kleiner Perkins.
Nous Research	$1B	2023	Applied — Agents, Open source, Open weights	Other startups, Stability AI	Karan Malhotra, Shivani Mitra, Jeffrey Quesnelle, Ryan Teknium	New York United States	Open-source Hermes models and decentralised training, from an internet-native collective.
01.AI	Undisclosed	2023	Applied — Open weights	Sinovation Ventures, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Silicon Graphics, Baidu, Other startups, SAP, Cisco, Alibaba, Huawei, Didi, Peking University	Anita Huang, Ma Jie, Kai-Fu Lee, Shen Pengfei, Qi Ruifeng, Li Xiangang, Gu Xuemei, Dai Zonghong	Beijing China	The Yi open-weight model family through early 2025; now enterprise and sovereign AI for industry and government.
Merge Labs	$850M	2026	AI for math & science — Neurotech / BCI	Brown University, MIT, Cyberkinetics, Third Rock Ventures, Caltech, Princeton, Forest Neurotech, University of Utah, UC Irvine, AE Studio, FAU Erlangen–Nürnberg, Max Planck Institute, Tools for Humanity / World, Stanford, Loopt, Y Combinator, OpenAI	Tyson Aflalo, Sam Altman, Alex Blania, Sandro Herbig, Sumner Norman, Mikhail Shapiro	San Francisco United States	Less-invasive, high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces combining biology, devices and AI.
Inferact	$800M	2026	Inference — Open source	UC Berkeley, Anyscale, Character.AI, Seoul National University, DeepMind, Thinking Machines Lab, Tsinghua, Apple, Roblox, University of Waterloo, U. Washington	Woosuk Kwon, Simon Mo, Roger Wang, Kaichao You	Berkeley United States	Founded by vLLM’s creators and core maintainers to build and commercialise open-source LLM inference infrastructure.
Prior Labs	Not independently valued	2024	Applied — Academic spinout, Open source, Open weights, Tabular / structured data	University of Freiburg, University of British Columbia, Bosch Center for AI	Sauraj Gambhir, Noah Hollmann, Frank Hutter	Freiburg Germany	Creator of TabPFN, a tabular foundation model that predicts on structured data by in-context learning over synthetic priors instead of per-dataset gradient training; spun out of the AutoML lab at Freiburg.
Isara Laboratories	$650M	2025	Applied — Agents	OpenAI, MIT, Harvard, Oxford / Cambridge	Henry Gasztowtt, Eddie Zhang	San Francisco United States	OpenAI-backed; demoed ~2,000 agents forecasting commodity prices for finance and biotech analysis.
EvolutionaryScale	Undisclosed	2024	AI for math & science — Drug discovery, Open weights	Meta (FAIR)	Sal Candido, Alexander Rives, Tom Sercu	New York United States	Creator of ESM3, a generative model for protein sequence, structure and function that produced a novel fluorescent protein; its team later joined Biohub.
Engram	$600M	2026	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Agents, Continual learning	Columbia, Stanford, Cornell, Meta (FAIR), Google, UC Berkeley, Harvard, U. Washington	Dan Biderman, Sabri Eyuboglu, Jessy Lin, Scott Linderman, Jack Morris, Chris Ré	San Francisco United States	A learned memory layer that trains models on an organization's knowledge in advance, creating compact, continuously improving memories that use up to 100× fewer tokens.
Moonvalley	Not independently valued	2024	Generative media & voice — Video	U. Toronto, Toggl, Zapier, ContentFly / Draft, Max Planck Institute, Saarland University, DeepMind, Imperial College London, Google, Mila, IBM, Jackman, RYOT, Verizon, XTR, Asteria	Mikołaj Bińkowski, Mateusz Malinowski, Bryn Mooser, Naeem Talukdar, John Thomas	Toronto Canada	Marey, a filmmaking-focused generative video model trained on licensed footage and built for precise creative control; later joined forces with Reka.
Inception Labs	~$500M	2025	General-purpose models	Stanford, UCLA, Cornell	Stefano Ermon, Aditya Grover, Volodymyr Kuleshov	Palo Alto United States	Develops and deploys diffusion-based language models, including Mercury, for production applications.
Standard Intelligence	$500M	2024	General-purpose models — Agents, Video	Other startups	Galen Mead, Devansh Pandey	San Francisco United States	FDM-1, a video-first computer-use model.
Adaption Labs	Undisclosed	2025	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Continual learning	Cohere, Google	Sara Hooker, Sudip Roy	San Francisco United States	Cohere For AI leadership betting that adaptation beats scale.
Irregular	$450M	2023	Applied — Security	IBM, Unit 81, Google, Unit 8200	Dan Lahav, Omer Nevo	Tel Aviv Israel	Frontier AI security lab that stress-tests models for offensive cyber capability inside simulated networks; its evaluations ship inside OpenAI and Anthropic system cards, alongside the SOLVE vulnerability-scoring framework.
RadixArk	$400M	2026	Inference — Open source, Training infra / tooling	xAI, Databricks, Stanford, U. Washington, Nvidia, Nexusflow AI	Ying Sheng, Banghua Zhu	Berkeley United States	Commercialising SGLang; out of the LMSYS and xAI orbit.
Oak Lab	Undisclosed	2026	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Continual learning	Keen Technologies, DeepMind, U. Alberta	Khurram Javed, Richard Sutton	Toronto Canada	The Turing laureate who wrote the book on reinforcement learning, arguing today's methods are a dead end and betting on agents that learn from their own experience — targeting a trillion-parameter agent that plans in real time on 20 watts.
Cartesia	>$400M	2023	Generative media & voice — Academic spinout, Agents, Voice	Stanford, Apple, Snorkel AI, Google, U. Washington	Arjun Desai, Karan Goel, Albert Gu, Chris Ré, Brandon Yang	San Francisco United States	Real-time voice built on state space models rather than transformers, out of the Stanford lab that invented them; the Sonic text-to-speech, Ink speech-to-text and Line agent stack, tuned for sub-100ms latency.
Orbital	Undisclosed	2022	AI for math & science — Agents, Materials, Open source, Open weights	DeepMind, Bloomsbury AI, DataSine, Pluto Data Analytics, Imprint AI	James Gin-Pollock, Jonathan Godwin, Daniel Miodovnik	London United Kingdom	Orb, an Apache-licensed universal interatomic potential fast enough to simulate 100,000 atoms on one GPU, and CurieOS, the agent OS built on top of it; renamed from Orbital Materials as it began selling what those models designed — a PFAS-free two-phase refrigerant for 2,000W+ GPUs, pitched as the first AI-designed molecule to reach commercial market.
QUTWO	$380M	2026	Compute & chips — Sovereign AI	AMD, IQM	Kaj-Mikael Björk, Peter Sarlin, Kuan-Yen Tan	Helsinki Finland	Qutwo OS and AI/quantum tooling for enterprises running classical, hybrid and quantum workloads.
H (The H Company)	Undisclosed	2024	Applied — Agents, Open weights	Paris Dauphine–PSL, CentraleSupélec, Stanford, Harvard, École Polytechnique, École des Ponts, DeepMind, IDSIA, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Maastricht University, University of Liverpool, University of Lille	Charles Kantor, Julien Perolat, Laurent Sifre, Karl Tuyls, Daan Wierstra	Paris France	French agentic/computer-use AI company, founded by a large ex-DeepMind contingent.
Sooth Labs	$335M	2026	World models & simulation	Meta (FAIR), Electronic Arts, Carnegie Mellon, Apple, Carnegie Robotics, Uber	Chuck Hoover, David Larose, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Yaser Sheikh, Shih-En Wei	Pittsburgh United States	Ex-Meta Codec Avatars leadership, now on probabilistic forecasting.
Kyutai	Not applicable	2023	Generative media & voice — Open source, Open weights, Voice	Valeo.ai, DeepMind, Google, Meta (FAIR), Other startups	Alexandre Défossez, Edouard Grave, Hervé Jégou, Laurent Mazare, Xavier Niel, Patrick Perez, Rodolphe Saadé, Neil Zeghidour	Paris France	Non-profit European open-science lab; Moshi shipped real-time voice before the big labs.
Elorian AI	$300M	2025	General-purpose models — Vision	DeepMind, Google, Apple	Andrew Dai, Yinfei Yang	Palo Alto United States	Ex-DeepMind and Apple leads working on vision-grounded reasoning.
Deep Cogito	Undisclosed	2024	General-purpose models — Open weights	Google, DeepMind, Microsoft	Drishan Arora, Dhruv Malrana	San Francisco United States	Open-weight hybrid reasoning models trained by iterated distillation and amplification; the model's own search traces are folded back into its weights.
Essential AI	Undisclosed	2023	General-purpose models — Open weights	Google, Adept	Niki Parmar, Ashish Vaswani	San Francisco United States	An open platform for deep-learning research and engineering; released Rnj-1, an open-weight language-model family for code and STEM work.
Inherent	Undisclosed	2026	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Agents	DeepMind, White House / NSC, London School of Economics, Queen Mary University of London, Google, IDSIA, UCL, Hasso Plattner Institute, Reka, Microsoft, University of Oxford	Kaloyan Aleksiev, Tantum Collins, Edward Hughes, Louis Kirsch	London United Kingdom	London public-benefit AI lab developing inventive research agents and redesigning the lab itself around recursive collective self-improvement.
Latent Labs	Undisclosed	2023	AI for math & science — Agents, Drug discovery	DeepMind, German Cancer Research Center, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology	Simon Kohl	London United Kingdom	Generative protein, peptide and antibody design models and autonomous drug-design agents, paired with an in-house wet lab for experimental validation.
Edison Scientific	~$250M	2025	AI for math & science — Agents, Drug discovery	FutureHouse, Francis Crick Institute, MIT, University of Rochester, University of Chicago, U. Washington, Max Planck Institute	Sam Rodriques, Andrew White	San Francisco United States	FutureHouse's for-profit spinout, commercialising Kosmos — an agent that runs multi-day research campaigns across literature and proprietary data to propose therapeutic targets.
Logical Intelligence	Undisclosed	2025	AI for math & science — Agents, Math	UC Santa Barbara	Eve Bodnia	San Francisco United States	Energy-based reasoning models and formal-verification agents that enforce constraints and produce machine-checkable answers for critical systems.
NeoCognition	Undisclosed	2025	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Continual learning, Agents, Academic spinout	Ohio State University, Microsoft, UC Santa Barbara, Scale AI, Google	Xiang Deng, Yu Gu, Yu Su	Palo Alto United States	Ohio State's AI agent group commercialized: the team behind Mind2Web, MMMU and SeeAct, now building agents that learn a “world model of work” on the job and specialize into domain experts rather than one general super-agent.
Grafton Sciences	Undisclosed	2024	Physical AI & robotics	Other startups	Anubhav Dubey	Redwood City United States	Robot-run factories and laboratories, and the models to drive them, so an AI can run its own physical experiments; funded so far by a $42.5M ARPA-H award for at-home cancer screening.
UniversalAGI	Undisclosed	2025	Physical AI & robotics	Brain Co., Anyscale, UC Berkeley	Ameer Haj-Ali	San Francisco United States	Large physics models in place of the CAE loop: SUV-PT predicts surface pressure, wall shear stress and drag straight from 3D geometry in seconds where high-fidelity CFD takes days, on an in-house Latent Interaction Field Transformer trained on millions of generated simulations.
Moonlake AI	$120M	2025	World models & simulation	Stanford, Nvidia	Sharon Lee, Fan-Yun Sun	San Francisco United States	Vibe-coding interactive worlds and games from text; $28M seed backed by Ian Goodfellow, Jeff Dean, and other angels.
Trajectory	$115M	2026	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Agents, Continual learning, Training infra / tooling	Windsurf, DeepMind, Stanford, Google, Apple	Michael Elabd, Arjun Karanam, Ronak Malde	San Francisco United States	A continual-learning layer that turns user feedback on agent trajectories into post-training data, helping deployed models improve from real-world use.
PrismML	Undisclosed	2025	General-purpose models — Academic spinout, Multimodal, On-device, Open source, Open weights	Neural Propulsion Systems, Caltech, Bell Labs, Stanford, UCLA, Instacart	Babak Hassibi, Sahin Lale, Omead Pooladzandi, Reza Sadri	Pasadena United States	Caltech spinout built on a compression theory that pushes model weights down to 1 bit and ternary; the Apache-2.0 Bonsai family and its custom llama.cpp and MLX kernels fit a 27B-class model into 3.9GB, small enough to run on a phone.
Autoscience	Undisclosed	2024	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Agents	Google, MIT	Eliot Cowan	San Mateo United States	Autonomous AI scientists that read literature, propose and run experiments, and turn verified discoveries into improved production machine-learning models.
Unreasonable Labs	Undisclosed	2026	AI for math & science — Materials	DeepMind, Google, Baidu, KITT.AI, Johns Hopkins University, MIT, Caltech, Max Planck Institute	Markus J. Buehler, Yuan Cao	Palo Alto United States	Unreasonable.DISCOVERY, a cross-domain discovery engine that pairs LLMs with neurosymbolic abstractions over a unified world model of physics, biology, chemistry and materials — built to compose new hypotheses rather than retrieve known facts.
Physical Superintelligence	Undisclosed	2025	AI for math & science — Agents, Open source	Bitcoin Policy Institute, SentinelOne, Other startups, Harvard	Matthew Pines, Alex Wissner-Gross	Boston United States	Get Physics Done, an open-source agentic AI physicist that scopes a problem, plans the research, runs its own derivations and numerical checks and verifies the results against physical constraints; a public benefit corporation industrialising physics discovery rather than building robots.
Math, Inc.	Undisclosed	2025	AI for math & science — Agents, Math, Open source	OpenAI, University of Pittsburgh, xAI, Google, Cadence Design Systems, University of Bonn	Jesse Michael Han, Christian Szegedy	Palo Alto United States	Gauss, an autoformalization agent that turns published mathematics into machine-checked Lean; it closed Terence Tao and Alex Kontorovich's 18-month Prime Number Theorem challenge in three weeks, then formalised Viazovska's Fields Medal sphere-packing proofs.
Oumi	Undisclosed	2024	Applied — Multimodal, Open source, Open weights, Training infra / tooling	Google, Microsoft, Meta (FAIR), Princeton, MIT, Cornell, University of Cincinnati, Stanford, Apple, Twitter, Georgia Tech, Steel Perlot, Snap	Panos Achlioptas, Kostas Aisopos, Oussama Elachqar, Jeremiah Greer, Manos Koukoumidis, Matthew Persons, William Zeng	Bellevue United States	Public-benefit lab and open platform for evaluating, fine-tuning and deploying specialized foundation models that organizations can own.
Poetiq	Undisclosed	2025	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Agents	Google, DeepMind, Other startups	Shumeet Baluja, Ian Fischer	Mountain View United States	Model-agnostic, self-improving reasoning systems that learn from solving new tasks.
LawZero	Not applicable	2025	AI safety & interpretability	Mila, Université de Montréal, CIFAR, IVADO, McGill, MIT, Bell Labs, Element AI	Yoshua Bengio	Montreal Canada	Yoshua Bengio’s nonprofit developing safe-by-design advanced AI, centered on a transparent, non-agentic Scientist AI without goals of its own.
Cursive	Undisclosed	2025	Recursive self-improvement & continual learning	DeepMind, Imperial College London, UCL, University of Oxford, NYU, École Polytechnique	Talfan Evans, Olivier J. Hénaff, Oliver Vikbladh	London United Kingdom	London frontier lab building foundation models and low-latency generative infrastructure for adaptive software and agents that improve continuously from use.
FutureHouse	Not applicable	2023	AI for math & science — Agents, Open weights	Francis Crick Institute, MIT, University of Rochester, University of Chicago, U. Washington, Max Planck Institute	Sam Rodriques, Andrew White	San Francisco United States	Nonprofit building and wet-lab-validating AI scientists for basic research in biology and health; its commercial platform spun out as Edison Scientific in 2025.
Transluce	Not applicable	2024	AI safety & interpretability — Open source, Open weights	UC Berkeley, OpenAI, Open Philanthropy, Stanford, MIT, IBM, Baylor College of Medicine, UTHealth Houston, Rice University	Sarah Schwettmann, Jacob Steinhardt	San Francisco United States	Nonprofit building open infrastructure for scalable oversight of frontier AI through automated interpretability, model-behavior analysis and evaluations.

DeepSeek$52B

Founded: 2023
Research area: General-purpose models — Math, Open source, Open weights
Based in: Hangzhou, China

Spun out of the quant fund High-Flyer; open-weight frontier models trained at a fraction of the compute cost US labs disclose.

Prometheus$41B

Founded: 2025
Research area: Physical AI & robotics
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Jeff Bezos' return to an operating role; AI for the physical economy.

SSI (Safe Superintelligence)$32B

Founded: 2024
Research area: General-purpose models
Based in: Palo Alto, United States

A straight-shot lab pursuing safe superintelligence, operating in total secrecy.

Reflection AI$25B

Founded: 2024
Research area: General-purpose models — Open weights, Sovereign AI
Based in: New York, United States

American open-weights frontier models, built by ex-DeepMind researchers.

Skild AI>$14B

Founded: 2023
Research area: Physical AI & robotics — Academic spinout, Robot foundation models
Based in: Pittsburgh, United States

Robot foundation models out of Carnegie Mellon.

Mistral AI~$14B

Founded: 2023
Research area: General-purpose models — Agents, On-device, Open weights, Sovereign AI
Based in: Paris, France

Europe's frontier lab; Apache-licensed open-weight models alongside proprietary ones, positioned as a sovereign alternative to the US labs.

Thinking Machines Lab$12B

Founded: 2025
Research area: General-purpose models — Open source, Open weights, Training infra / tooling
Based in: San Francisco, United States

A research and product company building AI systems that are more understandable, customisable and capable.

Poolside$12B *

Founded: 2023
Research area: Coding — Agents, Open weights
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Founded by GitHub's former CTO; builds frontier foundation models purpose-built for software development.

Physical Intelligence>$11B *

Founded: 2024
Research area: Physical AI & robotics — Open source, Open weights, Robot foundation models
Based in: San Francisco, United States

General-purpose robot policies from the Stanford/Berkeley/Google robotics world.

StepFun~$10B

Founded: 2023
Research area: General-purpose models — Multimodal, Open weights
Based in: Shanghai, China

The Step model series; unwound its VIE structure to file in Hong Kong.

Cohere~$7B

Founded: 2019
Research area: Applied — Agents, Multimodal, Open weights, Sovereign AI
Based in: Toronto, Canada

Enterprise LLMs sold on private deployment; the Command and Aya model families and the North agent platform. Announced a merger with Germany's Aleph Alpha in 2026.

Periodic Labs~$7B *

Founded: 2025
Research area: AI for math & science — Materials
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Autonomous labs for materials discovery; ex-OpenAI VP of Post-Training and ex-Google Brain/DeepMind materials lead.

Hark$6B

Founded: 2025
Research area: Applied — Agents
Based in: San Jose, United States

Personalised multimodal AI and bespoke hardware designed as a new interface to computing.

Runway$5.3B

Founded: 2018
Research area: Generative media & voice — Multimodal, Video
Based in: New York, United States

Generative video for film and production, from Gen-1 to Gen-4.5; a co-author of the latent diffusion work behind Stable Diffusion.

Ineffable Intelligence$5.1B

Founded: 2026
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Continual learning
Based in: London, United Kingdom

David Silver's lab building reinforcement-learning "superlearners" that learn from experience rather than human data.

World Labs~$5B *

Founded: 2024
Research area: World models & simulation — Multimodal
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Spatial intelligence and 3D world generation, from the creator of ImageNet.

River AI<$5B *

Founded: 2026
Research area: Applied — Training infra / tooling
Based in: Palo Alto, United States

Personal AI agents that learn from and are controlled by their users, built on an end-to-end stack spanning training, models, products and on-device hardware.

Zyphra>$5B *

Founded: 2021
Research area: General-purpose models — Open source, Open weights
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Outsized results from small models; the Zamba and Zaya (ZAYA1) stack.

Recursive Superintelligence$4.65B

Founded: 2025
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Agents
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Self-improving AI; raised $500M+ within four months of founding.

AMI Labs~$4.5B

Founded: 2025
Research area: World models & simulation
Based in: Paris, France

LeCun's post-Meta bet on world models over LLMs.

Unconventional AI$4.5B

Founded: 2025
Research area: Compute & chips
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Serial hardware founder (Nervana→Intel, MosaicML→Databricks) building analog AI chips for biology-scale efficiency.

humans&$4.48B

Founded: 2026
Research area: General-purpose models
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Human-centric frontier lab founded by alumni of xAI, OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and Stanford; $480M seed within months of founding.

Core Automation~$4B *

Founded: 2026
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Continual learning
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Ex-OpenAI VP building “the world's most automated AI lab”.

Inflection AI~$4B

Founded: 2022
Research area: Applied
Based in: Palo Alto, United States

The Pi assistant, then a 2024 Microsoft reverse acquihire of its co-founders and much of its team; rebuilt since as an enterprise AI company.

Luma AI~$4B

Founded: 2021
Research area: Generative media & voice — Agents, Video
Based in: Palo Alto, United States

Dream Machine and the Ray video-model family; evolved from neural rendering and smartphone 3D capture into generative video.

Ricursive Intelligence$4B

Founded: 2025
Research area: Compute & chips
Based in: Palo Alto, United States

The researchers behind AI-designed chip floorplanning, now doing it commercially.

Decart~$4B

Founded: 2023
Research area: World models & simulation — Video
Based in: Tel Aviv, Israel

Real-time generative world models — Oasis and Mirage.

Chai Discovery$3.8B

Founded: 2024
Research area: AI for math & science — Drug discovery, Open weights
Based in: San Francisco, United States

OpenAI-backed; Chai-1 structure prediction and Chai-2 de novo antibody design, used by Pfizer, Lilly and Novartis.

Isomorphic LabsNot independently valued

Founded: 2021
Research area: AI for math & science — Drug discovery
Based in: London, United Kingdom

Alphabet’s AI drug-discovery company, building predictive and generative models beyond AlphaFold.

Xaira TherapeuticsUndisclosed

Founded: 2023
Research area: AI for math & science — Drug discovery
Based in: South San Francisco, United States

An AI-native drug-discovery company combining model research, data generation and therapeutic development.

Black Forest Labs$3.25B

Founded: 2024
Research area: Generative media & voice — Multimodal, Open weights, Video
Based in: Freiburg, Germany

The Stable Diffusion authors' lab; the FLUX family of image models, part of it Apache-licensed, now extending into video and robot manipulation.

Genesis AI~$3B *

Founded: 2025
Research area: Physical AI & robotics — Robot foundation models
Based in: Paris, France

Robotics foundation models (the GENE series) on a proprietary physics-simulation engine; a Franco-American team out of CMU, Mistral and Skild AI.

Galbot>$3B

Founded: 2023
Research area: Physical AI & robotics — Humanoid, Robot foundation models
Based in: Beijing, China

Embodied foundation models and autonomous retail stores; over $900M raised.

Baichuan AI~$2.9B

Founded: 2023
Research area: Applied — Agents
Based in: Beijing, China

Sogou's founder; shifted strategic focus from the general-purpose LLM race toward AI-for-healthcare, while continuing to develop its base model series.

Sakana AI$2.65B

Founded: 2023
Research area: General-purpose models — Sovereign AI
Based in: Tokyo, Japan

Japan's first AI unicorn, co-founded by a Transformer co-author; nature-inspired model merging and AI for science, betting on sample efficiency over raw compute.

CuspAI~$2.6B

Founded: 2024
Research area: AI for math & science — Materials
Based in: Cambridge, United Kingdom

AI materials-discovery platform — expanding from carbon capture into semiconductors, batteries, coatings and catalysts.

General Intuition$2.3B

Founded: 2025
Research area: World models & simulation — Video
Based in: New York, United States

Action and world models trained on gameplay video to perceive, predict and act in virtual and physical environments.

Liquid AI>$2B

Founded: 2023
Research area: General-purpose models — Academic spinout, On-device, Open weights
Based in: Cambridge, MA, United States

MIT CSAIL spinout; liquid neural networks for on-device inference.

Simile$2B

Founded: 2025
Research area: World models & simulation
Based in: Palo Alto, United States

The Stanford generative-agents lineage, commercialised.

Aleph Alpha~$2B *

Founded: 2019
Research area: Applied — Multimodal, Sovereign AI
Based in: Heidelberg, Germany

Europe's early frontier lab, from the Luminous models to PhariaAI — a sovereign AI platform built for government, defence and regulated industry.

Generalist AI$2B

Founded: 2024
Research area: Physical AI & robotics — Robot foundation models
Based in: San Mateo, United States

GEN-0 and GEN-1, embodied foundation models pretrained from scratch on hundreds of thousands of hours of raw physical interaction collected with handheld grippers rather than in simulation; the DeepMind robotics researchers behind PaLM-E and RT-2, selling cross-embodiment robot intelligence rather than robots.

Rhoda AI$1.7B

Founded: 2024
Research area: Physical AI & robotics — Robot foundation models
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Serial founder Jagdeep Singh's robotics startup; FutureVision, a video-pretrained foundation model ('Direct Video-Action') that predicts the next frames of a scene and converts them into motor commands, driving a bimanual manipulation platform on factory lines.

Axiom Math>$1.6B

Founded: 2025
Research area: AI for math & science — Math, Open source
Based in: Palo Alto, United States

AxiomProver, an AI system for mathematical research that generates formally verified Lean proofs.

Flapping Airplanes$1.5B

Founded: 2025
Research area: General-purpose models
Based in: San Francisco, United States

A research lab pursuing radically more data-efficient AI, especially in data-constrained fields such as robotics and science.

Magic~$1.5B *

Founded: 2022
Research area: Coding
Based in: San Francisco, United States

AI models for software development, including ultra-long-context systems.

Sarvam AI$1.5B

Founded: 2023
Research area: General-purpose models — Open weights, Sovereign AI, Voice
Based in: Bengaluru, India

Foundation models and speech built for Indian languages; selected under the IndiaAI Mission to build an indigenous foundational model.

Harmonic$1.45B

Founded: 2023
Research area: AI for math & science — Math
Based in: Palo Alto, United States

Co-founded by Robinhood's Vlad Tenev (chairman) and CEO Tudor Achim, building formally verified mathematical superintelligence (the Aristotle model).

AI21 Labs$1.4B

Founded: 2017
Research area: Applied — Open weights
Based in: Tel Aviv, Israel

The original Israeli LLM company, predating the current wave by five years; its Jamba models pair Mamba state-space layers with transformer blocks for long context at lower memory cost.

Fundamental~$1.4B

Founded: 2024
Research area: Applied — Tabular / structured data
Based in: San Francisco, United States

NEXUS, a deterministic large tabular model pretrained on billions of enterprise spreadsheets and database tables, aimed at fraud detection, pricing and forecasting rather than free-text generation.

Lila Sciences>$1.3B

Founded: 2023
Research area: AI for math & science — Agents, Drug discovery, Materials
Based in: Cambridge, MA, United States

Flagship Pioneering's scientific superintelligence venture: the Lila Iris reasoning model driving AI Science Factory autonomous labs, which have closed the loop across hundreds of thousands of experiments spanning antibodies, genetic medicines, catalysts and coatings.

Deepgram$1.3B

Founded: 2015
Research area: Generative media & voice — Agents, Voice
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Founded by Michigan particle physicists who repurposed dark-matter waveform analysis for speech; the Nova speech-to-text models and a voice-agent stack sold as enterprise API infrastructure.

Goodfire$1.25B

Founded: 2024
Research area: AI safety & interpretability
Based in: San Francisco, United States

One of the first companies built entirely around mechanistic interpretability; Ember, an API for inspecting and steering model internals.

Prime Intellect$1B

Founded: 2024
Research area: Compute & chips — Agents, Open source, Open weights, Training infra / tooling
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Aggregated compute plus a training, sandbox and inference stack, sold on the pitch that any company can be its own lab; ships the INTELLECT open-weight models and an open RL toolchain.

Discovery LoopUndisclosed

Founded: 2026
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning
Based in: Palo Alto, United States

Three of the most-cited researchers in AI and two of the most-cited in distributed systems. Search, Spanner, MoE, distillation, Chinchilla laws and more. Now working on automating the scientific method.

Aaru$1B *

Founded: 2024
Research area: World models & simulation
Based in: New York, United States

AI-built populations and worlds that simulate how groups respond to new products, policies and other changed conditions.

NdeaUndisclosed

Founded: 2025
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Keras and Zapier founders betting on program synthesis over scaling.

Imbue>$1B

Founded: 2022
Research area: Applied — Agents, Open source
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Agent lab building Sculptor, a sandboxed environment for running coding agents in parallel, alongside other tools.

doubleAI>$1B *

Founded: 2023
Research area: General-purpose models
Based in: Tel Aviv, Israel

A once-stealth lab pursuing 'Artificial Expert Intelligence' — deep domain-expert AI rather than AGI — now public with its first system, WarpSpeed, for GPU kernel optimisation.

Reka$1B

Founded: 2022
Research area: Physical AI & robotics — Multimodal
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Models for physical-world intelligence: reasoning, simulation and action across robots, wearables, media and edge devices.

Arcee AI>$1B *

Founded: 2023
Research area: Applied — Open source, Open weights, Training infra / tooling
Based in: Miami, United States

Small enterprise language models; absorbed mergekit (created by Charles Goddard, now Arcee's Chief of Frontier Research) via a 2024 merger.

Mirendil$1B

Founded: 2026
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Founded by ex-Anthropic researchers Behnam Neyshabur and Harsh Mehta, building self-improving AI for scientific R&D; backed by a16z and Kleiner Perkins.

Nous Research$1B

Founded: 2023
Research area: Applied — Agents, Open source, Open weights
Based in: New York, United States

Open-source Hermes models and decentralised training, from an internet-native collective.

01.AIUndisclosed

Founded: 2023
Research area: Applied — Open weights
Based in: Beijing, China

The Yi open-weight model family through early 2025; now enterprise and sovereign AI for industry and government.

Merge Labs$850M

Founded: 2026
Research area: AI for math & science — Neurotech / BCI
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Less-invasive, high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces combining biology, devices and AI.

Inferact$800M

Founded: 2026
Research area: Inference — Open source
Based in: Berkeley, United States

Founded by vLLM’s creators and core maintainers to build and commercialise open-source LLM inference infrastructure.

Prior LabsNot independently valued

Founded: 2024
Research area: Applied — Academic spinout, Open source, Open weights, Tabular / structured data
Based in: Freiburg, Germany

Creator of TabPFN, a tabular foundation model that predicts on structured data by in-context learning over synthetic priors instead of per-dataset gradient training; spun out of the AutoML lab at Freiburg.

Isara Laboratories$650M

Founded: 2025
Research area: Applied — Agents
Based in: San Francisco, United States

OpenAI-backed; demoed ~2,000 agents forecasting commodity prices for finance and biotech analysis.

EvolutionaryScaleUndisclosed

Founded: 2024
Research area: AI for math & science — Drug discovery, Open weights
Based in: New York, United States

Creator of ESM3, a generative model for protein sequence, structure and function that produced a novel fluorescent protein; its team later joined Biohub.

Engram$600M

Founded: 2026
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Agents, Continual learning
Based in: San Francisco, United States

A learned memory layer that trains models on an organization's knowledge in advance, creating compact, continuously improving memories that use up to 100× fewer tokens.

MoonvalleyNot independently valued

Founded: 2024
Research area: Generative media & voice — Video
Based in: Toronto, Canada

Marey, a filmmaking-focused generative video model trained on licensed footage and built for precise creative control; later joined forces with Reka.

Inception Labs~$500M

Founded: 2025
Research area: General-purpose models
Based in: Palo Alto, United States

Develops and deploys diffusion-based language models, including Mercury, for production applications.

Standard Intelligence$500M

Founded: 2024
Research area: General-purpose models — Agents, Video
Based in: San Francisco, United States

FDM-1, a video-first computer-use model.

Adaption LabsUndisclosed

Founded: 2025
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Continual learning
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Cohere For AI leadership betting that adaptation beats scale.

Irregular$450M

Founded: 2023
Research area: Applied — Security
Based in: Tel Aviv, Israel

Frontier AI security lab that stress-tests models for offensive cyber capability inside simulated networks; its evaluations ship inside OpenAI and Anthropic system cards, alongside the SOLVE vulnerability-scoring framework.

RadixArk$400M

Founded: 2026
Research area: Inference — Open source, Training infra / tooling
Based in: Berkeley, United States

Commercialising SGLang; out of the LMSYS and xAI orbit.

Oak LabUndisclosed

Founded: 2026
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Continual learning
Based in: Toronto, Canada

The Turing laureate who wrote the book on reinforcement learning, arguing today's methods are a dead end and betting on agents that learn from their own experience — targeting a trillion-parameter agent that plans in real time on 20 watts.

Cartesia>$400M

Founded: 2023
Research area: Generative media & voice — Academic spinout, Agents, Voice
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Real-time voice built on state space models rather than transformers, out of the Stanford lab that invented them; the Sonic text-to-speech, Ink speech-to-text and Line agent stack, tuned for sub-100ms latency.

OrbitalUndisclosed

Founded: 2022
Research area: AI for math & science — Agents, Materials, Open source, Open weights
Based in: London, United Kingdom

Orb, an Apache-licensed universal interatomic potential fast enough to simulate 100,000 atoms on one GPU, and CurieOS, the agent OS built on top of it; renamed from Orbital Materials as it began selling what those models designed — a PFAS-free two-phase refrigerant for 2,000W+ GPUs, pitched as the first AI-designed molecule to reach commercial market.

QUTWO$380M

Founded: 2026
Research area: Compute & chips — Sovereign AI
Based in: Helsinki, Finland

Qutwo OS and AI/quantum tooling for enterprises running classical, hybrid and quantum workloads.

H (The H Company)Undisclosed

Founded: 2024
Research area: Applied — Agents, Open weights
Based in: Paris, France

French agentic/computer-use AI company, founded by a large ex-DeepMind contingent.

Sooth Labs$335M

Founded: 2026
Research area: World models & simulation
Based in: Pittsburgh, United States

Ex-Meta Codec Avatars leadership, now on probabilistic forecasting.

KyutaiNot applicable

Founded: 2023
Research area: Generative media & voice — Open source, Open weights, Voice
Based in: Paris, France

Non-profit European open-science lab; Moshi shipped real-time voice before the big labs.

Elorian AI$300M

Founded: 2025
Research area: General-purpose models — Vision
Based in: Palo Alto, United States

Ex-DeepMind and Apple leads working on vision-grounded reasoning.

Deep CogitoUndisclosed

Founded: 2024
Research area: General-purpose models — Open weights
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Open-weight hybrid reasoning models trained by iterated distillation and amplification; the model's own search traces are folded back into its weights.

Essential AIUndisclosed

Founded: 2023
Research area: General-purpose models — Open weights
Based in: San Francisco, United States

An open platform for deep-learning research and engineering; released Rnj-1, an open-weight language-model family for code and STEM work.

InherentUndisclosed

Founded: 2026
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Agents
Based in: London, United Kingdom

London public-benefit AI lab developing inventive research agents and redesigning the lab itself around recursive collective self-improvement.

Latent LabsUndisclosed

Founded: 2023
Research area: AI for math & science — Agents, Drug discovery
Based in: London, United Kingdom

Generative protein, peptide and antibody design models and autonomous drug-design agents, paired with an in-house wet lab for experimental validation.

Edison Scientific~$250M

Founded: 2025
Research area: AI for math & science — Agents, Drug discovery
Based in: San Francisco, United States

FutureHouse's for-profit spinout, commercialising Kosmos — an agent that runs multi-day research campaigns across literature and proprietary data to propose therapeutic targets.

Logical IntelligenceUndisclosed

Founded: 2025
Research area: AI for math & science — Agents, Math
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Energy-based reasoning models and formal-verification agents that enforce constraints and produce machine-checkable answers for critical systems.

NeoCognitionUndisclosed

Founded: 2025
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Continual learning, Agents, Academic spinout
Based in: Palo Alto, United States

Ohio State's AI agent group commercialized: the team behind Mind2Web, MMMU and SeeAct, now building agents that learn a “world model of work” on the job and specialize into domain experts rather than one general super-agent.

Grafton SciencesUndisclosed

Founded: 2024
Research area: Physical AI & robotics
Based in: Redwood City, United States

Robot-run factories and laboratories, and the models to drive them, so an AI can run its own physical experiments; funded so far by a $42.5M ARPA-H award for at-home cancer screening.

UniversalAGIUndisclosed

Founded: 2025
Research area: Physical AI & robotics
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Large physics models in place of the CAE loop: SUV-PT predicts surface pressure, wall shear stress and drag straight from 3D geometry in seconds where high-fidelity CFD takes days, on an in-house Latent Interaction Field Transformer trained on millions of generated simulations.

Moonlake AI$120M

Founded: 2025
Research area: World models & simulation
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Vibe-coding interactive worlds and games from text; $28M seed backed by Ian Goodfellow, Jeff Dean, and other angels.

Trajectory$115M

Founded: 2026
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Agents, Continual learning, Training infra / tooling
Based in: San Francisco, United States

A continual-learning layer that turns user feedback on agent trajectories into post-training data, helping deployed models improve from real-world use.

PrismMLUndisclosed

Founded: 2025
Research area: General-purpose models — Academic spinout, Multimodal, On-device, Open source, Open weights
Based in: Pasadena, United States

Caltech spinout built on a compression theory that pushes model weights down to 1 bit and ternary; the Apache-2.0 Bonsai family and its custom llama.cpp and MLX kernels fit a 27B-class model into 3.9GB, small enough to run on a phone.

AutoscienceUndisclosed

Founded: 2024
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Agents
Based in: San Mateo, United States

Autonomous AI scientists that read literature, propose and run experiments, and turn verified discoveries into improved production machine-learning models.

Unreasonable LabsUndisclosed

Founded: 2026
Research area: AI for math & science — Materials
Based in: Palo Alto, United States

Unreasonable.DISCOVERY, a cross-domain discovery engine that pairs LLMs with neurosymbolic abstractions over a unified world model of physics, biology, chemistry and materials — built to compose new hypotheses rather than retrieve known facts.

Physical SuperintelligenceUndisclosed

Founded: 2025
Research area: AI for math & science — Agents, Open source
Based in: Boston, United States

Get Physics Done, an open-source agentic AI physicist that scopes a problem, plans the research, runs its own derivations and numerical checks and verifies the results against physical constraints; a public benefit corporation industrialising physics discovery rather than building robots.

Math, Inc.Undisclosed

Founded: 2025
Research area: AI for math & science — Agents, Math, Open source
Based in: Palo Alto, United States

Gauss, an autoformalization agent that turns published mathematics into machine-checked Lean; it closed Terence Tao and Alex Kontorovich's 18-month Prime Number Theorem challenge in three weeks, then formalised Viazovska's Fields Medal sphere-packing proofs.

OumiUndisclosed

Founded: 2024
Research area: Applied — Multimodal, Open source, Open weights, Training infra / tooling
Based in: Bellevue, United States

Public-benefit lab and open platform for evaluating, fine-tuning and deploying specialized foundation models that organizations can own.

PoetiqUndisclosed

Founded: 2025
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning — Agents
Based in: Mountain View, United States

Model-agnostic, self-improving reasoning systems that learn from solving new tasks.

LawZeroNot applicable

Founded: 2025
Research area: AI safety & interpretability
Based in: Montreal, Canada

Yoshua Bengio’s nonprofit developing safe-by-design advanced AI, centered on a transparent, non-agentic Scientist AI without goals of its own.

CursiveUndisclosed

Founded: 2025
Research area: Recursive self-improvement & continual learning
Based in: London, United Kingdom

London frontier lab building foundation models and low-latency generative infrastructure for adaptive software and agents that improve continuously from use.

FutureHouseNot applicable

Founded: 2023
Research area: AI for math & science — Agents, Open weights
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Nonprofit building and wet-lab-validating AI scientists for basic research in biology and health; its commercial platform spun out as Edison Scientific in 2025.

TransluceNot applicable

Founded: 2024
Research area: AI safety & interpretability — Open source, Open weights
Based in: San Francisco, United States

Nonprofit building open infrastructure for scalable oversight of frontier AI through automated interpretability, model-behavior analysis and evaluations.