The most promising
artificial intelligence
startups of 2024
The AI 100 is CB Insights' annual list of the top private AI companies
in the world. From new AI architectures to precision manufacturing,
this year’s winners are tackling some of the hardest challenges
across industries.
CB Insights is launching the 8th annual AI 100 — a ranking of the 100 most promising
private AI companies in the world.
Highlights from the 2024 cohort include:
● 16 countries represented, from the US to France to South Africa
● 30+ categories of solutions, from foundation models to humanoids
● 68% early-stage startups building virtual worlds, autonomous factories, language
models for under-represented languages, and more
● 600+ business relationships since 2016 with industry leaders like Toyota, Netflix,
and the World Bank
Our research team picked winning companies based on CB Insights datasets including
deal activity, industry partnerships, team strength, investor strength, patent activity, and
proprietary Mosaic Scores. We also analyzed CB Insights’ exclusive interviews with
software buyers and dug into Analyst Briefings submitted directly to us by startups.
2024 AI 100 Cohort Highlights
Funding distribution
The cohort has raised over $28B across 240+ equity deals since 2020 (as of 3/22/24).
OpenAI has raised over 40% of that total, with $12B. Meanwhile, 25% of the winning
companies have raised less than $10M, with some not having raised any venture
funding.
Just over two-thirds (68%) of winning companies are in the early stages of fundraising
(seed/angel and Series A) or have yet to raise outside equity.
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Valuation trends
This year’s list includes 19 unicorns with a $1B+ valuation.
Meanwhile, Sakana AI — founded by one of the authors of the seminal Google research
paper on Transformers — has the highest valuation per employee, at $67M. (It had just 3
employees when it earned its $200M valuation in early 2024.) Sakana is working on new
“nature-inspired” AI architectures and recently released 3 Japanese-language models.
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Revenue generation
The AI 100 includes a mix of companies at different stages of maturity, product
development, and revenue.
Hugging Face, an AI infrastructure platform focused on open-source development, has
one of the highest revenue multiples at 150x ($30M in 2023 revenue at a $4.5B
valuation). It's followed by Perplexity, which is developing an alternative to traditional
search engines, at 65x (based on a 2023 valuation of $520M and $8M in 2024 ARR).
Midjourney, an image generation platform that has not raised any outside equity, is one
of the leading AI 100 winners by revenue with $200M in ARR.
Global reach
A total of 31 winning companies in this year’s cohort are headquartered outside the
United States, across 15 other countries. This includes South Africa-based Lelapa AI —
which is developing language processing tools for sub-Saharan African languages like
Afrikaans, isiZulu, and Sesotho — and Canada-based Ideogram, which is tackling the
problem of generating images with legible text.
Europe-based startups account for 19% of the list, including companies headquartered
in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
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Categories & applications
Over one-third of this year’s winners are focused on building core AI infrastructure, from
foundation models to AI chips to AI development platforms.
A total of 30 vendors are focused on horizontal (i.e., cross-industry) solutions like
coding automation, creator tools, and search, while 34 companies are specializing in
verticals like gaming, healthcare, education, and manufacturing.
A handful of winners are building niche applications where the use of AI is not yet
commonplace. These include:
● Atomic Industries, which is developing AI for tool and die making in
manufacturing and is backed by the venture arms of Porsche, Yamaha, and
Toyota
● Rosebud AI, a text-to-game generation startup backed by OpenAI co-founders Ilya
Sutskever and Andrej Karpathy, as well as Khosla Ventures
● Flawless AI, a startup developing lip-synced video dubbing for the film industry
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