Company OpenAI
CEO Sam Altman
Product Chatbot ChatGPT, image generator Dall-E
Location San Francisco
RAISED More than $11 billion
Valuation More than $27 billion
Investors Microsoft Corp., Sequoia Capital and others
One of the world’s most closely watched startups, OpenAI sparked global interest in generative AI tools, which can respond to written prompts with content including images, short essays or poems. In 2022 it released both the image generator Dall-E and the chatbot ChatGPT, which performs well on the bar exam and other standardized tests and has perhaps changed homework forever. ChatGPT’s introduction set off a chatbots craze, galvanizing a small army of new AI startups.
Company Stability AI
CEO Emad Mostaque
Product Image generator Stable Diffusion, language model StableLM
Location London
RAISED $111 million
Valuation $1 billion
Investors Coatue Management, Lightspeed Venture Partners, O’Shaughnessy Ventures and others
Stability AI popularized and paid for the computing power behind Stable Diffusion, a buzzy image generator capable of producing strikingly realistic pictures. The company has also attracted controversy: One of Stable Diffusion’s creators accused it of taking undue credit for building the program. (Stability said that three of the original creators work at the company and that it developed subsequent versions of the program in-house.) Stability, which was recently trying to raise money at a $4 billion valuation, could offer some of the year’s marquee AI drama—along with some of its most potent tools.
Company Runway
CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela
Product Text-to-video tools
Location New York
RAISED $196 million
Valuation $1.5 billion
Investors Felicis Ventures, Amplify Partners, Lux Capital, Coatue, Compound, Madrona and others
Many in the industry believe that the next step in generative AI — after the chatbot and image generator crazes— is video. Runway’s products are already allowing users to make short videos by typing in a few words as a prompt. The startup even held an AI film festival to showcase the potential of the technology.
Company Hugging Face
CEO Clement Delangue
Product Open-source repository for AI models
Location New York
RAISED $160 million
Valuation $2 billion
Investors Lux Capital, Sequoia, Coatue, Addition, A.Capital, SV Angel, Betaworks and others
Hugging Face occupies a central role in the generative-AI frenzy. The startup acts as a hub where companies can find freely available AI models, including those developed by Google, Meta and Microsoft. First founded in 2016 as a chatbot for teens, Hugging Face has become one of the most vocal advocates for making AI software open source, ethical and climate conscious.
Company Cohere
CEO Aidan Gomez
Product Natural language processing models for businesses
Location Toronto
RAISED $420 million
Valuation $2 billion
Investors Salesforce Inc., Nvidia Corp., Index Ventures, Tiger Global Management, Geoffrey Hinton, Pieter Abbeel, Fei-Fei Li and others
Cohere is developing large language models that other businesses can use to create chatbots, search and other products. The startup, already highly valued, was recently reported to be in talks to raise more cash at a towering valuation of $6 billion, though it declined to elaborate on the status of the deal.
Company Anthropic
CEO Dario Amodei
Product Claude, the AI assistant
Location San Francisco
RAISED More than $1 billion
Valuation $5 billion
Investors Spark Capital, Google, Salesforce, Sound Ventures, Zoom Ventures and others
Anthropic bills itself as an AI company with a focus on cautious development. Its AI services are meant to be as safe as possible. Founded in 2021 by several former OpenAI staffers, Anthropic made its first chatbot, Claude, available in March. Among its other uses, Claude can be found on Slack providing summaries of threads and answering questions. It’s also on Quora, via a question-answering bot called Poe.
Company Character.AI
CEO Noam Shazeer
Product Build-your-own chatbots
Location Palo Alto
RAISED $193 million
Valuation $1 billion
Investors Andreessen Horowitz, Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, SV Angel and A.Capital
Want to talk to Elon Musk, Socrates or Super Mario? With Character, you can—kind of. The company allows users to create chatbots that assume different characters, impersonating their personality and style of speech. People can also build fictional characters, such as a flatulent unicorn or a friendly banana. The startup offers its service for free, but recently launched a $9.99 monthly subscription program. Character’s CEO says he wants to get the technology into the hands of “everyone on Earth.”
Company Midjourney
CEO David Holz
Product Image-generation tool
Location San Francisco
RAISED Nothing
Valuation None
Investors Self-funded
Midjourney has generated some of the most spectacular AI art and images to date. The company uses text prompts, similar to Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s Dall-E. But unlike those services, the only way to use Midjourney is via a Discord group where would-be artists type their prompts. The CEO said in 2022 it had no investors and not much in the way of financial motivation, adding, “It’s just about having a home for the next 10 years to work on cool projects that matter.”
Company Scale AI
CEO Alexandr Wang
Product AI training
Location San Francisco
RAISED $603 million
Valuation $7.3 billion
Investors Dragoneer Investment Group, Greenoaks Capital Partners, Tiger Global Management, Coatue and others
Training an AI model requires a lot of labeled data—think pictures of cats that say they are cats—to create a program that can correctly identify images. Scale AI provides the software and manpower to label text, images and voice data. The company isn’t just cute cat pictures, though. In a May blog post, Scale’s CEO said he thinks “the next era of war” will be defined by AI, which would be required in the “war against authoritarianism.”
Company Abnormal Security
CEO Evan Reiser
Product Email security platform
Location San Francisco
RAISED $284 million
Valuation $4 billion
Investors Insight Partners, Greylock Partners, Menlo Ventures and others
Email inboxes can be a minefield of phishing attempts, malware and fraud. That problem has become a multibillion-dollar opportunity for Abnormal Security, which raised $210 million last year for a security platform that blocks threats sent through email, Slack and other services. The startup uses machine learning to detect red flags, such as changes in tone or urgent invoices, and has more than 500 human staffers. Its AI is trained to spot fraudulent behavior via messages that are, well, abnormal.
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