Top 50 AI companies, global: link here. Forty-four of them are in the US. Almost all of them are in San Francisco or Palo Alto, California.
The 20 AI Brink list, the up-and-comers: link here. Since there only 20, we can take time to take a deeper look. Mostly "pick-and-shovel." Mostly in Silicon Valley. Nothing jumps out at me.
Company, year founded, HQ, total funding raised, valuation, CEO:
- Accordance, 2024, SF, $13 million, $80 million, David Yue; spreadsheets;
- Advanced Machine Intelligence, 2026, Paris, $1 billion; $4.5 billion, Alexandre LeBrun, AI video
- Axiom, 2025, Palo Alto, $264 million; $1.6 billion, Carina Hong, complex math problems
- Certune, 2024, Austin, TX, $10 million; $60 million, Martin Vrsavsky, physician aids
- Flapping Airplanes, 2026, SF, $180 million; $1.5 billion; Aidan Smith, tighter
- Giga, 2024, SF, $61 million, $350 million, Varun Vummadi, customer support
- Humans& (no typo), 2025, SF, $500 million; $4.5 billion, Eric Zelikman, human collaboration
- Irregular, 2023, SF, $80 million; $450 million; Dan Lavah, testing risks
- Latent Health, 2022, SF, $80 million, $600 million, Sriram Somasudrarm, Rishabh Jain, insurance paperwork
- Microl, 2022, SF, $41 million, $500 million, Ali Asari, data for AI labs
- Nectar Social, 2023, Palo Alto, $10.6 million, undisclosed, Misbah Uraizee, monitors social media for sales leads
- OpenRouter, 2023, NYC, $167.7 million; $1.3 billion, Alex Atallah, apps to switch between AI models
- Periodic Labs, SF, $300 million; $1.3 billion, Liam Fedus, Dogus Cubic; to run scientific experiments;
- Resolve AI, 2024, SF, $190 million; $1.5 billion, Spiros Xathos, monitor / fix software issues
- Ricursive Intelligence, 2025, Palo Alto, $335 million, $4 billion, Anna Goldie, AI to design chips
- Rox, 2024, SF, $199 million, $1.2 billion, Isha Mukherjee, business cycle revenue
- Simile, 2025, Palo Alto, $100 million, $700 million, Joon Sung Park, digital humanoid replicas for research (crash test dummies)
- TollBit, 2023, NYC, $31 million, $94 million, Tohit Panigrahi, tracks bots pinging websites
- WisprFlow, 2021, SF, $81 million, $700 million, Tanay Kothari, convert speech to writing
- Worktrace AI, 2025, SF, $10 million, $50 million, Deepak Vasisht, assist companies finding tasks that can be automated
Link here. These kids simply 30 years ahead of their time.
