Artificial intelligence is developing at a dizzying pace, with technology that can do everything from churning out pop ballads to writing code. And while it’s still early days—even the best chatbots make things up—the implications for humans are good, bad and inescapable.
A boom in innovation has led to more funding, with tens of billions of dollars put into AI companies in just the first half of this year. Here are 10 of the biggest, most important and best-funded startups to watch in 2024, plus six of the industry’s most significant up-and-comers.
COMPANY
OpenAI
CEO
Sam Altman
PRODUCT
Chatbot ChatGPT, AI model GPT-4o
LOCATION
San Francisco
RAISED
More than $13 billion
VALUATION
$86 billion*
OpenAI introduced the world to what AI could be with the introduction of the ChatGPT chatbot in 2022. Since then the company has continued to push the boundaries of the technology. It’s developed software that can generate impressively realistic-looking videos, and its AI can respond almost in real time to a user’s question with a human-sounding voice. (These products have yet to be rolled out to general audiences.) OpenAI has also provided one of the most engrossing tech dramas in modern history: firing Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman in November, only to bring him back five days later, a series of events that unnerved some AI safety advocates.
COMPANY
Anthropic
CEO
Dario Amodei
PRODUCT
Claude AI models and chatbot
LOCATION
San Francisco
RAISED
$8.9 billion
VALUATION
$18.2 billion
Founded by former staffers at OpenAI, Anthropic is its chief rival in the world of large language models, the technology that powers this era’s most dazzling AI achievements. The startup has closed in on OpenAI both in terms of performance and its massive haul of funding from the likes of Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc. Anthropic says its most recent model outperforms OpenAI’s in key evaluations in coding and text-based reasoning. With a focus on making tools for businesses, it’s expanded its enterprise business to include Bridgewater Associates, Salesforce and Pfizer, among other customers. Led by an unusual brother-and-sister team, with Daniela Amodei as president, Anthropic has been vocal about its emphasis on safety and has recently published research containing insights into the still mysterious ways generative AI actually works.
COMPANY
Suno
CEO
Mikey Shulman
PRODUCT
AI music generator
LOCATION
Cambridge, Massachusetts
RAISED
$125 million
VALUATION
$500 million
Give Suno a command—for example, “Sing me a reggae ballad about anchovies on pizza”—and its software will deliver, churning out a surprisingly complex, human-sounding song in seconds, complete with vocals and rhyming lyrics. Suno is a leader among new AI startups building tools to automate the music-making process. Its technological innovation has made it popular with users, and, predictably, the company has drawn the wrath of the music industry. Generative AI must be trained on massive troves of data, which in this case means Suno has ingested a lot of songs. In June the world’s biggest record labels sued Suno and competitor Udio, alleging that their training data included a large number of copyrighted sound recordings, kicking off what could be a landmark case in the AI industry.
COMPANY
Perplexity
CEO
Aravind Srinivas
PRODUCT
AI search engine
LOCATION
San Francisco
RAISED
$165 million
VALUATION
$1 billion
Founded in 2022, Perplexity has speed-run the journey from tiny upstart to one of the most closely watched startups in Silicon Valley, stirring up fierce controversy along the way. Hailed as a Google-disruptor, the company offers an AI-powered search engine and is in late-stage talks for new funding that would value it at $3 billion, making the startup the poster child for AI tools that rethink internet services as basic as search. Perplexity’s investors include big names in tech such as Jeff Bezos, SoftBank and Nvidia. With products that deliver conversational search results and news summaries, the company has also panicked the publishing world, garnering accusations of plagiarism and stoking fears that writers’ work could be subsumed into traffic-hogging AI products.
COMPANY
Mistral
CEO
Arthur Mensch
PRODUCT
Open-source LLMs, developer tools and a chatbot
LOCATION
Paris
RAISED
More than $1 billion
VALUATION
$6 billion
The splashiest AI companies with the most famous models generally hail from the US or China: Mistral is an exception. The Parisian startup, formed last year by French alums of Google DeepMind and Meta Platforms Inc., has released a flurry of popular large language models, primarily as open-source technology, along with developer tools, a chatbot (Le Chat) and an AI programming product (Codestral). It’s all part of a pitch Mistral is making as the independent alternative to Silicon Valley—though the startup has also inked deals with US tech giants including Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp. in a bid to get more traction across the Atlantic.
COMPANY
xAI
CEO
Elon Musk
PRODUCT
Grok chatbot
LOCATION
Bay Area
RAISED
$6 billion
VALUATION
$24 billion
Elon Musk’s new startup raised several billion dollars earlier this year on the back of his pledge to build an anti-woke chatbot “with a rebellious streak.” Grok, as the bot is called, is trained on posts from X, the site formerly known as Twitter, and is currently available to the network’s paying subscribers. “We want to try to be the funniest AI,” Musk said at a conference earlier this year. “If we are gonna die, at least we should die laughing.” It’s personal for Musk, a former co-founder of OpenAI whose acrimonious falling out with the startup included a lawsuit, which he later dropped. Next, xAI is using some of its multibillion-dollar war chest to develop a supercomputer facility in Memphis.
COMPANY
Scale AI
CEO
Alexandr Wang
PRODUCT
Data labeling service to build AI products
LOCATION
San Francisco
RAISED
$1.6 billion
VALUATION
$13.8 billion
An AI system’s output is only as good as the data it’s ingesting. Scale’s platform cleans up troves of data using a combination of software and human workers to sift through and label the images, text and audio that underpin large language models. The startup counts AI giants such as OpenAI, Google and Meta as customers, in addition to the US Department of Defense. That seemingly insatiable demand for data has made Scale one of the world’s most highly valued AI startups.
COMPANY
Cohere
CEO
Aidan Gomez
PRODUCT
Enterprise models including Command R+
LOCATION
Toronto
RAISED
$970 million
VALUATION
$5.5 billion
Cohere doesn’t have a cool consumer chatbot that can discuss the weather or write a poem. The company develops large language models almost exclusively for its corporate customers, which include Salesforce Inc. and Accenture. CEO Aidan Gomez is an AI celebrity, one of the former Google engineers who co-authored “Attention Is All You Need,” a 2017 seminal AI paper, helping usher in the current age of AI. Cohere’s investors include major names such as Nvidia Corp. and Oracle Corp. The company’s latest model, Command R+, is cheaper than OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo, and though it doesn’t perform as well in terms of raw capabilities, Cohere says it’s better for certain business-focused tasks.
COMPANY
CoreWeave
CEO
Michael Intrator
PRODUCT
Compute infrastructure services
LOCATION
Roseland, New Jersey
RAISED
$12.1 billion**
VALUATION
$19 billion
No one—not OpenAI, not Anthropic, not Google—has enough graphics processing units for all the AI work they want to do. Enter CoreWeave, a provider of cloud computing horsepower, offering chips for hire to a new generation of companies desperate for capacity. According to reports, even Microsoft inked a deal with CoreWeave to access extra GPUs. CoreWeave more than doubled its valuation in April, vaulting it into the ranks of the US’s most valuable startups as it raked in billions of dollars in debt and equity. Formerly focused on Bitcoin mining, the company has made a lucrative transition.
COMPANY
ElevenLabs
CEO
Mati Staniszewski
PRODUCT
AI voice-generating software
LOCATION
New York
RAISED
$101 million
VALUATION
$1.1 billion
In a critical year for elections, ElevenLabs’ technology is freaking people out. The company is at the forefront of voice-cloning AI, with software that can replicate a person’s voice, turn text into human-sounding utterances and translate speech from one language to another. The technology is used by AI video startups such as HeyGen and Captions as well as individuals. Virginia lawmaker Jennifer Wexton, for instance, created a copy of her voice to help her communicate after a neurological disease affected her ability to speak. Not all use cases are altruistic. Early this year, ElevenLabs banned a user for creating faked audio of President Joe Biden urging people not to vote in the New Hampshire primary.
The Contenders
OpenAI may dominate the headlines, but a quieter crop of startups is emerging around the world with major backers, celebrity founders and big potential.
Cognition AI
Cognition is part of a new crop of AI coding companies jockeying to replace market leader GitHub Copilot. The startup is backed by Peter Thiel’s venture firm Founders Fund and staffed with sport-coders (think the Olympics, but for solving programming puzzles). With a product called Devin, billed as “the first AI software engineer,” Cognition claims to have made a breakthrough in an AI model’s ability to reason.
Helsing
Helsing has emerged as one of the buzziest startups in Europe by focusing on modernizing militaries and combating Russia’s electronic warfare. Valued at $5.4 billion, the company won a contract with the German armed forces to work on fighter jets and also cut deals with Airbus SE and Saab AB to build autonomous software capabilities for weapons. Amid concerns about AI’s role in wars, Helsing says it will only work to “protect our democracies.”
Imbue
Imbue is building AI models to design “agents,” a new frontier of tools that can handle complex tasks for users. To start, the Nvidia-backed company is focusing on developing systems with superior coding and reasoning capabilities. It’s also the rare billion-dollar AI startup to have a female CEO, with Kanjun Qiu heading the company.
Safe Superintelligence
Ilya Sutskever was central to the rise of OpenAI as its co-founder and chief scientist, and he later upended the company by voting to oust CEO Altman. Now Sutskever is working on Safe Superintelligence, which is dedicated to creating a safe, powerful AI system without any short-term deadlines to build products. The star researcher has declined to say how much he’s raised, but given his stature in the industry, funding is probably not an issue.
01.AI
As the US-China AI rivarly heats up, many are watching 01.AI. Founded by tech pioneer Kai-Fu Lee, the Chinese startup earned a billion-dollar valuation in a matter of months, and its newly launched Yi-Large is now considered by some to be one of the world’s top AI models.
Covariant
Covariant is one of a number of companies trying to realize a dream older than AI itself: smart robots. Created by early OpenAI employees, the Bay Area startup has raised more than $200 million for its software that helps robots perform tasks in warehouses. In March it released its first multimodal robotics foundation model—similar to a large language model but for real-world machines.
—With assistance from Mark Bergen, Jackie Davalos, Kurt Wagner and Saritha Rai.
Sources: Company data, Bloomberg reporting, PitchBook data
*OpenAI valuation derived from its last known secondary share sale
**CoreWeave total dollars raised represents both debt and equity
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