It’s here! Check out the latest edition of the highly anticipated CB Insights’ 8th Annual List of the Most Promising AI Companies.
This year’s list showcases exceptional innovation from across the globe, featuring companies working in over 30 categories spanning 16 countries. What’s particularly exciting is that a remarkable 68 percent of these pioneering ventures are early-stage startups, illustrating the boundless potential of the AI industry.
In order to pick the 100 winning companies, the CB Insights selection team analyzed interviews with software buyers, reviewed analyst briefings submitted by startups, and considered data that included the following:
- Deal activity
- Industry partnerships
- Team strength
- Investor strength
- Patent activity
- Mosaic scores, i.e., a proprietary tool that uses filters to automatically match customized criteria to ensure that prospects align with GTM strategy.
Based on results, 30 vendors 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.
Other key areas that helped determine winning selections include Revenue Generation and Global Reach.
Revenue Generation
The AI 100 includes a mix of companies at different stages of maturity, product development, and revenue.
One example is Hugging Face, an AI infrastructure platform focused on open-source development. It 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).
Global Reach
Interestingly, 31 winning companies 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.
Additionally, Europe-based startups account for 19% of the list, including companies headquartered in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
This CB Insights Annual AI100 list is a testament to the remarkable ingenuity and dedication driving progress in this transformative field. Previous years’ winners have gone on to become unicorns, get acquired by big tech companies, and raise funding from top VC firms.
