The top artificial intelligence (AI) startups are seeing plenty of $$$ signs that the market is taking off: The top 50 have collectively raised $52.8 billion and reached a valuation of more than $358 billion through late 2024, up a staggering 600% from 2023.
Funding continues to pour in for OpenAI ($21.9 billion), Anthropic ($9.7 billion) and Databricks ($4 billion), according to a WriterBuddy.ai study that analyzed funding, valuations and influence trends among top AI companies from the 2024 Forbes AI 50 list. Data was sourced from Crunchbase, PitchBook and news reports, with a focus on private companies through October.
Top-funded sectors were AI infrastructure and models ($35.5 billion), followed by data and analytics ($5.9 billion) and defense and security ($3.8 billion), according to the analysis that purviewed investment trends, geographic distribution, and the influence of ex-Google employees.
U.S.-based companies raised $49.4 billion or 94% of the global total, followed by France ($1.3 billion, mostly by Mistral AI). California companies like OpenAI and Anthropic led U.S. states in attracting $47.9 billion, making it the leading AI hub in the world.
Alumni of Alphabet Inc.’s Google wielded huge influence: Ex-Google employees spearhead 14 companies — including Anthropic, Perplexity AI and Mistral AI — that raised $14.7 billion, or more than one-fourth of the $52.8 billion. The 14 companies are currently valued at a combined $71.6 billion.
The most-valued AI startups are Microsoft Corp.-backed OpenAI ($157 billion), Databricks ($43 billion) and Amazon.com Inc.-backed Anthropic ($40 billion). Of the 50 companies, 29 are unicorns.
Strong investor confidence, while hardly surprising given the AI stampede throughout the tech industry, does underscore continued spending on AI at a time when many of the industry’s largest players are slashing payroll while transitioning to agentic AI models from the likes of Salesforce Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., ServiceNow Inc., Microsoft and Adobe Inc. This week alone, Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon and Cisco announced plans to dive further into AI. And Meta Platforms Inc. reportedly expects every business to begin using AI agents.
On Thursday, AI startup CTGT landed $7.2 million in seed funding. The San Francisco-based company’s technology lets enterprises scale AI efforts with a new approach to customizing, training and deploying AI models up to 500 times faster.
At the same time, several metrics highlight that the digital land rush is trickling down to the American workforce.
The St. Louis Fed found 23% of U.S. workers now use generative AI tools weekly. The study of more than 10,000 working-age adults revealed roughly a third of them who use GenAI daily believe they are saving at least four hours of work a week.
AI job postings in the U.S., meanwhile, have soared 68% over the past two years while overall job postings have declined 17% in the same period, says AIMaps, a program between the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business, and LinkUp, a job-tracking firm that analyzes AI job growth in U.S. sectors such as manufacturing and retail.
