Most likely to go public
We have a hunch that Anthropic will IPO before any of the other companies on this list. But it's impossible to know for sure, right?

Selected by Bessemer Venture Partners and Newcomer, and unveiled live at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit in San Francisco.
These 100 companies, identified and ranked by Newcomer and Bessemer Venture Partners, represent what we judged to be the most promising private AI companies today.
It’s a group that in just a few years has come to include some of the biggest movers in the global economy. It’s only fitting that Anthropic, ahead of its expected IPO next week, took first place in the inaugural AI 100.
The AI 100 is in many ways a reinvention of Bessemer’s storied Cloud 100. Gone are names like Celonis, Tanium, and Attentive. In their place are multiple categories of AI companies, with a collective valuation sitting somewhere around $3.5 trillion.
The AI 100 is part art, part science. We weighed quantitative factors including revenue, valuation and market share alongside less tangible criteria such as people and culture. Bessemer helped to fact-check all the figures we included, which are based on company data and PitchBook.
We’ve added some tags to help show which companies are ranked on their revenue and other important facts. One thing that didn’t change their ranking but we like to highlight: many of the founders of AI 100 companies have been attending the Cerebral Valley AI Summit the last few years. And we’re excited to have had many of them at the summit on Nov 12, 2026 as Bessemer revealed the list on stage.
There will be lots of opinions about who should have been ranked higher or lower, or who was wrongly left out. But we think we’ve landed on a pretty solid who’s who of private AI companies to watch.
Most likely to go public
We have a hunch that Anthropic will IPO before any of the other companies on this list. But it's impossible to know for sure, right?
Hottest Recent Fundraise
Burkay Gur and team closed a whopping $1.3 billion Series F at the beginning of November as investors bet big on inference and media.
Best Pivot
Once a job board, now a core data company for the AI ecosystem. We’re all AI-native here.
Most recent Fascination
Not every job needs an LLM and Jev is one of the first models to prove it. But based on the reaction, it won’t be the last.
Cerebral Valley loyalists
The CEOs of three AI 100 companies attended the very first Cerebral Valley AI Summit all the way back in March 2023 and have been to many since.
Top 1% AI Startup
Simulating their way into the AI 100.
* Not validated by company
Developer of a large language model platform designed for business-critical use cases.
CEO Dario Amodei
Founders Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Christopher Olah, Benjamin (Ben) Mann
LLMs, multimodal, code generation, API platform
CEO Sam Altman
Founders Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk (Diederik) Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, Wojciech Zaremba
Data and AI company
CEO Ali Ghodsi
Founders Ali Ghodsi, Andy Konwinski, Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Patrick Wendell, Reynold Xin
Developer of an online financial infrastructure platform designed to accept payments, grow revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities.
CEO Patrick Collison
Founders Patrick Collison, John Collison
Developer of a self-driving technology designed to offer on-demand riding services that make it convenient for people and things to move around.
Co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana & Dmitri Dolgov
Autonomous AI software engineer (Devin)
CEO Scott Wu
Founders Scott Wu, Steven Hao, Walden Yan
Autonomous defense systems and C2 software
CEO Brian Schimpf
Founders Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, Joseph (Joe) Chen
Smart financial infrastructure that helps companies save time and money on every dollar they spend.
Co-CEOs Eric Glyman & Karim Atiyeh
Founders Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh, Gene Lee
Platform for specialized intelligence
CEO Lin Qiao
Founders Lin Qiao, Dmytro Dzhulgakov, Benny Chen, Pawel Garbacki, Dmytro Ivchenko, James Reed, Chenyu Zhao
Developer of a voice artificial intelligence (AI) platform designed for speech, audio, and agent creation.
CEO Mati (Mateusz) Staniszewski
Founders Mati (Mateusz) Staniszewski, Piotr Dąbkowski
Inference, training, and execution together on one platform, helping companies build durable intelligence and run AI models at scale.
CEO Tuhin Srivastava
Founders Tuhin Srivastava, Amir Haghighat, Phil (Philip) Howes, Pankaj Gupta
AI-powered visual communication platform
CEO Melanie Perkins
Founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht, Cameron Adams
Developer of an autonomous vehicle platform designed for simulation, validation, and deployment of advanced driver-assistance and automated driving systems.
CEO Qasar Younis
Founders Qasar Younis, Peter Ludwig
Operator of a digital biology company intended to redefine drug discovery with the power of artificial intelligence.
CEO Demis Hassabis
Founders Demis Hassabis
Human intelligence behind frontier AI
Co-CEOs Brendan Foody & Adarsh Hiremath
Founders Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, Surya Midha
Generative Media Infrastructure Platform
CEO Burkay Gür
Founders Burkay Gür, Görkem Yurtseven
Agents for customer experience
CEO Bret Taylor
Founders Bret Taylor, Clay Bavor
Developer of an online analytical processing database management system designed to generate analytical reports using SQL queries.
CEO Aaron Katz
Founders Alexey Milovidov, Yury Izrailevsky, Aaron Katz
Accurate AI agents
CEO Aravind Srinivas
Founders Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, Andy Konwinski
Serverless GPU cloud for AI inference and training
CEO Erik Bernhardsson
Founders Erik Bernhardsson, Akshat Bubna
Research lab and product company whose mission is to build AI that extends human will and judgment
CEO Mira Murati
Founders Mira Murati, Barret Zoph, John Schulman, Lilian Weng, Andrew Tulloch, Luke Metz
Vertically integrated AI infrastructure provider
CEO Chase Lochmiller
Founders Chase Lochmiller, Cully Cavness
AI model training and inference
CEO Vipul Ved Prakash
Founders Vipul Ved Prakash, Ce Zhang, Christopher (Chris) Ré, Percy Liang, Tri Dao
Developer of an AI-based software designed to use learning algorithms to create robots.
CEO Karol Hausman
Founders Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter, Chelsea Finn, Lachy (Lachlan) Groom, Sergey Levine, Adnan Esmail, Quan Vuong
Open frontier models and the software and infrastructure to bring them into production
CEO Misha (Michael) Laskin
Founders Misha (Michael) Laskin, Ioannis Antonoglou
Robotics foundation model
CEO Deepak Pathak
Founders Deepak Pathak, Abhinav Gupta
AI context system for all your docs, projects, meetings & agents
CEO Ivan Zhao
Founders Ivan Zhao, Simon Last, Akshay Kothari, Chris Prucha, Jessica Lam, Toby Schachman
Software creation platform
CEO Anton Osika
Founders Anton Osika, Fabian Hedin
Agentic infrastructure platform
CEO Guillermo Rauch
Founders Guillermo Rauch, Naoyuki Kanezawa, Tony Kovanen
Developer of artificial intelligence-driven autonomous systems and defense hardware designed for protecting democratic nations.
Co-CEOs Gundbert Scherf & Torsten Reil
Founders Gundbert Scherf, Torsten Reil, Niklas Köhler
Developer of an open-source backend platform designed to help developers build and manage applications.
CEO Paul Copplestone
Founders Paul Copplestone, Anthony Wilson
Enterprise AI platform with open-weight models
CEO Arthur Mensch
Founders Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, Timothée Lacroix
Developer of artificial intelligence tools designed to support real-world, hands-on tasks.
Co-CEOs Jeff Bezos & Vik Bajaj
Founders Jeff Bezos, Vik Bajaj
Durable workflow orchestration for applications and agents
CEO Samar Abbas
Founders Maxim Fateev, Samar Abbas
Operator of a defense technology company intended to restructure battlefields and commercial aviation.
CEO Gary Steele
Founders Ryan Tseng, Brandon Tseng, Andrew Reiter
GPU cloud for AI training/inference
CEO Michel Combes
Founders Stephen Balaban, Michael Balaban
Developer of an artificial intelligence research laboratory and foundational model architecture designed for the secure development of superhuman intelligence.
CEO Ilya Sutskever
Founders Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, Daniel Levy
AI cloud / large-scale GPU clusters for frontier labs
CEO Gary (Peixian) Wu
Founders Gary (Peixian) Wu, César Maklary, Jamie Cox
Legal AI platform
CEO Winston Weinberg
Founders Winston Weinberg, Gabriel (Gabe) Pereyra
Instinct is a personal assistant for everyday life.
CEO Noah Shinn
Founders Noah Shinn
Autonomous Surface Vessels
CEO Dino Mavrookas
Founders Dino Mavrookas, Rob Lehman, Vibhav Altekar, Doug Lambert
Developer of AI infrastructure and cloud computing platforms intended to support artificial intelligence workloads.
CEO Josh Payne
Founders Josh Payne
Autonomous delivery
CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton
Founders Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Keenan Wyrobek, Will (William) Hetzler, Ryan Oksenhorn
Developer of an AI-powered information platform designed to organize medical knowledge and make it useful, accessible, and understandable.
CEO Daniel Nadler
Founders Daniel Nadler, Zachary Ziegler
OS for Legal Work
CEO Max Junestrand
Founders Max Junestrand, Sigge Labor, August Erséus
Developer of industrial automation systems designed to digitize and automate operations across physical industries.
CEO Travis Kalanick
Founders Travis Kalanick
Agentic software creation platform for anyone to build anything without learning code
CEO Amjad Masad
Founders Amjad Masad, Haya Odeh, Faris Masad
AI recruiting platform
CEO Garrett Lord
Founders Garrett Lord, Ben Christensen, Scott Ringwelski
Data platform for AI factories
CEO Renen Hallak
Founders Renen Hallak, Shachar Fienblit, Jeff Denworth
AI Security Platform
CEO Yotam Segev
Founders Yotam Segev, Tamar Bar-Ilan, Yonatan Itai
Sovereign enterprise AI platform
CEO Aidan Gomez
Founders Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, Ivan Zhang
Typed probabilistic decision models for automation
CEO Diogo Almeida
Founders Diogo Almeida, Erik Gafni, Sasha Sheng
AI native workforce management company
CEO Parker Conrad
Founders Parker Conrad, Prasanna Sankar
Autonomous AI drones
CEO Adam Bry
Founders Adam Bry, Abraham (Abe) Bachrach, Matt Donahoe
Developer of humanoid robots designed to address drastic labor shortages and reduce the number of workers in unsafe jobs.
CEO Brett Adcock
Founders Brett Adcock
Stops cybercrime with behavioral AI
CEO Evan Reiser
Founders Evan Reiser, Sanjay Jeyakumar
Frontier inference clusters
CEO Gavin Uberti
Founders Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu, Robert Wachen
Developer of an AI-driven video creation platform intended for cinematic content generation and editing purposes.
CEO Alex (Aleksandr) Mashrabov
Founders Alex (Aleksandr) Mashrabov, Yerzat Dulat, Mahi de Silva
End-to-end embodied AI for autonomous driving
CEO Alex Kendall
Founders Alex Kendall, Amar Shah
AI-native clinician intelligence platform for every moment of care
CEO Shiv (Shivdev) Rao
Founders Shiv (Shivdev) Rao, Sandeep Konam, Florian Metze
Agentic open observability platform
CEO Raj Dutt
Founders Raj Dutt, Anthony Woods, Torkel Ödegaard
AI concierge for CX
CEO Jesse Zhang
Founders Jesse Zhang, Ashwin Sreenivas
Developer of a serverless vector database designed for the technology and data storage industries.
CEO Simon Hørup Eskildsen
Founders Simon Hørup Eskildsen, Justine Li
AI music platform
CEO Mikey (Michael) Shulman
Founders Mikey (Michael) Shulman, Georg Kucsko, Martin Camacho, Keenan Freyberg
Developer of an artificial intelligence-powered search engine designed to perform web searches at a large scale.
CEO Will (William) Bryk
Founders Will (William) Bryk, Jeff Wang
AI Platform for Telemetry
CEO Clint Sharp
Founders Clint Sharp, Dritan Bitincka, Ledion Bitincka
Developer of artificial intelligence processor chips and computing hardware systems designed to accelerate inference execution for frontier models.
CEO Walter Goodwin
Founders Walter Goodwin
AI automating housing and healthcare
CEO Minna Song
Founders Minna Song, Tony (Stoyan) Stoyanov
Memory-first inference hardware for transformer models
CEO Mitesh Agrawal
Founders Thomas Sohmers, Edward Kmett, Barrett Woodside
Developer of a global artificial intelligence research and technology designed for building foundational research models and tools to create multimodal simulators.
Co-CEOs Cristóbal Valenzuela & Anastasis Germanidis
Founders Cristóbal Valenzuela, Anastasis Germanidis, Alejandro Matamala-Ortiz
Manufacturer of computer chips intended to build a computing platform for artificial general intelligence.
CEO Reiner Pope
Founders Reiner Pope, Mike (Michial) Gunter
Developer of an artificial intelligence operating system designed to help large enterprises implement artificial intelligence across business processes.
CEO Bar Winkler
Founders Bar Winkler, Roey Lalazar
Self-improving software development
CEO Matan Grinberg
Founders Matan Grinberg, Eno Reyes
Developer of artificial intelligence computing infrastructure intended to provide inference for frontier models.
CEO Ganesh Venkataramanan (Ganesh Venkat)
Founders Ganesh Venkataramanan (Ganesh Venkat), Bill Chang, Ben Floering
Enterprise AI Platform
CEO Arvind Jain
Founders Arvind Jain, T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka, Tony Gentilcore
Developer of a livestock management software designed to monitor, manage and optimize pasture-based farming operations.
CEO Craig Piggott
Founders Craig Piggott
AI evaluation platform
CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos
Founders Anastasios Angelopoulos, Wei-Lin Chiang, Ion Stoica
Web research infrastructure for AI
CEO Parag Agrawal
Founders Parag Agrawal, Travers Nisbet
Developer of a language model framework designed to power applications that integrate with other sources of data and interact with their environment.
CEO Harrison Chase
Founders Harrison Chase, Ankush Gola
AI notepad for back-to-back meetings. Granola captures what matters and connects it to your teams’ apps and AI tools, giving everyone the same context to work from.
CEO Chris Pedregal
Founders Chris Pedregal, Sam Stephenson
Frontier visual intelligence models (FLUX)
CEO Robin Rombach
Founders Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser
AI platform to the world's leading global banks and investment firms
CEO Gabriel (Gabe) Stengel
Founders Gabriel (Gabe) Stengel, John Willett, Tumas Rackaitis
AI platform for marketing
CEO James Cadwallader
Founders James Cadwallader, Dylan Babbs
Developer of an artificial intelligence (AI)-based presentation tool designed for enterprise collaboration.
CEO Grant Lee
Founders Grant Lee, Jon Noronha, James Fox
General intelligence for the physical world
CEO Pete Florence
Founders Pete Florence, Andy Zeng, Andrew (Andy) Barry
Operator of an AI-driven scientific research platform intended to create autonomous AI scientists and laboratories.
Co-CEOs Liam (William) Fedus & Ekin Doğuş Çubuk
Founders Liam (William) Fedus, Ekin Doğuş Çubuk
Operator of a foundational artificial intelligence research laboratory intended to develop data-efficient models.
CEO Ben Spector
Founders Ben Spector, Asher Spector, Aidan Smith
AI models for molecular design and drug discovery, used by the world's leading pharmaceutical companies.
CEO Joshua (Josh) Meier
Founders Joshua (Josh) Meier, Jack Dent, Matthew (Matt) McPartlon, Jacques Boitreaud
AI and Telco networking infrastructure
CEO Ido Susan
Founders Ido Susan, Hillel Kobrinsky
Cloud & AI Security Platform
CEO Amiram Shachar
Founders Amiram Shachar, Liran Polak, Lavi Ferdman, Tal Zur
Manufacturing of AI-driven robotic systems designed for industrial optimisation and operational transformation.
CEO RJ (Robert Joseph) Scaringe
Founders RJ (Robert Joseph) Scaringe
Developer of a workflow automation platform designed to integrate applications to create tasks and activities.
CEO Jan Oberhauser
Founders Jan Oberhauser
AI for personal injury law
CEO Rami Karabibar
Founders Rami Karabibar, Raymond Mieszaniec, Saam Mashhad
Applied Compute unifies training, inference, and continuous improvement on one platform, so enterprises can turn their data into intelligence that improves with use.
CEO Yash Patil
Founders Yash Patil, Rhythm Garg, Linden Li
AI video platform for business
CEO Victor Riparbelli
Founders Victor Riparbelli, Steffen Tjerrild, Matthias Nießner, Lourdes Agapito
AI for enterprise automation
CEO Jake Stauch
Founders Jake Stauch, Alex McLeod
AI-native Cloud
CEO Anurag Goel
Founders Anurag Goel
Developer of an artificial intelligence platform designed to grow companies.
CEO Kareem Amin
Founders Kareem Amin, Nicolae Rusan, Varun Anand
Autonomous construction equipment and heavy machinery
CEO Boris Sofman
Founders Boris Sofman, Kevin Peterson, Ajay Gummalla, Tom Eliaz
A research and product lab building foundation models of human behavior to help companies make better decisions by simulating how their customers will respond to change.
CEO Joon Sung Park
Founders Joon Sung Park, Michael Bernstein, Percy Liang, Lainie Yallen