AI agents and infrastructure made a strong showing on CB Insights’s latest list of the top 100 AI startups.
What’s new: CB Insights, which tracks tech startups and venture capital, selected companies in the AI 100 based on their market traction, talent, finances, and partnerships. The list purports to highlight the next wave of winners, shedding light on the key executives, investors, fundraising, and valuations behind up-and-coming AI ventures.
How it works: The analysts evaluated 17,000 early-stage, private AI companies that had raised funds within the last year and continue to seek further investment.
- CB Insights evaluated the startups according to its own Mosaic Score, a proprietary system designed to assess the health and growth potential of private companies. The score takes into account a startup’s market momentum (traction and growth rate), market size, financial health, and management team.
- The analysts divided their choices into three broad categories: (i) horizontal (providing business products or services common to multiple industries), (ii) vertical (serving a single industry or business function), or (iii) providers of AI hardware or software infrastructure.
- They further divided the horizontal companies by business function (customer service, cybersecurity, software development, and so on), the vertical companies into industries (healthcare, automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, finance, energy, and the like), and the infrastructure providers into segments (hardware, monitoring, data, and development and training).
Where the action is: This year’s AI 100 companies are based in 14 countries, around two-thirds of them in the United States. 10 are based in the United Kingdom, five in France, and four in Germany, with one each in Norway (Braintrust), Singapore (Bria), Spain (Cartwheel), Sweden (Chainguard), and Switzerland (Clarium).
- More than 20 percent of this year’s AI 100 build AI agents or support them, including Texas-based Apptronik (valued at $423 million) and Canada’s 1X ($134 million, the second-most highly valued agent specialist).
- The report also notes the rapid growth of companies that monitor AI performance and reliability, such as California-based Arize (valued at $131 million) and the French startup Bioptimus ($76 million).
- Opportunity may be rising for AI companies that cater to specific industries. This year, the vertical companies pulled in the most total funding, just over $1 billion. These included the Texas aerospace specialist Saronic (valued at $4 billion) and the California software development and training provider Together.AI ($3.3 billion).
- The AI infrastructure category raised the second-highest total funding, a leading indicator of need for infrastructure as businesses take advantage of the technology. Infrastructure companies on the list were led by Munich’s defense startup Helsing (valued at $5.37 billion), California robot maker Figure ($2.77 billion) and Washington-state cybersecurity provider Chainguard ($1.12 billion).
Why it matters: This year’s AI 100 offers a snapshot of AI becoming more central to businesses of all kinds. Most of the startups listed here offer practical products and services that are poised to deliver a timely return, rather than moonshots with long development cycles and risky payoffs. In addition, they mostly target corporate customers rather than consumers.
We’re thinking: The falling cost of access to AI models and increasingly capable open-weights models make this the perfect time to build applications. What kind? The report singles out health care (8 companies) and life sciences (6 companies) as growing areas, but it also documents opportunities in defense, gaming, and finance.