AI Research

16 companies

The frontier is moving fast. These companies push the boundaries of what AI can do, building foundation models, inventing new architectures, and pursuing long-term research. Breakthroughs here ripple across the entire economy.

16 companies
Anthropic logo
Anthropic

Advances frontier AI research.

--
Series D+
Founders
Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish
HQ City
San Francisco, CA
Founded
2021
Socials
𝕏💼
Total Raised
$13.0B
Employees
201-1,000
Last Round Date
Sep 2025
Applied Compute logo
Applied Compute

Creates enterprise-specific AI agents.

--
Series A
Founders
Rhythm Garg, Linden Li, Yash Patil
HQ City
San Francisco, CA
Founded
2025
Socials
💼
Total Raised
$100M
Employees
21-50
Last Round Date
Nov 2025
Applied Intuition logo
Applied Intuition

Powers large-scale simulation systems.

--
Series D+
Founders
Qasar Younis, Peter Ludwig
HQ City
Mountain View, CA
Founded
2017
Socials
𝕏💼
Total Raised
$1.2B
Employees
1,001-5,000
Last Round Date
Jun 2025
Cortical Labs logo
Cortical Labs

Computes with biological neurons.

--
Founders
Hon Weng Chong
HQ City
Melbourne, Australia
Founded
2019
Socials
𝕏💼
Total Raised
$10.7M
Employees
1-20
Last Round Date
Nov 2025
DeepNight logo
DeepNight

Enhances night vision with AI.

--
Seed
Founders
Lucas Young, Thomas Li
HQ City
San Francisco, CA
Founded
2023
Socials
💼
Total Raised
$11M
Employees
1-20
Last Round Date
Feb 2025
ElevenLabs logo
ElevenLabs

Generates synthetic voices with AI.

--
Series C
Founders
Mati Staniszewski, Piotr Dabkowski
HQ City
New York, NY
Founded
2022
Socials
𝕏💼
Total Raised
$350.4M
Employees
201-1,000
Harmonic logo
Harmonic

Builds provable mathematical AI.

--
Series C
Founders
Vlad Tenev, Tudor Achim
HQ City
Palo Alto, CA
Founded
2023
Socials
💼
Total Raised
$295M
Employees
51-200
Last Round Date
Nov 2025
Haxion logo
Haxion

Generates synthetic intelligence data.

--
Founders
John Lewis
Founded
2023
Socials
𝕏💼
Meta logo
Meta

Creates AI-powered social platforms.

--
Public
Founders
Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes
HQ City
Menlo Park, CA
Founded
2004
Socials
𝕏💼
Total Raised
$16.0B
Employees
5,001+
Last Round Date
May 2012
MidJourney logo
MidJourney

Exploring imagination.

--
Founders
David Holz
HQ City
San Francisco, CA
Founded
2022
Socials
𝕏💼
Employees
51-200
Mistral AI logo
Mistral AI

Builds open AI models.

--
Series B
Founders
Timothee Lacroix, Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, Charles Gorintin
HQ City
Paris, France
Founded
2023
Socials
𝕏💼
Total Raised
$2.7B
Employees
51-200
Open Orion logo
Open Orion

Unlocks AI-powered design.

--
Founders
Afshawn Lotfi
HQ City
San Francisco, CA
Founded
2023
Socials
💼
Employees
1-20
OpenAI logo
OpenAI

Develops artificial general intelligence.

--
Series D+
Founders
Trevor Blackwell, Pamela Vagata, Sam Altman, Durk Kingma, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Greg Brockman, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Wojciech Zaremba, Elon Musk
HQ City
San Francisco, CA
Founded
2015
Socials
𝕏💼
Total Raised
$6.3B
Employees
1,001-5,000
Last Round Date
Dec 2025
Safe Superintelligence logo
Safe Superintelligence

Builds safe superintelligence.

--
Series A
Founders
Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, Daniel Levy
HQ City
Palo Alto, CA
Founded
2024
Socials
💼
Total Raised
$3.0B
Employees
21-50
Last Round Date
Jun 2025
Thinking Machines logo
Thinking Machines

Researches and builds AI systems.

--
Series B
Founders
Mira Murati, John Schulman, Barrett Zoph, Andrew Tulloch, Lilian Weng, Luke Metz
HQ City
San Francisco, CA
Total Raised
$2B
Employees
21-50
Last Round Date
Jul 2025
xAI logo
xAI

Accelerates innovation with AI.

--
Series C
Founders
Elon Musk
HQ City
Palo Alto, CA
Founded
2023
Socials
𝕏💼
Total Raised
$27B
Employees
201-1,000
Last Round Date
Dec 2025

Want to work at one of these companies?

Join the BuildList Job Network to get connected with hiring managers at companies building the future.

Join the Job Network
verifying