The 2026 list · Sixth annual
The top private companies building with and enabling the AI applications shaping our future.
Early <$50M raised · Mid $50–200M · Late $200M+ · Enablers stage-agnostic · Emerging Enablers <$100M. Click any row for the record.
| Rank | Logo | Company | Sector | Headquarters | Capital raised | Website |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | | Productivity | San Francisco, CA | $15M | yutori.com | |
| Personal AI agent teams, from ex-Meta researchers. CEO Abhishek Das & Devi Parikh Yutori appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 02 | | Content Creation | San Francisco, CA | $38M | paper.design | |
| CEO Stephen Haney Paper appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 03 | | Insurance | San Francisco, CA | $15M | aiuc.com | |
| AI-native underwriting. CEO Rune Kvist AI Underwriting Company appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 04 | | Coding | San Francisco, CA | $24M | pierre.computer | |
| A better home for code review. CEO Jacob Thornton Pierre appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 05 | | Sales | Seattle, WA | $23M | clarify.ai | |
| An autonomous CRM that does the data entry itself — reinventing a $100B category. CEO Patrick Thompson Clarify appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| 06 | | Security | Santa Clara, CA | $34M | jetstream.security | |
| CEO Raj Rajamani JetStream Security appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 07 | | Security | San Francisco, CA | $31M | fablesecurity.com | |
| Human-risk security platform. CEO Nicole Jiang-Gibson Fable Security appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 08 | | Infrastructure | San Francisco, CA | $22M | resend.com | |
| Email infrastructure for developers. CEO Zeno Rocha Resend appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 09 | | Sales | San Francisco, CA | $27M | roadrunner.ai | |
| CEO Joubin Mirzadegan Roadrunner appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 10 | | Productivity | Miami, FL | $19M | fireflies.ai | |
| An AI meeting assistant that records, transcribes and turns conversations into action. CEO Krishna Ramineni Fireflies.ai appeared in 2024, 2025, 2026. 3× on the list | ||||||
| 11 | | Coding | Boulder, CO | $45M | zed.dev | |
| The high-performance, AI-native code editor. CEO Nathan Sobo Zed Industries appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| Rank | Logo | Company | Sector | Headquarters | Capital raised | Website |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | | Voice & Video | San Francisco, CA | $79M | wisprflow.ai | |
| Voice dictation that writes like you. CEO Tanay Kothari Wispr Flow appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 02 | | Productivity | London, England | $192M | granola.ai | |
| The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings — notes that write themselves. CEO Chris Pedregal Granola appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| 03 | | AIOps | San Francisco, CA | $127M | serval.com | |
| AI agents for IT service management. CEO Jake Stauch Serval appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 04 | | Marketing | New York, NY | $155M | tryprofound.com | |
| Answer-engine optimization for brands. CEO James Cadwallader Profound appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 05 | | Content Creation | San Francisco, CA | $92M | gamma.app | |
| AI-native content creation — decks, docs and sites generated from a prompt. CEO Grant Lee Gamma appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| 06 | | AIOps | San Francisco, CA | $134M | linear.app | |
| The project and issue tracker modern product teams run on, now agent-native. CEO Karri Saarinen Linear appeared in 2022, 2024, 2025, 2026. 4× on the list | ||||||
| 07 | | Coding | San Francisco, CA | $223M | coderabbit.ai | |
| AI code review that catches issues and compounds engineering quality with every PR. CEO Harjot Gill CodeRabbit appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| 08 | | Marketing | Seattle, WA | $118M | gradial.com | |
| AI agents for marketing operations. CEO Doug Tallmadge Gradial appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 09 | | Research | San Francisco, CA | $97M | listenlabs.ai | |
| AI-moderated customer interviews that turn qualitative research into overnight insight. CEO Alfred Wahlforss Listen Labs appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| 10 | | Productivity | San Francisco, CA | $78M | town.com | |
| AI tax advisory for small business. CEO Jean-Denis Grèze Town appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 11 | | Voice & Video | Los Angeles, CA | $66M | heygen.com | |
| AI video avatars that make studio-quality, multilingual video a text edit. CEO Joshua Xu HeyGen appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| Rank | Logo | Company | Sector | Headquarters | Capital raised | Website |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | | Voice & Video | New York, NY | $850M | elevenlabs.io | |
| Lifelike voice synthesis and audio AI for products, media and accessibility. CEO Mati Staniszewski ElevenLabs appeared in 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026. 4× on the list | ||||||
| 02 | | Defense | Costa Mesa, CA | $12B | anduril.com | |
| AI-defined defense — autonomous systems built on the Lattice software platform. CEO Brian Schimpf Anduril appeared in 2021, 2024, 2025, 2026. 4× on the list | ||||||
| 03 | | Finance | New York, NY | $3.6B | ramp.com | |
| Finance automation — the corporate card that saves. CEO Eric Glyman & Karim Atiyeh Ramp appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 04 | | Customer Experience | San Francisco, CA | $1.6B | sierra.ai | |
| Conversational AI agents for brands. CEO Bret Taylor Sierra appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 05 | | Healthcare | Miami, FL | $795M | openevidence.com | |
| The AI medical information platform used daily by clinicians across the U.S. CEO Daniel Nadler OpenEvidence appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| 06 | | Coding | San Francisco, CA | $1.7B | cognition.com | |
| Devin — the AI software engineer. CEO Scott Wu Cognition appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 07 | | Infrastructure | Mountain View, CA | $1.2B | appliedintuition.com | |
| The vehicle intelligence stack for autonomy across automotive, trucking and defense. CEO Qasar Younis Applied Intuition appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| 08 | | Legal | Stockholm, Sweden | $867M | legora.com | |
| Collaborative AI for lawyers — review, draft and research across the firm. CEO Max Junestrand Legora appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| 09 | | Sales | New York, NY | $206M | clay.com | |
| AI-powered data enrichment and outbound for go-to-market teams. CEO Kareem Amin Clay appeared in 2024, 2025, 2026. 3× on the list | ||||||
| 10 | | Coding | Stockholm, Sweden | $1B | lovable.dev | |
| A prompt-to-app builder that ships full-stack products in minutes — Europe's fastest-growing startup. CEO Anton Osika Lovable appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| 11 | | Research | San Francisco, CA | $300M | simile.com | |
| CEO Joon Sung Park Simile appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| Rank | Logo | Company | Sector | Headquarters | Capital raised | Website |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | | Models & More | San Francisco, CA | $161B | anthropic.com | |
| Frontier models and Claude, built for safety and reliability at enterprise scale. CEO Dario Amodei Anthropic appeared in 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026. 4× on the list | ||||||
| 02 | | Infrastructure | Ottawa, Canada | Not disclosed | turbopuffer.com | |
| Serverless vector search on object storage. CEO Simon Eskildsen Turbopuffer appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 03 | | Data & Analytics | San Francisco, CA | $30B | databricks.com | |
| The data and AI lakehouse — the only company on every IA40 list. CEO Ali Ghodsi Databricks appeared in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026. 6× on the list | ||||||
| 04 | | Models & More | San Francisco, CA | $186B | openai.com | |
| ChatGPT and the GPT model family — the largest private tech raise on record. CEO Samuel Altman OpenAI appeared in 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026. 4× on the list | ||||||
| 05 | | Inference | San Francisco, CA | $2.1B | baseten.co | |
| Inference infrastructure for production AI. CEO Tuhin Srivastava Baseten appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 06 | | Models & More | New York, NY | $164M | openrouter.ai | |
| One API for every model. CEO Alexander Atallah OpenRouter appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 07 | | Data & Analytics | San Francisco, CA | $1.1B | clickhouse.com | |
| Real-time analytics database powering user-facing, data-intensive applications. CEO Aaron Katz ClickHouse appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| 08 | | Voice & Video | San Francisco, CA | $191M | cartesia.ai | |
| Real-time voice AI built on state-space models — instant, lifelike, on any device. CEO Karan Goel Cartesia appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| 09 | | Inference | San Francisco, CA | $1.3B | together.ai | |
| A cloud platform for training and running open models at speed and scale. CEO Vipul Ved Prakash Together AI appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| 10 | | Inference | San Francisco, CA | $338M | fal.ai | |
| Generative media infrastructure — the fastest way to run diffusion models in production. CEO Burkay Gur Fal appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| 11 | | Infrastructure | San Francisco, CA | $863M | vercel.com | |
| The agentic infrastructure platform where humans and agents ship software together. CEO Guillermo Rauch Vercel appeared in 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026. 4× on the list | ||||||
| 12 | | Inference | Redwood City, CA | $1.8B | fireworks.ai | |
| Fast inference for open models. CEO Lin Qiao Fireworks AI appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| Rank | Logo | Company | Sector | Headquarters | Capital raised | Website |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | | Inference | San Francisco, CA | $92M | gimletlabs.ai | |
| CEO Zain Asgar Gimlet Labs appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
| 02 | | Infrastructure | San Francisco, CA | $67M | browserbase.com | |
| Headless browser infrastructure that extends AI agents into the live web. CEO Paul Klein Browserbase appeared in 2025, 2026. 2× on the list | ||||||
| 03 | | Infrastructure | San Francisco, CA | $50M | mastra.ai | |
| The TypeScript agent framework. CEO Sam Bhagwat Mastra appeared in 2026. first appearance | ||||||
Stage bands per total capital raised at selection. Funding from public sources as of the 2026 list; ✕-badges count appearances across all six lists.
How the list is made
Over 340 nominations from 70+ venture investors, vetted by Madrona, voted by category, and weighted with PitchBook's Venture Exit Predictor.