Here are the 12 generative AI unicorns to watch in addition to OpenAI

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OpenAI , backed by LinkedIn’s parent company 微软 , may be the best-known AI unicorn, with its whopping $29 billion valuation. But it’s not alone.?

Generative AI has sparked the curiosity and fascination of users the world over – helping a dozen other startups defy the broader slump in tech and command bull-market prices to reach unicorn status in recent months and years.

These startups are also taking far less time to get to $1 billion-plus valuations than most of their unicorn peers in other sectors, according to market intelligence firm CB Insights , taking just 3.6 years to exceed a $1 billion valuation versus 7 years for the unicorn club as a whole.

Here’s a list of the 12 other generative AI unicorns worth watching, and what makes them unique, in alphabetical order.

Adept

Year founded: 2022

Valuation: $1 billion, according to CB Insights?

What it does: Founded by Google alums, Adept is building AI that can automate a range of tasks for the benefit of enterprise clients. It has been working with companies to use their data and help create a natural language interface that can access existing software tools, API, and web apps like Adobe Photoshop and Airtable .

What makes it unique: Adept is focused on using AI to create actions versus media like texts or images, and therefore, could be more attractive to enterprises. “Adept makes process automation a reality, thereby tangibly increasing knowledge worker productivity,” Deep Nishar , managing director at General Catalyst who led the firm's investment in Adept, told me.?

Anthropic

Year founded: 2021

Valuation: $4.4 billion, according to CB Insights

What it does: Anthropic was founded by OpenAI’s former VP of research Dario Amodei , and just raised $450 million in a Series C funding round led by Spark Capital and Google. It says its AI algorithm can be used to do everything from building virtual assistants that can answer emails to performing research and generating art, like other large language models.

What makes it unique: Anthropic is backed by Google and claims that its “next-gen algorithm” is superior to its competitors as it can communicate with users in normal language, is less prone to produce harmful content, and produces content that’s more human-like. This is because of its training technique called “constitutional AI,” which imbues the AI with anthropomorphic “values” defined by a “constitution.”

Character.ai

Year founded: 2021?

Valuation: $1 billion, according to CB Insights

What it does: One of the most recent members of the generative AI unicorn club, Character.AI was built by Google alums Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas. It lets you talk to more than 10 million fictional characters inspired by actual people based on data scraped from the open internet.

What makes it unique: Character.ai essentially does what chatbots like ChatGPT do, but it amps it up with some personality and role-playing, communicating with you in the characteristic style of President Obama, for example. It’s also got a heavier mobile base, unlike ChatGPT.

Cohere

Year founded: 2019

Valuation: $2.2 billion, according to most recent funding news

What it does: The Toronto-based startup Cohere was founded by Google alums Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst , and entrepreneur Ivan Zhang . It provides access to the underlying foundational large language models, or LLMs, used to power AI systems in the form of an API, making it easy for other businesses to deploy chatbots, search engines and other AI-powered products. It just raised $270 million in fresh funding this week.

What makes it unique: Similar to Adept, Cohere’s focused on helping enterprises around the world harness AI capabilities, at reduced costs, since LLMs require significant computing power and are expensive to train.

Glean

Year founded: 2019

Valuation: $1 billion, according to CB Insights?

What it does: Co-founded by a group of Google veterans, Glean has built an assistive AI-powered enterprise search tool that makes workers productive by pulling together information from dozens of disparate applications.

What makes it unique: Think of Glean as the “Google for work” or “ChatGPT for work,” Sequoia Capital partner Sonya Huang told me, as it helps pull up all the enterprise knowledge scattered across different SaaS products. “Most generative AI applications in the enterprise lack enterprise context; Glean is special because they are solving that with a team of elite ex-Google search engineers,” she said.

Hugging Face

Year founded: 2016

Valuation: $2 billion, according to CB Insights??

What it does: Hugging Face is an open-source competitor to OpenAI, with its product HuggingChat competing directly with ChatGPT to handle similar tasks like writing code and drafting emails. It’s available through a web interface and can also integrate with existing apps and services via Hugging Face’s API.

What makes it unique: Hugging Face is regarded as the machine learning equivalent of what GitHub is for software. “What makes Hugging Face so special is the community and the network effects – it is the de facto place for researchers to publish models and developers to grab them,” said Sequoia's Huang. “We are currently seeing a rise in open-source model development and usage, and much of that is happening in Hugging Face.”

Inflection

Year founded: 2022

Valuation: $1.2 billion, according to CB Insights

What it does: Inflection, founded by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman , was incubated by VC firm Greylock , which also led a $225 million investment in the startup. Similar to ChatGPT, its AI chatbot “Pi” uses generative AI to interact with users.

What makes it unique: Pi stands for “personal intelligence,” according to the company, and is billed as “a kind and supportive companion that’s on your side.” Pi, Inflection says, is a supportive “neutral listener” that can talk with users about personal problems and offer advice.

Jasper

Year founded: 2021

Valuation: $1.5 billion

What it does: Jasper is aimed at marketers and uses AI to create everything from marketing copy and blog posts to images.

What makes it unique: Jasper has been able to show the advantages of successfully applying generative AI to a specific industry and continued to expand on its suite of products. While it started off with a product for content marketers, “with the introduction of Jasper Campaigns, there is a natural expansion to more marketing personas,” George Mathew , managing director at Insight Partners , who is an investor, told me. This makes it a likely enterprise giant in the future, Bessemer Venture Partners ’ Sameer Dholakia told me, since they’ve “grown from having a product to a solution that you will keep putting down a credit card for.”

Lightricks?

Year founded: 2013

Valuation: $1.8 billion, according to CB Insights?

What it does: The Israeli company develops a range of video- and image-editing mobile apps, and is best-known for its selfie-editing app, Facetune.?

What makes it unique: Lightricks ' suite of mobile apps command a sizable audience already, with the company claiming to have over 30 million monthly users and 5.2 million monthly subscribers. It’s making AI accessible to influencers and content creators, and has also rolled out new AI-powered “text-to-image” capabilities for two of its apps, Motionleap and Photoleap.

Replit

Year founded: 2016

Valuation: $1.2 billion, according to CB Insights?

What it does: The San Francisco-based company competes with GitHub to help developers code faster and recently closed a $97.4 million fundraising round. It has an AI-assisted code-generating tool called Ghostwriter which helps users with coding and writing software — by making suggestions based on what users type and other context from their accounts, like the programming languages they’re using.

What makes it unique: Replit says it’s doubled its user base in a little over a year to 22.5 million developers, and claims that developers have created 235 million projects on the platform. These stats show that there are millions of humans who find Replit a better and faster way to build applications, said Nikita Shamgunov , partner at Khosla Ventures that’s invested in the company. “As AI makes humans more productive, we are on the path for every person to be a developer,” he said. “We believe that Replit will be the first platform with one billion developers.”?

Runway

Year founded: 2018

Valuation: $1.5 billion valuation, according to CB Insights?

What it does: Runway is one of the startups pioneering AI-powered text-to-image and -video capabilities, and is also one of the two startups behind the popular Stable Diffusion. It’s an end-to-end AI startup that builds everything from the underlying models to the infrastructure layer to the end application.

What makes it unique: Runway is one of the few companies already building net new revenue-generating businesses natively with generative AI, pointed out Tim Porter , managing director at Madrona . Its tools, for example, were utilized in the award-winning blockbuster Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. “As we shift from software applications to intelligent applications, Runway stands out with their years of cutting-edge research to create and tune their own AI models – they combine this with a disciplined focus on their customers, their community, and delivering a delightfully easy to use but powerful product,” Porter said. “We believe that Cristóbal Valenzuela and the team at Runway will change how we think about creative work and make it far more accessible than ever before.”?

Stability AI

Year founded: 2020

Valuation: $1 billion, according to CB Insights

What it does: London-based Stability AI is the other startup behind Stable Diffusion, which competes with other digital-image tools like OpenAI’s Dall-E 2, spitting out pictures based on the description people type.

What makes it unique: The company says it stands apart from competitors because its open-source software is available to the public. But a recent Forbes investigation has cast doubts on the company’s future, reporting that its founder Emad Mostaque lied about his background, his achievements, and his partnerships, and overstated his credentials.

This Week in AI

Here’s where we bring you up-to-speed with the latest advancements from the world of AI.

• This week, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published an essay titled “Why AI Will Save the World,” which makes the case that AI has the potential to dramatically improve life on Earth – and is not a threat as many factions of the industry have come to believe. The 7,000-word opus is reminiscent of his defining essay in The Wall Street Journal a decade ago, which made the case for “software eating the world.”
• As mentioned above, AI startup Cohere has raised $270 million in new funding from a mix of venture capital and strategic investors, including 甲骨文 and 英伟达 .?
• There’s a new generative AI startup on the block: Contextual AI. The startup aims to build LLMs for enterprises and launched from stealth this week with a $20 million seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Lightspeed , Greycroft , SV Angel and other well-known angel investors including Elad Gil , Sarah Guo , Harry Stebbings , and others.
• The artificial-intelligence boom is drawing tech workers back to San Francisco, with spots like Hayes Valley increasingly becoming known as “Cerebral Valley.” Workers are being drawn back to the city as investors pour money into AI – $10.7 billion in funding for generative AI startups during the first quarter alone, according to PitchBook.?
• Even so, hundreds of AI industry leaders have signed a stark one-sentence letter warning that the artificial intelligence they are developing could one day pose an existential threat to humanity. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads the statement from the nonprofit Center for AI Safety . Some 350 researchers and executives signed the letter, including OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

TechTok?

Catch up on the tech headlines you may have missed this week and what our members are saying about them on LinkedIn.

• 苹果 rolled out the Vision Pro, its much-awaited augmented reality headset at its annual developer conference WWDC this week. And while reactions to it were "all over the place," many consumers see its deep potential, especially in the tech giant's hands.
• Reddit, Inc. is laying off approximately 5% of its workforce — about 90 employees — and slowing down hiring, as it restructures in efforts to break even next year, The Wall Street Journal reported. The cost cuts are happening as the company plans new revenue streams, including charging artificial-intelligence firms and other third-party developers for access to its data.
• Twitter 's new CEO, Linda Yaccarino , faces a few obstacles after starting the role Monday — and ad sales may be top of the agenda. For the five weeks of April 1 to the first week of May, the social media platform's U.S. advertising revenue was down 59% from the same period a year ago — at $88 million, reported The New York Times.
• Salesforce is experimenting with a novel way to bring workers back into the office. The sales-software giant will donate $10 to local charities for each day an employee heads into the office June 12-23. The program aims to raise up to $2.5 million, and employees will help choose the charities.?
• 英伟达 ’s stock has tripled since the start of the year, making it “by far” the best performer in the S&P 500. And investor enthusiasm for Nvidia’s graphics processing units — used to power artificial intelligence programs — means the company’s shares could keep climbing.

Movers and Shakers

Here’s keeping tabs on key executives on the move and other big pivots in the tech industry. Please send me personnel moves within emerging tech.

• Twitter has lost two safety executives in the past week, with AJ Brown , its head of brand safety and ad quality, and Ella Irwin , head of trust and safety, both resigning.Quantum tech-focused VC fund QDNL Participations has hired Chad Rigetti , founder of Rigetti Computing, as a venture partner.
• Global growth equity investor Summit Partners has announced that John Coughlin is joining the firm’s Executive-in-Residence program.
• Cybersecurity-focused VC firm NightDragon has hired Joe Bubniak as VP of corporate development and partnerships. He previously was a tech banker at JPMorgan.
• San Francisco-based crypto VC firm Electric Capital has promoted Ken Deeter and Maria Shen to general partners.
• Alphabet’s independent VC wing GV (Google Ventures) has promoted Brendan Bulik-Sullivan , Crystal Huang , Frederique Dame and Issi Rozen to general partners.

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