AI Leaders to Watch

As seen in Business Insider (subscription required)

What are the hottest use cases for AI? And which business activities is it most likely to disrupt?

One way to gauge that is to look at which application providers entered the year with the most momentum. These are companies offering solutions for specific—sometimes very specific—corporate or consumer activities, rather than big foundation model players like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, or Anthropic.   

Below, we highlight 24 companies to watch in 2024, including 15 “must-know” leaders that already have gained customer traction and market support and 9 “emerging disrupters” that are attracting investor attention and market recognition in this rapidly evolving space. (For more on our selection, see the Methodology section.)

The application providers on the list include Glean, which offers an AI-powered search engine for a company's internal documentation; Writer, which helps create consistent marketing and other documentation based on a company’s brand standards and guidelines; and Synthesia, which creates humanlike avatars for training, customer service, marketing, and other uses.

Others on the list are focusing on industry-specific solutions, such as Harvey, an AI tool developed for law firms and corporate law departments, and Hippocratic, an AI model trained specifically for the heavily regulated healthcare industry.  

Methodology

To select the 24 to watch in 2024, we used a data-driven evaluation, looking at founding year, funding, investor reputation, market recognition, and headcount at the end of 2023. Total funding numbers shown above are current through May 1, 2024.

For the must-know leaders, we considered companies that:

• Have raised at least $75 million to date or are self-funded
• Have at least one leading investor involved
• Have been included in at least two leading market maps, “best of” lists, or other publications
• Have at least 25 employees and more than 20% year-over-year headcount growth

For the emerging disrupters, we considered companies that:

• Were founded in 2021 or later
• Have raised at least $20 million to date
• Have at least one leading investor involved
• Have been included in at least one leading market map, “best of” list, or other publication

Funding and series data was sourced from Crunchbase.