Organizations shaping AI

Quantitative trading firm and global liquidity provider founded in 2013, where traders and AI researchers build autonomous trading agents and machine-learning-driven strategies for financial markets.

Developed large-model navigation and simulation systems for autonomous delivery robots, technology Serve Robotics acquired in 2025 to advance its last-mile autonomy stack.

Privacy-focused, decentralized generative-AI platform founded in 2024 by Erik Voorhees, founder of ShapeShift. Offers access to open models for text, image, and code with on-device data and decentralized inference.

Builds data platforms and AI-enabled products for precision health, connecting clinical research, care delivery and longitudinal health data. It began inside Google X and became an independent company in 2026.

Public land-grant research university in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA (Virginia Tech), founded in 1872 and known for engineering.

VMware is a cloud-computing and virtualization company founded in 1998 in Palo Alto, known for pioneering x86 server virtualization.

Developed embedding and reranking models that help AI applications retrieve relevant information from text, code, images and video. Its team and technology joined MongoDB, where the models continue as part of its retrieval and database infrastructure.

Private liberal arts university in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA, founded in 1834.

American mass-media and entertainment conglomerate (The Walt Disney Company), founded in 1923 by Walt and Roy Disney.

Audio-LLM company founded in 2024 by Alexis Conneau, a former OpenAI researcher who helped create ChatGPT's voice. Aims to bring emotional intelligence to spoken AI; later acquired by Meta.

AI video-compression startup, founded in 2016; acquired by Apple in 2023.

Website-builder company, founded in 2006, that lets users create sites and online stores; acquired by Square in 2018.

Weights & Biases

Provides tools for tracking experiments, managing models and datasets, and evaluating and monitoring AI applications, helping teams reproduce work and move systems from research into production.

Private liberal-arts college offering undergraduate education in computer science and related disciplines.

Public university in Bellingham, Washington, USA, founded in 1893.

WhatsApp is an encrypted messaging platform founded by Jan Koum and Brian Acton and acquired by Facebook in 2014. Its scale, privacy model, and integration into Meta make it part of the communications infrastructure through which consumer AI agents and assistants are likely to reach users.

Berkeley-based startup co-founded by wind-industry veteran Eric Thompson and ML researcher Jason Yosinski (former head of Uber's deep-learning team). Uses low-cost sensors and machine learning to forecast wind and improve turbine energy output.

Video-hosting and marketing platform for businesses, founded in 2006.

Wolfram Research is a software company founded in 1987 by Stephen Wolfram, known for the Mathematica computing system and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine.

Builds enterprise software for human resources and finance on a unified data platform. Its machine-learning systems and AI agents automate recruiting, contracts, finance, IT, and other organizational workflows.

Workshop Labs

Public-benefit AI research company developing user-aligned models, accessible post-training, privacy-preserving infrastructure, and systems designed for human collaboration.

Cross-platform mobile-development framework company, founded in 2011, acquired by Microsoft in 2016.

Yelp is a crowd-sourced local-business review platform founded in 2004 and headquartered in San Francisco.

Zendesk is a customer-service software company founded in 2007 in Copenhagen and now based in San Francisco, providing cloud-based support and ticketing tools.