Organizations shaping AI

Palantir

Software company building data-integration, analytics, and operational AI platforms for government and enterprise customers.

Databricks

Data and AI platform company built around Apache Spark; develops the open DBRX language model.

Aleph Alpha

German AI company building language models and enterprise AI systems, with emphasis on European customers, sovereignty, and explainability.

Engram

AI research lab building models that learn from a user or organization's private context, including long-running workspace knowledge and shared document corpora. Launched with $98M from General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Factory, Modern, Amplify Partners, Neo, SV Angel, and others.

Essential AI

AI startup co-founded by Transformer first author Ashish Vaswani. Vaswani's LinkedIn profile shows his Essential AI role ending in June 2026 and a new NVIDIA computer-scientist role beginning the same month, consistent with an NVIDIA acqui-hire.

Discovery Loop

Discovery Loop is a public benefit corporation building systems that automate work across machine learning, science, and engineering. Its mission is to accelerate technical and scientific discovery by making AI capable of solving important research and engineering problems.

UMA

UMA develops vertically integrated, general-purpose mobile and humanoid robots for dexterous work in real-world settings. Its founding team draws on Tesla Optimus, Google robotics and Hugging Face's open-source LeRobot platform.

Applied Compute

AI startup building enterprise-specific agents and infrastructure for training, deploying, and continuously improving models on company workflows and data. In April 2026 it announced an $80 million round led by Kleiner Perkins, bringing total funding to $160 million.

Element AI sought to turn Montreal's deep-learning research base into enterprise products spanning language, vision, search and decision support. Its team and technology became the foundation of a Canadian AI innovation hub inside ServiceNow.

Mercor

Mercor is a San Francisco-based AI recruiting and talent-marketplace startup founded by Thiel Fellows Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha. It uses large language models to vet candidates and supplies human experts for AI training-data work.

Salesforce's AI research organization develops language models, agents and methods for trusted enterprise AI. Its work has included large-scale language modeling, controllable generation, conversational systems, causal inference and benchmarks for agents operating in business software.

Domyn

Develops sovereign AI models, agents, infrastructure, and enterprise software for regulated industries, designed to give organizations control over their data, models, and deployment.

Sierra

Enterprise AI company building conversational agents for customer service and business workflows.

Afresh

Afresh builds AI software for grocery operations, with tools for store ordering, production planning, inventory management, demand forecasting, and distribution-center buying. Its platform is focused on fresh-food supply chains, where better forecasting can improve availability and reduce waste.

Box

Box provides an intelligent content-management platform for organizations to secure, govern, collaborate on, and automate work across business files. Box AI adds search, extraction, content generation, and customizable agents grounded in company data and existing permissions.

C3.ai is a Redwood City, California-based enterprise AI software company founded by Thomas Siebel, offering predictive analytics and machine learning applications for industries including energy, financial services, and defense; it went public on the NYSE in December 2020.

Contextual AI

Startup building retrieval-augmented generation systems for enterprises, founded by the originators of RAG.

Dataiku

Dataiku is a data-science and machine-learning platform company in Paris, offering an end-to-end environment for building and deploying analytics and AI.

Developed collaborative knowledge-discovery software that analyzed working documents, identified entities, and recommended related information for defense, intelligence, and financial-services users. Salesforce acquired the company in 2019.

Software company that developed business-rule, optimization, visualization, and supply-chain tools, including ILOG Solver, before its acquisition by IBM.

French AI company building large language models and enterprise AI products.

Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed Venture Partners is a global venture-capital firm backing technology companies from seed through growth. Its AI portfolio and writing emphasize infrastructure, enterprise software, security, developer tools, and frontier AI companies including Anthropic.

Builds and deploys computer-vision and agentic systems for manufacturing, life sciences, agriculture, and other demanding industrial environments; it now operates as part of Domyn.

Ramp

Financial operations platform combining corporate cards, expense management, accounts payable, procurement, travel, and accounting automation, with agents that enforce spending policies and surface anomalies and savings opportunities.