ViSenze makes the Datamation Top 45 AI company List for 2019 alongside giants like Amazon, Google, Nvidia, IBM, Tencent and Twilio. This is the third time ViSenze has made their list; previously featured on the Top 20 (2016) and Top 25 (2017) AI companies on Datamation’s list. We’re really happy to see other smaller AI companies like us joining the list such as OpenAI and OneModel.
“To keep up with the AI market, we have updated our list of top AI companies playing a role in shaping the future of AI and its capabilities and feature companies that are particularly noteworthy as well as those that invested significantly in AI,” Datamation
As artificial intelligence has become a growing force in business, today’s top AI companies are leaders in this emerging technology.
Often leveraging cloud computing, AI companies mix and match myriad technologies. Foremost among these is machine learning, but today’s AI leading firms tech ranging from predictive analytics to business intelligence to data warehouse tools to deep learning.
Entire industries are being reshaped by AI. RPA companies have completely shifted their platforms. AI in healthcare is changing patient care in numerous – and major – ways.
AI companies are attracting massive investment from venture capitalist firms and giant firms like Microsoft and Google. Academic AI research is growing, as are AI job openings across a multitude of industries. All of this is documented in the AI Index, produced by Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute.
Consulting giant Accenture believes AI has the potential to boost rates of profitability by an average of 38 percentage points and could lead to an economic boost of $14 trillion in additional gross value added (GVA) by 2035.
In truth, artificial intelligence holds not just possibilities, but a plethora of risks. “It will have a huge economic impact but also change society, and it’s hard to make strong predictions, but clearly job markets will be affected,” said Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, and head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms.
To keep up with the AI market, we have updated our list of top AI companies playing a key role in shaping the future of AI. We feature artificial intelligence companies that are commercially successful as well as those that have invested significantly in artificial intelligence.
AI companies in the years ahead are forecast to see exponential growth in deep learning, machine learning and natural language processing.
Top AI Companies: The Leaders
The AI vendors are leading the market by providing AI and ML through their popular cloud platforms, enabling companies to incorporate AI into applications and systems without the expense of developing it in-house.
1) Amazon Web Services
Clearly the leader in cloud computing, AWS offers both consumer and business-oriented AI products and services and many of its professional AI services are built on consumer products. Amazon Echo brings artificial intelligence into the home through the intelligent voice server, Alexa. For AWS, the company’s primary AI services include Lex, a business version of Alexa; Polly, which turns text to speech; and Rekognition, an image recognition service.
2) Google Cloud Platform
Google, a leader in AI and data analytics, is on a massive AI acquisition binge, having acquired myriad AI startups in the last several years. Google is deeply invested in furthering artificial intelligence capabilities. In addition to using AI to improve its services, Google Cloud sells a number of AI and machine learning services to business. It has an industry-leading software project in TensorFlow as well as its own Tensor AI chip project.
3) IBM Cloud
IBM has been a leader in the field of artificial intelligence since the 1950s. Its efforts in recent years are around IBM Watson, including an a AI-based cognitive service, AI software as a service, and scale-out systems designed for delivering cloud-based analytics and AI services. It has been acquisitive, purchasing a number of AI startups over several years. It benefits from having a strong cloud platform.
4) Microsoft Azure
Microsoft has a mix of consumer-facing and business/IT AI projects. On the consumer side it has Cortana, the digital assistant that comes with Windows and now is available for smartphones other than Windows Phone, and the chatbot Zo that talks like a teenager. On its Azure cloud service, Microsoft sells AI services such as bot services, machine learning and cognitive services.
5) Alibaba Cloud
The leading cloud computing platform in Asia, Alibaba offers clients a sophisticated Machine Learning Platform for AI. Significantly, the platform offers a visual interface for ease of use, so companies can drag and drop various components into a canvas to assemble their AI functionality. Also included in the platform are scores of algorithm components that can handle any number of chores, enabling customers to use pre-built solutions. Expect huge AI growth from Alibaba.
Top AI Companies: Notable Vendors
These top AI providers are demonstrating that artificial intelligence can be used in a dazzling number of ways, across virtually every industry sector.
6) Anduril Industries
Palmer Luckey is one of the most intriguing figures in today’s emerging tech. He co-founded Oculous, which Facebook bought for a cool $2 billion. Post Facebook, at the ripe age of 27, he’s launched Anduril, which adds sophisticated sensors and vehicles and drones to create a threat protection zone. Products include Sentry Tower (autonomous awareness), Ghost sUAS (unmanned ISR) and Anvil (precision kinetic intercept).
7) Sift
Formerly known as Sift Science, the company provides multiple fraud management services in one platform. Sift mines thousands of data points from around the web to train in detecting fraud patterns. Its machine learning tools, bolstered by data analytics, seek insight on fraud before it happens.
8) Nauto
Nauto offers an AI-powered driver behavior learning platform. So instead of self-driving cars, Nauto is an AI-technology designed to improve the safety of commercial fleets today as well as autonomous fleets by assessing how drivers interact with the vehicle and the road ahead to reduce distracted driving and prevent collisions.
9) Tempus
Tempus – “data driven precision medicine” – uses AI to fight disease and bolster patient outcomes. It gathers and analyzes massive pools of medical and clinical data at scale to provide precision medicine that personalizes and optimizes treatments to each individual’s specific health needs. Applications includes neurology, psychiatry and oncology.
10) Salesforce
In recent years, Salesforce has acquired a handful of AI companies and unveiled Salesforce Einstein, their artificial intelligence service. Their latest initiative, which includes an extensive team of data scientists, uses machine learning to help employees more efficiently perform tasks by simplifying and speeding them up. In addition to Salesforce’s own employees, Einstein will be available for customers who can build their own applications.
11) Automation Anywhere
A dominant vendor in the small but growing Robotic Process Automation market – it actually coined the term RPA – Automation Anywhere makes great use of AI. Its applications included “attended” RPA, which helps office works do mundane, repetitive tasks much more efficiently, employing the power of machine learning. A vendor to watch.
12) SenSat
SenSat builds digital copies of physical environments and applies AI modeling to help understand the parameters of that environment and provide valuable feedback. For example, it can give spatial and volume statistics about a roadway that is about to undergo repair work. Boosting its fortunes, in October 2019, Tencent led a $10 million in SenSat.
13) Phrasee
Phrasee specializes in natural language generation for marketing copy. Its natural language generation system can generate millions of human-sounding variants of marketing at the touch of a button, allowing customers to tailor their copy to targeted customers. Retail/marketing and AI is a combination on a rapid growth curve in the AI sector.
14) Defined Crowd
Using a combination of human freelancers and a system built with machine learning automation, Defined Crowd provides a data set that companies can leverage to improve the performance of their algorithms. This union of the human with AI is a brilliant stroke – expect many more startups with this combo.
15) Pymetrics
Based in New York City, Pymetrics leverages AI to help companies hire the optimal candidates, by examining more than a resume scan. Customers have their best employees fill out the Pymetrics assessment, which then creates a model for what future ideal candidates should be like. In essence, the AI-based system is attempting to find more new staff that will fit in well with the existing top staff.
16) Siemens
Siemens, the famed legacy German multinational, focuses on areas like energy, electrification, digitization, and automation, as well as resource-saving and energy efficient technologies and a leading provider of devices and systems for medical diagnosis, power generation, and transmission. Yes, the Siemens web site actually makes reference to “AI in the beer garden.”
17) Socure
Given how lucrative it is for hackers, will identity theft ever go away? Unlikely, but New York City-based Socure is using AI to fight it. Its AI-enable system monitors and checks the quality of countless data sources – far more than a human, of course, but more important, far more than a legacy system that doesn’t have the speed and flexibility and insight of AI. Its motto is “identify more real people in real time.”
18) AEye
AEye builds the vision algorithms, software and hardware used to guide autonomous vehicles. Its LiDAR technology focuses on the most important information in a vehicle’s sightline, such as people, other cars and animals, while putting less emphasis on things like the sky, buildings and surrounding vegetation.
19) Rev.com
In a world with a vast ocean of podcasts and videos to transcribe, Rev uses AI to find its market. An AI-powered – but human assisted – transcription provider, the company also sells access to developers, so tech-savvy folks can use its speech recognition technology. But the key part here is the combination of human with AI, which is a sweet spot in the effective use cases for artificial intelligence.
20) Suki.ai
It’s not enough that Suki offers a AI-powered software solution that assists doctors as they make voice notes in a busy day. Suki’s aim – using the power of AI to learn over time – is to mold and adapt to users with repeated use, so the solution becomes ever more of a time saver and efficiency booster for physicians and healthcare workers. In a sign of the times, Suki is delivered with COVID-19 data and templates to speed this critically important process.
21) Verkada
In the future, everything will be tracked by intelligent cameras. Verkada is working to create that future by offering a network of AI-assisted cameras that can handle sophisticated movement monitoring. Given all the uses for such cameras (which employ the cloud), it’s no surprise that the company’s clients range from schools to shopping malls.
22) DataVisor
DataVisor uses machine learning to detect fraud and financial crime detection, utilizing unsupervised machine learning to identify attack campaigns before they conduct any damage. DataVisor protects companies from attacks such as account takeovers, fake account creation, money laundering, fake social posts, fraudulent transactions and more.
23) People.ai
Founded in 2016, People.ai’s goal is to streamline the life of salespeople, assisting them in putting the reams of small details into the relevant CRM systems, chiefly Salesforce. Think of all those pesky info bits from texting, your calendar, endless Slack conversations – People.ai aims to help you with all that. Plus: the system attempts to coach sales reps on the most effective methods to spend their time.
24) AlphaSense
AlphaSense is an AI-powered search engine designed for investment firms, banks, and Fortune 500 companies focused on searching for important information within earnings call transcripts, SEC filings, news, and research. The technology uses artificial intelligence to expand keyword searches for relevant content.
25) Icertis
The remarkable truth about AI is that it keeps moving up the food chain in terms of the sophisticated tasks it can handle. Taking a big step up from simple automation, Icertis – with a decade under its belt – handles millions of business contracts. Leveraging the cloud, the company’s solution automates certain tasks, and scans previous contract details. The company has gained some big clients, including Microsoft.
26) Casetext
Casetext is an AI-powered legal search engine specializing in legal documents, with a database of more than 10 million statutes, cases, and regulations. A recent study comparing legal research platforms found that attorneys using Casetext’s CARA AI finished their research more than 20 percent faster, required 4.4 times fewer searches to accomplish the same research task, and rated the cases they found as significantly more relevant than those found with a legacy research tool.
27) Blue River Tech
Blue River Tech is a subsidiary of Deere & Co. that combines artificial intelligence and computer vision to build smart farm tech – clearly a growing need, given population growth. The company’s See & Spray technology can detect individual plants and apply herbicide to the weeds only. This reduces the amount of chemicals sprayed by up to 90% over traditional methods.
28) Nvidia
Nvidia’s emergence as an AI leader was hardly overnight. It has been promoting its CUDA GPU programming language for nearly two decades. AI developers have come to see the value in the GPU’s massively parallel processing design and embraced Nvidia GPUs for machine learning and artificial intelligence. One area Nvidia is making a big push is in self-driving cars, but it is one of many efforts.
29) Bright Machines
Automation in factories has been progressing for years, even decades, but Bright Machines hopes to push it a quantum leap forward. Based in San Francisco, the AI company is leveraging advances in robotics like machine learning and facial recognition. Its solutions can accomplish any number of fine-grain tasks that might previously have required the exactitude of a skilled human.
30) Orbital Insight
Orbital Insight uses satellite geospatial imagery and artificial intelligence to gain insights not visible to the human eye. It uses data from satellites, drones, balloons and other aircraft to look for answers or insight on things related to the agriculture and energy industries that normally wouldn’t be visible. The company touts itself as “the leader in geospatial analytics.”
31) Brighterion
Once a stand alone company and now a division of MasterCard, Brighterion offers AI for the financial services industry, specifically designed to block fraud rates. The company’s AI Express is a fast-to-market solution – within 6-8 weeks – that is custom designed for customers. Its solution is used by most of the 100 largest banks.
32) H2O
H2O.ai provides an open source machine learning platform that makes it easy to build smart applications. Used by many thousands of data scientists across a large community of organizations worldwide, H2O claims to be “the world’s leading open source deep learning platform.” H20.ai provides solutions for insurance, healthcare, telecom, marketing, financial service, retail, and manufacturing.
33) Intel
With a long legacy as the top chipmaker, Intel has both hardware and software AI initiatives in the works. Its Nervana processor is a deep learning processor while Movidius is geared toward neural networks and visual recognition. Intel is also working on natural language processing and deep learning through software and hardware. In a sign of the times, one of the company’s slogan is “accelerate your AI journey with Intel.”
34) Clarifai
Clarifai is an image recognition platform that helps users organize, filter, and search their image database. Images and videos are tagged, teaching the technology to find similarities in images. Its AI solution is offered via mobile, on-premise or API. Image recognition is a huge growth area for AI.
35) X.ai
Geared for busy users, X.ai’s intelligent virtual assistant “Amy” helps users schedule meetings. The concept is simple — if you receive a meeting request but don’t have time to work out logistics, you copy Amy onto the email and she handles it. Through machine learning and natural language processing, Amy schedules the best time and location for your meeting based on your preferences and schedule. We all need a helper like this in our lives.
36) Zebra Medical Vision
Zebra Medical Systems is an Israeli company that applies deep learning techniques to the field of radiology. It claims it can predict multiple diseases with better-than-human accuracy by examining a huge library of medical images and a specialized examination technology. It recently moved its algorithms to Google Cloud to help it scale. It offers inexpensive medical scans.
37) Iris AI
Iris AI helps researchers sort through scientific work and research to find the relevant information, and as it is used, it learns how to make better searchers. Since its launch, countless people have tried the service, some becoming regular users. Its Iris.ai release includes the Focus tool, an intelligent mechanism to refine and collate a reading list of research literature, cutting out a huge amount of manual effort.
38) Freenome
Freenome uses artificial intelligence to conduct cancer screenings and diagnostic tests to spot signs of cancer earlier than possible with traditional testing methods. It uses non-invasive blood tests to recognize disease-associated patterns. The company’s solution has trained on cancer-positive blood samples, which enable it to detect problems using specific biomarkers.
39) Neurala
Neurala claims that it helps users improve visual inspection problem using AI. It develops The Neurala Brain, a deep learning neural network software that makes devices like cameras, phones and drones smarter and easier to use. AI tends to be power-hungry but The Neurala Brain uses audio and visual input in low-power settings to make simple devices more intelligent.
40) Graphcore
Graphcore makes what it calls the Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), a processor specifically for machine learning, used to build high performance machines. The IPU’s unique architecture allows developers to run current machine learning models orders of magnitude faster and undertake entirely new types of work not possible with current technologies.
41) CognitiveScale
CognitiveScale builds customer service AI apps for the healthcare, insurance, financial services and digital commerce industries. Its products are built on its Cortex augmented intelligence platform for companies to design, development, delivery, and manage enterprise-grade AI systems. It also has an AI marketplace, an online AI collaboration system for business experts, researchers, data scientists, and developers to solve problems.
42) iCarbonX
iCarbonX is a Chinese biotech startup that uses artificial intelligence to provide personalized health analyses and health index predictions. It has formed an alliance with seven technology companies from around the world that specialize in gathering different types of health-care data, and will use algorithms to analyze genomic, physiological and behavioral data and provide customized health and medical advice.
43) OneModel
Human Resources can be a bifurcated place, with different apps for each task HR handles. OneModel is a talent analytics accelerator that helps HR departments handle employees, career pathing, recruiting, succession, exits, engagement, surveys, HR effectiveness, payrolls, planning, and others, all in one place and in one uniform way. The company’s core goal is to equip HR pros with machine learning smarts.
44) Lobster
AI meets social media. Lobster is an AI-powered platform that helps brands, advertisers and media outlets find and license user-generated social media content by scanning major social networks and several cloud storage providers for images and video, using AI-tagging and machine learning algorithms to identify the most relevant content. It then provides those images to clients for a fee.
45) Next IT
Next IT, now part of Verint, is one of the pioneers in customer service chatbots. It develops conversational AI for customer engagement and workforce support on any endpoint. The company’s Alme platform powers natural language business products that are continually enhanced through A.I.-powered tools that empower human trainers to assess performance and end-user satisfaction.
46) Pointr
Pointr is an indoor positioning and navigation company with analytics and messaging features to help people navigate busy locations, like train stations and airport terminals. Its modules include indoor navigation, contextual notifications, location-based analytics and location tracking. Its Bluetook beacons use customer phones to help orient them around the building.
47) Tencent
One of the largest social media companies to come out of China, Tencent has an advanced AI lab which developed tools to process information across its ecosystem, including natural language processing, news aggregators and facial recognition. They also have one of China’s top video streaming platforms, Tencent Music. A giant in the field, they also fund AI efforts.
48) Xnor.ai
AI applications are massive consumers of computing resources, hence the special chips required for AI. Xnor is working to alleviate the strain that AI puts on infrastructure by building a solution that allows heavy duty algorithms to be powered by everyday hardware. This is a key challenge in the move to democratize AI, to make it useable by anyone; it also ties into the trend toward edge computing. Apple acquired the company in early 2020.
49) Twilio
Twilio is a cloud communications platform as a service (PaaS) company that allows software developers to integrate text messages, phone calls, and video calls into applications through the use of various APIs. Twilio’s services are accessed over HTTP and are billed based on usage. The Twilio Autopilot offering allows companies to build and train AI-driven chatbots.
50) ViSenze
ViSenze’s artificial intelligence visual recognition technology works by recommending visually similar items to users when shopping online. Its advanced visual search and image recognition solutions to help businesses in eCommerce, mCommerce and online advertising by recommending visually similar items to online shoppers.
51) SenseTime
Based on Asia, SenseTime develops facial recognition technology that can be applied to payment and picture analysis. It is used in banks and security systems. Its valuation is impressive, racking several billion dollars in recent years. Specializes in deep learning, education and fintech.
52) Flatiron Health
Using machine learning to mine health data for cancer research, Flatiron finds cancer research information in near real time, drawing on a variety of sources. The company raised more than $175 million in Series C funding before being acquired earlier by cancer research giant Roache.
53) Deep 6
Deep 6 uses AI to, in its own words, “find more patients in minutes, not months.” The patients in this sense are participants in clinical trials – a critical part of the research process in developing new medicine; certainly one of the challenging issues finding a vaccine for COVID-19 is finding a community of appropriate candidates. Deep 6 accomplishes this by using a AI-powered system to scan through medical records, with the ability understand patterns in human health.
54) Directly
Considered one of the best AI-driven customer support tool out there, Directly counts Microsoft as a customer. It helps its customers by intelligently routing their questions to chatbots to answer their questions personally or to customer support personnel. It prides itself on“intelligent automation.”
55) Element AI
Based on Montreal, Element AI provides a platform for companies to build AI-powered solutions, firms that may not have the talent in-house to do it. Element AI says it supports building apps for predictive modeling, forecasting modeling, conversational AI and natural language processing, image recognition and automatic tagging of attributes based on images. Founded in 2016.
56) Pony.ai
Pony.ai develops software for self-driving cars – it was created by ex-Google and Baidu engineers who felt the big companies are moving too slow. It has already made its first fully autonomous driving demonstration. It now operates a self-driving ride-sharing fleet in Guangzhou, China, using cars from a local auto maker. The company raised $400 million from Toyota.
57) C3.ai
Focusing on enterprise AI, C3.ai offers a wide array of pre-built applications, along with a PaaS solution, to enable the development of enterprise-level AI, IoT applications and analytics software. These AI-fueled applications serve a wide array of sectors and and industry verticals, from supply chains to healthcare to anti-fraud efforts. The goal is to speed and optimize the process of digital transformation.
58) Big Panda
Some of the best applications of AI “look into the future” to prevent future problem. Such is the goal with BigPanda, which leverages AI to lessen or stop IT outages prior to when they take down a full business, an ecommerce operation or a mission-critical application. In essence, this company’s goal is the magic of AIOps, using AI to improve admin and IT operations. A major growth area.
59) Banjo
Banjo offers an AI-powered “event-detection engine” that draws on geolocated public posts made from mobile devices to tell you what is going on in your immediate area. It draws upon more than a dozen major social networks to give a live digital capture of everything that’s happening in the world and near you in real-time.
60) Stem
Stem is a veteran energy storage firm that has adopted AI to help automate energy management by using AI to determine when to charge energy storage systems and when to draw on them. Focused on energy forecasting and automated control.
61) Bossa Nova Robotics
The robots imagined by1950s futurists were tin men that could walk and talk – and probably become masters of the human race. It hasn’t turned out that way (fortunately) but Bossa Nova Robotics is using AI to make today’s robots more effective. Indeed, modern robots are rarely shaped like humans; Bossa Nova’s resemble a tall vacuum cleaner. Ironically, Bossa Nova started as a robotic toy maker, but now has full scale robots in retailers like Walmart. The robots roll up and down the shelves, spotting inventory problems – and allowing cost savings on human workers.
62) Tamr
In a world run by data, in many cases, someone – or some system – has to prep that data so that it’s useable. Data prep is unglamorous but absolutely essential. Tamr combines machine learning and human tech staff to help customers optimize and integrate the highest value datasets into its operations. Referred to as an enterprise-scale data unification company. Significantly, Tamr enables cloud native, on-premise or hybrid scenarios – truly a good fit for today’s data-driven, multi-cloud world.
63) Xant
Formerly known as InsideSales.com, Xant underwent a major rebrand, and is now focusing on the enterprise market. It is a sales acceleration platform that is a predictive and prescriptive self-learning engine by helping assist in a sale and providing guidance to the salesperson to help close the deal. At its core is machine learning.
64) Dataminr
Dataminr is a global real-time information discovery company that monitors news feeds for high impact events and critical breaking news far faster than your Google News feed. It cuts through the clutter of non-news or irrelevant news to specific industries and only gives them highly relevant news when it happens. For news sensitive vendors, its goal is to detect early risks from media coverage.
65) K Health
There’s a gray area in our lives in terms of healthcare; we ask ourselves, does this problem I’m having really require making a doctor’s appointment, or could a major dose of simple information be enough? K Health’s AI solution operates in this area. Users can text with a doctor or find similar cases near them (useful for COVID-19). And, using a model built from a vast store of anonymous health records, its system offers help based on how a users complaint correlates with this vast history of other patients. Think of K Health as the advanced edge of telemedicine.
66) Qualcomm
Driving the AI revolution with the highly capable smartphone chips it makes, Qualcomm leverages a signal processor for image and sound capabilities. Given its market size and power, it’s likely that Qualcomm will continue to be a key driver of AI functionality in the all-important consumer device market.
67) HyperScience
HyperScience is designed to cut down on the tedium of mundane tasks, like filling out forms or data entry of hand-written forms. It also processes the relevant information from forms rather than requiring that a human read through the whole form. It touts itself as “intelligent document processing.”
68) Vivint
Vivint’s Smart Home is a highly popular smart home services in North America, with features like security cameras, heating and cooling management, door and window security and a remote speaker to talk to people at the door. All of this is monitored by AI, which learns the residents’ behavioral patterns and adjusts management accordingly.
69) Anki
Not to be confused with the spaced repetition flashcard teaching program with the same name, Anki specializes in entertainment robotics for kids (or kids at heart). It uses a mixture of computer-vision, advanced robotics, and a set of machine-learning algorithms that Anki calls the “emotional engine” to make its robots have a personality. Motto: “We create robots that move you.”
70) Ayasdi
Ayasdi is a machine intelligence software company that offers intelligent applications to its clients around the world for using Big Data and complex data analytics problems. Its goal is to help customers automate what would be the manual processes of using their own unique data. Very much focused on the enterprise AI sector.
71) iCarbonX
iCarbonX is a China-based AI platform for health care designed to build an ecosystem of digital life based on the combination of consumers’ life data, internet and artificial intelligence. The idea is that the individual will lead a healthy life through the digital life ecosystem, and that by collecting data from of millions participants, new methods of health care can be found through data mining and machine learning.
72) CrowdStrike
This cloud-based SaaS firm focuses on endpoint security. Leveraging AI, CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform enables it to identify what it calls active indicators of attack to detect malicious activity before a breach actually happens. It presents the network administrators with actionable intelligence of real time findings for them to take necessary action.
73) Cylance
Cylance develops security apps that prevent – instead of reactively detecting – viruses and other malware. Using a mathematical learning process, Cylance identifies what is safe and what is a threat rather than operating from a blacklist or whitelist. The company claims its machine learning has an understanding of a hacker’s mentality to predict their behavior.
74) Tetra
Tetra uses AI to take notes on phone calls, so people working in call centers can focus on discussions with the callers. It uses AI to generate a detailed script of dialogues using its speech recognition technology. Given the large market for call centers – and the need to make them more effective at low cost – this is a big market for AI.
75) Nuro
Nuro makes very small self-driving electric delivery trucks designed for local deliveries, such as groceries or takeout. Its founders previously worked on Google’s Waymo self-driving car project. Overall the company’s goal is to boost the value of robotics in daily life.
76) SoundHound started as a Shazam-like song recognition app called Midomi, but it has expanded to answering complex voice prompts like Siri and Cortana. But instead of converting language into text like most virtual assistants, the app’s AI combines voice recognition and language understanding into single step.
77) Zoox
Acquired in a $1.2 billion high profile deal by Amazon, Zoox is focused on self-driving cars, or, in the larger sense, a self driving fleet (hence Amazon’s interest). Their AI-based vehicle is geared for the robo-taxi market.
78) Zymergen
Founded in 2013, AI biotech company Zymergen describes itself as a “biofacturer.” One of their offerings is called Hyline, a bio-based polyimide film. Their work includes applications for pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and industrial uses. Based in Emeryville, California.
79) Tamr
Tamr is an enterprise data unification company that is cost-effective, scalable, and accessible to any enterprise. It specializes in using AI to connect and integrate diverse data at scale, quickly and cost effectively. Clients include Reuters, Toyota and GSK.
80) DJI
Based on China, DJI is a big player in the rapidly growing drone market. It’s leveraging AI and image recognition to track and monitor the landscape. It’s expected that the company will play a role in the self-driving car market. Impressively, DJI has partnered with Microsoft for a drone initiative.
81) HiSilicon
Running AI is exceptionally data intensive – the more data the better – and so today’s chipmakers (like Intel and Nvidia) are star players. Add to that list HiSilicon. The company fabricated the first AI chip for mobile units. Impressively, the chip accomplishes tasks like high speed language translation and facial recognition.
82) Insitro
Insitro operates at “the convergence of human biology and machine learning.” More specifically, it uses artificial intelligence to build models of various human illnesses, using those model to forecast previously unknown solutions – far beyond human intuition. These models use the power of ML to improve drug discovery and development. Founded by Daphne Koller, Insitro has drawn investment from an exhaustive array of VC and financial firms.
83) Blue Prism
A leading RPA company, Blue Prism uses AI-fueled automation to do an array of repetitive, manual software tasks, which frees human staff up to focus on more meaningful work. The company’s AI laboratory that researches automated document reading and software vision. To further boost its AI functionality, Blue Prism bought Thoughtonomy, which has a AI based in the cloud.
84) Rulai
You have surely encountered the limited conversational elan of a chatbot; a few stock phrases delivered in a monotone. Rulai is working to change this using the flexibility and adaptabililty of AI. The company claims its level 3 AI dialog manager can create “multi-round” conversation, without requiring code from customers. Clearly a major growth area.
Top AI Companies: Notable Vendors
Think of these forward-looking AI companies as taking a particularly inventive approach to machine learning and AI.
85) OpenAI
OpenAI is a non-profit research firm that operates under an open source type of model to allow other institutions and researchers to freely collaborate, making its patents and research open to the public. The founders say they are motivated in part by concerns about existential risk from artificial general intelligence
86) Vicarious
With backing by some real heavweights – Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg – Vicarious’s goal is nothing less than to develop a robot brain that can think like a human. It hasn’t been particularly forthcoming with details, but its AI robots, geared for industrial automation, are known to “learn” as they do more tasks.
87) Ubiquity6
Arguably the coolest application of AI on this entire list, Ubiquity6 has built a mobile app that enables augmented reality for several people at once. Users see and interact with objects presented by fully dimensioned visual world of the Ubiquity app, immersing themselves in a creative or educational environment. The company’s website is itself worth visiting for its visual creativity and wonderment.
88) AIBrain
AIBrain is an artificial intelligence company that builds AI solutions for smartphones and robotics applications. Its products include: AICoRE, the AI agent; iRSP, an intelligent robot software platform; and Futurable, a future simulation AI game where every character is a fully autonomous AI. The focus of their work is to develop artificial intelligence infused with the human skill set of problem solving, learning and memory.
89) CloudMinds
One of the better known AI vendors, CloudMinds develops the Human Augmented Robotics Intelligence (HARI) platform for robots, for what it calls an end-to-end cloud intelligence (CI) system. CI combines the machine with humans, allowing the robot to be controlled by human beings if need be. In essence, it’s a cloud-based solution for intelligent robots.
90) DataRobot
A high profile emerging AI company, DataRobot provides data scientists with a platform for building and deploying machine learning models. The software helps business analysts build predictive analytics with no knowledge of Machine Learning or programming and uses automated ML to build and deploy accurate predictive models quickly.
91) Affectiva
Arguably, the two “final frontiers” in artificial intelligence are ethics and emotion. Can software decide between right and wrong, in a moral sense? And can software “feel” emotions. Affectiva is dealing with this latter issue by using AI to help system understand the emotions in a human face and conversation. Founded by Rosalind Picard and Rana el Kaliouby, the firm was launched from an MIT Media Lab, and has venture backing by some of the biggest names in VC.
92) UiPath
Arguably the top vendor in the robotic process automation sector, UiPath makes an enterprise software platform that includes tools for robot licensing, provisioning, scheduling, monitoring and alerting. Its robots do the mundane work of communication between legacy apps so developers can focus on new AI-oriented apps. In short, robots can make our lives better.
93) Algorithmia
Is there a better name for an AI company than Algorithmia? Based in Seattle, Algorithmia’s goal is to help data scientists find and use algorithms. It was initially an exchange for algorithms on a one-off, single user basis. As it has grown, it has trained its sights on the enterprise market – certainly a more lucrative market.
94) Deepmind
Acquired by Google in 2014, Deepmind is a research firm that focuses on AI research, covering everything from climate change to health care and finance. It’s goal is to build “safe” AI that evolve in their abilities to solve problems. The firm is based in London and recruits heavily from Oxford and Cambridge, which are leading universities in Europe for AI and ML research.
95) Domino Data Lab
Certainly an AI company with a certain “buzz” about it, Domino is a SaaS solution that helps tech and data professionals program and test AI models. Think of it as a gathering place, an aggretation of sorts, for the AI community. Expect Domino to grow rapidly in the years ahead. Based on San Francisco, the company touts itself as “The Most Powerful Platform for Data Science.”
96) Narrative Science
Narrative Science creates natural language generation technology to translate data from multiple silos into what it calls stories. AI highlights only the most relevant and interesting information, to turn data into easy-to-understand reports, transforms statistics into stories, and converts numbers into knowledge. To be sure, “data storytelling” is a key trend to watch.
97) Sherpa.ai
Sherpa is a virtual personal assistant that works with a user’s entire array of devices, inferring and predicting their needs that allow the assistant to learn about the users and anticipate their needs before they ask. It works with a number of consumer devices and any accessory that could use some kind of intelligence. Tapping a growth market, Sherpa sells white label digital assistants for consumer applications.
98) Swim.ai
Swim.ai’s goal is to enable businesses to mine continuously streaming data into actionable information. Leveraging machine learning, the company’s “open core platform” (the SwimOS is open source) augments the decision making process by providing streaming data, and contextualizing data sources. Founded in 2015.
99) Xanadu
Based in Canada, Xanadu is a quantum hardware and technology outfit that is developing a type of quantum computer based on photonic technology. Instead of transmitting energy via electrons, Xanadu’s system employs laser light to move data. That means no more energy-hungry, overheating electric machines, among other advantages. A player in the new field of quantum machine learning.
100) Butterfly Network
In an effort to use AI to make healthcare more affordable and accessible, Butterfly Network provides a handheld medical diagnostic device that connects with a user’s smartphone. This device – powered by Butterfly iQ – allows an ultrasound examination of the entire body, at a far lower cost than legacy systems. This is especially helpful for poor communities where healthcare resources are scarce.
