World Top 30 best-funded AI startups 2020

Artificial Intelligence – AI – is currently among the most disruptive technologies, and a great means for startups to achieve their hyper-growth targets. With a number of applications in big data, computer vision, natural language processing, and more, AI is revolutionizing businesses, industries, and people’s lives.

AI technology startups are attracting the attention of multiple investors across the globe, and particularly so in the US and China. In the very best-funded and most promising independent startups, most AI companies hail either from the US or China, with a few more countries represented. In both of these key countries, the benefits of AI are clear in a number of industries, but the focus of each country seems to be slightly different.

The largest American AI startups are particularly present in the fields of big data analytics and process automation for business, autonomous driving, and biotechnology. However, the largest Chinese AI startups tend to be more developed in computer vision, AI for the internet of things and hardware, and facial recognition for applications in public security, financial security, and payments.

For good measure, it is important to remark that three British startups are also present in the top, denoting an early interest and effectiveness of UK companies in AI, together with a Canadian and Singaporean company.

Nevertheless, we should note that the following ranking only includes companies that are primarily operating with AI at their core and not just adding a few algorithms that use some AI to accompany their non-AI businesses. Nowadays many companies use artificial intelligence algorithms in some of their secondary processes, boasting being AI companies just as a marketing tactic.

That’s why the companies listed here are only startups that are built upon AI. They all process big data with machine learning algorithms at the center of their value proposition, in the fields that are traditionally associated with AI: recognizing patterns in videos, images, and visual data, optimizing AI algorithms performance, processing large amounts of textual data to extract insights or generating new text, analyzing genetic data, or creating robots.

Some of these startups are already famous in their field, having reached massive recognition for their products and services. But many are not very well known, as they focus on certain business markets and take charge of problems faced in specific verticals. Many of the 30 startups presented hereafter have already reached the “Unicorn” status, that is to say, a valuation of more than a billion dollars.

For the complete list of the world’s unicorn startups, download our 580 Unicorn Startups Excel file which includes valuations, funds raised, known investors, websites link, descriptions, and much more information on each company,

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List of the world’s 30 top-funded AI startups

Here is the list of the top 30 best-funded AI startups with details about each company, the total amount of funds received by the company according to Crunchbase, as of June 2020, in US $ or Chinese Yuan (with CN¥ converted to US $ with the rate of 7,0779 CN¥/$), together with a direct link to the company’s website.

Note that if you are interested in learning about AI and its applications, to work in an AI company, or create your own programs or platform, check our post on the best online courses for AI, machine learning and data science. It gathers courses multiple use cases in the most effective courses for all levels.

For more information on other world-leading startups, check our series of posts on Top Startups.

Shortcuts to each startup

To facilitate your browsing in this long list, here are quick links to go directly to the details of any of the world’s top 30 AI startups. Be sure to also check the Top 10 AI startups’ summary after the list!

30. Darktrace

Market: Privacy and Security – Total funding: $230.5 Million

Darktrace is a cybersecurity company that relies upon artificial intelligence. With tens of thousands of previously unknown threats identified, Darktrace uses self-learning algorithms to detect and respond to cyber threats in cloud networks and virtualized networks, IoT, and industrial control systems.

Country: UK – Headquarters: Cambridge – Founded: 2013

Website: darktrace.com

29. Freenome

Market: Biotechnology – Total funding: $237.6 Million

Freenome is a biotech company dedicated to diagnosing cancer. Developing screening technologies for cancer and other diseases with a simple blood test, Freenome combines computational biology and machine learning techniques to facilitate early diagnosis, make treatments more effective, and providing a platform to help design personalized health conditions.

Country: USA – Headquarters: San Francisco, CA – Founded: 2014

Website: freenome.com

28. Mobvoi

Market: Internet of Things, Speech Recognition – Total funding: $252.8 Million

Mobvoi is an AI and electronics company providing a range of wearable products with advanced voice interaction and voice services. Focusing on speech recognition, natural language processing, and hardware-software integration, Mobvoi selling smartwatches with mobile intelligence voice search, as well as enterprise Internet of Things and voice recognition technologies.

Country: China – Headquarters: Beijing – Founded: 2012

Website: mobvoi.com

27. BenevolentAI

Market: Biotechnology – Total funding: $292 Million

BenevolentAI is a technology company focusing on accelerating the journey from data to medicines. It uses a computational and experimental technology platform for R&D programs to lower drug development costs, decrease failure rates, and increase the speed at which medicines are generated.

Country: UK – Headquarters: London – Founded: 2013

Website: benevolent.com

26. TuSimple

Market: Autonomous Vehicles – Total funding: $298.1 Million

TuSimple is a self-driving truck company. It enables long-haul, heavy-duty trucks to operate autonomously from depot-to-depot on any type of street and highway. With a commercial-ready trucking solution with lidar, radar, cameras, and AI vehicle control for the logistics industry, TuSimple helps to decrease transportation costs, while increasing safety and reducing carbon emissions.

Country: USA – Headquarters: San Diego, CA – Founded: 2015

Website: tusimple.com

25. Unisound

Market: Natural Language Processing, Internet of Things – Total funding: $301.4 Million

Unisound is an Internet of Things company specialized in voice and speech processing. It provides a cloud computing platform and mobile internet technologies designed for speech recognition, and operating robots and smart devices for home, autonomous driving, healthcare, education, and communication.

Country: China – Headquarters: Beijing – Founded: 2012

Website: unisound.com

24. CloudMinds

Market: Robotics, Internet of Things – Total funding: $316 Million

CloudMinds is a company specialized in robots, smart devices, and cloud systems. It builds and operates an open end-to-end cloud computing system to operate robots, with a machine learning platform, intelligent terminals, and robot control units. CloudMinds provides a number of humanoid robots, infrastructure to operate fleets of robots, and smart devices for communication and crowd health monitoring.

Country: USA – Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA – Founded: 2015

Website: en.cloudminds.com

23. Coveo

Market: Data Analytics – Total funding: $339.4 Million

Coveo provides Artificial Intelligence-powered search and recommendation engines. It helps organizations deliver personalized experiences through contextually relevant information at every interaction in their customer relations management, customer service applications, intranets, and websites.

Country: Canada – Headquarters: Quebec – Founded: 2005

Website: coveo.com

22. 4Paradigm

Market: Data Analytics – Total funding: $375.3 Million

4Paradigm is an AI platform and cloud services provider. It allows organizations from multiple industries including finance, retail, marketing, energy, and healthcare to deploy machine learning technology and improve business processes, help decision making, and manage and reduce risks. 4Paradigm also provides cloud services to host its applications and computing power to run them.

Country: China – Headquarters: Beijing – Founded: 2014

Website: 4paradigm.com

21. Trax

Market: Computer Vision, Retail Technology – Total funding: $386.9 Million

Trax is an image recognition company dedicated to the retail industry. The Trax platform provides in-store execution tools, market measurement services, and data science to improve in-store control and collect competitive insights to increase points of sale revenues. It partners with IoT technologies to understand the in-store reality.

Country: Singapore – Headquarters: Singapore – Founded: 2010

Website: traxretail.com

20. SentinelOne

Market: Privacy and Security – Total funding: $429.5 Million

SentinelOne is an autonomous AI endpoint security platform. Aiming at replacing antivirus software, SentinelOne relies on behavioral-based detection, advanced mitigation, and forensics to defeat attacks in real-time and offer complete protection against incidents, malware, breaches, data loss, ransomware, and other threats.

Country: USA – Headquarters: Mountain View, CA – Founded: 2013

Website: sentinelone.com

19. DataRobot

Market: Data Analytics – Total funding: $430.6 Million

DataRobot provides an enterprise AI platform to build, deploy, and manage machine learning models. Designed to deliver artificial intelligence insights as scale and keep optimizing performance, DataRobot’s software, AI models, and support team aim at delivering a return on investment to organizations of all sizes and industries and help them obtain better business results.

Country: USA – Headquarters: Boston, MA – Founded: 2012

Website: datarobot.com

18. Terminus Group

Market: Internet of Things – Total funding: CN¥3.7 Billion

Terminus Group is an AI and Internet of Things company. It provides platforms, computing technologies, and patrol and service robots for Smart Cities, buildings monitoring, management and maintenance solutions, community management and safety, and Internet of Things and computer vision for retail.

Country: China – Headquarters: Beijing – Founded: 2015

Website: terminusgroup.com

17. Graphcore

Market: Semiconductors, Data Processing – Total funding: $460 Million

Graphcore is a company developing hardware systems to accelerate machine learning applications. Having created a new processor named the Intelligence Processing Unit, Graphcore products allow AI developers and researchers to run machine learning models much faster than previous hardware generations.

Country: UK – Headquarters: Bristol – Founded: 2016

Website: graphcore.ai

16. Dataminr

Market: Data Analytics – Total funding: $577 Million

Dataminr is a real-time AI platform to detect events and risks. Relying upon publicly available data, it helps businesses, public organizations, and media discover high-impact events and emerging risks and provides alerts to those who need them for corporate security, news, the public sector, pr/crisis management, and finance.

Country: USA – Headquarters: New York, NY – Founded: 2009

Website: dataminr.com

15. CloudWalk

Market: Computer Vision, Facial Recognition, Data Analytics – Total funding: CN¥5.6 Billion

CloudWalk Technology is a facial recognition technology company. It provides a range of biometrics identifying technology for the financial, public security, and aviation sectors with a series of platforms for data analysis as well as a number of terminals for facial scanning and recognition. It also offers other AI services including body and vehicle recognition, voice technology, and natural language processing.

Country: China – Headquarters: Beijing – Founded: 2015

Website: cloudwalk.cn

14. Tempus

Market: Biotechnology, Data-Driven Medicine – Total funding: $620 Million

Tempus is a company specialized in precision medicine relying on data and artificial intelligence. It uses the world’s largest library of clinical and molecular data together to help physicians make data-driven decisions. Thanks to its genomic data analysis and machine learning platform, physicians can deliver personalized patient care and treatments for cancer.

Country: USA – Headquarters: Chicago, IL – Founded: 2015

Website: tempus.com

13. Aurora Innovation

Market: Autonomous Vehicles – Total funding: $690 Million

Aurora Innovation is an autonomous driving technology company. It aims at transforming how people and goods move by developing machine learning algorithms for self-driving. Its platform is complete with localization, perception, planning and control, simulation, and infrastructure capabilities together with hardware to capture data and monitor vehicle movement.

Country: USA – Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA – Founded: 2017

Website: aurora.tech

12. Horizon Robotics

Market: Semiconductors, Autonomous Vehicles – Total funding: $700.6 Million

Horizon Robotics is a company specialized in semiconductors for AI processing and the Internet of Things. It provides artificial intelligence embedded chips and hardware with computer vision and speech recognition capabilities and solutions for autonomous vehicles, smart cities, retail, and robots.

Country: China – Headquarters: Beijing – Founded: 2015

Website: horizon.ai

11. Pony.ai

Market: Autonomous Vehicles – Total funding: $726 Million

Pony.ai is an autonomous vehicle technology company. It develops a full-stack self-driving solution, combining computer vision, deep-learning for planning and control, localization and mapping, and infrastructure, as well as artificial intelligence for robotics. Pony.ai deploys its self-driving solution, with sensor and computing hardware in the US and China.

Country: USA – Headquarters: Fremont, CA – Founded: 2016

Website: pony.ai

10. ThoughtSpot

Market: Data Analytics – Total funding: $743.7 Million

ThoughtSpot is a business intelligence company operating through big data analytics. Through its AI analytics platform, it enables the exploration, analysis, and sharing of real-time business analytics data for e-commerce and retail, financial services, manufacturing and logistics, media and communications, public sector, healthcare, and life sciences, and procurement.

Country: USA – Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA – Founded: 2012

Website: thoughtspot.com

9. MiningLamp

Market: Data Analytics – Total funding: $786.6 Million

MiningLamp is a big data company. It provides an AI products and service platform for a range of industries including public security and safety, smart city, manufacturing, finance, business intelligence, and marketing. MinigLamp notably helps organizations build knowledge graphs, apply AI, and discover insights to boost human-machine collaboration and accelerate digital transformation.

Country: China – Headquarters: Beijing – Founded: 2014

Website: mininglamp.com

8. Automation Anywhere

Market: Robotic Process Automation – Total funding: $840 Million

Automation Anywhere is a software company dedicated to Robotic Process Automation – RPA. Combining a cloud automation platform with Ai, machine learning, and analytics, it deploys software bots to help customers automate their repetitive and manual tasks, and other business processes to increase productivity, and improve customer experience and employee engagement.

Country: USA – Headquarters: San Francisco, CA – Founded: 2003

Website: automationanywhere.com

7. Samsara

Market: Internet of Things – Total funding: $930 Million

Samsara is a company specialized in the Internet of Things. Heavily relying on cloud, analytics, and AI technologies connected through an open platform, Samsara provides a range of IoT products and associated services for vehicle telematics, driver safety, mobile workflow, compliance, asset tracking, and industrial process controls.

Country: USA – Headquarters: San Francisco, CA – Founded: 2015

Website: samsara.com

6. Zoox

Market: Autonomous Vehicles – Total funding: $955 Million

Zoox is a company specialized in autonomous vehicles. It aims at creating a new self-driving vehicle for the robo-taxi market, creating an entirely redesigned vehicle that will be optimized for autonomous driving rather than using regular cars that are fitted with self-driving capacities. Zoox plans on revealing its autonomous vehicle in late 2020.

Country: USA – Headquarters: Foster City, CA – Founded: 2014

Website: zoox.com

5. Nuro

Market: Autonomous Vehicles, Robotics – Total funding: $1 Billion

Nuro is a company specialized in the development of autonomous delivery vehicles. It commercializes an electric self-driving delivery vehicle designed to transport goods such as food, grocery bags, and other cargo. Nuro partners with retail companies and restaurant chains to offer safer, cleaner, and cheaper delivery opportunities.

Country: USA – Headquarters: Mountain View, CA – Founded: 2016

Website: nuro.ai

4. OpenAI

Market: Natural Language Processing, Research – Total funding: $1 Billion

Created at the initiative of Elon Musk, OpenAI was launched as a non-profit artificial intelligence research company to develop and promote benevolent AI that would not create an existential risk to humanity. Even though OpenAI is a non-profit, it has recently launched a commercial API providing access to its new natural language processing models.

Country: USA – Headquarters: San Francisco, CA – Founded: 2015

Website: openai.com

3. UiPath

Market: Robotic Process Automation – Total funding: $1 Billion

UiPath is a software company dedicated to robotic process automation. It provides a platform for the implementation of process automation and deployment to the cloud. One of the global leaders in both process mining and robotic process automation, UiPath allows the deployment of attended and unattended robots together with AI, machine learning tools, and analytics.

Country: USA – Headquarters: New York, NY – Founded: 2005

Website: uipath.com

2. Megvii

Market: Internet of Things – Total funding: $1.4 Billion

Megvii is an image recognition and deep-learning technology company particularly focusing on the Internet of Things – IoT. Especially servicing the public sector, it develops authentication software, an open-source computer vision platform, Face++, as well as a range of solutions for Personal IoT, Smart Cities IoT, and supply chain IoT.

Country: China – Headquarters: Beijing – Founded: 2011

Website: megvii.com

1. SenseTime

Market: Computer Vision, Facial Recognition – Total funding: $3.3 Billion

SenseTime is an AI technology company particularly operating in the field of computer vision. It provides a number of products and services including facial recognition and biometrics, image and video processing, robot sensors, and autonomous driving with applications in financial services, security, smart cities, culture and entertainment, education, and advertising.

Country: China – Headquarters: Beijing – Founded: 2014

Website: sensetime.com

Summary: Top 10 AI Startups 2020

To give you a quick overview of the largest AI startups in the world in 2020, here is a synthesizing image regrouping the information of the top 10. Note that you can use this image to embed it on your website and other digital properties using the embed code below.

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Here are the top 30 best-funded AI startups in the world. Did we forget any? Did you buy any product or service from them? Which one do you think provides the most useful product or service? Let us know in the comments below!