Research
We track the AI landscape so we can pick the right tools for each job. This is the data we work from.
Comparison dashboard
Three views of the AI landscape. Toggle between valuation trajectories, total funding, and a quick-stats overview.
Valuation trajectories over time. Click any line or legend label to highlight. Google DeepMind & Meta AI shown at parent market cap. DeepSeek excluded (self-funded, no external valuation).
Total external capital raised. Google DeepMind, Meta AI, DeepSeek, and Qwen excluded (internal or self-funded).
Revenue and compute estimates are based on publicly reported data. "Not disclosed" means no public figures are available. Open Weights = model weights downloadable for use, but training data and code are not shared.
Cumulative funding raised
Total external capital raised over time for VC-funded companies. Click any line or legend label to highlight. Google DeepMind, Meta AI, DeepSeek, and Qwen excluded (internal/self-funded).
Company profiles
Click any card to expand. Use tabs to explore funding timelines and investor details.
Safety-focused AI lab, now the most valuable private AI company at $965B (May 2026 Series H, $65B round co-led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia). Confidentially filed for an IPO on 1 June 2026. Founded by former OpenAI VP of Research Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei. Unique governance: Long-Term Benefit Trust with escalating board control. Amazon ($8B+) and Google ($2B+) are early investors with zero voting rights. Revenue run-rate crossed ~$47B in May 2026, driven heavily by enterprise Claude Code adoption. Released Claude Opus 4.8 in late May and Claude Fable 5 (its first publicly available Mythos-class model) on 9 June 2026.
Lead Investors
Amazon ($8B+ — largest external investor) Google ($2B+ — ~10% est. stake) Altimeter (co-led Series H) Dragoneer (co-led Series H) Greenoaks (co-led Series H) Sequoia (co-led Series H) GIC Coatue D. E. Shaw Spark CapitalStrategic
SK Telecom Microsoft (minority stake) Nvidia SalesforceOther
Menlo Ventures Lightspeed Sequoia Fidelity Goldman Sachs BlackRock Founders Fund Bessemer Insight PartnersAmazon is the largest external investor at $8B+. Google's $2B+ investment gives it roughly a 10% stake. No single investor holds a controlling interest.
Pivoted from nonprofit to public benefit corporation. $852B post-money valuation (Mar 2026) — overtaken by Anthropic's $965B in May 2026. Amazon ($50B), Nvidia ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B) led the latest round. Microsoft holds ~27%. Board reshaped after the Nov 2023 crisis. ARR crossed ~$25B in March 2026 with ~900M weekly ChatGPT users, projecting ~$29B for 2026 — though still operating at a significant loss (reported −122% non-GAAP operating margin in Q1 2026). GPT-5.5 released April 2026.
Lead Investors
Amazon ($50B) Nvidia ($30B) SoftBank ($30B+) Microsoft ($10B+ — ~27% equity pre-restructure)Other
a16z D. E. Shaw MGX TPG T. Rowe Price Thrive Capital Tiger Global Khosla VenturesEstimated / Reconstructed. Not an official disclosure. See full cap table ↓
World's largest AI lab. Merged Google Brain + DeepMind in 2023. Parent Alphabet's market cap reached ~$4.3T by June 2026, among the largest public companies globally. Massive compute infrastructure advantage with $75B+ CapEx planned for 2025. Gemini models integrated across Google products — Gemini 3.5 Flash shipped May 2026 alongside the 3.1 Pro flagship. Revenue (TTM) ~$403B, net income ~$132B. Google Cloud (including AI/ML services) reached ~$44B ARR, the fastest-growing segment.
Parent Company
Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) — 100% ownershipPre-Acquisition Investors
Founders Fund Horizons Ventures Elon Musk (angel)Fully owned subsidiary of Alphabet since the $500M acquisition in 2014. No external investors. All AI investment ($75B+ CapEx in 2025) comes from Alphabet's balance sheet.
Open-weights AI leader. LLaMA models are the most widely used open-weight foundation models. Yann LeCun departed Nov 2025 to found AMI Labs after strategic disagreements with Zuckerberg over LLM direction. Meta Superintelligence Labs now led by Alexandr Wang (Scale AI CEO). The open-weights strategy creates ecosystem lock-in without licensing revenue. Meta's total revenue ~$164B (TTM), with AI embedded across its ad targeting and recommendation systems. AI CapEx budget of $60B+ in 2025.
Parent Company
Meta Platforms Inc. (META) — 100% ownershipAI Acquisitions
Scale AI ($14.3B, Jun 2025)Meta AI is a wholly owned division of Meta Platforms. All funding is via corporate R&D budget and CapEx ($60B+ in 2025). No external VC investors.
Elon Musk's AI lab. Founded 2023. Acquired by SpaceX in Feb 2026 at $250B valuation after raising $20B Series E in Jan 2026 — and now part of the listed SpaceX, which began trading on Nasdaq (SPCX) on 12 June 2026 at a ~$1.77T IPO valuation. Built the Memphis Supercluster (100K H100 GPUs). Grok integrated into X (Twitter) platform. "Any lawful use" military stance contrasts with Anthropic's safety focus. The AI unit generated ~$3.2B revenue in 2025 against a ~$6.4B operating loss, per SpaceX's IPO prospectus. Grok-1 was open-sourced, but later models are closed.
Lead Investors
Nvidia Valor Equity a16zStrategic
SpaceX (acquirer — now 100% owner) Tesla (~$2B) CiscoOther
Fidelity Qatar Investment Authority MGX (Abu Dhabi) Stepstone Baron CapitalSpaceX acquired xAI in Feb 2026 at $250B valuation, making it a wholly owned subsidiary. Previous VC investors were bought out or converted to SpaceX equity. Elon Musk maintains control through SpaceX.
Self-funded open-weights lab from Hangzhou, China. ~200 employees. Founded July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, co-founder of High-Flyer quantitative hedge fund. DeepSeek-V3 (Dec 2024) uses a 671B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts architecture with only 37B active per token. DeepSeek-R1 (Jan 2025) matched GPT-4o on reasoning benchmarks at a reported training cost of ~$5.6M — a fraction of Western equivalents — triggering a $1T market-cap sell-off in US tech stocks. MIT-licensed models. No external VC. Operates under Chinese AI regulations and US export controls restricting access to advanced Nvidia chips. Estimated $1B+ annual compute spend funded entirely from High-Flyer's trading profits. Minimal direct revenue — the API is priced 90-95% below Western competitors. Controversies include questions around data provenance (potential training on proprietary model outputs) and national security concerns raised by US lawmakers.
DeepSeek has never taken external venture funding. All capital comes from High-Flyer's quantitative trading profits. R1 became the #1 free app on Apple's App Store within days of launch, triggering a ~$1T sell-off in US tech stocks.
Sole Backer
High-Flyer (幻方量化) — 100% ownershipFounder
Liang Wenfeng (CEO & sole controller)No external VC, PE, or strategic investors. DeepSeek is entirely self-funded through High-Flyer's quant trading profits. Estimated $1B+ annual compute spend funded from trading revenue.
Alibaba Cloud's AI model division, led by Zhou Jingren (Alibaba Cloud CTO, Ph.D. Columbia, ex-Microsoft Research). Qwen3.5, released on the eve of Chinese New Year 2026, is a 397B-parameter open-weight model with self-reported benchmarks on par with leading closed models; the Qwen series (300+ models, 140,000+ derivatives) is among the most downloaded open-weight families globally. Zhou was elevated to Alibaba's core management committee in 2025, signalling the company's deepening AI commitment. Free API tier available. Alibaba Cloud revenue ~$16B ARR, with AI workloads driving growth. $63B CapEx commitment over 3 years for AI infrastructure (~$21B/yr).
Qwen is an internal division of Alibaba Cloud. All funding comes from Alibaba's corporate R&D budget ($63B committed over 3 years). Zhou Jingren, the division head, was promoted to Alibaba's core management committee in 2025.
Parent Company
Alibaba Group (BABA/9988.HK) — 100% ownershipDivision
Alibaba Cloud IntelligenceQwen is a wholly owned division of Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba is committing $63B over 3 years to AI infrastructure. No external VC investors.
AI-native search engine. $21B valuation (early 2026). Founded by former Google/DeepMind researchers. ARR reached ~$500M by June 2026 — roughly 5x in a year on a barely larger team — against an internal target of $656M by year-end, helped by a pivot into AI agents and usage-based pricing. 780M+ monthly queries. Ongoing copyright disputes with publishers over content usage.
Lead Investors
SoftBank IVP AccelStrategic
Nvidia Jeff Bezos (personal investment)Other
NEA Databricks Ventures Tobi Lütke Elad Gil Kindred VenturesVC-backed with no single controlling investor. $1.7B raised across 11 rounds. Founders Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats retain significant equity. SoftBank and IVP are the largest institutional investors.
Beijing-based lab. Known for long-context capabilities. Raised a ~$2B Meituan-led round at a $20B+ valuation in May 2026 — up from $10B in February — and is reportedly now targeting up to $30B as China's AI race intensifies. Backed by Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, and 5Y Capital. Accused of training on Claude outputs. The fastest valuation growth among Chinese AI startups. ARR passed $200M in April 2026, driven by Kimi subscriptions and enterprise model services.
Lead Investors
Alibaba (led Series A — largest investor) Meituan (led May 2026 round) Tencent 5Y Capital IDG CapitalOther
Meituan Andon HK HongShanAlibaba led the $1B Series A and is the largest institutional investor. Yang Zhilin (founder) retains significant equity. Unusually broad Chinese tech backing with both Alibaba and Tencent as investors.
Europe's AI champion. French sovereignty angle. ~862 employees. $14B valuation (Sep 2025). Secured €722M ($830M) debt financing in Mar 2026 for its first large-scale data centre near Paris with 13,800 Nvidia GB300 GPUs. Shipped Voxtral TTS (open-weight speech model) in March and Mistral Medium 3.5 (open weights, 256K context) in April 2026. EU AI Act compliance built in. Strong enterprise adoption in Europe. Estimated ~$100M ARR from its La Plateforme API and enterprise contracts.
Lead Investors
Bpifrance (French sovereign fund) a16z General Catalyst LightspeedStrategic
Microsoft (minority stake) Nvidia Samsung SalesforceOther
DST Global BNP Paribas HSBC NatixisCo-founders Arthur Mensch, Timothée Lacroix, and Guillaume Lample retain significant equity. Bpifrance (French state investment bank) is a key backer supporting European AI sovereignty. Microsoft took a minority stake. $3.1B raised across 8 rounds plus €722M in debt financing.
OpenAI cap table — who owns the $852B
A reconstructed ownership breakdown of one of the two most valuable AI startups (alongside Anthropic at $965B), based on publicly reported funding rounds, investor disclosures, and secondary-market data as of March 2026.
| Shareholder | % Ownership | Value at $852B | Est. Cost Basis | Unrealized Gain | Return Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nonprofit Foundation & Governance — 25.80% ($219.8B) | |||||
| The OpenAI Foundation retains a controlling governance stake to ensure the company remains aligned with its public-benefit mission. This block does not represent a cash investment. | |||||
| OpenAI Foundation | 25.80% | $219.8B | $0.0 | $219.8B | — |
| Strategic Corporate Investors — 46.58% ($396.9B) | |||||
| Large technology companies that invested for both financial returns and strategic access to OpenAI’s models and infrastructure. Microsoft is by far the largest, having backed OpenAI since 2019. | |||||
| Microsoft | 26.79% | $228.3B | $13.0B | $215.3B | 17.6x |
| SoftBank Group | 11.66% | $99.3B | $69.3B | $34.7B | 1.5x |
| Amazon.com, Inc | 4.66% | $39.7B | $15.0B | $24.7B | 2.6x |
| NVIDIA Corporation | 3.47% | $29.6B | $30.1B | -$0.5B | 1.0x |
| Employees, Founders & Management — 19.35% ($164.9B) | |||||
| Equity held by current and former staff through stock grants, options, and secondary sales. CEO Sam Altman’s stake was disclosed as pending restructuring terms. | |||||
| Current Employees (Pool) | 15.88% | $135.3B | ~$0 | ~$135B | — |
| Former Employees / Alumni | 3.47% | $29.6B | ~$0 | ~$30B | — |
| Sam Altman — CEO | Stake not publicly disclosed — reportedly under restructuring as part of the PBC conversion. Figures will update when OpenAI files them. | ||||
| Venture Capital & Institutional Investors — 7.83% ($63.4B) | |||||
| Professional venture capital, growth equity, and institutional funds. Many entered at earlier (lower) valuations, producing outsized returns. Thrive Capital led the October 2024 PBC round. Khosla Ventures and Sound Ventures were among the earliest backers. | |||||
| Thrive Capital | 1.98% | $16.9B | $3.5B | $13.4B | 4.8x |
| Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) | 0.79% | $6.8B | $2.5B | $4.3B | 2.7x |
| MGX (Mubadala) | 0.69% | $5.9B | $1.5B | $4.4B | 3.9x |
| D.E. Shaw Ventures | 0.50% | $4.2B | $2.0B | $2.2B | 2.1x |
| TPG Inc. | 0.45% | $3.8B | $1.5B | $2.3B | 2.5x |
| T. Rowe Price Associates | 0.40% | $3.4B | $1.0B | $2.4B | 3.4x |
| Sequoia Capital | 0.35% | $3.0B | $1.0B | $2.0B | 3.0x |
| Blackstone / BlackRock | 0.35% | $3.0B | $1.0B | $2.0B | 3.0x |
| Coatue Management | 0.30% | $2.5B | $0.8B | $1.7B | 3.1x |
| Dragoneer Investment Group | 0.25% | $2.1B | $2.8B | -$0.7B | 0.75x |
| Altimeter Capital | 0.20% | $1.7B | $0.6B | $1.1B | 2.8x |
| Temasek Holdings | 0.20% | $1.7B | $1.7B | $0.0 | 1.0x |
| Khosla Ventures | 0.18% | $1.5B | $0.05B | $1.5B | 30x |
| Sound Ventures | 0.15% | $1.3B | $0.03B | — | ~43x |
| Insight Partners | 0.15% | $1.3B | — | — | — |
| UC Investments (Univ. of California) | 0.12% | $1.0B | — | — | — |
| Fidelity Mgmt. & Research Co. | 0.12% | $1.0B | — | — | — |
| D1/Apolus/Sands/Whale/Goanna/Paragon | 0.48% | $4.1B | — | — | — |
| Early Angels — Hamid Diboud | 0.17% | $1.4B | $0.01B | $1.4B | ~140x |
| Individual Investors, Retail & Secondary Market — 0.44% ($3.4B) | |||||
| Smaller allocations available through bank-brokered channels during Series G, plus publicly traded ETF exposure via ARK Invest funds. | |||||
| Individual Investors (Bank Channel — Series G) | 0.35% | $3.0B | $3.0B | — | 1.0x |
| ARK Invest ETFs (ARKK/ARKQ/ARK) | 0.09% | $0.4B | $0.4B | $0.0 | 1.0x |
| Grand Total | 100.0% | $852.0B | |||
Estimated / Reconstructed. Not an official disclosure. Cost basis figures are best estimates from public sources. Percentages are approximate and may not sum to exactly 100% due to rounding. Data compiled from SEC filings, press releases, and credible financial reporting as of March 2026.
At a glance
This is the landscape we navigate when picking tools for each project. No single model wins everything.
| Company | Key Model | Model Access | Valuation | Total Raised | Revenue | Compute Spend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | Claude Fable 5 | Closed | $965B | $132.3B | ~$47B run-rate | ~$3B+/yr |
| OpenAI | GPT-5.5 | Closed | $852B | $189.6B | ~$25B ARR | ~$7B+/yr |
| Google DeepMind | Gemini 3.5 Flash / 3.1 Pro | Closed | ~$4.3T * | — | ~$44B Cloud | ~$75B+/yr |
| Meta AI | LLaMA 4 | Open Weights | ~$1.4T * | — | In $164B rev. | ~$60B+/yr |
| xAI | Grok 4.1 / 4.20 | Partial (Grok) | $250B | $36.1B | ~$3.2B (2025) | ~$3B+/yr |
| DeepSeek | DeepSeek V4 (preview) | Open Weights (MIT) | Self-funded | $0 | Minimal | ~$1B+/yr |
| Qwen | Qwen 3.5 | Open Weights (Apache 2.0) | — * | — | ~$16B Cloud | ~$21B/yr |
| Perplexity | pplx-api | Closed | $21B | $1.7B | ~$500M ARR | Not disclosed |
| Kimi | Kimi 2.5 | Open Weights | $20B+ | $4.6B+ | ~$200M ARR | Not disclosed |
| Mistral | Mistral Medium 3.5 | Open Weights (Apache 2.0) | $14B | $3.1B | ~$100M ARR | ~€240M/yr |
* Parent company market cap, not standalone AI division valuation. Revenue and compute spend estimates based on publicly reported figures. Open Weights = model weights downloadable, but training data and code not shared.