Latest news with #AI50
Forbes
02-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
AI Startup Decagon In Talks To Raise $100 Million At A $1.5 Billion Valuation
CEO Jesse Zhang (left) and CTO Ashwin Sreenivas (right) competed in science and math Olympiad competitions growing up. Now Decagon is in talks to raise $100 million in funding at a $1.5 billion valuation. AI startup Decagon, which is building customer service-focused agents, is in talks to raise $100 million in fresh funding at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to five sources familiar with the deal. Andreessen Horowitz and Accel are leading the round, with participation from existing investors, according to four of the people. The company has more than $10 million in signed contracts (often denoted using the term annual recurring revenue), according to two sources. Decagon confirmed it has been in talks to raise additional funding, but said the round hasn't been closed yet and the figures could change. Andreessen Horowitz and Accel did not immediately respond to comment requests. Decagon is building customer support chatbots and agents— software that can autonomously perform basic tasks— for things like answering questions on how a product works, processing refunds and canceling subscriptions. Companies like Notion, Bilt, Duolingo, Substack and Rippling use Decagon customer support chatbots. The latest investment comes less than a year after Decagon raised a $65 million Series B round led by Bain Capital Ventures at a $650 million valuation, Forbes reported in October. The new investment would bring Decagon's total funding to $200 million. The company, which was featured on the Forbes AI 50 list, was cofounded by 27-year-old CEO Jesse Zhang and Ashwin Sreenivas in 2023 after the duo surveyed dozens of companies to find the problem that could best be solved with AI. Customer support, a tedious but pivotal part of any business, has long been targeted for automation as a means to save millions in labor costs by eliminating largely outsourced customer support teams. Credit card provider Bilt downsized its customer support team from hundreds to 65 with Decagon, Forbes reported last year. And fitness giant ClassPass, which uses Decagon's AI agents to carry out 2.5 million conversations with its customers, has reduced its customer support costs by 95%, according to The Information. 'We think AI agents can be 10x employees,' Zhang told Forbes in March. Under the hood, Decagon's agents are built on the most advanced models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere, and trained on internal data like how-to blogs, manuals and past customer service conversations. Staff rate and review responses generated by the AI to improve it. In February, Decagon partnered with audio generation startup ElevenLabs to create voice agents to have more natural, human-like conversations with customers. Customer service software is a competitive market and Decagon is up against companies like $4.5 billion-valued Sierra, helmed by former Salesforce co-CEO and OpenAI board Chairman Bret Taylor, and Salesforce, which has its own AI agents for customer support. The products themselves are also increasingly identical to each other and businesses regularly do what are called bake offs to pit one AI tool against another to see how well they perform on the job. 'Decagon claims they win almost every time they go up against Sierra head to head,' said one investor involved in the talks. 'Ultimately, they are both going to have exactly the same product and it will really be a race to see who can solve a higher percentage of the support calls with the best accuracy.' MORE FROM FORBES
Forbes
10-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Forbes Announces Seventh Annual AI 50 List, Featuring The Most Prominent AI Startups In The World
Illustration by Grabriel Grabriel Garble for Forbes Thursday, April 10, 2025 – Forbes today announced its seventh annual AI 50 list, highlighting the most promising startups driving advancements across industries. As AI continues to dominate global discussions, this year's list celebrates innovative companies that are building impactful products and applications that use AI to solve real-world challenges and generate business growth. 'Even amid industry-wide challenges such as data shortages and legal battles, the AI industry continues to make significant strides and attract massive levels of funding,' said Rashi Shrivastava, Forbes reporter. 'The seventh annual AI 50 list was among the most competitive with several new AI players introduced to the industry, a testament to both the rapidly changing AI landscape and the longevity of the companies on this year's list.' Notable highlights from this year's list include: The Forbes AI 50 List was compiled in partnership with Sequoia Capital and Meritech Capital. Methodology This year was among the most competitive for the AI 50 list. Forbes received some 1,860 submissions. Applicants do not pay a fee to be considered and are judged for their business promise, technical talent and use of AI through a quantitative algorithm and qualitative judging panels. Companies are encouraged to share data on diversity, and our list aims to promote a more equitable startup ecosystem. For the full package of coverage, including a detailed explanation of the list methodology, videos and analyses on trends in AI, visit: Media contacts: Christina Magrini, cmagrini@ Feryal Nawaz, fnawaz@
Forbes
10-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
These Chinese AI Companies Could Be The Next DeepSeek
Illustration by Fernando Capeto for Forbes; Icons by Ruby/Noun Project InJanuary, a little-known Chinese AI lab named DeepSeek rocked the world when it released an advanced open source model that rivaled those of US tech giants, seemingly using a fraction of their resources. A who's who of AI's juggernauts, from OpenAI to Anthropic, lauded the company's achievements while defending their own progress and methods. President Donald Trump called it a 'wake-up call.' But beyond that viral moment, spun up by AI's own frothy hype cycle and a frenzy of geopolitical concerns, DeepSeek's emergence had a deeper impact: It put the spotlight on Chinese AI, and gave it a face on an international stage. DeepSeek and other Chinese companies were not included on the AI 50 list, which honors the most promising privately-held companies in artificial intelligence, because their financials and business practices are opaque. But they are worth highlighting as many of them make significant impacts beyond China, thanks to an emphasis on open source models made freely available for anyone to use. Forbes Many of the Chinese AI models gaining traction are made by the country's tech giants. There's video generation app Hunyuan owned by tech conglomerate Tencent, the $92 billion (2024 revenue) maker of WeChat. The company claims its recent 'reasoning' AI models, which can answer complex questions by breaking them into smaller sub-questions, outperforms DeepSeek's flagship models. Then there's Doubao, a consumer-focused app from TikTok parent ByteDance, which has built spatial models that analyze physical environments and generate 3D landscapes. There's also Qwen, a family of large language models from the ecommerce behemoth Alibaba, which has amassed more than 90,000 enterprise users on the company's cloud platform. 'Alibaba is kind of the leading big tech AI champion in China, comparable to what Google or Meta represent in the U.S.,' Rob Toews, a partner at Radical Ventures, told Forbes. As of publication, models from Alibaba and DeepSeek were among the top 5 trending models on Hugging Face, a widely used hub for open source AI models and datasets. 'In the realm of open source releases, there is no such barrier. There is no Great Firewall.' DeepSeek's meteoric rise opened the floodgates for other Chinese startups. In March, Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect launched an AI system called Manus, which it claims can autonomously browse the web and do things like search for apartments, analyze stocks and design websites. The tool has some pitfalls, ranging from making incorrect assumptions about the task at hand to crashing while processing large amounts of text. But its release was praised as an emerging rival to OpenAI's service, Operator. Fueled by the likes of Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, buzz around the company has drawn investor interest: Butterfly Effect is reportedly in talks to raise funding from US-based investors at a $500 million valuation, according to The Information. While DeepSeek built its models by finetuning other models from Meta and Alibaba, Manus managed to use Anthopic's Claude models off the shelf. 'It's basically a much better version of what OpenAI is trying to do with Operator," Toews said. China has been making significant leaps in humanoid robotics too. Agibot, founded in 2023 by former Huawei 'genius youth' recruit Peng Zhihui, claims it has already manufactured over 1,000 AI-powered bipedal robots and reportedly plans to grow that number to 5,000 robots by the end of the year, in a bid to match Elon Musk's plans for Tesla's general purpose robot Optimus. Earlier this month, the company hired Luo JianLan, who previously worked at Google X, Alphabet's moonshot factory, to lead its research efforts: 'I hear about them when I'm talking with my robotics companies and they're talking about competition they're seeing in China,' Aaron Jacobson, partner at venture capital firm NEA said. 'This one's come up a few times now.' Prominent investor and AI expert Kai-Fu Lee, who helped Google and Microsoft set up their outposts in China, founded his AI startup called in 2022. It recently pivoted from training its own open source models to using DeepSeek's AI to build enterprise apps across areas like gaming, law and finance. The company has raised some $200 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to PitchBook. It's one of China's 'Six Tigers,' an elite group of top AI companies in the country that includes the multimodal AI developer MiniMax AI and model maker Moonshot AI, both of which have attracted investment from Alibaba. China's advances in AI come as political relations with the U.S. grow ever more fraught. In 2022, then-President Biden issued export controls on semiconductor companies, including crucial chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD, restricting sales of their most powerful hardware in the country, aimed at throttling China's AI growth. Now, a trade war has broken out between the two nations created by President Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariffs, with the U.S. imposing 125% duties on exports. 'This is the power of a centralized state that can say, 'We're going to try to go in that direction.'' China's gains in AI are driven in part by an emphasis on academic research and open source publishing at universities, Russell Wald, executive director of Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), told Forbes. In 2018, China said it wanted to be the leader in AI by 2030, and marshaled significant academic resources toward that goal. Now the country is producing most of the world's AI research. As of 2023 it accounted for about 70% of all granted patents and produced 23% of the world's AI publications and citations. 'This is the power of a centralized state that can say, 'We're going to try to go in that direction.'' Wald said. (He added that the downside, however, is censorship in AI models by the Chinese government might put off western users.) So far the strategy is working. Earlier this week, HAI released its annual AI Index, which shows the AI race between the U.S. and China narrowing. The U.S. is still producing most of the world's cutting edge AI, with U.S. companies releasing 40 'notable models,' defined as 'particularly influential models within the AI/machine learning ecosystem.' China, in second place, released 15 such models. And the country is closing the gap in model performance: Two years ago, the U.S. led by double digit points on various benchmark tests. Last year, China reached 'near parity,' according to HAI. The country's open source approach, which lets anyone download the model and build applications with it, has made it easy for Chinese companies to have global impact. For decades, the U.S. and China have had starkly different tech ecosystems, with products and services only available in one region or the other. But DeepSeek's success showed the AI community that Chinese labs could circumvent those restrictions with open publishing. 'In the realm of open source releases, there is no such barrier,' Jeff Boudier, head of product and growth at Hugging Face, told Forbes. 'There is no Great Firewall.' Meanwhile, given the country's strong cultivation of AI talent at its universities and support for R&D, Wald sees a lot of promise not just in DeepSeek and its current cohort, but what follows them. 'What I think is more interesting is the company you don't know about right now, and you might hear about a year or two from now.'
Forbes
10-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
AI 50 2025: AI Agents Move Beyond Chat
The 2025 edition of the AI 50 list shows how companies are using agents and reasoning models to start replacing work previously done by people at scale. Artificial intelligence is entering a new phase in 2025. After years of AI tools mostly answering questions or generating content on command, this year's innovations are about AI actually getting work done. The 2025 Forbes AI 50 list illustrates this pivotal shift, as startups on it signal a move from AI that merely responds to prompts to one that solves problems and completes entire workflows. For all the buzz around big AI model makers like OpenAI, Anthropic or xAI, the biggest changes to the story in 2025 are in these application-layer tools that use AI to produce real business results. Sequoia Historically, AI assistants could chat or provide information, but humans still had to act on the output. In 2025, that's changing. For example, legal AI startup Harvey is showing that its software can do more than just answer legal questions–it can handle entire legal workflows, from document review to predictive analysis of cases. Its platform can draft documents, suggest revisions and even help automate negotiations, case management and client contact—suites of tasks that normally require a team of junior lawyers. This achievement earned Harvey a spot on the Forbes AI 50 list, and it exemplifies AI evolving from a helpful tool to a hands-on problem solver. Many of the standout AI 50 companies are enterprise tools that do on-the-job work. Sierra and Cursor, the only product of startup Anysphere, are emblematic of this new generation of business AI. Sierra automates customer service while vastly improving the experience, opening the way for companies to offer help to their customers at all hours. Cursor, meanwhile, has taken the software developer community by storm. Its technology allows anyone to not only autocomplete lines of code (à la GitHub CoPilot), but also generate entire features and applications simply by asking for it in plain English. Although we're not yet at a point where companies are deploying robots en masse, startups focused on robotics have made meaningful strides in the past year as they integrate models built using transformers (the 't' in ChatGPT) with hardware. Robotics featured prominently in Nvidia's keynote at its recent developer conference, with Jensen Huang claiming, 'physical AI for industrial and robotics is a $50 trillion opportunity.' Figure AI recently announced its BotQ high-volume manufacturing facility capable of producing 12,000 of its humanoid robots a year along with its new generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, Helix. Another AI 50 company, Skild AI, is taking a different approach, focusing on developing a universal robotics foundation model, Skild Brain, that can be integrated into a wide variety of robots, rather than building its own. Skild is also planning to sell services to the robotics industry that use Skild Brain. So far, everyday consumers have mainly encountered advanced AI via chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude (and newcomers like Grok). Hundreds of millions have tried talking to these AI tools, but we've yet to see a truly mainstream app where AI completes everyday tasks for people. That is likely to change in 2026. With the technology maturing—and people realizing how AI can save them time and money at work—expect a wave of consumer-facing AI products that handle whole tasks on their users' behalf. For example, Anthropic recently launched Claude Code, making software writing accessible to consumers. These new capabilities raise the prospect that AIs able to manage your schedule, book travel or organize your files end-to-end are on the horizon. This year is a turning point: AI graduated from an answer engine to an action engine in the workplace. The 2025 AI 50 companies proved that AI can be trusted with meaningful workloads and deliver real results, setting the stage for broader adoption. As we head into 2026, expect the enterprise gains to start spilling into everyday life. Challenges like accuracy and security remain, but the momentum is undeniable. In 2025, AI gets real work done.
