譯科技 | 福布斯公布全美 AI 50公司名單

　　來源 | Forbes（轉載請註明來源）

　　作者 | Jillian D'Onfro

　　譯者 | 黃玉葉

　　編輯 | 蒲蒲

　　人工智慧（AI）正在滲透各行各業，它支持車輛無人駕駛，協助醫生進行醫學診斷，模仿人類說話……然而，儘管它以真實可靠又振奮人心的方式改變了計算機的執行任務，也不排除很多炒作的情況。

　　「眾所周知，機器學習值得每個人擁有，否則你就落伍了。」

　　——Jeremy Achin

　　新晉獨角獸公司DataRobot執行長

　　AI這個本身就很寬泛的術語被頻繁提及，以至於它開始喪失意義，甚至連它基本的數據分析能力都被一眾公司拿來當作噱頭。為了防止過度炒作，《福布斯》和數據合作夥伴方Meritech Capital整理了一份美國私營AI企業名單以正視聽，這些公司正以一種有意義的方式運用人工智慧的部分功能，以展示其真正的商業潛力。

　　例如，其中一家公司製造的機器人可以在購物者周圍快速移動，幫助工人補充貨架上的貨物；另一家公司將AI應用於掃描招聘廣告中的無意識偏見；還有一家公司則通過AI分析大量數據集來對每條街道的天氣進行精準預測。

　　想要被列入我們的「全美AI50」名單，公司需要證明他們諸如「機器學習」(即系統從數據中學習以改進任務)、自然語言處理(使程序能夠「理解」書面文字或口語語言)，亦或計算機視覺(這涉及到機器如何「看」)這樣的技術，以上提到的這些技術必須是他們商業模式和未來成就的核心部分。

　　「AI50」的上榜者涵蓋了人力資源、安全、保險和金融等領域，其中醫療、交通和基礎設施的初創公司表現最好。儘管這50家公司中大多數來自矽谷、紐約和波士頓等傳統科技中心，但也有來自底特律和奧斯汀等較小科技中心的代表。

　　CB Insights的數據顯示，這些初創公司累積起來現金充裕——考慮到兜售人工智慧的初創公司僅在2019年第二季度就獲得了創紀錄的74億美元資金，這也就不足為奇了。這當中，僅8家初創公司是由女性創辦或聯合創辦的，這反映了風險投資的趨勢——由男性創辦的軟體初創公司獲得了最大份額的投資。

　　這可能是一個令人擔憂的原因：研究表明，人工智慧會加劇現有數據中的偏見，倘若女性人數更少、少數族裔人數更少，那麼這種情況更有可能發生。

　　以下列出的上榜公司按照估值上升的順序排列，在每個案例中，我們都試圖關注公司正在解決的問題，而不是解決問題的工具。鑑於部分公司可能秘密提交估值信息，《福布斯》使用了數據提供商Pitchbook的估值數據。

　　在這個過程中，AI 50的創辦方仔細考慮了他們聽到的關於人工智慧的最大誤解，Meritech Capital的負責人Konstantine Buhler也解釋了他評判初創公司的方式。

　　50 | Viz.ai

　　總部：舊金山

　　創始人：Chris Mansi(CEO)，David Golan

　　資金：2100萬美元

　　估值：未知

　　Viz.ai旨在減少沒有及時接受正確治療的中風患者的數量。該公司的軟體通過掃描資料庫對患者大腦的CT圖像進行交叉比對，可以在幾分鐘內提醒專科醫生注意到患者大血管閉塞性中風的早期跡象，否則他們可能會錯過這些症狀，要不就是花了太長時間才發現。Viz.ai向醫院網絡和醫療機構出售一系列相關產品，包括紐約市的西奈山醫療系統和丹佛市的瑞典醫療系統。

　　49 | Deep 6

　　總部：帕薩迪納，加州

　　創始人：Wout Brusselaers

　　資金：2200萬美元

　　估值：未知

　　當製藥研究團隊開始一項新的臨床試驗時，最大的瓶頸之一就是如何找到合適的患者群。這就是Deep 6的用武之地，他們的執行長Wout Brusselaers表示，該公司的軟體可以從電子醫學記錄中提取數據，創建患者圖表讓研究人員過濾特定的病情和病徵，從而在「幾分鐘內，而非幾個月內」找到相匹配的患者。

　　該系統的語言理解引擎已經通過訓練，因此即使在備註中沒有明確提到相應的病情和病徵，它也可以自己推斷出部分情況。Deep 6公司表示，他們已有20多個醫療系統和製藥方的客戶。

　　48 | Lilt

　　總部：舊金山

　　創始人：Spence Green，John DeNero

　　資金：1250萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　估值：2950萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　Lilt讓人工翻譯員的工作漸入佳境。聯合創始人John DeNero是資深的谷歌翻譯研究科學家，已經在該領域工作了幾年，致力於自主翻譯的優勢和局限性。比起依賴於翻譯機器，Lilt可以通過為自由職業者配備機器翻譯和預測性打字工具，向HBC和Zendesk等公司提供更好、更快的翻譯服務。

　　47 | Armorblox

　　總部：庫比蒂諾，加州

　　創始人：DJ Sampath (CEO)， Arjun Sambamoorthy，Chetan Anand，Anand Raghavan

　　資金：1650萬美元

　　估值：3700萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　兩年前，Armorblox的執行長兼聯合創始人Dhananjay Sampath將Armorblox引入了已經飽和的網絡安全市場，目的是保護客戶免受網絡釣魚郵件等利用人為失誤進行的社會工程攻擊。Sampath希望通過使用自然語言處理，讓機器學習和理解語言，從競爭中脫穎而出。該公司的軟體會分析客戶的通信風格，以獲得感知上下文的功能，然後自動標記潛在的釣魚企圖、內部威脅或意外數據洩露。

　　46 | DefinedCrowd

　　總部：西雅圖

　　創始人：Daniela Braga

　　資金：1310萬美元

　　估值：3880萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　DefinedCrowd利用人工貢獻者為包括萬事達(Mastercard)和寶馬(BMW)在內的客戶名單建立定製數據集。這家初創公司通過一個名為Neevo的平臺招募自由職業者，並分配給他們一些任務，比如給圖片貼標籤或錄製音頻，儘可能用機器學習驅動的自動化來加速他們的工作。人們創建或檢查的所有數據都被編譯成一種格式，客戶可以使用這種格式來訓練自己的算法。DefinedCrowd目前正在進行B輪融資，預計將在今年年底前完成。

　　45 | May Mobility

　　總部：安阿伯市，密西根州

　　創始人：Edwin Olson (CEO)， Alisyn Malek，Steve Vozar

　　資金：3300萬美元

　　估值：6190萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　May Mobility正在挑戰自動駕駛汽車，其產品外形因素比汽車更容易預測：自動駕駛巴士。該公司的軟體為羅得島州普羅維登斯市和俄亥俄州哥倫布市的穿梭巴士服務提供了動力，乘客可以乘車在這些地方遊覽市景。

　　44 | Xnor.ai

　　總部：西雅圖

　　創始人：Ali Farhadi，Mohammad Rastegari. (CEO: Jon Gelsey)

　　資金：1460萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　估值：6205萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　艾倫人工智慧研究所(Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence)的研究人員Ali Farhadi和Mohammad Rastegari發現了一個問題：「大多數時候，人工智慧研究人員(包括我們自己)，傾向於造出更好、更新的算法，對計算、內存和功率的要求更高」，Farhadi說。然而，現實世界中的用例卻傾向於相反的方向——需要更少計算、內存和能力的解決方案。他們開始嘗試創建一個系統，讓複雜的算法可以在簡單的硬體上運行。今年年初的時候，該公司實現了一項技術突破——在太陽能(000591,股吧)電腦晶片上運行了一個簡單的計算機視覺系統。

　　43 | Suki AI

　　總部：雷德伍德城，加州

　　創始人：Punit Soni (CEO)

　　資金：2000萬美元

　　估值：6500萬美元

　　行政管理工作對醫生來說是一個沉重的負擔，這減少了他們關注病人的時間，由此，Suki應運而生。為了緩解行政管理的壓力，這家初創公司開發了一款語音數字助手，醫生可以用它做筆記，並實時填寫電子記錄。據悉，Suki已經與幾家大型醫療系統和醫療服務機構籤署了協議，其中包括統一醫師管理公司(Unified Physician Management)和阿森松醫療集團(Ascension Health)。

　　Suki方表示，用戶完成臨床記錄的時間平均減少了76%，執行長Punit Soni說，它的數字助手已經「遠遠超越」了語音轉文本的軟體，它能識別上下文，而且醫生越用它，它就越個性化。Punit說：「Suki的創造肩負著將快樂帶回醫學界的使命。」

　　42 | Aira

　　總部：聖地牙哥

　　創始人：Suman Kanuganti, Sujeeth Kanuganti, Watson Yim, Yuja Chang, Larry Bock. (CEO: Mike Randall)

　　資金：3500萬美元

　　估值：6600萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　Aira通過其應用程式或定製的智能眼鏡，將真人與人工智慧輔件結合起來，幫助盲人和弱視者更好地「看」世界。該公司承認，其人工智慧輔件Chloe雖然目前仍處於初級階段——可以完成一些簡單的任務，如閱讀藥瓶上的說明——但它具有更強大的基於計算機視覺的導航系統的潛力。該產品對五分鐘以下的會議是免費的，Aira已建立了超過25,000個合作夥伴地點，如JFK機場和雜貨連鎖店Wegmans，在所有合作夥伴地點使用Chloe都是免費的。

　　41 | Rulai

　　總部：坎貝爾，加州

　　創始人：Marc Vanlerberghe (CEO)， Yi Zhang

　　資金：1450萬美元

　　估值：8000萬美元

　　儘管聊天機器人的出現帶來了無盡希望(諸如它們接管了Facebook Messenger），但它們從未被主流接受，部分原因是由於它們的範圍有限和對話僵化。Rulai方表示，它的虛擬助手則與眾不同，儘管當用戶切換上下文或添加任務時，大多數機器人都會遇到麻煩，但聯合創始人張奕表示，Rulai的對話管理器模型不會出錯，「虛擬助手需要處理自然語言的變化和會話流的變化」，她說。Rulai憑藉其客戶支持、銷售和僱員生產力機器人贏得了來福車（Lyft）、賽諾菲(Sanofi)和富達(Fidelity)等公司的青睞。

　　40 | Algorithmia

　　總部：西雅圖

　　創始人：Diego Oppenheimer (CEO)， Kenny Daniel

　　資金：3800萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　估值：1億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　Algorithmia的創始人之一Kenny Daniel曾經說過這樣一句話：「未來已經被創造出來了，它只是碰巧卡在某篇研究論文裡的某個地方。」他和長期在微軟工作的員工Diego Oppenheimer聯合設計了一種更簡單的方法，讓數據科學家能夠發現並使用機器學習模型。雖然Algorithmia最初是一個主要由單個開發人員使用的算法市場，但現在已經適應為大型企業提供更強健的基礎設施服務。該公司表示，例如，一家金融機構利用其平臺將一種新的風險模型投入生產。

　　39 | Ubiquity6

　　總部：舊金山

　　創始人：Anjney Midha (CEO)，Ankit Kumar

　　資金：3700萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　估值：1.02億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　該公司由Kleiner Perkins的前合伙人Anjney Midha和深度學習研究員Ankit Kumar創立，Ubiquity6為多人增強現實體驗開發了一款智慧型手機應用，該應用程式可以在大約30秒內構建一個3D空間地圖，並使用計算機視覺來識別現實世界物體，因此人們可以同AR中創建的對象進行現實般的交互。例如，2018年8月，該公司在舊金山現代藝術博物館預展了一款遊戲，玩家可以在遊戲中創建Rene magritte主題的物品，與其他用戶進行互動。

　　38 | Textio

　　總部：西雅圖

　　創始人：Kieran Snyder (CEO)，Jensen Harris

　　資金：2950萬美元

　　估值：1.15億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　位於西雅圖的人力資源初創公司Textio致力於幫助眾公司們更有效地發布招聘啟事或招聘郵件，他們建議改變語言表達以增加回復的可能性。鑑於如Spotify、Expedia和強生(Johnson & Johnson)等在內的350名客戶可以共享他們的匿名用戶統計數據和郵件回復率，因此Textio的系統可以幫助判斷文字中的某些短語是否適合某一特定性別或背景的人。

　　今年4月，他們推出了的一款名為Textio Flow的工具，它可以根據用戶的筆記自動生成完整的段落，Textio的CEO Kieran Snyder將該服務定義為一項「超級功能」，可以幫助用戶「以高水平高效率的語言準確表達自己的意思」。

　　37 | Affectiva

　　總部：波士頓

　　創始人：Rana el Kaliouby (CEO)， Rosalind Picard

　　資金：5300萬美元

　　估值：1.16億美元

　　Affectiva是一款基於面部表情和聲音識別的軟體。聯合創始人兼執行長Ranael Kaliouby表示：「啟發式編碼或簡單的基於規則的方法無法捕捉這當中的複雜性和細微差別。」該公司最近獲得了由汽車公司Aptiv牽頭的新一輪融資，希望有一天能將其技術集成到智能汽車中(想像一下，一輛汽車可以向一位睡眼惺忪的司機發出警告)。同時，它也被用來測試消費者對廣告和電視節目的反饋。

　　36 | BigPanda

　　總部：山景城，加州

　　創始人：Assaf Resnick (CEO)， Elik Eizenberg

　　資金：5100萬美元

　　估值：1.35億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　沒有什麼比網站或應用程式宕機更能激怒用戶的事了。為了簡化和防止這樣的災難，紅杉資本前CEO Assaf Resnick與軟體開發者Elik Eizenberg聯合推出了BigPanda。

　　Resnick擔任這家歷時8年的公司的執行長和首席技術官，該公司利用人工智慧和機器學習技術，在IT問題演變為全網中斷之前，實時減少這些隱患。在各行各業，BigPanda已經引起了包括耐克和聯合航空在內的數十家客戶的注意。

　　35 | Insitro

　　總部：南舊金山

　　創始人：Daphne Koller (CEO)

　　資金：1億美元

　　估值：1.35億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　Insitro旨在改進藥物研發進程。該公司由機器學習領域的資深人士Daphne Koller創立，在其自動化實驗室中創建了人類疾病的體外模型，然後應用機器學習模型來預測可能的有效療法。

　　該公司最近宣布與藥物製造商Gilead Sciences合作，斥資10億美元，以找到一種叫做非酒精性脂肪肝炎（NASH）病的治療方法。

　　34 | Blue Hexagon

　　總部：森尼維耳市，加州

　　創始人：Nayeem Islam (CEO)，Saumitra Das

　　資金：3100萬美元

　　估值：1.439億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　Blue Hexagon在高通公司(Qualcomm)高管Nayeem Islam的領導下，花了一年半多的時間建立了一個深度學習系統來分析網絡流量。該公司表示，這個系統可以在不到一秒的時間內檢測並阻止網絡威脅。

　　Islam表示，當潛在客戶試用該軟體時，它標記出的潛在攻擊數量可能會「令人瞠目」，因為它能夠預測攻擊者如何控制惡意軟體，「發現威脅的突變是人工智慧的優秀之處，我們去年的檢測率一直在99%以上。」

　　33 | Tamr

　　總部：坎布裡奇，麻薩諸塞州

　　創始人：Andy Palmer (CEO), Ihab Ilyas, Mike Stonebraker

　　資金：7350萬美元

　　估值：1.55億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　數據管理公司Tamr誕生於麻省理工學院的一個研究項目，該項目旨在應用機器學習來清理和組織所謂「不完整」、「不一致」的髒數據。Andy Palmer在製藥公司Novartis負責數據工程時，引入了麻省理工學院(MIT)的系統，用於整理過去10年裡分布在逾1.5萬個表格上的生物分析信息。

　　這項技術效果非常好，因此他和兩位研究人員決定以此創辦一家公司，Tamr的CEOPalmer表示：「管理成千上萬個不斷變化的表格式數據源，唯一的方法是巧妙地將機器學習和人類的專業技能結合起來。」

　　在實踐中，意味著Tamr的系統會自動識別整個公司中可能有用的數據源，然後在員工身上加上標籤，指導軟體如何集成這些數據源。目前，該公司向豐田(Toyota)、葛蘭素史克(GSK)和通用電氣(GE)等客戶銷售這項服務。

　　32 | Socure

　　總部：紐約

　　創始人：Johnny Ayers, Sunil Madhu (非當前員工) (CEO: Tom Thimot)

　　資金：6000萬美元

　　估值：1.75億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　Socure旨在消除身份欺詐。它評估來自數百個在線、離線數據源的數據，包括徵信局、運營商電話記錄、IP位址、社交網絡等，以監控任何可疑行為。該公司表示，它們能夠幫助客戶將欺詐率和人工審核成本降低80%至90%。

　　31 | Bossa Nova Robotics

　　總部：舊金山

　　創始人：Sarjoun Skaff， Martin Hitch (CEO: Bruce McWilliams)

　　資金：7657萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　估值：1.79億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　如果你發現自己身處沃爾瑪超市，一定要睜大眼睛，看看是不是有一個緩慢移動的大型機器人在過道裡走來走去，這是機器人初創公司Bossa Nova的創意。目前該機器人產品正在全美範圍內的350家門店中推廣，以保證貨超市架上的貨品充足。

　　該公司的系統會讀取價格標籤上的差異，並找出貨架上的缺口，以便在出現任何問題時提醒工作人員。公司的首席技術官Sarjoun Skaff表示，自2013年以來，公司一次又一次地研究如何讓機器人在購物者周圍安全移動，並以準確、及時和可靠的方式解讀數十億張圖像。

　　30 | Pymetrics

　　總部：紐約

　　創始人：Frida Polli (CEO)

　　資金：5660萬美元

　　估值：1.9億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　在線招聘平臺Pymetrics通過從簡歷中篩選經驗和技能都符合條件的人才，幫助企業找到合適的員工。該公司已有的80多家企業客戶，包括領英（LinkedIn）、埃森哲(Accenture)、萬事達(MasterCard)和聯合利華(Unilever)等，目前入職這些公司且表現最佳的員工都對該平臺進行了一系列評估。

　　Pymetrics為不同的職位收集了關鍵的情感和認知特徵，因此當求職者申請其中一家公司並自己完成挑戰時，他們會選擇最適合自己的工作，公司也可以利用這個平臺進行內部的職業發展規劃。

　　執行長兼神經心理學博士Frida Polli說:「Pymetrics能夠使整個應聘過程更有效率，結果更佳，且極大地增加了員工的多樣性。」此外，Pymetrics還公開了算法審計工具的原始碼，以防止其系統加強性別或種族偏見。

　　29 | K Health

　　總部：紐約

　　創始人：Allon Bloch (CEO), Ran Shaul, Adam Singolda

　　資金：5600萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　估值：2億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　K Health主張日常健康問題沒有必要麻煩醫生。「K Health是由技術專家和醫生共同建立的，因為我們對獲得相關的、個性化的和可負擔的醫療保健服務感到沮喪」，聯合創始人兼執行長Allon Bloch說。

　　該公司的App系統通過利用一個超20億份匿名醫療記錄的數據集，能夠為用戶提供個性化的健康建議。今年7月，K Health宣布與保險公司Anthem合作，讓會員免費了解醫生如何診斷和治療有相似症狀的患者，但在醫患交流環節需要支付費用。

　　28 | Moveworks

　　總部：山景城，加州

　　創始人：Bhavin Shah (CEO)， Vaibhav Nivargi， Varun Singh，Jiang Chen

　　資金：3000萬美元

　　估值：﹥2億美元

　　Moveworks希望終結等待企業IT部門給予幫助的望眼欲穿——它的自然語言理解引擎可以解決25%到35%IT人員的問題。例如，一個員工火急火燎地發了一條信息：「對不起，我騎自行車上班路上把筆記本電腦摔了，現在它打不開。我該怎麼辦？求助！」這時，該系統既能理解這個問題，又能為外借的筆記本電腦發送正確的表格。

　　Moveworks的執行長Bhavin Shah說：「Moveworks對員工所經歷的各種問題以及他們如何表達這些問題有著深刻的語義理解。」目前，該公司已擁有像Autodesk、Western Digital和Nutanix等大客戶加入。

　　27 | Rev.com

　　總部：奧斯汀，德州

　　創始人：Jason Chicola (CEO)， David Abrameto，Mark Chen，Paul Huck，Dan Kokotov

　　資金：3100萬美元

　　估值：2.06億美元

　　今年6月，音譯服務網站Rev.com表示，其測試顯示，播客轉錄的錯誤率低於谷歌、亞馬遜(Amazon)或微軟(Microsoft)的工具。雖然開發人員可以購買完全自動化的語音識別引擎，但他們的自由轉錄網絡也能幫助客戶提高工作效率。Rev.com的執行長Jason Chicola表示，這種混合方法帶來了更高質量、更便宜的轉錄服務。

　　Chicola說：「語言是非常複雜的——想想口音、喃喃自語、晦澀難懂的術語、糟糕的麥克風、背景噪音……人類在對這些真實世界的因素做出判斷方面要遠勝一籌。」

　　26 | Noodle.ai

　　總部：舊金山

　　創始人：Stephen Pratt (CEO)， Raj Joshi， Martha McGaw，Ted Gaubert， Matt Denesuk

　　資金：5100萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　估值：2.1億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　上世紀90年代初，Stephen Pratt在擔任美國國防部的項目顧問時，首次看到了機器學習的實際應用。當時電腦太慢，數據又太貴，人工智慧還無法實現，但大約30年後，Prat與投資公司TPG合作，幫助對方確定一家可購買或可投資的數據分析公司。

　　經過一年的尋覓，他沒有找到合適的選擇，於是加入了IBM Watson，僅呆了八個月，就決定在TPG的支持下開發新產品。Prat召集了一些業內資深人士作為他的聯合創始人，並於2016年圓周率日（3.14）推出了Noodle.ai，這家初創公司為工業和運輸公司開發人工智慧軟體收取一次性費用，外加每月額外的託管費用。它從XoJet和Big River Steel等公司獲得了總價值5000萬美元的合同。

　　25 | Kodiak Robotics

　　總部：山景城，加州

　　創始人：Don Burnette (CEO)， Paz Eshel

　　資金：4000萬美元

　　估值：2.1億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　炙手可熱的自動貨運領域充滿了來自資金方面的競爭，但這種固有風險並沒有阻止Kodiak Robotics的聯合創始人Don Burnette和Paz Eshel。他們在一次跳傘旅行中認識了彼此，並且想法一致：高速路上滿載貨物的自動駕駛卡車，可能是一個比乘用車更容易、甚至更有吸引力的商業機會。

　　Kodiak Robotics最近開始在德州的達拉斯市和休斯頓市之間運送家居品，但該公司表示，目前還不能透露客戶的信息。最終，他們計劃建立自己的綜合物流業務，而非把技術賣給其他運營商。

　　24 | ClimaCell

　　總部：波士頓

　　創始人：Shimon Elkabetz (CEO)， Rei Goffer， Itai Zlotnik

　　資金：8000萬美元

　　估值：2.17億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　ClimaCell的聯合創始人Shimon Elkabetz（CEO）在以色列軍隊服役時經歷了「由於天氣誤報而差點喪命」的經歷，這激勵他和其他創始人積極投身於精準天氣預報的事業。ClimaCell利用大量非傳統數據——如手機、物聯網設備和街景相機發出的信號來發布超本地化的「逐街逐分鐘」天氣預報。

　　目前，包括捷藍航空(JetBlue)、新英格蘭愛國者航空(New England Patriots)和Via拼車等在內的150多家企業客戶正在為ClimaCell的實時天氣預測系統買單。

　　23 | AEye

　　總部：普萊森頓，加州

　　創始人：Luis Dussan (CEO)， Ransom Wuller，Jordan Greene，Barry Behnken

　　資金：6500萬美元

　　估值：2.2億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　AEye希望通過將雷射雷達與高清晰度攝像機相結合，來改善自動駕駛汽車、機器人和無人機的「看」的功能。該集成系統可以提高速度，降低自動駕駛汽車感知系統的功耗，執行長Luis Dussan表示，他在公司成立之前曾在Northrop Grumman和美國宇航局(NASA)的噴氣推進實驗室工作。

　　22 | Brain Corp.

　　總部：聖地牙哥

　　創始人：Eugene Izhikevich (CEO)，Allen Gruber

　　資金：1.25億美元

　　估值：2.4億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　Brain公司的目標是用機器人軟體升級無聲的機器。首先，他們需要解決地板清潔設備的問題，和製造商達成合作，讓他們的機器能在複雜的環境中更好地避開障礙物。

　　沃爾瑪今年早些時候曾宣布，到2019年年底，將有近2000家分店安裝智能吸塵器。神經生物學研究員兼執行長Eugene Izhikevich表示：「我一直夢想著建造人工大腦，創業大腦公司給了我這個機會。」

　　21 | Domino Data Lab

　　總部：舊金山

　　創始人：Nick Elprin (CEO)

　　資金：8060萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　估值：2.6億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　Domino Data Lab的軟體即服務平臺為數據科學家提供了構建、測試和運行自有AI模型所需的「工具」。執行長Elprin將其描述為一種面向專家的GitHub。現階段，該公司的客戶已有70多家，包括好事達（Allstate）、Instacart、戴爾（Dell）、Gap和FabFitFun在內的大型企業和創企。

　　20 | Matterport

　　總部：森尼維爾市，加州

　　創始人：Matt Bell，David Gausebeck，Michael Beebe (非現任職) ， (CEO：RJ Pittman)

　　資金：1.15億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　估值：3.55億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　Matterport為創建逼真的3D模型提供了相應的硬體和軟體。它的圖像處理技術叫做Cortex，能夠與自帶3D相機以及一些更便宜的360度相機協作，讓用戶創建自己空間的虛擬版本。該公司目前正傾向於房地產市場，展示代理商如何利用它進行3D旅遊。

　　19 | PathAI

　　總部：波士頓

　　創始人：Andy Beck (CEO)， Aditya Kholsa

　　資金：7500萬美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　估值：3.75億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　Andy Beck曾在在哈佛醫學院任職，在他如日中天的時候毅然辭職與Aditya Khosla共同創辦了 PathAI。Beck曾在哈佛大學當了五年多的病理學家，他希望通過機器學習來更快、更準確地分析細胞圖像，從而使其他病理學家能更容易地診斷癌症等疾病，與其說它的工具是被醫生使用，不如說是被製藥公司的研究人員使用。

　　這家總部位于波士頓的初創公司目前擁有一份全球最大製藥巨頭的客戶名單，如諾華(Novartis)、吉利德科學(Gilead Sciences)和百時美施貴寶(Bristol-Myers Squibb)。

　　18 | People.ai

　　總部：舊金山

　　創始人：Oleg Rogynskyy (CEO)

　　資金：1億美元

　　估值：5億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　People.ai 的執行長 Oleg Rogynskyy 表示，他永遠也忘不了做銷售的時候花了大量時間在做非銷售的事情。當時，他還是Nstein Technologies公司的早期員工。「Nstein的營運長讓整個銷售團隊在一間滿是汗臭、沒有窗戶的會議室裡呆了一個星期去清理我們的銷售隊伍，」Rogynskyy回憶道。

　　他說那一周的情況促使他直面「糟糕的」客戶關係管理數據。2016年，Rogynskyy創立了People，它可集成到Salesforce等CRM系統中，自動輸入來自電子郵件、日曆、Slack聊天記錄等相關數據，並為銷售人員提供最佳任務建議。目前，VMware、Zoom、New Relic和Lyft都是他們的客戶。

　　17 | Standard Cognition

　　總部：舊金山

　　創始人：Jordan Fisher (CEO)， Michael Suswal， David Valdman，John Novack，Brandon Ogle， Dan Fischetti，TJ Lutz

　　資金：8600萬美元

　　估值：5.35億美元

　　再見，收銀員。你好，攝像頭。Standard Cognition正在開發一種自動結帳系統，購物者可以在店內閒逛，挑選商品並付款，無需掃描商品或與店員互動。其頭頂上的攝像頭持續跟蹤消費者和貨物，值得注意的是，攝像頭並不依賴於面部識別，能給消費者帶來更多隱私保障。

　　該公司表示：「我們基本上為所有非亞馬遜用戶創建了自動結帳功能。」Standard Cognition還在舊金山開了一家快閃店來展示它的技術，並表示他們正在北美的幾家商店進行「影子模式」測試。

　　16 | Verkada

　　總部：聖馬特奧市，加州

　　創始人：Filip Kaliszan (CEO)， Hans Robertson， James Ren， Benjamin Bercovitz

　　資金：5900萬美元

　　估值：5.4億美元

　　Verkada產品面世兩年，市場估值就已飆升至5.4億美元，並擁有1200多家客戶。Verkada配備AI驅動功能的雲連接安全攝像機系列，進一步推動了公司的發展。例如，物體檢測和運動檢測。此外，該公司的聯合創始人中，有三名畢業於史丹福大學的計算機科學系，以及一名企業雲公司Meraki的聯合創始人，而後者公司最後以10多億美元的價格「賣身」思科。

　　實際上，Verkada的客戶範圍廣泛，包括健身俱樂部Equinox、價值11億美元的溫哥華購物中心和500多個學區。同時，這些學區也將使用攝像頭，監控學生從安全問題到食品配送的方方面面，無所不包。今年早些時候，它上榜《福布斯》(Forbes)「下一個十億美元創業公司」榜單。

　　15 | Feedzai

　　總部：聖馬特奧市，加州

　　創始人：Nuno Sebastiao (CEO)，Pedro Bizarro，Paulo Marques

　　資金：8200萬美元

　　估值：5.75億美元

　　2011年，Feedzai推出了以打擊欺詐和反洗錢服務，後來越來越多的競爭對手也開始銷售相關的機器學習工具。公司的執行長Nuno Sebastiao表示，公司公司已通過自動化模型，構建和推出了新的視覺分析工具，並已適應了新的存儲庫。他強調，包括花旗銀行(Citi Bank)和勞埃德銀行集團(Lloyds Banking Group)在內的英國主要客戶成功證明了其產品的吸引力。

　　14 | SentinelOne

　　總部：山景城，加州

　　創始人：Tomer Weingarten (CEO) ， Almog Cohen

　　資金：2.3億美元

　　估值：6億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　2013年，市場上的殺毒軟體尚且不完整，或是有著無效或難以部署的等缺陷，因此Tomer Weingarten與聯合創始人創辦了SentinelOne。他們花了六年的時間研究如何讓終端安全變得更智能，諸如筆記本電腦、手機和其他聯網設備的數據等，他們訓練機器學習模型來檢測文件和應用程式中的惡意軟體。

　　目前，該公司已擁有包括雅詩蘭黛(Estee Lauder)和歐特克(Autodesk)在內的2500多家客戶。SentinelOne方表示，即將宣布與全球最大的PC製造商之一結成重大合作夥伴關係，為他們提供SentinelOne的技術。

　　13 | Bright Machines

　　總部：舊金山

　　創始人：Amar Hanspal (CEO)， Tzahi Rodrig， Lior Susan

　　資金：2億美元

　　估值：6.79億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　儘管近幾十年來，工廠的自動化程度越來越高，但Bright Machines依然相信，機器人系統終於為黃金時段的部署做好了準備。

　　該公司執行長Amar Hanspal表示：「到目前為止，製造行業最複雜的操作對於又盲又啞的機器人來說都太難了，它們無法像人類一樣精準地執行任務。」他還補充稱，計算機視覺和機器學習方面的進步，已經改變了這一「遊戲規則」。

　　今年6月，該公司剛剛發布了它的第一款產品，名為「微型工廠」，它是一個帶有機械臂的封閉式系統，可以完成將晶片插入電路板等任務。

　　12 | Upstart

　　總部：聖卡洛斯，加州

　　創始人：Dave Girouard (CEO)， Anna M. Counselman， Paul Gu

　　資金：1.64億美元

　　估值：7.5億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　Upstart執行長Dave Girouard表示，2012年，當谷歌前員工提出將前沿的數據科學應用於信貸流程的想法時，他們中的大多數人都沒有金融服務方面的經驗，認為當前的系統已經過時，且具有排他性。

　　Girouard 表示，通過使用個人信用歷史中不常見的數據，來尋找更細微的風險模式，使得Upstart的貸款模式比傳統方法有更高的批准率、更低的利率，並且損失率不到同行平臺的一半。迄今為止，已有30多萬個借款人通過Upstart獲得貸款。

　　11 | Fundbox

　　總部：舊金山

　　創始人：Eyal Shinar (CEO), Tomer Michaeli, Yuval Ariav

　　資金：1.4億美元

　　估值：7.5億美元

　　Fundbox採用數據驅動的方式幫助小企業而非普通人獲得貸款。公司創始人Eyal Shinar表示，他的母親經營著一家勞務中介公司，看到母親在現金流方面舉步維艱，於是他萌生了一個想法：讓客戶提前拿到未付的發票。

　　具體操作是，若有企業想要通過Fundbox獲得貸款時，只要將他們現有的金融工具與平臺連接起來，隨後平臺會使用這些數據流評估風險，並決定是否批准，而這個過程可能只需要三分鐘。

　　10 | Anduril Industries

　　總部：爾灣市，加州

　　創始人：Palmer Luckey，Brian Schimpf (CEO)， Trae Stephens，Matt Grimm，Joe Chen

　　資金：1.8億美元

　　估值：﹤10億美元

　　Oculus前聯合創始人Palmer Luckey曾因政治觀點被Facebook從VR部門戲劇性地解僱，並在2017年創辦了一家名為Anduril Industries的國防科技初創公司。

　　該公司開發了一個威脅檢測系統，通過利用在塔、無人機和車輛上的傳感器數據，來創建一個事實的3D區域模型。公司與美國海軍陸戰隊(Marine Corps)和英國皇家海軍(Royal Navy)籤訂了合同，還與海關和邊境保護局(Customs and Border Protection)籤署了一項所謂的「虛擬邊境牆」的合同。在最近的一次融資之後，有報導稱它已經成為了一家獨角獸企業。

　　隨後， Anduril Industries向《福布斯》(Forbes)證實，它目前的總融資金額為1.8億美元，估值接近10億美元。

　　9 | Scale AI

　　總部：舊金山

　　創始人：Alexandr Wang (CEO)

　　資金：1.22億美元

　　估值：10億美元

　　Scale AI是一家數據標註領域的創企，且獲得了客戶們的極大關注，尤其是自動運輸公司，它們需要大量標記好的數據來訓練算法系統。以至於創始人Alexandr Wang在23歲以前就開始獨立運營一家獨角獸公司。

　　目前，Scale AI已與幾千家承包商合作，儘管Wang說其公司使用機器學習來提高標記的準確性，但其實人才是核心。「機器學習會出現良莠不齊的現象，所以我們從第一天起就在關注質量」，他說。

　　8 | Hippo Insurance

　　總部：帕洛阿爾託，加州

　　創始人：Assaf Wand (CEO)，Eyal Navan

　　資金：2.09億美元

　　估值：10億美元

　　Hippo Insurance是一家智能家庭保險公司，是少數幾家能讓申請家庭保險的程序變得更快捷，並且其客戶更加年輕化（千禧一代）的公司之一。公司提取有關房產的公共數據，自動回答一般保險公司會問的許多問題——這意味著它可以迅速發布報價，並從航拍圖像和智能家居傳感器中提取數據，以實時發現可能導致索賠的問題。Hippo出售的保險是由持牌的保險公司發行，而非由自己承保，並從每個保險公司中扣除佣金。

　　7 | Icertis

　　總部：西雅圖

　　創始人：Samir Bodas (CEO)， Monish Darda

　　資金：2.11億美元

　　估值：10億美元

　　Icertis今年早些時候舉辦了十周年成立慶典。該公司管理著近600萬份合同，他們雲平臺可幫助企業分析過往合同談判並自動執行管理任務。這些產品吸引了來自90多個國家的客戶，包括空客（法國）、戴姆勒（德國）以及Icertis執行長Samir Bodas曾擔任總監的微軟等。

　　6 | DataRobot

　　總部：波士頓

　　創始人：Samir Bodas (CEO)， Monish Darda

　　資金：4.31億美元

　　估值：12億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　DataRobot致力於儘可能多地將數據科學家的工作自動化。該公司剛剛籌集了新一輪2.06億美元的E輪融資，用於開發該軟體。公司表示，該軟體幫助美國聯合航空公司(United Airlines)、PNC銀行(PNC Bank)和德勤(Deloitte)等客戶建立了自己的預測模型。

　　此外，DataRobot還表示，客戶只需要準備「好奇心和數據」，而不需要編碼技巧，就可使用其平臺通過機器學習實現商業問題的解決方案。

　　5 | Dataminr

　　總部：紐約

　　創始人：Ted Bailey (CEO)

　　資金：5.77億美元

　　估值：15.9億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　數據分析公司Dataminr通過提取像社交媒體帖子那樣的公共網際網路數據，使用深度學習、自然語言處理和高級統計建模，來向用戶發送定製的訂閱內容。目前，該公司擁有500多家付費訂閱客戶，包括亞馬遜(Amazon)、CNN和聯合國(United Nations)等，他們利用該系統在世界範圍內監測潛在人道主義危機。

　　4 | Lemonade

　　總部：紐約

　　創始人：Daniel Schreiber (CEO)，Shai Wininger

　　資金：4.8億美元

　　估值：21億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　Lemonade的業務主要是出售保險給租房者和房主。但與排名第八的Hippo Insurance不同的是，Lemonade本身就是一個持照的保單運承商。它通過使用聊天機器人收集客戶信息並處理索賠業務，其中30％已不需要人工幹預來解決。現階段，該公司現在擁有超過50萬客戶，其中大多數客戶是首次購買保險。

　　3 | Uptake

　　總部：芝加哥

　　創始人：Brad Keywell

　　資金：2.58億美元

　　估值：23億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　Uptake的執行長Brad Keywell表示，公司的業務是確保一切機器正常運行，「無論是美國陸軍的布拉德利戰車，還是勞斯萊斯市場一流的引擎部件。」Uptake已經吸引了100多家工業客戶，估值達到23億美元，並且擁有龐大的機器故障資料庫，這家成立5年的公司利用人工智慧分析客戶的機器以更好運行，並避免故障。

　　2 | Aurora Innovation

　　總部：帕洛阿爾託

　　創始人：Chris Urmson (CEO)，Sterling Anderson，Drew Bagnell

　　資金：6.96億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　估值：25.7億美元（Pitchbook提供數據）

　　Aurora Innovation是一家自動駕駛汽車公司，他們並不運營任何車輛，而是計劃將其自動駕駛系統出售給汽車製造商。目前可以確定的是，它與現代公司已籤署協議，為其起亞系新車提供軟體系統。最近，來自紅杉資本、亞馬遜和T. Rowe Price的一輪投資，讓該公司在這個日益競爭激烈的市場之中，成為資金最充足的玩家之一。

　　1 | Nuro

　　總部：山景城

　　創始人：Jiajun Zhu (CEO)，Dave Ferguson

　　資金：10.3億美元

　　估值：27億美元

　　Dave Ferguson和朱家俊在為谷歌自動駕駛項目工作超過5年之後，終於完成了用自動駕駛汽車接送乘客的任務，他們放棄了載人，選擇了載物（當地的商品）。Nuro的無人駕駛運輸車，通過與德克薩斯州克羅格公司（Kroger）的合作，已完成了數千次代購之旅。從載人變為運輸義大利麵等商品，進一步消除了安全和技術限制。「你可以開得更保守一些，因為車裡沒有人會因此感到沮喪」 ，Ferguson說。

　　編後按

　　從業務領域來看，上述50家公司主要分布在企業服務、自動駕駛與機器人、健康醫療、網絡安全等領域，代表了當前人工智慧的主流創業與投資方向，以及面向未來的商業潛力。

　　企業服務：最大的應用場景

　　榜單中有22家公司聚焦企業服務，涉及非常豐富的企業應用場景。這些場景又可以劃分為三大類型：

　　第一類是人工智慧基礎工具與服務商，關注人工智慧大數據集、訓練工具、機器學習平臺的開發，旨在幫助企業快速部署人工智慧。例如：聚焦企業預測模型的機器學習平臺DataRobot、數據標記與AI培訓數據服務商Scale AI、企業級數據科學平臺Domino Data Lab、在線錄音、錄像和文件轉錄服務商Rev.com、機器學習基礎設施服務商Algorithmia等。

　　第二類是垂直行業服務商，主要關注特定行業的人工智慧應用。例如：基於預測維護的工業物聯網平臺Uptake、聚焦工業4.0的企業AI應用平臺Noodle.ai、金融行業反欺詐技術服務商Feedzai等。這些公司正在推動傳統行業，特別是重資產行業的人工智慧應用落地。

　　第三類是聚焦於企業運營某個環節的服務商。例如：Pymetrics和Textio都試圖建立基於AI的企業招聘工具；Icertis專注於建立新的雲端合同生命周期管理平臺；People.ai致力於打造基於AI的銷售流程自動化服務平臺；MoveWorks正在基於機器學習，幫助企業建立自動化的IT支持系統。

　　健康醫療：最活躍的行業

　　根據CB Insights數據，健康醫療行業是目前全球人工智慧投資最活躍的行業。福布斯的榜單也體現了這一趨勢。

　　根據榜單，有7家公司來自健康醫療行業。其中，PathAI和Viz.ai均利用人工智慧進行醫療診斷技術的開發；Insitro則旨在建立目前最前沿的基於機器學習的新藥發現平臺；Suki AI基於語音技術，為醫生提供數字語音助理工具；Aira專為視障人群開發軟硬體技術。

　　自動駕駛：特定場景下的突破

　　作為最受追捧的投資領域，自動駕駛在近幾年吸引了大量投資。但是大量的技術障礙、漫長的應用落地、現實的盈利難題等因素導致該行業近期由熱轉冷。但不可忽視的是，自動駕駛技術其實早已在零售、倉儲、園區、通勤等特定場景中得到應用。

　　福布斯列出的相關公司並非全是自動駕駛汽車技術開發商，而是更多涉及特定場景的自動駕駛應用，可以說是對上述趨勢的呼應。例如：倉儲與零售機器人技術開發商Bossa Nova Robotics、清潔機器人等自動駕駛設備軟體系統開發商Brain Corp.、自動駕駛通勤車隊技術開發商May Mobility等。

　　應用場景是生存之本

　　此外，我們可以看到，在榜單上的相當一部分公司都已經得到市場驗證，並獲得了眾多知名企業客戶。

　　例如，Dataminr利用社交媒體大數據分析為客戶提供預測預警分析，擁有包括亞馬遜、美國有線電視新聞網和聯合國在內的500多個付費用戶；DataRobot幫助聯合航空和德勤等客戶建立自己的預測模型；Icertis有著超過90個國家的客戶，幫助空客（荷蘭）、戴姆勒（法國）和微軟等客戶管理著近600萬份合同；網絡安全平臺SentineLone則與雅詩蘭黛和Autodesk等2500多家客戶建立了合作關係。

　　這些案例對創業同行來說，是一個非常好的提醒：回歸商業的本質，快速找到現實的應用場景，對人工智慧創業公司的生存發展至關重要。

　　原文

　　AI 50: America’s Most Promising Artificial Intelligence Companies

　　Artificial intelligence is infiltrating every industry, allowing vehicles to navigate without drivers, assisting doctors with medical diagnoses, and mimicking the way humans speak. But for all the authentic and exciting ways it’s transforming the tasks computers can perform, there’s a lot of hype, too.

　　As Jeremy Achin, CEO of newly minted unicorn DataRobot, puts it: 「Everyone knows you have to have machine learning in your story or you’re not sexy.」

　　The inherently broad term gets bandied about so often that it can start to feel meaningless and gets trotted out by companies to gussy up even simple data analysis. To help cut through the noise, Forbes and data partner Meritech Capital put together a list of private, U.S.-based companies that are wielding some subset of artificial intelligence in a meaningful way and demonstrating real business potential from doing so. One makes robots that can whir around shoppers to help workers restock shelves. Another scans recruiting pitches for unconscious bias. A third analyzes massive data sets to make street-by-street weather predictions.

　　To be included on the list, companies needed to show that techniques like machine learning (where systems learn from data to improve on tasks), natural language processing (which enables programs to 「understand」 written or spoken language), or computer vision (which relates to how machines 「see」) are a core part of their business model and future success.

　　The honorees span categories like human resources, security, insurance, and finance, with healthcare, transportation, and infrastructure startups best represented on the list. While most of the 50 hail from traditional tech centers like Silicon Valley, New York City and Boston, there’s representation from smaller hubs such as Detroit and Austin, too. Cumulatively, the startups are flush with cash–unsurprising, given that startups touting AI received a record $7.4 billion in funding in just the second quarter of 2019, according to CBInsights. Only eight startups were founded or cofounded by women, reflecting trends in venture funding, where software startups run by men have received the lion’s share of investment dollars. That’s a possible cause for concern: Studies have shown that artificial intelligence can compound existing biases in data, which may be more likely to happen if there are fewer women and underrepresented minorities in the room.

　　The winners below are listed in order of ascending valuation, and in each case we』ve tried to focus on the problem the company is trying to solve instead of the tool solving it. In instances where companies submitted valuation information on the condition of confidentially, Forbes used estimates from data provider Pitchbook.

　　AI 50 founders reflect on the biggest misconceptions they hear about artificial intelligence and Meritech Capital principal Konstantine Buhler explains how he evaluates startups.

　　50 | Viz.ai

　　Headquarters: San Francisco

　　Founders: Chris Mansi (CEO), David Golan

　　Funding: $21 million

　　Valuation: Unknown

　　Viz.ai aims to reduce the number of stroke victims who don’t receive the right treatment in time. Its software cross-references CT images of a patient’s brain with its database of scans and can alert specialists in minutes to early signs of large vessel occlusion strokes that they may have otherwise missed or taken too long to spot. It sells its suite of products to hospital networks and medical institutions, including Mount Sinai in New York and Swedish Health System in Denver.

　　49 | Deep 6

　　Headquarters: Pasadena, CA

　　Founder: Wout Brusselaers

　　Funding: $22 million

　　Valuation: Unknown

　　When pharmaceutical research teams embark on a new clinical trial, one of the biggest bottlenecks can be finding the right cohort of patients to work with. That’s where Deep 6 comes in. CEO Wout Brusselaers says the company’s software can pull data from electronic medical records to create patient graphs that allow researchers to filter for specific conditions and traits, leading to matches in 「minutes, instead of months.」 The system’s language understanding engine has been trained so that it can infer some conditions even if they’re not explicitly mentioned in notes, and Deep 6 says it has more than 20 health system or pharmaceutical customers.

　　48 | Lilt

　　Headquarters: San Francisco

　　Founders: Spence Green, John DeNero

　　Funding: $12.5 million, via Pitchbook

　　Valuation: $29.5 million, via Pitchbook

　　Lilt makes human translators better at their job. Cofounder John DeNero spent several years as a senior research scientist for Google Translate, learning the strengths and limitations of autonomous translation. Instead of relying solely on machines, Lilt can churn out better translations, faster, for the likes of HBC and Zendesk by equipping freelancers with machine translations and predictive typing tools.

　　47 | Armorblox

　　Headquarters: Cupertino, CA

　　Founders: DJ Sampath (CEO), Arjun Sambamoorthy, Chetan Anand, Anand Raghavan

　　Funding: $16.5 million

　　Valuation: $37 million, via Pitchbook

　　CEO and cofounder Dhananjay Sampath launched Armorblox into the saturated cybersecurity market two years ago with the aim of protecting customers from socially engineered attacks, like phishing emails, that take advantage of human missteps. Sampath hopes it will stand out from the competition by using natural language processing, which allows machines to learn and understand language. Its software analyzes a customer’s communication styles to get a sense context and then automatically flags possible phishing attempts, insider threats or accidental data disclosures.

　　46 | DefinedCrowd

　　Headquarters: Seattle

　　Founders: Daniela Braga

　　Funding: $13.1 million

　　Valuation: $38.8 million, via Pitchbook

　　DefinedCrowd taps human contributors to build bespoke datasets for a client list that includes Mastercard and BMW. The startup recruits freelancers through a platform called Neevo and assigns them tasks like labeling images or recording audio, hastening their work with machine learning-powered automation where possible. All the data created or checked by people gets compiled into a format that customers can use to train their own algorithms. DefinedCrowd is currently in the process of raising a big Series B round of funding it expects to complete by the end of the year.

　　45 | May Mobility

　　Headquarters: Ann Arbor, MI

　　Founders: Edwin Olson (CEO), Alisyn Malek, Steve Vozar

　　Funding: $33 million

　　Valuation: $61.9 million, via Pitchbook

　　May Mobility is taking on the self-driving challenge with form factor that’s more predictable than cars: autonomous shuttles. The company’s software has powered shuttle services in Providence, Rhode Island, and Columbus, Ohio, where passengers get scenic tours of the city.

　　44 | Xnor.ai

　　Headquarters: Seattle

　　Founders: Ali Farhadi,  Mohammad Rastegari (CEO: Jon Gelsey)

　　Funding: $14.6 million, via Pitchbook

　　Valuation: $62.05 million, via Pitchbook

　　While researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Ali Farhadi and Mohammad Rastegari identified a problem: 「Most of the time, AI researchers (including ourselves) tend to make better, newer algorithms with more demand for compute, memory and power,」 Farhadi says. 「However, the real-world use cases tend to move in the opposite direction—demanding solutions with less compute, memory and power.」 They set about trying to create a system where complex algorithms could run on simple hardware and spun out of the Allen Institute, which was cofounded by the late Paul Allen of Microsoft, in 2016. Earlier this year, the company hit a technology breakthrough when it managed to run a simple computer vision system on a solar-powered computer chip.

　　43 | Suki AI

　　Headquarters: Redwood City, CA

　　Founder: Punit Soni (CEO)

　　Funding: $20 million

　　Valuation: $65 million

　　Suki is built around the idea that administrative tasks are a significant burden for doctors, cutting into their time to focus on patients. To relieve that strain, the startup makes a voice-enabled digital assistant that doctors can use to take notes and fill in electronic records in real time. It has signed on several large health systems and provider groups, including Unified Physician Management and Ascension Health, and says that users average a 76% reduction in time spent completing clinical notes. CEO Punit Soni says that its digital assistant goes 「far beyond」 voice-to-text software, recognizing context and becoming more personalized the more doctors use it. 「Suki was born with a mission to bring joy back to medicine,」 he says.

　　42 | Aira

　　Headquarters: San Diego

　　Founders: Suman Kanuganti, Sujeeth Kanuganti, Watson Yim, Yuja Chang, Larry Bock (CEO: Mike Randall)

　　Funding: $35 million

　　Valuation: $66 million, via Pitchbook

　　Aira helps blind and low-vision people better 「see」 the world by combining real human beings with an AI-powered agent through its app or custom smart glasses. The company admits that its AI agent, Chloe, is still in its infant stage right now—it can complete simple tasks like reading the instructions on a pill bottle — but it has big ambitions for more robust computer-vision-based navigation. The product is free for sessions under five minutes, and for all sessions in the 25,000+ locations where Aira has partnerships, like JFK Airport and the grocery chain Wegmans.

　　41 | Rulai

　　Headquarters: Campbell, CA

　　Founders: Marc Vanlerberghe (CEO), Yi Zhang

　　Funding: $14.5 million

　　Valuation: $80 million

　　While chat bots burst onto the scene with a lot of promise (remember how they were going to take over Facebook Messenger?), they never quite reached mainstream adoption, due in part to disenchantment with their limited scope and conversational rigidity. Rulai says its virtual assistants are different. While most bots run into trouble when users switch context or add tasks, cofounder Yi Zhang says that Rulai’s dialog manager models don’t get tripped up. 「Virtual assistants need to handle the variation of natural language and the variation of conversation flows,」 she says. Rulai has won over the likes of Lyft, Sanofi and Fidelity with its customer support, sales and employee productivity bots.

　　40 | Algorithmia

　　Headquarters: Seattle

　　Founders: Diego Oppenheimer (CEO), Kenny Daniel

　　Funding: $38 million, via Pitchbook

　　Valuation: $100 million, via Pitchbook

　　Algorithmia cofounder Kenny Daniel used to have a favorite saying: 「'The future is already invented; it just happens to be stuck in a research paper somewhere.」 He and longtime Microsoft employee Diego Oppenheimer banded together to devise an easier way for data scientists to discover and work with machine learning models. While Algorithmia began as a marketplace for algorithms used primarily by individual developers, it has adapted into a more robust infrastructure service for large enterprises. For example, it says that one financial institution used its platform to bring a new risk model into production.

　　39 | Ubiquity6

　　Headquarters: San Francisco

　　Founders: Anjney Midha (CEO), Ankit Kumar

　　Funding: $37 million, via Pitchbook

　　Valuation: $102 million, via Pitchbook

　　Founded by former Kleiner Perkins partner Anjney Midha and deep learning researcher Ankit Kumar, Ubiquity6 makes a smartphone app for multi-person augmented reality experiences. The app can build a 3D map of a space in roughly 30 seconds and uses computer vision to recognize real-world objects, so that objects created in AR can interact with them like they would in the real world. For example, in August 2018 it previewed a game at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that let guests create René Magritte-themed objects with which other users could interact.

　　38 | Textio

　　Headquarters: Seattle

　　Founders: Kieran Snyder (CEO), Jensen Harris

　　Funding: $29.5 million

　　Valuation: $115 million, via Pitchbook

　　Seattle-based HR startup Textio helps companies make their job postings or recruiting emails more effective, suggesting language changes to increase the likelihood of responses. Because its 350 customers, including Spotify, Expedia and Johnson & Johnson, share their anonymized audience demographics as well as response rates, its system can help flag whether certain phrases appeal particularly to people of.

　　37 | Affectiva

　　Headquarters: Boston

　　Founders: Rana el Kaliouby (CEO), Rosalind Picard

　　Funding: $53 million

　　Valuation: $116 million

　　Affectiva is trying to tackle the incredibly hard problem of  teaching software to recognize emotions based on facial expressions and voice. 「There is no way that heuristic coding or a simple rules-based approach can capture all these complexities and nuance,」 says cofounder and CEO Rana el Kaliouby. The company recently raised a fresh round of funding led by automotive company Aptiv with the hope that its technology could one day be integrated into smart cars (imagine a vehicle that could issue a warning to a drowsy-looking driver). In the meantime, it’s also being used to test consumer feedback on ads and TV programming.

　　36 | BigPanda

　　Headquarters: Mountain View, CA

　　Founders: Assaf Resnick (CEO), Elik Eizenberg

　　Funding: $51 million

　　Valuation: $135 million, via Pitchbook

　　Nothing riles up users like a website or application going down. To streamline and prevent IT catastrophes like this, former Sequoia Capital principle Assaf Resnick joined forces with software developer Elik Eizenberg to launch BigPanda. Resnick is CEO and Eizenberg chief technology officer of the eight-year-old company, which uses AI and machine learning to curtail IT problems in real time before they turn into full-blown network outages. Across industries, BigPanda has attracted dozens of customers including Nike and United Airlines.

　　35 | Insitro

　　Headquarters: South San Francisco

　　Founders: Daphne Koller (CEO)

　　Funding: $100 million

　　Valuation: $135 million, via Pitchbook

　　Insitro aims to improve the drug discovery process. Founded by machine-learning veteran Daphne Koller, it creates in vitro models of human disease in its automated laboratory and then applies machine-learning models to predict possible effective therapies. It recently announced a partnership with drug maker Gilead Sciences, worth up to $1 billion, to help it find a treatment for a form of liver disease called nonalcoholic steatohepatis, or NASH.

　　34 | Blue Hexagon

　　Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA

　　Founders: Nayeem Islam (CEO), Saumitra Das

　　Funding: $31 million

　　Valuation: $143.9 million, via PitchBook

　　Blue Hexagon, led by longtime Qualcomm executive Nayeem Islam, spent more than a year and a half building a deep learning system to analyze network traffic that it says can detect and block threats in under a second. Islam says that when potential customers try the software, it can be 「startling」 how many more potential attacks it flags, which he attributes to its ability to predict how attackers will adapt their malware. 「[Finding] the mutation of a threat is what AI does incredibly well,」 he says. 「Our detection rate for the last year has consistently been over 99%.」

　　33 | Tamr

　　Headquarters: Cambridge, MA

　　Founders: Andy Palmer (CEO), Ihab Ilyas, Mike Stonebraker

　　Funding: $73.5 million

　　Valuation: $155 million, via Pitchbook

　　Data management company Tamr was born out of an MIT research project to apply machine learning to clean and organize so-called dirty data that’s incomplete or inconsistent. Andy Palmer was running data engineering at pharmaceutical company Novartis when MIT’s system was brought in to organize a decade’s worth of biological assay information spread across more than 15,000 tables. The technology worked so well that he and two of the researchers decided to start a company around it. 「The only way to curate thousands of tabular data sources that are constantly changing is using an artful combination of machine learning and human expertise,」 says Palmer, who is now CEO. In practice, that means that Tamr’s system automatically identifies sources of data across a company that could be useful together and then tags in an employee to instruct the software how to integrate it. The company sells its service to customers like Toyota, GSK and GE, which it says saved over $80 million using Tamr.

　　32 | Socure

　　Headquarters: New York City

　　Founders: Johnny Ayers, Sunil Madhu (no longer active employee) - (CEO: Tom Thimot)

　　Funding: $60 million

　　Valuation: $175 million, via Pitchbook

　　Socure aims to wipe out identity fraud. It evaluates data from hundreds of online and offline data sources including credit bureaus, carrier phone records, IP addresses, social networks and more, to monitor for any suspicious behavior. The company says that customers see reductions in fraud rate and manual review costs by 80% to 90%.

　　31 | Bossa Nova Robotics

　　Headquarters: San Francisco

　　Founders: Sarjoun Skaff, Martin Hitch (CEO: Bruce McWilliams)

　　Funding: $76.57 million, via Pitchbook

　　Valuation: $179 million, via Pitchbook

　　If you find yourself in a Walmart, keep your eyes peeled for a big, slow-moving robot gliding up and down the aisles. It’s the brainchild of robotics startup Bossa Nova and is rolling out to 350 stores around the country to help keep shelves well stocked. Its system reads price labels for discrepancies and finds gaps on shelves so it can alert workers about any problems. Chief technology officer Sarjoun Skaff says it has taken iteration after iteration since 2013 to figure out how to let its robots maneuver safely around shoppers and interpret billions of images in a way that was accurate, timely and reliable.

　　30 | Pymetrics

　　Headquarters: New York City

　　Founders: Frida Polli (CEO)

　　Funding: $56.6 million

　　Valuation: $190 million, via Pitchbook

　　Online recruiting platform Pymetrics helps companies find the right hires by looking beyond experiences and skills on a résumé. Its more than 80 enterprise customers, including LinkedIn, Accenture, MasterCard and Unilever have current, top-performing employees complete the platform’s set of assessments. Pymetrics gleans key emotional and cognitive traits for different roles so when job seekers apply to work at one of those companies and complete the challenges themselves, they’re paired with jobs that are the best fit. Companies can also use the platform for internal career development. 「It makes the process more efficient with better outcomes and increases diversity tremendously,」 says CEO and neuropsychology Ph.D. Frida Polli. Pymetrics open-sources its algorithm auditing tool, aimed at preventing its systems from reinforcing gender or ethnic bias.

　　29 | K Health

　　Headquarters: New York City

　　Founders: Allon Bloch (CEO), Ran Shaul, Adam Singolda

　　Funding: $56 million, via Pitchbook

　　Valuation: $200 million, via Pitchbook

　　K Health doesn’t think that everyday health concerns need to warrant a trip to the doctor’s office. 「K was built by technologists and doctors because we felt frustrated with the ability to access relevant, personalized and affordable healthcare,」 says cofounder and CEO Allon Bloch. The company’s consumer app draws on a data set of more than 2 billion anonymized medical records, finding subtle patterns in the data to give users personalized health advice. In July, K announced a partnership with insurance provider Anthem to let members see how doctors diagnose and treat similar people with similar symptoms for free (though they』ll be charged to chat with an actual doctor).

　　28 | Moveworks

　　Headquarters: Mountain View, CA

　　Founders: Bhavin Shah (CEO), Vaibhav Nivargi, Varun Singh, Jiang Chen

　　Funding: $30 million

　　Valuation: $200 million+

　　Moveworks wants to end the frustration of waiting around for corporate IT help–its natural language understanding engine can solve 25% to 35% of all employee IT issues autonomously. For example, if a worker sends a frantic message like,  「Sorry, I was biking to work and dropped my laptop accidentally, and it won’t turn on now. What should I do?? Please help!」 the system can both understand the problem and send the right form for a loaner laptop. Moveworks has a 「deep, semantic understanding of the kinds of problems employees experience and how they express them,」 CEO Bhavin Shah says. Big customers like Autodesk, Western Digital and Nutanix are on board.

　　27 | Rev.com

　　Headquarters: Austin, TX

　　Founder: Jason Chicola (CEO), David Abrameto, Mark Chen, Paul Huck, Dan Kokotov.

　　Funding: $31 million

　　Valuation: $206 million

　　In June, transcription service Rev.com said that its tests show that its word error rate on podcast transcriptions was lower than what Google, Amazon or Microsoft’s tools produced. While developers can buy access to that completely automated speech recognition engine, its network of freelance transcribers also use it to make their client work easier and faster. CEO Jason Chicola says this hybrid approach leads to higher- quality, cheaper transcriptions. 「Language is incredibly complex—think accents, mumbling, arcane terminology, bad microphones, background noise,」 says Chicola. 「Humans are far, far better at making judgment calls for these real-world factors.」

　　26 | Noodle.ai

　　Headquarters: San Francisco

　　Founders: Stephen Pratt (CEO), Raj Joshi, Martha McGaw, Ted Gaubert, Matt Denesuk

　　Funding: $51 million, via Pitchbook

　　Valuation: $210 million, via Pitchbook

　　Stephen Pratt first saw machine learning in action while working as a consultant on a Department of Defense project in the early 1990s. Computers were too slow and data too expensive to make AI practical at the time, but roughly three decades later, Pratt teamed up with investment firm TPG to help it identify a data analytics company to buy or invest in. After a yearlong search he couldn’t find the right fit and joined IBM Watson, but only stayed for eight months before deciding to build something new with TPG’s backing. Pratt gathered a handful of industry vets as his cofounders and Noodle.ai launched on Pi Day 2016 (3.14.16). The startup charges a one-time fee to create AI software for industrial and transportation companies, with a monthly hosting fee on top. It’s booked $50 million in total contract value from the likes of XoJet and Big River Steel.

　　25 | Kodiak Robotics

　　Headquarters: Mountain View, CA

　　Founders: Don Burnette (CEO), Paz Eshel

　　Funding: $40 million

　　Valuation: $210 million, via Pitchbook

　　The red-hot autonomous trucking space is full of well-funded competition, but that inherent risk isn’t deterring Kodiak Robotics cofounders Don Burnette and Paz Eshel (the two met on a sky-diving trip, after all). The idea is that autonomously driving cargo-laden trucks down a highway could be a nearer-term and even more attractive commercial opportunity than passenger vehicles. Kodiak recently started shipping household goods in between Dallas and Houston, Texas, but said that it can’t name clients just yet. Ultimately, it plans to build its own comprehensive logistics business instead of selling its technology to other carriers.

　　24 | ClimaCell

　　Headquarters: Boston

　　Founders: Shimon Elkabetz (CEO), Rei Goffer, Itai Zlotnik

　　Funding: $80 million

　　Valuation: $217 million, via Pitchbook

　　ClimaCell’s cofounders all had what CEO Shimon Elkabetz describes as 「life-threatening experiences due to poor weather forecasts」 while serving in the Israeli military, inspiring them to try to find a way to make predictions more accurate. The company uses vast quantities of nontraditional data—like signals from cellphones, internet-of-things devices and street cameras—to issue hyperlocal 「street-by-street, minute-by-minute」 weather forecasts. More than 150 corporate customers, including JetBlue, the New England Patriots and ride-sharing service Via, are shelling out for its real-time predictions.

　　23 | AEye

　　Headquarters: Pleasanton, CA

　　Founders: Luis Dussan (CEO), Ransom Wuller, Jordan Greene, Barry Behnken

　　Funding: $65 million

　　Valuation: $220 million, via Pitchbook

　　AEye wants to improve the 「eyes」 of autonomous cars, robots and drones by combining laser lidar— which stands for 「light detection and ranging」—with a high-definition camera. That integrated system can increase the speed and decrease the power consumption of a self-driving car’s perception system, says CEO Luis Dussan, who worked at Northrop Grumman and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab before founding the company.

　　22 | Brain Corp.

　　Headquarters: San Diego

　　Founders: Eugene Izhikevich (CEO), Allen Gruber

　　Funding: $125 million

　　Valuation: $240 million via Pitchbook

　　Brain Corp. aims to upgrade dumb machinery with robotic software. It’s tackling the world of floor-cleaning equipment first, partnering with manufacturers to make their machines better at avoiding obstacles in busy environments. Walmart announced earlier this year that nearly 2,000 stores will be humming with BrainOS-powered cleaners by the end of 2019. 「I have always dreamed of building artificial brains,」 says neurobiology researcher and CEO Eugene Izhikevich. 「Starting Brain Corp. gave me this opportunity.」

　　21 | Domino Data Lab

　　Headquarters: San Francisco

　　Founders: Nick Elprin (CEO)

　　Funding: $80.6 million, via Pitchbook

　　Valuation: $260 million, via Pitchbook

　　Domino Data Lab’s software-as-a-service platform provides data scientists with the 「picks and shovels」 they need to build, test and run their own AI models. CEO Elprin describes its as a sort of GitHub for experts and its 70-plus client lists include big enterprises and startups alike, including Allstate, Instacart, Dell, Gap and FabFitFun.

　　20 | Matterport

　　Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA

　　Founders: Matt Bell, David Gausebeck, Michael Beebe (no longer active employee) - (CEO: RJ Pittman)

　　Funding: $115 million, via Pitchbook

　　Valuation: $355 million, via Pitchbook

　　Matterport makes hardware and software for creating realistic 3D models. Its image processing technology, called Cortex, works with its own 3D camera, as well as a selection of cheaper 360-degree cameras, to let users create virtual versions of their space. The company’s leaning into the real estate market, showcasing how agents can use it to give 3D tours.

　　19 | PathAI

　　Headquarters: Boston

　　Founders: Andy Beck (CEO), Aditya Kholsa

　　Funding: $75 million, via Pitchbook

　　Valuation: $375 million, via Pitchbook

　　Andy Beck was rising up the ranks of the Harvard Medical School faculty when he quit to cofound PathAI with Aditya Khosla. Beck, who spent more than five years as a pathologist at Harvard, wants to make it easier for other pathologists to diagnose diseases like cancer by using machine learning to more quickly and accurately analyze images of cells. For the time being, its tools are used not so much by doctors as they are by researchers at pharmaceutical companies. The Boston-based startup boasts a client list of the world’s largest pharma giants, such as Novartis, Gilead Sciences and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

　　18 | People.ai

　　Headquarters: San Francisco

　　Founder:Oleg Rogynskyy (CEO)

　　Funding: $100 million

　　Valuation: $500 million, via Pitchbook

　　People.ai CEO Oleg Rogynskyy says he』ll never forget the moment he realized how much time salespeople spend doing nonsales things. At the time, he was an early employee at a company called Nstein Technologies. 「The COO of Nstein grounded the whole sales team for a week in a sweaty, windowless conference room to go and clean up our Salesforce,」 Rogynskyy recalls. That week inspired him to address 「bad」 customer relationship management data head-on, he says. In 2016, Rogynskyy founded People.ai, which integrates into CRM systems like Salesforce and automatically inputs relevant data from email, calendars, Slack chats and more, and advises salespeople on the 「best」 tasks to focus on. VMware, Zoom, New Relic and Lyft are all customers.

　　17 | Standard Cognition

　　Headquarters: San Francisco

　　Founders: Jordan Fisher (CEO), Michael Suswal, David Valdman, John Novack, Brandon Ogle, Dan Fischetti, TJ Lutz

　　Funding: $86 million

　　Valuation: $535 million

　　Goodbye, cashiers. Hello, cameras. Standard Cognition is working on an autonomous checkout system where shoppers can wander through a store, picking out goods and pay without scanning their items or interacting with an employee. Its overhead cameras track individuals and items continuously (notably, its so-called entity cohesion doesn’t rely on facial recognition, which it says gives shoppers more privacy). 「We have essentially created autonomous checkout for everyone who is not Amazon,」 the company says. Standard Cognition has opened a pop-up in San Francisco to show off its tech and says that it’s in 「shadow mode」 testing in several stores in North America.

　　16 | Verkada

　　Headquarters: San Mateo, CA

　　Founders: Filip Kaliszan (CEO), Hans Robertson, James Ren, Benjamin Bercovitz

　　Funding: $59 million

　　Valuation: $540 million

　　Verkada has only been selling its products for two years, but it has already boomed to a $540 million valuation and more than 1,200 customers. A lineup of cloud-connected security cameras equipped with AI-driven features like object and movement detection has driven growth at Verkada, whose cofounders are three Stanford computer science graduates and the cofounder of enterprise cloud company Meraki, which sold to Cisco for more than $1 billion. Among the company’s wide-ranging list of clients are fitness club Equinox, the $1.1 billion Vancouver Mall and more than 500 school districts, which use the cameras for anything from monitoring student safety to tracking food deliveries. It earned a spot on Forbes』 list of Next Billion-Dollar Startups earlier this year.

　　15 | Feedzai

　　Headquarters: San Mateo, CA

　　Founders: Nuno Sebastiao (CEO), Pedro Bizarro, Paulo Marques

　　Funding: $82 million

　　Valuation: $575 million

　　Since Feedzai launched back in 2011 to fight fraud and money laundering, many more competitors have started touting how their own tools move beyond rules-based systems to machine learning, too. CEO Nuno Sebastiao says the company has adapted to the new hoards by automating its model building and rolling out new visual analysis tools. He highlights major customers including Citi Bank and Lloyds Banking Group in the United Kingdom as proof of its product’s traction.

　　14 | SentinelOne

　　Headquarters: Mountain View, CA

　　Founders: Tomer Weingarten (CEO) and Almog Cohen

　　Funding: $230 million

　　Valuation: $600 million, via Pitchbook

　　SentinelOne CEO Tomer Weingarten says he and his cofounder started the company in 2013 because antivirus software at the time was 「some flavor of bad, incomplete, ineffective, and /or painful to deploy and operate.」 They spent the past six years figuring out how to make endpoint security (which focuses on data coming from laptops, phones, and other network-connected devices) smarter, training machine learning models to detect malware in files and running in applications. The company has over 2,500 customers, including Estee Lauder and Autodesk, and it says it’s on the verge of announcing a major partnership with one of the largest PC makers to offer SentinelOne tech on its enterprise devices.

　　13 | Bright Machines

　　Headquarters: San Francisco

　　Founder: Amar Hanspal (CEO), Tzahi Rodrig, Lior Susan

　　Funding: $200 million

　　Valuation: $679 million, via Pitchbook

　　While factories have become increasingly automated over recent decades, Bright Machines believes that robotic systems are finally ready for primetime deployment. 「Until now, the most complex operations in manufacturing have been too difficult for blind and dumb robots to perform with the same precision and fidelity as humans,」 says CEO Amar Hanspal, adding that advances in computer vision and machine learning have changed the game. The company just released its first product in June: So-called 「microfactories,」 or closed systems with robotic arms that can complete tasks like inserting chips in a circuit board.

　　12 | Upstart

　　Headquarters: San Carlos, CA

　　Founders: Dave Girouard (CEO), Anna M. Counselman, Paul Gu

　　Funding: $164 million

　　Valuation: $750 million, via Pitchbook

　　Upstart CEO Dave Girouard admits that most of the early team of former Google employees had no history in financial services when they came up with the idea to apply advanced data science to the credit process in 2012: Only the belief that the current system was antiquated and exclusionary. By using data not typically found in a person’s credit history to find more nuanced risk patterns, Girouard says Upstart’s lending model has higher approval rates and lower interest rates than traditional methods, with loss rates that are 「less than half」 of those of peer platforms. To-date, more than 300,000 individual borrowers have used Upstart to get a loan.

　　11 | Fundbox

　　Headquarters: San Francisco

　　Founders: Eyal Shinar (CEO), Tomer Michaeli, Yuval Ariav

　　Funding: $140 million

　　Valuation: $750 million

　　Fundbox has a data-driven take on lending that facilitates loans to small businesses rather than regular people. Founder Eyal Shinar says that seeing his mother, who ran a staffing agency, struggle with cash flow inspired the idea of advancing customers for outstanding invoices. A company that wants a loan through Fundbox connects their existing finance tools to its platform, which then uses these data streams to assess risk and either approve the loan or not. Shinar says that process can take as little as three minutes.

　　10 | Anduril Industries

　　Headquarters: Irvine, CA

　　Founders: Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf (CEO), Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, Joe Chen

　　Funding: $180 million

　　Valuation: Just under $1 billion

　　Former Oculus cofounder Palmer Luckey is back after his dramatic exit from Facebook (he has hinted that the company fired him from the virtual reality unit for his political views, which it denies) with a defense technology startup called Anduril Industries, founded in 2017. The company makes a threat-detection system, using data from sensors mounted.

　　9 | Scale AI

　　Headquarters: San Francisco

　　Founders: Alexandr Wang (CEO)

　　Funding: $122 million

　　Valuation: $1 billion

　　Alexandr Wang’s data labeling startup Scale AI has gained so much attention from customers — particularly autonomous transportation companies, which need gobs of well-labeled data to train their systems — that he’s running a unicorn company before his 23rd birthday. Scale works with tens of thousands of contractors and though Wang says that the company uses machine learning to help improve the accuracy of its labeling, those humans are core to its mission. 「ML is very much garbage-in garbage out, so we focused on quality from day one,」 he says.

　　8 | Hippo Insurance

　　Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA

　　Founders: Assaf Wand (CEO), Eyal Navan

　　Funding: $209 million

　　Valuation: $1 billion

　　Hippo Insurance is one of a handful of companies trying to make the process of applying for home insurance faster and more Millennial-friendly. It pulls public data about a property to automatically answer many of the questions a typical insurer would ask, which means it can quickly dole out quotes, and pulls data from aerial images and smart home sensors to detect issues that could lead to claims in real-time. Hippo sells policies backed by established insurers, rather than underwriting them itself, and takes a commission off each one.

　　7 | Icertis

　　Headquarters: Seattle

　　Founders: Samir Bodas (CEO), Monish Darda

　　Funding: $211 million

　　Valuation: $1 billion

　　Icertis, which celebrated its ten-year anniversary earlier this year, manages nearly 6 million contracts. Its cloud-based platform helps companies analyze past contract negotiations and automate administrative tasks. These offerings have brought on clients from more than 90 countries, including Airbus (France), Daimler (Germany), and Microsoft, the company where CEO Samir Bodas was previously a director.

　　6 | DataRobot

　　Headquarters: Boston

　　Founders: Jeremy Achin (CEO), Tom de Godoy

　　Funding: $431 million

　　Valuation: $1.2 billion, via Pitchbook

　　DataRobot wants to automate as much of a data scientist’s job as possible. The company just raised a new $206 million Series E round of funding as it develops the software that it says has helped customers like United Airlines, PNC Bank, and Deloitte build their own predictive models. The company boasts that users only need 「curiosity and data,」 and not coding skills, to use its platform to answer business questions with machine learning.

　　5 | Dataminr

　　Headquarters: New York City

　　Founders: Ted Bailey (CEO)

　　Funding: $577 million

　　Valuation: $1.59 billion, via Pitchbook

　　Dataminr ingests public internet data, like social media posts, and uses deep learning, natural language processing, and advanced statistical modeling to send users tailored alerts. The company has more than 500 clients paying its subscription fees, including Amazon, CNN, and The United Nations, which uses the system to find early signs of potential humanitarian crises around the world.

　　4 | Lemonade

　　Headquarters: New York City

　　Founders: Daniel Schreiber (CEO), Shai Wininger

　　Funding: $480 million

　　Valuation: $2.1 billion, via Pitchbook

　　Lemonade sells renters and homeowners insurance, though, unlike Hippo, it is actually a licensed policy carrier itself. It uses a chatbot to collect customer information and work through claims — 30% of which apparently don’t require human intervention to be resolved. It now has more than 500,000 customers, the majority of whom are first-time insurance buyers.

　　3 | Uptake

　　Headquarters: Chicago

　　Founders: Brad Keywell

　　Funding: $258 million

　　Valuation: $2.3 billion, via Pitchbook

　　Uptake CEO Brad Keywell says his company is in the business of making sure things work, 「whether it’s the U.S. Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle, or the components that make up Rolls-Royce’s fleet of market-leading engines.」 It’s brought in more than 100 industrial customers on its way to a $2.3 billion valuation. With a huge database of machine failures at its disposal, the five-year-old company leverages artificial intelligence to analyze how its customers』 machines can run better and avoid these failures. 「There is no more guesswork or operating blindly involved,」 says Keywell, who cofounded Groupon before founding Uptake.

　　2 | Aurora Innovation

　　Headquarters: Palo Alto

　　Founders: Chris Urmson (CEO), Sterling Anderson, Drew Bagnell

　　Funding: $696 million, via Pitchbook

　　Valuation: $2.57 billion, via Pitchbook

　　A trifecta of autonomy and transportation experts from Tesla, Uber, and Google came together to build Aurora, a self-driving car company that plans to sell its system to automakers instead of operating its own fleet (it currently has a deal with Hyundai to provide software for its future Kia models). A recent round of funding from Sequoia Capital, Amazon, and T. Rowe Price makes it one of the best-funded players in an increasingly crowded space.

　　1 | Nuro

　　Headquarters: Mountain View

　　Founders: Jiajun Zhu (CEO), Dave Ferguson

　　Funding: $1.03 billion

　　Valuation: $2.7 billion

　　After working for more than five years each on Google’s self-driving project, Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu were done trying to ferry people around in autonomous vehicles. So, they ditched humans for local goods. Nuro’s driverless delivery vehicles have completed thousands of trips to shoppers through a partnership with Kroger in Texas. Shifting from people to pasta and Poptarts eliminates safety and technical constraints. 「You can drive more conservatively because you don’t have someone inside the vehicle that’s getting frustrated,」 Ferguson says.

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