NEXT BILLION DOLLAR STARTUPS
Damn, we’re good. For the tenth year running, Forbes has teamed up with TrueBridge Capital Partners to search for the 25 U.S. venture-backed companies most likely to reach a $1 billion valuation. Of the list’s 225 alumni, 130, or 58%, became unicorns, including DoorDash, Figma, Anduril, Benchling and Rippling, although 21 of those are now worth less than $1 billion. Forty-two were acquired; only three (1%) went public for less than $1 billion. There have been surprisingly few disasters: Just ve startups imploded or shut down, most spectacularly microbiome testing startup uBiome, an alum of the 2018 list, which liquidated a er being raided by the FBI over its billing practices. This year’s batch— chosen from more than 150 nominations and presented here in alphabetical order—is, unsurprisingly, full of companies be ing on arti cial intelligence to do, well, just about everything.
Edited by Amy Feldman
Editorial Operations: Elisabeth Brier • Reporters: Thomas Brewster, Kenrick Cai, Katie Jennings, Brit Morse, Rashi Shrivastava
CLAY
FOUNDERS: Kareem Amin (CEO), Varun Anand, Nicolae Rusan
EQUITY RAISED: $62 million
ESTIMATED ¥¦¥§ REVENUE: $3 million
LEAD INVESTORS: BoxGroup, First Round Capital, Meritech Capital, Sequoia Capital
New York City–based Clay makes an AI-based assistant that helps companies manage customer relationships by automating tasks that typically require a human hand—drafting emails, say, then sending them and keeping track of who was contacted and when. The company has 2,500 corporate customers, including Notion, Reddit, Opendoor and Anthropic.
COACTIVE AI
FOUNDERS: Cody Coleman (CEO), Will Gaviria Rojas
EQUITY RAISED: $44 million ESTIMATED ¥¦¥§ REVENUE: $0
LEAD INVESTORS: Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cherryrock Capital, Emerson Collective
Promotional photos and videos can be hard for companies to manage because of the multitude of places they’re used—broadcast, print, online—and how they’re stored. San Jose, California–based Coactive AI aims to x that by using AI to analyze, categorize and otherwise wrangle «oods of visual data for marketing folks. Cody Coleman, 33, who holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford, previously cofounded AI industry consortium MLCommons.
CODEIUM
FOUNDERS: Douglas Chen, Varun Mohan (CEO)
EQUITY RAISED: $93 million
ESTIMATED ¥¦¥§ REVENUE: $1 million
LEAD INVESTORS: Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins