The biggest reapers from the 2023 generative AI boom

The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 opened the floodgates for what will go down as the AI revolution. 2023 has been the year that artificial intelligence went mainstream with Pitchbook estimating that AI startups raised more than $68.7 billion across the year.

These 5 companies were some of the biggest beneficiaries of the massive influx of AI investment.

OpenAI

They started it all, so it’s unsurprising that they’ve reaped the most from investors. Microsoft in particular proved to be the most generous pumping a whooping $10 billion into OpenAI in January.

However, the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft has received its share of controversy even leading to investigations as to whether it could be a secret merger.

The involved parties are concerned Microsoft may be involved in steering OpenAI to profitability even if the startup was started as a non-profit.

In total, OpenAI has raised $11.3 billion and remains the biggest player in the race to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Anthropic

The closest OpenAI competitor is Anthropic which was formed by former OpenAI employees, Daniela and Dario Amodei. The company behind Claude 2 chatbot managed to raise a combined total of $6 billion and there are reports that it could raise $750 million in a new round of funding.

Among the investors in the company include Amazon AWS which pledged $4 billion in a deal that would see AWS become Anthropic’s main cloud provider.

Google has also pledged $2 billion to the AI startup making it 2 out of 3 major hyperscalers to invest in Anthropic.

Inflection AI

Inflection may not be as popular as the OpenAI and Anthropic, but the company’s LLM Inflection 2 has proved to be a major challenger in the market.

So much so that Inflection has attracted investments from juggernauts like Microsoft and Nvidia. In June the startup raised $1.3 billion which took its current valuation to about $4 billion.

Definitely another company to watch out for in 2024.

Databricks

Databricks is another company that has avoided the limelight for the most part but is causing ripples in the industry.

The AI-powered data intelligence platform raised $500 million in September to take its market value to $43 billion.

The company, which has been growing exponentially, announced in October that it had acquired enterprise data company Arcion in a deal valued at around $100 million.

Mistral AI

Mistral is an emerging player that is looking to capitalize on the European market. The company just secured $415 million in its Series A funding that ended in early December.

The startup which is now valued at $2 billion also announced a non-monetary deal with Google Cloud that may prove to be critical in its effort to compete with the already established businesses.

Mistral said that the deal allows it to offer its Mixtral LLM through the Google Cloud Marketplace.