Centrical Funding, Investors & Competitors

Founded in Germany in 1972 by former IBM employees, SAP is the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software. Known as the leader in enterprise resource planning software, SAP’s portfolio also includes software for supply chain management, procurement, travel and expense management, and customer relationship management, among others. The company operates in more than 180 countries and has more than 400,000 customers, approximately 80% of which are small to medium-size enterprises.

Workday is a software company that offers human capital management, financial management, and business planning solutions for enterprises. Known for being a cloud-only software provider, Workday was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Pleasanton, California.

BetterUp is a San Francisco-headquartered coaching platform serving Fortune 500 companies. The service pairs employees with ICF-certified coaches via video for leadership tracks focused on DEI and resilience. BetterUp integrates with Workday for goal alignment and measures outcomes through 360 feedback. Clients include NASA and Hilton with programs in 190 countries.

Eightfold AI is a Mountain View-headquartered developer of a talent intelligence platform that leverages deep learning to match candidates to roles and optimize workforce planning. Founded in 2016, the platform analyzes skills from resumes, job histories, and behavioral data to reduce hiring time by up to 70 percent for enterprise clients. Eightfold AI serves Fortune 500 companies including Tata, Bayer, and Unilever, enabling internal mobility and diversity initiatives across global operations in over 100 countries.

Anthropic is an AI safety company developing large language models and researching methods to make artificial intelligence more reliable and steerable. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers including Dario and Daniela Amodei. The company's flagship product is Claude, a family of AI assistants deployed across consumer applications and enterprise APIs. Research priorities center on constitutional AI, mechanistic interpretability, and alignment techniques. Major investors include Google, Spark Capital, and Salesforce Ventures.

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company that develops large language models, including the GPT series, and consumer-facing products such as ChatGPT. Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, the organization transitioned to a capped-profit structure in 2019 to attract the capital needed for large-scale AI development. The company offers API access to its models for enterprise and developer use, alongside image generation through DALL-E and code-assistance tools. Headquartered in San Francisco, OpenAI has become one of the most prominent players in the generative AI space, backed by a multibillion-dollar investments from Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, SoftBank and many more.

Databricks is a San Francisco-headquartered cloud platform unifying data engineering, analytics, and AI on a lakehouse architecture. Founded in 2013, it supports Delta Lake for reliable data lakes, MLflow for machine learning lifecycle management, and Unity Catalog for governance across workspaces. The platform powers ETL pipelines, serverless SQL warehouses, and generative AI model deployment for enterprises worldwide, including integrations with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Founded in 2012, Snowflake is a fully managed platform that consolidates data hosted on different public clouds for centralized analytics and governance. Snowflake’s cloud-native architecture allows users to independently scale the compute and storage layers, providing customers with optimized performance at lower costs. The company’s data lake and data warehouse products support a variety of use cases, including business analytics, data engineering, and artificial intelligence. Snowflake is widely used by Fortune 2000 companies in financial services, media, and retail sectors.

Nebius is a vertically integrated cloud provider focusing on AI and high-performance computing. It is a carve-out of the previous Russian tech firm Yandex, following the Russian sanctions since the Ukraine-Russia war. Nebius designs and operates its own data centers and servers across Europe and the US, with a total capacity of several hundred megawatts. In September 2025, Microsoft became a major Nebius client under a multiyear $17 billion revenue agreement to provide computing capacity.

DeepSeek is a Chinese frontier AI lab that develops open-source large language models. DeepSeek conducts research in machine learning, natural language processing and related AI applications. DeepSeek has earned global recognition by challenging the hegemony of U.S. AI incumbents (like OpenAI and Google) through technological breakthroughs in efficiency and reasoning. DeepSeek-R1: A powerful reasoning model that rivals premium Western models. Its unique capability to mimic human thought and break down mathematical or programming tasks incrementally sent shockwaves through the tech industry.DeepSeek-V3 & V4: State-of-the-art general language models capable of running incredibly fast while consuming significantly less computational power than peer models.

Paychex is a technology company providing human capital management solutions, enabling clients to better implement payroll, talent, time, tax, and benefits administration. It has a diverse set of product offerings addressing client needs. Aside from its traditional cloud-based payroll and HCM software offering, which accounts for close to half of total revenue, the company provides outsourcing options. Paychex's administrative service organization and professional employer organization accounts generate over 40% of sales. The balance of revenue is generated through retirement services, insurance solutions, and other products. In fiscal 2025, the company had 800,000 clients and almost 2.5 million worksite employees across its ASO and PEO.

Safe Superintelligence is a Palo Alto-based AI firm building systems with embedded safety protocols. Launched in 2024, the company develops risk assessment frameworks and mitigation tools to ensure secure deployment of advanced models in enterprise settings.

Crusoe Energy Systems is a Denver-headquartered AI infrastructure provider that designs and operates data centers powered by renewable and waste energy sources. The company converts flared natural gas, wind, solar, and geothermal into electricity for GPU clusters. Crusoe Cloud delivers Infrastructure as a Service with NVIDIA H100 and other GPUs for AI workloads. Founded in 2018, it maintains facilities in Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming.

Mistral AI is a Paris-headquartered developer of open-source large language models outperforming GPT-3.5 benchmarks. The company releases models like Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B with 46.7 percent MT-Bench scores, and Pixtral 12B for vision-language tasks. Enterprises deploy these via La Plateforme API supporting 80 billion parameter models for coding, translation, and summarization. Mistral AI partners with Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA for inference hardware. Founded in 2023, it serves clients in automotive and finance across Europe and the U.S.

Kling AI is a creative studio that produces images and videos using sophisticated artificial intelligence methods.

Deel is a San Francisco-headquartered global workforce management platform handling payroll, compliance, HR, and payments for employees and contractors in over 150 countries. The service includes Employer of Record and Contractor of Record options, automated invoicing, multi-currency transfers, and integrations with HRIS systems like Workday and BambooHR, ensuring local tax and benefits adherence.

Rippling is a San Francisco-headquartered workforce management platform that integrates HR, payroll, IT, and finance in one system. Founded in 2016, the company automates onboarding, benefits, device management, expense tracking, and compliance for global teams at over 100,000 organizations including Shopify and DoorDash. Its API ecosystem connects with 500-plus apps for seamless operations.

Harvey is a San Francisco-based legal technology company offering AI-powered tools for law firms and in-house legal teams. Its platform handles contract drafting, due diligence, deposition preparation, and regulatory compliance using models trained on legal datasets. Founded in 2022 and backed by Sequoia Capital and OpenAI, Harvey serves clients like Allen & Overy and PwC, processing millions of documents with natural language generation for precise outputs across litigation and M&A practices.