Sesame Funding, Investors & Competitors

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.

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.

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.

Cognition is a San Francisco-based applied AI lab developing end-to-end software agents that function as collaborative teammates for engineering projects. Its agents automate complex tasks to boost team efficiency and innovation through https://www.cognition.ai.

Z.ai is an advanced artificial intelligence platform known for its GLM model series, multimodal creation tools, and cost-efficient agentic coding environments like ZCode. It provides high-performance reasoning, real-time web search capabilities, and versatile utilities for building full-stack applications and data dashboards.

Project Prometheus is an artificial intelligence company developing AI systems for the physical economy, with applications across engineering and manufacturing in sectors such as aerospace, automotive, and computing. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in San Francisco with offices in London and Zurich, the company is co-led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, a chemist and physicist formerly of Google X and co-founder of Verily. Unlike large language models that learn primarily from digital text, Prometheus focuses on AI that learns from real-world experimentation and physical trial and error, aiming to optimize design, production, and performance in industrial settings. The company launched with $6.2 billion in initial funding and subsequently closed a $10 billion round at a valuation of approximately $38 billion, with participation from investors including JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock. Its team has grown to over 120 employees, drawing talent from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta, and the company acquired agentic AI startup General Agents in 2025.

Moonshot AI is a Beijing-headquartered artificial intelligence company developing large language models like Kimi, a chatbot rivaling GPT-4 with 200K token context. Founded in 2023 by ex-Google researchers from Gemini and Bard teams, it processes Chinese-English queries via proprietary MoE architecture. Moonshot AI serves enterprise clients in search, content generation, and multimodal tasks across Asia.

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.

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.

Perplexity is a San Francisco-headquartered AI-powered answer engine combining large language models with web search capabilities. Launched in 2022, the platform processes natural language queries to generate cited, conversational responses drawing from real-time internet sources. Perplexity serves millions of monthly users through web, mobile apps, and API integrations for research and productivity tasks.

FluidStack delivers a leading AI cloud platform with supercomputing infrastructure for AI labs, governments, and enterprises, serving clients like Mistral, Meta, and Black Forest Labs.

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

Fireworks AI is a San Francisco-headquartered cloud platform for deploying open-source AI models at scale. The service offers serverless inference for large language models like Llama 3 and vision transformers with sub-100ms latency via custom GPU clusters. Fireworks partners with Cerebras and Groq for hardware acceleration, serving enterprises in e-commerce and healthcare for fine-tuned deployments.

IonQ Inc sells access to several quantum computers of various qubit capacities and is in the process of researching and developing technologies for quantum computers with increasing computational capabilities. The company currently makes access to its quantum computers available via cloud platforms and also to select customers via its own cloud service. This cloud-based approach enables the broad availability of quantum-computing-as-a-service (QCaaS). The company derives its revenue from its quantum-computing-as-a-service arrangements, consulting services related to co-developing algorithms on company's quantum computing systems and contracts associated with the design, development, and construction of specialized quantum computing systems together with related services.

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.

Applied Intuition is a Mountain View-headquartered developer of simulation software, Vehicle OS, and self-driving toolchains for AI-driven autonomous vehicles. The company accelerates deployment across automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining, and agriculture sectors. Major global automakers and Department of Defense programs rely on its platforms to validate sensor suites, perception stacks, and planning algorithms. Founded in 2017, Applied Intuition maintains offices in Washington, D.C., San Diego, Ann Arbor, London, Stuttgart, Munich, Stockholm, Bangalore, Seoul, and Tokyo to support international engineering teams.

MiniMax Group Inc is a AI foundation model company. It is committed to driving AI innovation towards performing the full range of human intellectual tasks, from learning and reasoning to planning and generalizing knowledge across diverse domains. Its proprietary foundation model suite, led by MiniMax-M2, Hailuo-02, and Speech-02, has long context processing capacity and can understand, generate, and integrate a wide range of modalities, including text, video, and audio. These models power its AI-native products - including MiniMax, Hailuo AI, MiniMax Audio, Talkie/Xingye, and its enterprise and developer-facing Open Platform, delivering intelligent and dynamic experiences to users globally.