Nvidia Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It is a software and fabless company which designs and supplies graphics processing units (GPUs), application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science and high-performance computing as well as system on a chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Nvidia is also a dominant supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and software.
SoftBank Group Corp. is a Japanese multinational investment holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo which focuses on investment management. The group primarily invests in companies operating in technology that offer goods and services to customers in a multitude of markets and industries ranging from the internet to automation. With over $100 billion in capital at its onset, SoftBank's Vision Fund is the world's largest technology-focused venture capital fund. Fund investors included sovereign wealth funds from countries in the Middle East.
Magna International Inc. is a Canadian parts manufacturer for automakers. It is one of the largest companies in Canada and was recognized on the 2020 Forbes Global 2000. The company is the largest automobile parts manufacturer in North America by sales of original equipment parts; it has ranked consistently in the Fortune Global 500 list for 20 years in a row since 2001. It produces automotive systems, assemblies, modules, and components, which are supplied to General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, as well as BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Toyota, Tesla, and Tata Motors, among others.
Khosla Ventures is an American venture capital firm founded by Vinod Khosla, focused on early-stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile, financial services, agriculture, healthcare and clean technology sectors. Some of its most successful investments include Affirm, DoorDash, Square, Impossible Foods, Instacart, and OpenAI.
Insight Partners is a global venture capital and private equity firm that invests in high-growth technology, software, and Internet businesses. The company is headquartered in New York City, with offices in London, Tel Aviv, and Palo Alto.
Vicarious was an artificial intelligence company based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. They use the theorized computational principles of the brain to attempt to build software that can think and learn like a human. Vicarious describes its technology as "a turnkey robotics solution integrator using artificial intelligence to automate tasks too complex and versatile for traditional automations". Alphabet Inc acquired the company in 2022 for an undisclosed amount.
Databricks, Inc. is a global data, analytics and artificial intelligence company founded by the original creators of Apache Spark.
Daniel Gross is an American entrepreneur who co-founded Cue, led artificial intelligence efforts at Apple, served as a partner at Y-Combinator, and is a notable technology investor in companies like Uber, Instacart, Figma, GitHub, Airtable, Rippling, CoreWeave, Character.ai, Perplexity.ai, and others.
Argo AI LLC was an autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The company was co-founded in 2016 by Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander, veterans of the Google and Uber automated driving programs. Argo AI was an independent company that built software, hardware, maps, and cloud-support infrastructure to power self-driving vehicles. Argo was mostly backed by Ford Motor Co. (2017) and the Volkswagen Group (2020).
Desktop Metal, Inc. is a public American technology company that designs and markets 3D printing systems. Headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, the company has raised $438 million in venture funding since its founding from investors such as Google Ventures, BMW, and Ford Motor Company. Desktop Metal launched its first two products in April 2017: the Studio System, a metal 3D printing system catered to engineers and small production runs, and the Production System, intended for manufacturers and large-scale printing. In November 2019, the company launched two new printer systems: the Shop System for machine shops, and the Fiber industrial-grade composites printer for automated fiber placement. The World Economic Forum named Desktop Metal a Technology Pioneer in 2017.
aiMotive is an autonomous vehicle technology company. The company aims to work with automotive manufacturers and Tier1s to enable automated technologies. aiMotive describes its approach as "vision-first", a system that primarily relies on cameras and artificial intelligence to detect its surroundings. The technology is designed to be implemented by automobile manufacturers to create autonomous vehicles, which can operate in all conditions and locations. In September 2017, PSA Group teamed up with AImotive.
Nuro, Inc. is an American robotics company based in Mountain View, California. Founded by Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson, Nuro develops autonomous delivery vehicles and is the first company to receive an autonomous exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Amazon is an American multinational technology company which focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, and digital streaming. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economic and cultural forces in the world", and is one of the world's most valuable brands.
Bright Machines is a software and robotics company whose applications focus on automation for the manufacturing industry. The San Francisco-based company has two primary products. First, Bright Machines employs “micro-factories” made up of robot cells for the purpose of automating electronics manufacturing and inspection. Second, Bright Machines offers software tools for the purpose of improving efficiencies in the manufacturing process.
VAST Data is a privately held technology company focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning computing infrastructure. Founded in 2016, the company offers a data computing platform that allows users to train AI models by storing and synthesizing large amounts of unstructured data.
Aurora Innovation, Inc., doing business as Aurora, is a self-driving vehicle technology company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Aurora has developed the Aurora Driver, a computer system that can be integrated into cars for autonomous driving. Aurora was co-founded by Chris Urmson, the former chief technology officer of Google/Alphabet Inc.'s self-driving team, which became known as Waymo, as well as by Sterling Anderson, former head of Tesla Autopilot, and Drew Bagnell, former head of Uber's autonomy and perception team.
Hugging Face, Inc. is a French-American company based in New York City that develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning. It is most notable for its transformers library built for natural language processing applications and its platform that allows users to share machine learning models and datasets and showcase their work.
Brett Adcock is an American technology entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Figure AI, an AI startup working on a general-purpose humanoid robot. In 2018, Adcock founded Archer Aviation, five years after he started Vettery.
Perplexity AI is an AI-chatbot-powered research and conversational search engine that answers queries using natural language predictive text. Launched in 2022, Perplexity generates answers using the sources from the web and cites links within the text response. Perplexity works on a freemium model; the free product uses its Perplexity model based on OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model combined with the company's standalone large language model (LLM) that incorporates natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, while the paid version Perplexity Pro has access to GPT-4, Claude 3, Mistral Large, Llama 3 and an Experimental Perplexity Model. It has garnered about 10 million monthly users.
