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Indian American-led companies have found a firm footing in this year’s ‘AI 50,’ Forbes’ annual list which recognizes the most promising privately-held artificial intelligence companies. The AI companies with Indian American founders are Abridge, Basemen, Codieum, Glean, Perplexity, and Together AI.
According to the magazine, the artificial intelligence sector has never been more competitive. Forbes received some 1,900 submissions this year, more than double last year’s count.
Pennsylvania based Abridge founded by Dr Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist, was established in 2018 to free clinicians from the time-sucking paperwork that comes after they see patients: jotting down detailed notes for their medical records. Abridge records their conversations with patients and uses AI to summarize them. Ten thousand clinicians are already using it and the startup is worth $850 million after raising more than $200 million in venture funding.
More than 45,000 registered developers are using Together AI’s cloud-based tools to deploy open-source generative AI models. The company is also known for its RedPajama-V2 dataset. Named for the children’s book Llama Llama Red Pajama, the San Francisco based company was co-founded by CEO Vipul Ved Prakash. It is the largest open resource available for training LLMs with more than 30 trillion “tokens,” or units of data.
California-based Basemen is led by CEO Tuhin Srivastava. The company helps businesses handle machine learning workflows, and make it easier for more companies to integrate AI into their business practices. Companies can choose to do it on their own cloud, or through Baseten’s offering. The company just raised a $40 million Series B at a $220 million valuation, per PitchBook, and plans to use the capital to add more GPUs, make workloads run more efficiently, and hire more staff.
AI extension Codeium in Mountain View, California, can auto-generate chunks of code in more than 70 languages, helping support CEO Varun Mohan‘s goal of enabling coders to work faster and more efficiently. And while the service is free to individual users, teams and companies have to pay for the extension. Early traction on the business model has nabbed for the company $93 million and a $500 million valuation awarded by investors including Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.
Arvind Jain is the CEO of the Palo Alto, California-based Glean, a $2.2 billion (valuation) AI-based search engine trained on a company’s entire database, employees can get quick answers to pedestrian HR queries and other company-related questions. Canva, Duolingo, and Grammarly are among the startup’s 200 customers. Next up for Glean is helping companies build applications like Slack bots that act as “first responders” to employees’ questions.
Aravind Srinivas, the former OpenAI researcher, in 2022, quit his job to start Perplexity AI in San Francisco, California. It is a conversational search engine that uses a medley of AI models to provide answers on any topic on the internet. Perplexity was last valued at $520 million and has crossed $10 million in annual recurring revenue.
