#
# A bunch of friends ask me what companies they should look at
# working at. Everyone has different criteria, but I thought it
# would be cool to curate a list. Inspired majorly by Ben Lang.
# Here are 50 companies, big and small.
#
# Curated by Logan Horowitz. Updated monthly.
01Anthropic — AI safety company building reliable, interpretable AI systems.
AI Labs
>Doing the most serious work on alignment. Claude is the most thoughtful product in the space.
AI SafetyLLMsResearch
02OpenAI — Research lab and deployment company behind GPT and ChatGPT.
AI Labs
>Shipped the product that changed everything. Still the most influential lab in the world.
LLMsResearchConsumer
03Google — Search, DeepMind, and the broadest AI research portfolio on earth.
AI Labs
>Gemini, AlphaFold, TPUs — the breadth is unreal. Still playing for keeps.
ResearchLLMsInfrastructure
04Meta — Open-source AI lab behind Llama, PyTorch, and massive compute infrastructure.
AI Labs
>Open-sourcing Llama changed the entire AI landscape. Bold bet, massive payoff.
Open SourceLLMsResearch
05xAI — Elon Musk's AI lab building Grok and Colossus, the world's largest GPU cluster.
AI Labs
>Moving fast with massive compute. Grok 3 was a legitimate surprise.
LLMsResearch
06Mistral AI — European AI lab building open-weight and proprietary frontier models.
AI Labs
>Moving faster than anyone expected. €5.8B valuation and models that punch above their weight.
LLMsOpen SourceResearch
07DeepSeek — Chinese AI lab that shocked the world by training frontier models for a fraction of the cost.
AI Labs
>V3 trained for $6M when everyone else was spending billions. Changed the efficiency conversation overnight.
LLMsResearchOpen Source
08NVIDIA — The company that built the picks and shovels for the AI gold rush.
Hardware
>CUDA moat is the deepest in tech. H100 is the most sought-after product in the world.
HardwareAIInfrastructure
09AMD — Challenger in AI accelerators with MI300X taking on H100.
Hardware
>The only credible competitor to Nvidia. ROCm is getting real. Watch this space.
HardwareAIChips
10Apple — Devices, silicon, and on-device AI at a scale no one else can match.
Hardware
>Apple Intelligence is just getting started. The distribution moat is unbeatable.
HardwareAIConsumer
11Cursor — The AI-first code editor that made developers dramatically faster overnight.
Dev Tools
>Best product velocity in AI tooling. Changed how I write code permanently.
Dev ToolsAIProductivity
12Windsurf — AI coding environment by Codeium with a deeply integrated agentic experience.
Dev Tools
>Cursor's most serious competitor. The Cascade agent model is genuinely different.
Dev ToolsAIProductivity
13Vercel — Frontend cloud platform that made shipping fast and joyful.
Dev Tools
>Best DX in the industry. V0 is what AI-first tooling looks like.
InfrastructureDev ToolsAI
14Replit — AI-first development platform that went from $10M to $100M ARR after launching Agent.
Dev Tools
>Democratizing software creation. The growth after Agent launched speaks for itself.
Dev ToolsAINo-Code
15Lovable — AI full-stack engineer that builds web apps from a single prompt.
Dev Tools
>The clearest vision of what 'AI writes the code' looks like in production.
AIDev ToolsNo-Code
16Figma — Collaborative design tool that became the operating system for product teams.
Dev Tools
>Collaboration-first design changed how PMs, designers, and engineers work together.
DesignCollaborationSaaS
17Braintrust — AI evaluation and observability platform for shipping reliable AI products.
Dev Tools
>Evals are the unit tests of AI. Braintrust is the pytest.
AIDev ToolsObservability
18Databricks — Unified data + AI platform built on top of Apache Spark.
Infrastructure
>The data layer that every serious AI company runs on. DBRX was a statement.
DataAIEnterprise
19Snowflake — Cloud data platform running the analytics layer for thousands of enterprises.
Infrastructure
>Cortex AI is a serious bet. Every company's data is already here.
DataInfrastructureEnterprise
20Temporal Technologies — Workflow orchestration platform for durable, reliable distributed systems.
Infrastructure
>Every serious AI agent system will eventually need Temporal under the hood.
InfrastructureDev ToolsOrchestration
21Exa — Neural search API that retrieves the best content from the web for AI apps.
Infrastructure
>The right abstraction for giving AI agents access to real-time knowledge.
SearchAIInfrastructure
22Together AI — Cloud platform for running and fine-tuning open-source AI models at scale.
Infrastructure
>The fastest inference for open models. Critical infrastructure for the AI stack.
InfrastructureAIOpen Source
23Crusoe Energy — Energy-first AI infrastructure company solving the compute power crisis.
Infrastructure
>$2.8B valuation and the right thesis: AI's biggest bottleneck is energy, not chips.
InfrastructureAIEnergy
24Cerebras — Purpose-built AI hardware and inference infrastructure.
Hardware
>Running Llama at 2000 tokens/sec is wild. Inference speed is the next frontier.
HardwareInfrastructureAI
25Privy — Embedded wallet infrastructure making crypto accessible to any app.
Infrastructure
>Solving the UX problem that blocked crypto adoption for years.
CryptoInfrastructureAuth
26Perplexity — AI answer engine that replaced how millions of people search.
AI Products
>Actually changed my search behavior. Great wedge product done right.
SearchAIConsumer
27Harvey — AI platform for lawyers — grew from $3B to $8B valuation in four months.
AI Products
>Best vertical AI play in the market. Used by 50% of AmLaw 100 firms.
LegalAIVertical SaaS
28OpenEvidence — AI platform built for clinicians to access medical evidence instantly.
AI Products
>Best vertical AI play in healthcare. Trusted by top medical centers.
HealthcareAIVertical SaaS
29Abridge — AI that listens to doctor-patient conversations and writes the clinical note.
AI Products
>Reducing physician documentation time by 50%+. The ROI is immediate and undeniable.
HealthcareAIVertical SaaS
30Sierra — AI platform for enterprise customer experience and sales — founded by Bret Taylor.
AI Products
>The pedigree (ex-Salesforce CEO) plus the right problem. Watching closely.
AIEnterpriseCX
31TextQL — Talk to your data warehouse in plain English. AI-native analytics.
AI Products
>Removes the bottleneck between business questions and data answers.
AIDataAnalytics
32Runway — Leading AI video generation platform pushing the boundaries of creative AI.
AI Products
>Gen-3 was a step change. The creative AI category starts and ends with Runway.
AIVideoCreative
33ElevenLabs — Ultra-realistic voice synthesis and cloning — $90M ARR and still accelerating.
AI Products
>The voice layer for AI applications. Every audio product will run on this eventually.
AIVoiceAPI
34Synthesia — AI video generation platform used by 60% of the Fortune 100.
AI Products
>Enterprise video at scale with no cameras or studios. The ROI case is airtight.
AIVideoEnterprise
35Hugging Face — The GitHub of machine learning — home to 600K+ models and 60% of Fortune 500 AI workflows.
AI Labs
>The open-source backbone of the AI ecosystem. Everything connects through here.
Open SourceAIInfrastructure
36Cohere — Enterprise AI platform for search, summarization, and generation with a privacy-first approach.
AI Labs
>Smart enterprise bet. Owns the stack for companies that can't use OpenAI.
LLMsEnterpriseAI
37Writer — Enterprise AI platform that trains proprietary models on company knowledge.
AI Products
>$326M raised and the right bet: enterprises need AI that knows their business.
AIEnterpriseLLMs
38Anduril Industries — Defense technology company building autonomous systems and AI for national security.
Other
>$30.5B valuation. The intersection of AI and defense is one of the most consequential bets of the decade.
DefenseAIRobotics
39Apptronik — Humanoid robotics company building Apollo — backed by Google with $935M+ raised.
Other
>Physical AI is the next frontier. Apptronik has the Google backing and the team to matter.
RoboticsAIHardware
40Stripe — Payment infrastructure that powers the internet economy.
Fintech
>Set the gold standard for developer-first B2B. Their docs are a product.
FintechInfrastructureB2B
41Ramp — Corporate finance automation platform built for speed and savings.
Fintech
>Doing for corporate finance what Stripe did for payments.
FintechAIB2B
42SpaceX — Private aerospace company redefining what's possible in space.
Other
>The most ambitious engineering org on earth. Starlink alone is a $100B business.
AerospaceHardwareDeep Tech
43DoorDash — Last-mile logistics platform that became the backbone of local commerce.
Other
>Massive ML infra, complex marketplace, and real operational excellence at scale.
MarketplaceLogisticsML
44Twelve Labs — Video understanding AI that lets you search and analyze video like text.
AI Products
>Video is the most underindexed modality in AI. Twelve Labs is fixing that.
AIVideoSearch
45Flapping Airplanes — Stealth-mode startup building something worth watching.
Other
>On my radar — details TBD.
Stealth
46Basis — Building foundational AI infrastructure for the next generation of products.
Infrastructure
>Early but promising — worth keeping an eye on.
AIInfrastructure
47Dreamer — Building something ambitious in AI. Details emerging.
AI Products
>On the list for a reason — more soon.
AIStealth
48Simile — New wave AI company building with a distinct point of view.
AI Products
>The name alone is worth paying attention to.
AI
49Hercules — Building strength in AI infrastructure and tooling.
Infrastructure
>Worth watching — early days with a strong foundation.
AIInfrastructure
50Pika Labs — Accessible text-to-video platform with 500K+ users and $470M valuation.
AI Products
>Making video generation feel as easy as typing a sentence. Consumer adoption is real.
AIVideoConsumer
50 companies. 7 categories. Updated monthly.