In 2025 the AI landscape is dominated not only by platform giants, but also by specialist companies that build models, developer tools, data infrastructure and multimodal generative systems. Below are the 10 largest strictly AI-first companies in 2025 (or companies built around AI as their core product) with compact, factual profiles to help you understand who they are and what they offer.
OpenAI
Founded: Dec 2015 | Founders: Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba and others.
HQ: San Francisco.
What they do: Developer of the GPT family (ChatGPT), DALL·E image models, APIs for text, image and multimodal generative AI; productised as consumer (ChatGPT) and enterprise APIs.
Funding & milestones: Transformed from non-profit to a capped commercial model, partnered heavily with Microsoft (major investment and cloud partnership), and scaled enterprise API usage worldwide. Recent corporate restructuring and large investments have positioned it among the most capitalised pure-AI firms.
OpenAI re-structured its for-profit arm as a public-benefit corporation while retaining a nonprofit foundation oversight. Today OpenAI supports billions of users via ChatGPT and enterprise systems, and its infrastructure expansion plans include building mass-scale AI data centers. It remains one of the most capitalized pure-AI companies globally, driving key shifts in model-led AI access, scaling, and governance. For technology leaders and software developers alike, OpenAI’s ecosystem defines much of the vendor and model landscape in 2025.
Anthropic
Founded: 2021 | Founders: Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei and others (former OpenAI researchers).
HQ: San Francisco / Bay Area.
What they do: Developer of the Claude family of LLMs focused on safety-first and alignment research; sells enterprise model access and specialized products (e.g., Claude Code for developers).
Funding & milestones: Rapid fundraising rounds and major Series E in 2025 pushed valuations into the tens of billions; continued model releases (Claude 3.x series) emphasise enterprise safety and scale.
Anthropic focuses on creating “reliable, interpretable, and steerable” AI systems via its Claude model family. Its governance structure is distinctive: the company is organised as a public-benefit corporation (PBC) with a Long-Term Benefit Trust ensuring safety remains central. In 2025, it secured major funding (Series F) with valuations reported around US$183 billion. Its enterprise focus includes high-context models, alignment research and partnerships with large cloud vendors. For businesses looking to adopt AI under strong governance or safety frameworks, Anthropic offers a model-centric partner.
Hugging Face
Founded: 2016 | Founders: Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf.
HQ: New York & Paris (roots in open source).
What they do: Open model hub and ML developer platform (model hub, transformers library, inference APIs, spaces for demos); primary hub for open-source LLMs and developer tooling.
Funding & milestones: Led major open initiatives (BigScience/BLOOM), acquired Gradio, and raised multiple funding rounds to support a hybrid open + commercial model for enterprises.
Hugging Face offers services for developers and enterprises — model training, custom deploys, hosted inference and community-driven open model sharing. The company raised multiple funding rounds, including a 2023 Series C (~US$100 million) to fund expansion of model-deployment infrastructure and enterprise tooling. Hugging Face occupies a unique position as both a community-open-source hub and a commercial service provider for model operations, enabling enterprises to fine-tune and deploy LLMs while leveraging the ecosystem of 100,000+ models on its hub. Its dual role in open-source and enterprise, and its focus on model-ops (MLOps) tooling, make it a foundational player in the AI-model stack.
Stability AI
Founded: 2020 | Founder (noted): Emad Mostaque (founder & former CEO).
HQ: London / distributed.
What they do: Creator of Stable Diffusion (open-source text-to-image) and DreamStudio; builds generative media models and developer tools, with a focus on open research and community contributions.
Funding & milestones: Large community adoption of Stable Diffusion, multiple funding rounds to support open-source model work and tooling; leadership changes and governance discussions have been notable in the press.
Stability AI supports a broad suite of generative media models across image, video, audio and 3D (Stable Video, Stable Audio, Stable TripoSR, etc.). The company has grown rapidly but also faced legal and governance challenges — notably the 2025 historic copyright trial initiated by Getty Images over training data usage. Its open-source-oriented model releases have catalyzed broad adoption in creator communities and unlocked new generative workflows for startups and enterprises. Stability blends research, model releases and infrastructure tooling for media-centric AI applications.
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ElevenLabs
Founded: 2022 | Founders: Piotr Dąbkowski, Mati Staniszewski.
HQ: London (with US presence).
What they do: High-fidelity text-to-speech and voice AI: voice cloning, long-form audio generation, dubbing tools and developer APIs for voice products.
Funding & milestones: Rapid growth since 2023 with Series A/B financing; by 2025 raised large rounds (Series C reported) and valuations in the multi-billion category as voice AI adoption expanded.
ElevenLabs builds deep-learning systems for high-fidelity, expressive text-to-speech (TTS), voice-cloning, dubbing and agentic voice platforms supporting over 70 languages. The company gained attention for its “most realistic AI voice” platform and within months reached substantial developer and enterprise adoption. In early 2025, ElevenLabs raised a US$180 million Series C round at a valuation of US$3.3 billion, expanding voice-AI infrastructure and multilingual capabilities. As audio becomes a key interface in AI systems—from conversational agents to accessibility tools, ElevenLabs is positioned as a leader in voice-first AI innovation and deployment.
Cohere
Founded: 2019 | Founders: Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, Nick Frosst.
HQ: Toronto / global offices.
What they do: Builds enterprise-grade LLMs and embeddings for retrieval, search and private deployments; positions itself for regulated industries with on-prem/private cloud options and enterprise tooling.
Funding & milestones: Several large funding rounds and strong enterprise traction; launched premium platforms and products aimed at knowledge worker productivity and private deployments.
Cohere emphasizes “turning everyday effort into extraordinary impact”. Between 2021 and 2024 it raised nearly US$1 billion across Series A through D rounds, expanding globally and developing a research lab (Cohere Labs) that has published over 100 papers and amassed a 4,500+ community. A key milestone in 2025 is the launch of North, a turnkey agent-style platform for knowledge workers that enables document summarization, query-based workflows and private model deployments. Cohere supports enterprises with embedding APIs, fine-tuned models, and governance controls for private data. Its focus on regulated industries (finance, healthcare) and private AI infrastructure enables businesses to adopt large-language model capabilities while retaining data control.
Mistral AI
Founded: 2023 | Founders: Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, Timothée Lacroix.
HQ: Paris.
What they do: European LLM builder producing high-performance open and commercial models (Mixtral family, Mistral Medium, Devstral coding models), with API access and enterprise developer tools.
Funding & milestones: Quickly became Europe’s best-funded model lab; released several performant open models and enterprise stacks in 2024–2025.
With its 2023 fundraising of €105 million and a further €385 million in December 2023, Mistral grew rapidly. In 2024–25 it launched models such as Mistral Small 3.1, Mistral Medium 3, and Magistral Small/Medium, including open releases under Apache 2.0 license. The company also deployed Le Chat Enterprise, a multilingual conversational AI assistant integrating search, code and image capabilities. Their push into Mistral Compute, GPU-stack infrastructure aimed at enterprises and sovereign cloud customers, reflects a strategy to offer both AI models and the compute backbone for frontier AI outside US-centric cloud dominance. Mistral now positions itself as a challenger to the largest US/China model labs, backing open research and regional data sovereignty for Europe.
Runaway
Founded: 2018 | Founders: Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamala, Anastasis Germanidis.
HQ: New York.
What they do: Multimodal generative AI for creators — text-to-video, image and video editing models (Gen-series), and production tools for filmmakers and creative teams.
Funding & milestones: Rapid product expansion into video generation (Gen-2/Gen-4) and multimodal creative tools; major funding and partnerships with cloud and creative platforms.
In April 2025 Runway raised US$308 million (Series D) led by General Atlantic with participation from Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, Nvidia and SoftBank, valuing the company at over US$3 billion. Its product suite includes Gen-4, Aleph, Act-One and Frames, enabling creators to generate videos from single images, produce consistent characters, backgrounds and motion, and adapt AI tools to film and media production. Runway also hosts an annual AI Film Festival, showcasing AI-driven creative works worldwide. The focus is on enabling creators, agencies and enterprises to integrate generative AI into creative pipelines.
Inflection AI
Founded: 2022 | Founders: Reid Hoffman, Mustafa Suleyman, Karén Simonyan.
HQ: Palo Alto.
What they do: Builds conversational AI products (Pi chatbot, human-centric assistants) and focuses on human-computer interaction, composable agents and natural dialogue interfaces.
Funding & milestones: High profile founding team, large equity and compute backing, and product releases focused on conversational agents and developer usage.
As a public-benefit corporation (PBC), Inflection AI emphasizes responsible AI development. In June 2023 Inflection closed a US$1.3 billion funding round, with support from Microsoft, Nvidia and others, bringing its total fundraising to ~US$1.5 billion and valuation around US$4 billion. Its flagship product “Pi” is designed to offer conversational, agent-style support for tasks such as scheduling, information gathering and planning rather than just Q&A. Inflection has indicated plans to build a large GPU cluster (22,000 Nvidia H100s) and partner with major cloud providers for massive model infrastructure. The company emphasises human-centric AI assistants that adapt fluently to users and contexts.
Scale AI
Founded: 2016 | Founder: Alexandr Wang (and Lucy Guo as cofounder historically).
HQ: San Francisco.
What they do: Data annotation, labeling, model evaluation and tooling for training high-quality ML models; safety, evaluation and alignment tooling for LLMs and computer-vision datasets.
Funding & milestones: Grew from data labeling to full ML infrastructure and evaluation products; expanded enterprise contracts and introduced LLM evaluation and alignment services as model deployments scaled.
Scale AI services include data tagging, model evaluation, dataset curation and training-data pipelines for AI models across computer vision, LLMs and autonomous systems. By 2021 it had reached unicorn status (valuation ~$7 billion) and in 2025 it struck a major deal: Meta invested US$14.3 billion to acquire a 49% stake, valuing the company at over US$29 billion. Scale uses its “Safety, Evaluation & Alignment Lab” to benchmark LLMs, test model robustness and ensure alignment. Its infrastructure supports leading AI labs and enterprises deploying models. Scale acts as both a service platform and a critical AI ecosystem enabler.
