Startups

The private companies powering the AI stack

The iconic private and venture-backed names mapped across the AI stack — model labs, AI-native apps and agents, custom silicon, robotics and compute infrastructure — each carrying the same web-grounded dossier, last round and valuation trail as every public name. Analyst work product, not advice.

90 startups

Read the thesis before it’s consensus — every board, dossier & note the moment the desk ships it.

90 companies

1X Technologies

$10BTBA

Norway-founded, now Silicon Valley-headquartered (Palo Alto, relocated summer 2025), OpenAI- and EQT-backed humanoid-robotics company selling NEO, a $20k / $499-per-month consumer home humanoid that today runs largely on remote human teleoperation ('Expert Mode') while it gathers data toward autonomy.

IPO: No announced IPO timeline; 1X is focused on NEO commercialization (2026 deliveries) and closing its in-progress Series C, and remains privately, venture-funded

Abridge

Abridge is the category-leading ambient AI clinical documentation ('AI scribe') platform, turning doctor-patient conversations into structured notes and billing codes inside the EHR; last valued ~$5.3B, deployed at 150-200+ US health systems.

IPO: No confirmed timeline; named on 2026 digital-health IPO watchlists but no S-1 filed. Near-term liquidity is secondary/round-driven; earliest plausible listing 2027+ if hyper-growth and margin proof hold.

Agility Robotics

Maker of Digit, a bipedal humanoid robot for warehouse/factory logistics, sold mostly as a monthly Robots-as-a-Service subscription; going public via a $2.5B SPAC merger to become the first U.S. pure-play humanoid on public markets.

IPO: H2 2026 — targeted to close before end-2026, pending CCXI shareholder vote + SEC Form S-4 review

AI21 Labs

Israeli enterprise-AI foundation-model lab (Jamba hybrid Transformer-Mamba LLMs + Maestro agent-orchestration platform), private since 2017; last priced at ~$1.4B (2023 Series C, backed by Google + Nvidia), with a widely reported ~$300M Series D (2025) that was never closed, now pivoting hard from selling standalone models to agents after a 61% mid-2026 workforce cut.

IPO: No near-term IPO; a strategic sale / acqui-hire is the more probable liquidity path (2026-2027). Repeated M&A interest (Nvidia, Nebius) rather than IPO-track signals precede any public listing.

Aligned Data Centers

Aligned Data Centers is a private US hyperscale/colocation data-center developer-operator (~5GW operational + planned across ~50 campuses) known for adaptive Delta3 air cooling and DeltaFlow~ liquid cooling, being taken private at a record ~$40B enterprise value by a BlackRock/GIP-Microsoft-MGX-Nvidia consortium.

IPO: None contemplated — Aligned is moving the other direction: it agreed in Oct 2025 to a ~$40B take-private by the AIP/MGX/BlackRock-GIP consortium (expected close H1 2026). No IPO or public listing is planned; the platform stays private under sponsor ownership.

Ambience Healthcare

Ambience Healthcare is a private, VC-backed ambient-AI platform for health systems that auto-generates clinical documentation, coding, and CDI from the patient encounter, expanding from AI scribe into the clinical revenue-integrity stack.

IPO: No public IPO signal; earliest plausible 2028+ given the Jul-2025 Series C and pre-profitability - the fresh $243M provides multi-year private runway

Apptronik

Austin-based humanoid-robot maker whose Apollo general-purpose robot (currently the Apollo 2 prototype generation) is piloting in Mercedes-Benz plants and GXO warehouses, backed by Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics AI and ~$935M of Series A capital at a ~$5B+ valuation.

IPO: No announced IPO timeline; a listing is unlikely before the Apollo 3 commercial ramp (2027) proves out fleet economics - realistically 2028+ if execution holds. Just raised private capital (Feb 2026), so near-term financing need is covered.

Ayar Labs

Ayar Labs is a private silicon-photonics company building in-package optical I/O (the TeraPHY chiplet + SuperNova external laser) to replace copper interconnect inside AI accelerators; last priced at ~$3.75B in a Mar-2026 Series E and targeting high-volume co-packaged-optics production.

IPO: 2027-2028 (~1-2 years post Series E)

Baseten

Baseten is a fast-growing private AI inference-infrastructure platform that runs open and custom models in production across a multi-cloud GPU fleet, riding the 2025-26 shift of AI spend from training to inference.

IPO: 2027+ at earliest; no S-1, confidential filing, or public IPO signal. Fresh $1.5B Series F (Jun 2026) removes any near-term financing need to go public.

Basis

Basis is a New York AI-agent startup automating end-to-end accounting, tax, and audit workflows for CPA firms; $1.15B private valuation after a $100M Series B in Feb 2026.

IPO: No near-term plan disclosed; earliest plausible 2028+ and only if ARR scales and net retention is proven — freshly capitalized after the Feb 2026 Series B

ByteDance

ByteDance is the privately held Beijing parent of TikTok, Douyin, Toutiao, CapCut, Lark and the Doubao AI stack — the world's most valuable private company, monetizing ~4B+ users chiefly through recommendation-driven advertising and short-video commerce.

IPO: No confirmed filing; recurring Hong Kong / U.S. IPO speculation (2026-2027) that ByteDance has repeatedly declined to confirm. TikTok U.S. JV resolution (Jan 2026) revived listing chatter but no S-1.

Canva

Canva is the world's largest visual-communication / design SaaS platform — a freemium, product-led juggernaut at ~$3.5B revenue (~$4B ARR) and 265M+ monthly users, profitable for eight straight years, now staging a US redomicile and a widely-expected 2026 IPO.

IPO: 2026 (widely expected but unconfirmed; COO Cliff Obrecht: will list 'in the next couple of years'). No exchange or date confirmed.

Character.AI

Character.AI is a private consumer AI-companion/entertainment platform (personalized chatbots, AI video/AvatarFX) that was effectively hollowed out by Google's Aug-2024 $2.7B non-exclusive technology-license-plus-acqui-hire, and is now a restructured, model-agnostic entertainment app fighting user decline and youth-safety litigation.

IPO: No near-term IPO signaled; most plausible endgame is a further strategic sale or continued independent operation on the Google cash cushion, not a public listing

Cognition

Cognition is the maker of Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer, which after acquiring the Windsurf IDE has scaled to a ~$492M ARR run-rate and a ~$26B private valuation as one of the two or three category leaders in agentic AI coding.

IPO: No filed timeline; earliest plausible 2028+ given the May 2026 Series E (~$1B+ raised) and ample private runway - company is scaling ARR, not signaling a listing

Cornelis Networks

Private US high-performance interconnect company building the Omni-Path fabric (CN5000 400G, shipping; CN6000 800G SuperNIC, unveiled Nov 2025) as a non-NVIDIA scale-out network for AI and HPC clusters, backed by Intel Capital and funded by DOE-NNSA and IARPA.

IPO: No public IPO timeline or filing signals as of 2026-07; given sub-scale capitalization (~$85-139M lifetime raised) and reliance on small rounds, a strategic acquisition (AMD, Intel, a server OEM, or a networking vendor) is a more probable liquidity path than an IPO.

Cresta

Cresta is a private Sunnyvale-based generative-AI contact-center platform (real-time agent assist, conversation intelligence, QM, and virtual agents) co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, last funded at a $125M Series D (Nov 2024).

IPO: No public IPO timeline; not expected before 2026+ given the undisclosed/flat 2024 mark and continued private-market financing posture

Anysphere (Cursor)

Anysphere builds Cursor, the AI-native code editor/agent that became one of the fastest-scaling software companies ever (~$4B annualized revenue in under four years), now the subject of an announced $60B all-stock SpaceX acquisition after a $29.3B Series D.

IPO: None disclosed — the announced $60B all-stock SpaceX/xAI acquisition (Jun 16 2026, ~Q3 2026 target close) supersedes any independent IPO path; if it clears, Cursor becomes an xAI subsidiary rather than a public listing. No S-1 filed; company remains private and non-US-listed.

PrivateAppsAI

Context31

CXMT

ChangXin Memory Technologies

$350BTBA

China's only large-scale DRAM maker and the world's #4 memory supplier, riding the 2026 AI-memory supercycle to explosive registration-disclosed earnings as it prepares a record ~$4.3B Shanghai STAR Market IPO at an analyst-floated CNY 2-3 trillion valuation.

IPO: Late-Aug to Sept 2026 STAR Market debut (~3-4 months post-approval); listing-committee review cleared and registration filed 2026-05-27, CSRC registration approved June 2026

Decagon

Decagon builds AI 'concierge' customer-service agents (chat, email, voice) for large enterprises, differentiated by its Agent Operating Procedures (AOP) framework; a ~3-year-old startup that tripled to a $4.5B valuation in under six months.

IPO: Not before 2028; no S-1 or confidential filing disclosed. The Mar 2026 employee tender (early secondary liquidity at $4.5B) typically signals a long private runway rather than an imminent listing.

DeepSeek

China's breakout open-weight frontier-model lab, spun out of quant fund High-Flyer, that matches Western frontier models on agentic/reasoning benchmarks at ~10x lower API cost -- privately held, first outside capital raised in 2026 at up to a ~$59B valuation.

IPO: No public timeline -- mainland-China private company, research-first mandate; founder has repeatedly deprioritized commercialization over an IPO. Any listing would most plausibly be a domestic (STAR Market / HK) venue given US-China decoupling, not a US ADR.

d-Matrix

Santa Clara AI-inference chip startup building digital in-memory compute (DIMC) accelerators (Corsair) to undercut Nvidia on inference cost, latency, and energy; Microsoft- and Temasek-backed, ~$2B private valuation.

IPO: Not before 2027; IPO optionality flagged after the oversubscribed Series C, but no S-1 and CEO states no intent to sell

ElevenLabs

The category-leading AI voice/audio platform (TTS, dubbing, and voice agents) that ~95% of first-time voice-AI buyers start with, scaling ARR from ~$100M (2024) to $500M+ (2026) and last priced in a primary round at $11B (Feb 2026), with secondary talks circling ~$22B.

IPO: No confirmed date or venue; CEO Mati Staniszewski has said the company is building toward an IPO but named no timeline. Crossover/PE entrants (BlackRock, Wellington, D.E. Shaw, Schroders) in the Series D third close and ~$22B secondary talks point to a listing readiness likely 2027+, not near-term. Reports of a specific date or a Warsaw Stock Exchange listing are unconfirmed.

EvenUp

EvenUp is a private San Francisco AI startup (Series E, ~$2B+, Oct 2025) building the leading AI platform for U.S. plaintiff-side personal-injury law — auto-drafting demand letters, medical chronologies and case analyses, now extending into a Pre-Litigation-as-a-Service (PLAAS) model.

IPO: No public timeline. Fresh off a $150M Series E (Oct 2025) and pushing into the PLAAS services expansion; a public listing is most plausibly 2+ years out (2028+), and a strategic acquisition by a legal-data incumbent (RELX/Thomson Reuters) is a live alternative exit.

EV Group

EV Group is a privately held, family-owned Austrian semiconductor-equipment maker that quietly monopolizes wafer bonding (~82% share) and is a front-line enabler of hybrid bonding and nanoimprint lithography for 3D-IC and advanced packaging.

IPO: None disclosed — family-owned (E. Thallner family) and self-funded since its 1980 founding; no IPO, S-1, or exit process signaled.

Fireworks AI

Fireworks AI is a private, fast-growing GenAI inference-and-fine-tuning platform (founded 2022 by ex-Meta PyTorch leads, incl. CEO Lin Qiao) that serves open-weight models at high speed and low cost, riding the inference-token boom to a reported ~$800M annualized revenue run-rate in mid-2026.

IPO: No public IPO timeline; company is focused on private growth financing (reportedly raising a ~$15B private round as of mid-2026, not yet closed). A public listing is not expected before the ~$15B round matures and revenue scales past a $1B+ run-rate — realistically 2027+ at the earliest, contingent on AI-infra market conditions.

Fivetran

Fivetran is the leading automated data-movement (ELT/CDC) platform; on June 1, 2026 it completed an all-stock merger with dbt Labs to form a private data-infrastructure company (~$600M combined ARR) positioning as the governed 'data layer for AI agents.'

IPO: No filed timeline; an eventual IPO of the combined ~$600M-ARR Fivetran+dbt entity is contemplated when public markets reopen (2027+ at the earliest). No S-1, no confidential filing disclosed.

FluidStack

London-founded (relocating global HQ to NYC) private 'neocloud' that rents Nvidia GPU compute at scale via an owned-datacenter private-cloud business plus an asset-light marketplace; catapulted from a niche broker to AI infrastructure heavyweight by a Nov-2025 $50B build-out partnership with Anthropic, and in talks (Apr-2026) to raise $1B at an ~$18B valuation.

IPO: None disclosed; focused on a private growth round (~$1B at ~$18B in talks, Apr-2026). A future IPO is plausible on neocloud comps (CoreWeave, Nebius listed) if the AI-capex cycle holds, but no S-1 or timeline exists.

G42 (Group 42) is Abu Dhabi's state-aligned AI national champion: a private holding company controlled by the UAE's National Security Adviser, spanning AI compute/cloud, data-center infrastructure, applied-AI analytics, space/geospatial and healthtech, and a primary UAE recipient of US advanced-chip export allocations.

IPO: Rumored

Glean

Glean is a privately held enterprise 'Work AI' platform (Palo Alto, founded ~2019 by ex-Google distinguished engineer and Rubrik co-founder Arvind Jain) that indexes a company's apps into a permissions-aware knowledge graph to power cross-app search, an AI assistant, and no-code AI agents; last priced at a $7.2B valuation (Series F, Jun 2025) and reporting ~$300M ARR as of May 2026 (+89% YoY).

IPO: 2027+ (no filing; CEO Arvind Jain has framed an IPO as a long-term possibility, not a near-term event; Glean remains venture-funded post-Series F with ample runway)

Graphcore

UK AI-accelerator pioneer (the IPU) that flamed out as an independent NVIDIA challenger, was bought cheaply by SoftBank in 2024, and is now a captive silicon unit inside SoftBank's Arm+Ampere+Graphcore vertical AI-compute stack aimed at Stargate.

IPO: None - wholly-owned SoftBank subsidiary since Jul 2024; delisted from the merchant market as an independent entity, no IPO path while captive to SoftBank/Stargate

PrivateChips

Context33

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