Former Google Researchers are Dominating the A.I. Startup Scene

From rolling out new A.I. models to securing U.S. defense contracts to advancing autonomous systems, the world’s top 50 A.I. startups of 2024 are focused on a wide range of sectors. Despite their differing focus areas, one factor links roughly a quarter of them: a CEO that counts Google as their former employer.

More than a dozen of this year’s top A.I. companies are helmed by a former Google worker, according to a recent analysis from Writerbuddy, an online content writing platform. As of this October, 14 startups led by ex-Google staffers received a combined valuation of $71.6 billion and raised a cumulative $14.7 billion—representing 28 percent of the total funding for the world’s top 50 startups. (The list was taken from Forbes’ AI 50 list for 2024, which ranks companies based on  business promise, technical usage of A.I., etc.)

The highest-valued A.I. startup led by an ex-Googler is Anthropic, an OpenAI rival known for its Claude family of A.I. models. It was co-founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, a former senior research scientist at Google between 2015 and 2016. Having raised $9.7 billion over the past three years, the Amazon-backed Anthropic is reportedly eyeing a new fundraising round that would hike its valuation to a staggering $40 billion.

Perplexity AI, too, was co-founded by a former Google researcher. The A.I.-search focused startup, most recently valued at $9 billion, was established in 2022 by its CEO Aravind Srinivas, who previously interned at Google and Google DeepMind between 2019 and 2021.

Mistral AI, a French startup valued at $6.2 billion, is led by the former Google researcher Arthur Mensch. And Canada’s Cohere, valued at $5.5 billion, is led by Aidan Gomez, also a former Google researcher.

Google isn't the only tech company littering the resumes of startup leaders. Of the 14 companies led by ex-Google workers, three CEOs also previously spent stints at OpenAI.

Amodei worked at the A.I. company as vice president of research before leaving in 2020 to found Anthropic. Perplexity's Srinivas served as an OpenAI research scientist between 2021 and 2022. David Luan, the co-founder and CEO of the A.I. company Adept who earlier this month jumped over to head Amazon (AMZN)'s artificial general intelligence (A.G.I.) efforts in San Francisco, also previously worked at both Google and OpenAI.

It comes as no surprise that OpenAI is expected to finish out 2024 as the most well-funded A.I. company of the year. Valued at a staggering $157 billion, the Sam Altman-helmed company's lead is miles ahead of the second largest A.I company, Databricks, valued at $43 billion and led by Ali Ghodsi.

The debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022 spurred a frenzy of A.I. investments. Last year, the top 50 A.I. companies managed to raise $20.7 billion, representing a 600 percent increase year-over-year. This year's A.I. investments, which already reached $20.2 billion as of October, are already nearly on par with last year's total, according to Writerbuddy's report.

Money is pouring into companies focused on building A.I. infrastructure and models, a sector dominated by players like OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere that accounts for two thirds of the $52.8 billion raised by the top 50 A.I. startups this year. Data and analytics, an area that includes players like Databricks and Scale AI, has a more than 11 percent share, while defense and security efforts have attracted around 7 percent of funding. Other popular A.I. startup sectors include autonomous systems and robots, generative A.I., search tools, health care and biotech, and productivity software.