Market intelligence platform CB Insights has released its selection of this year’s 100 most promising artificial intelligence (AI) companies, from this list we filtered the top AI companies in Asia.

These companies, which were picked based on CB Insights datasets including deal activity, industry partnerships, team strength, investor strength and patent activity, represent 16 countries and 30+ solution categories, and comprise a mix of companies at different stages of maturity, product development, and revenue.

The 2024 AI 100, released on April 02, have raised over US$28 billion across 240+ equity deals since 2020. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has secured over 40% of that total with US$14 billion. However, the vast majority of these companies (68%) are in the early stages of fundraising (seed/angel or Series A), or have yet to raise outside equity.

The 2024 AI 100 cohort include 19 unicorns with OpenAI boasting the highest valuation with US$80 billion, followed by Databrick with US$43 billion, Anthropic with US$16 billion, and Hugging Face with US$4.5 billion.

Over one-third of this year’s selected companies focus on building core AI infrastructure, such as foundation models, AI chips and AI development platforms. A total of 30 vendors offer horizontal and cross-industry solutions like coding automation, creator tools, and search, while 34 companies specialize in verticals like gaming, healthcare, education, and manufacturing.

Looking at geographic distribution, the US is the represented country, accounting for 69% of all AI 100 companies. The US is followed by the UK (7%), Canada (5%), France (3%) and Germany (3%). Asia is represented by five companies: 01.AI and DP Technology, both from China, Rebellions from South Korea, Sakana AI from Japan, and Sarvam AI from India.

Top AI Companies in Asia – CB Insights AI 100, 2024

01.AI

01.AI is a Chinese AI startup founded by Kai-Fu Lee, a Taiwanese businessman, computer scientist and prominent venture capitalist (VC). Given Kai-Fu Lee’s reputation in this space it’s no surprise that CB Insights included his company as one of the top AI companies in Asia.

01.AI is the company behind a groundbreaking open-source foundational large language model (LLM) called Yi-34B. Last year, Hugging Face, which evaluates LLMs, ranked the Chinese model first for pre-trained base LLMs.

01.AI received US$200 million in funding in November 2023 from Alibaba Cloud and Lee’s venture firm Sinovation Ventures. The funding saw the company’s valuation soar past US$1 billion within just eight months since its creation. 01.AI was launched in July after a three-month incubation period.

DP Technology

DP Technology is a Chinese AI research and development (R&D) company aspiring to solve the biggest problems in science by fusing AI with physics-based modeling and simulation. Established in 2018, DP Technology provides a suite of tools for scientific computing, a critical process integral to technological development and scientific exploration. This approach involves leveraging computer simulations to understand and enhance various aspects of real-world products and systems, spanning industries from biopharmaceuticals to semiconductor development.

DP Technology’s business model encompasses both software as a service (SaaS) platforms and tailored services, catering to the diverse needs of its customers.

DP Technology secured US$100 million in August 2023 from United Media FOFs, MSA Capital, Loyal Valley Capital, Evergreen Scitech Delta, and other investors, Pandaily reported.

Rebellions

Rebellions is a South Korean fabless AI chip startup. Founded in 2020, the company’s mission is centered around developing cutting-edge AI chips that excel in inference tasks, which refer to the process of running live data through an AI model to make predictions or solve tasks. Unlike training, which involves creating and fine-tuning models, inference is crucial for real-time applications.

Rebellions closed a US$124 million Series B in January 2024, bringing its total raise to over US$200 million and its valuation to more than US$650 million. The startup said it would use the proceeds to attract more talents and accelerate the development of Rebel, the company’s next-generation AI chip designed for running LLMs with Samsung Electronics, and expand the customer base of its Atom chip.

In industry benchmark tests conducted in 2023, the Atom chip outperformed Qualcomm’s AI chip and Nvidia’s equivalent GPUs, showing off the fastest speed in processing large language and vision models.

Sakana AI

Sakana AI is an AI R&D company based in Tokyo that aims to develop transformative AI models that draw inspiration from nature-inspired intelligence. The company leverages innovative techniques like evolutionary methods and character-level training to develop more adaptive and resource-efficient AI systems. So far, it has released three Japanese language models: a LLM, an image-to-text model and an image generation model.

Sakana AI secured US$30 million in seed funding in January 2024 from Lux Capital, Khosla Ventures, NTT Group (Japan’s largest telco) and angel investors including Google AI leader Jeff Dean, Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue and ScaleAI CEO Alexandr Wang.

In addition to its seed round, the startup also announced a major R&D partnership with NTT Group and are working with strategic partners including KDDI and Sony as anchor customers.

Sarvam AI

Sarvam AI is an AI/ML R&D company striving to build reliable, performant, enterprise-grade AI systems at scale for the Indian market.

Sarvam AI is building a full-stack for generative AI, mainly investing in developing LLMs and bespoke enterprise models; building an enterprise-grade platform for organizations to develop and ship creative and performant genAI applications at scale; and contributing to open-source models and datasets, as well as efforts for large scale data curation in public-good space.

Sarvam AI raised US$41 million in a Series A closed in December 2023. The round, led by Lightspeed and supported by Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures, represented the largest raise at this stage for an Indian AI startup, the startup said.

Featured image credit: Edited from freepik

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• Source: https://fintechnews.sg/94489/ai/top-ai-companies-asia/