Six Indian American-led firms on Forbes’ AI 50 list

Abridge (Shiv Rao), Baseten (Tuhin Srivastava), Codieum (Varun Mohan), Glean (Arvind Jain), Perplexity (Aravind Srinivas), Together AI (Vipul Ved Prakash) on the list

Six firms led by Indian Americans figure among Forbes’ sixth annual AI 50 recognizing the most promising privately-held artificial intelligence companies.

The AI companies with Indian American leads are: Abridge (CEO Shiv Rao), Baseten (CEO Tuhin Srivastava), Codieum (Varun Mohan), Glean (CEO Arvind Jain), Perplexity (CEO Aravind Srinivas), and Together AI (Vipul Ved Prakash).

Thanks to the massive popularity of apps like ChatGPT, a new tech economy has emerged to help businesses develop and deploy AI-powered apps, Forbes noted. That’s reflected by the makeup of Forbes’ sixth annual AI 50, produced in partnership with Sequoia and Meritech Capital, it said.

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“For the startups on AI 50, the technology has evolved from capturing customers’ imaginations to capturing billions of dollars in collective revenue. They have also captured the attention of Silicon Valley investors at a time when the fundraising market continues to pose difficulty for other once-hot sectors.”

The companies on this year’s AI 50 have raised a total of $34.7 billion in funding. Nearly one-third of that total comes from OpenAI, thanks to some $10 billion from Microsoft. Much more comes from other ascendant AI research firms like Anthropic ($7.7 billion raised), Cohere ($445 million) and Mistral AI ($528 million).

There are companies that are seamlessly layering the latest advances in AI into their own apps. Abridge led by Indian American Shiv Rao uses voice recognition and language summarization to deliver automated documentation of one’s visit to the doctor’s office, according to Forbes.

Indian American-led firms on Forbes’ AI 50 list:

Abridge (CEO Shiv Rao)

Dr. Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist, founded the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Abridge in 2018 to free clinicians from the time-sucking paperwork that comes after they see patients: jotting down detailed notes for their medical records.

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Abridge records their conversations with patients and uses AI to summarize them. Ten thousand clinicians are already using it and the startup is worth $850 million after raising more than $200 million in venture funding.

Baseten (CEO Tuhin Srivastava)

San Francisco, California-based Baseten is led by CEO Tuhin Srivastava. The company helps businesses handle machine learning workflows, and make it easier for more companies to integrate AI into their business practices.

Companies can choose to do it on their own cloud, or through Baseten’s offering. The company just raised a $40 million Series B at a $220 million valuation, per PitchBook, and plans to use the capital to add more GPUs, make workloads run more efficiently, and hire more staff.

Codieum (Varun Mohan)

AI extension Codeium in Mountain View, California, can auto-generate chunks of code in more than 70 languages, helping support CEO Varun Mohan’s goal of enabling coders to work faster and more efficiently. And while the service is free to individual users, teams and companies have to pay for the extension. Early traction on the business model has nabbed for the company $93 million and a $500 million valuation awarded by investors including Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.

Glean (CEO Arvind Jain)

Palo Alto, California-based Glean, a $2.2 billion (valuation) AI-based search engine trained on a company’s entire database, employees can get quick answers to pedestrian HR queries and other company-related questions.

Canva, Duolingo, and Grammarly are among the startup’s 200 customers. Workers love it, using the AI assistant more than 10 times a day. Next up for Glean is helping companies build applications like Slack bots that act as “first responders” to employees’ questions.

Perplexity (CEO Aravind Srinivas) 

In the search for straightforward answers, people are buried in blue links, says Aravind Srinivas. In 2022, the former OpenAI researcher quit his job to start Perplexity AI in San Francisco, California. It is a conversational search engine that uses a medley of AI models to provide answers on any topic on the internet. “It’s almost like Wikipedia and ChatGPT had a kid,” Srinivas told Forbes. Perplexity, which was last valued at $520 million and has crossed $10 million in annual recurring revenue, has about 15 million users — including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Together AI (Vipul Ved Prakash)

More than 45,000 registered developers are using Together AI’s cloud-based tools to deploy open-source generative AI models. The company is also known for its RedPajama-V2 dataset.

Named for the children’s book Llama Llama Red Pajama, the San Francisco, California-based company is the largest open resource available for training LLMs with more than 30 trillion “tokens,” or units of data. In March, cofounder and CEO Vipul Ved Prakash announced the company’s $106 million Series C led by Salesforce Ventures. The company’s valuation is now $1.3 billion.