Using CB Insights' Key People data and Management Mosaic algorithm, we identify 5 promising teams bringing generative AI tech to market.
Generative AI companies have already raised over $17B in equity funding this year. While $10B of that went to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the remaining $7.2B still eclipses what these companies raised any year prior.
OpenAI is the most highly valued company here at a whopping $29B, putting it in the top 10 unicorns globally by valuation. However, a number of other genAI startups — led by impressive founding teams — have joined the unicorn club with $1B+ valuations.
We analyzed generative AI unicorns and used the CB Insights Management Mosaic — an algorithmic scoring of founding and management team quality — to identify 5 stand-out teams.
The Management Mosaic factors in a variety of signals, including past employment and milestones, educational history, and network quality. This score helps measure the likelihood that the team will create a successful outcome, such as an IPO or acquisition.
The table below highlights 5 genAI unicorns with impressive management teams.
Management Mosaic scores are as of 10/18/2023 — data is dynamic and scores on company profiles may have changed. Our analysis focused on pure-play generative AI companies with a broad consumer or enterprise focus.
You can learn more about Mosaic here and in our whitepaper.
TYPEFACE
Management Mosaic score: 960
Typeface uses generative AI to accelerate content creation for businesses across formats like images, social media & blog posts, and ads. This cuts the time it takes for companies to design and deploy marketing campaigns, job postings, and other assets.
Before co-founding Typeface, CEO Abhay Parasnis served as SVP of Oracle Public Cloud and president & COO of Kony. He also held multiple leadership roles, including CTO and chief product officer, at Adobe.
Typeface’s founding partner and head of product, Vishal Sood, previously held product and engineering roles at Microsoft and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise.
GLEAN
Management Mosaic score: 940
Glean is an AI-powered knowledge management tool that searches through a company’s apps and data silos to find and summarize answers to employee questions.
CEO Arvind Jain previously spent 11 years at Google as a distinguished engineer, leading teams across Google Search, Maps, and YouTube. He also co-founded data management & security company Rubrik ($4B valuation).
Meanwhile, Glean co-founder T.R. Vishwanath spent almost a decade as a principal software engineer at Meta, working on its News Feed ranking, ads, and developer platform. Before that, he was a principal development lead at Microsoft.
Tony Gentilcore, also a co-founder, spent a decade as an engineer at Google, where he founded and led Chrome’s Speed Team.
CHARACTER.AI
Management Mosaic score: 920
Character.AI develops AI companion chatbots capable of engaging with users in open-ended conversations. Potential applications span entertainment, education, and gaming.
CEO Noam Shazeer spent 18 years as an engineer at Google and was a major contributor to the development of Google’s LaMDA, a family of conversational large language models.
Co-founder and Character.AI president Daniel De Freitas previously led work on LaMDA at Google. Before that, he spent 4 years at Microsoft as an engineer working on natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning for the Bing search engine.
ADEPT
Management Mosaic score: 790
Adept is building a human-machine interface (HMI) and has developed an AI model called ACT-1, which is capable of taking user commands in natural language and executing tasks across a variety of software applications such as Salesforce and Google Sheets.
Adept’s leadership team includes a number of founding members who previously worked on AI at Google or Alphabet-owned DeepMind.
Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan, for instance, helped lead Google’s efforts to develop large models. Before that, he was CEO of computer vision startup Dextro. (Dextro was later acquired by Axon, where Luan served as director of AI.) Luan was also a VP of engineering at OpenAI.
INFLECTION
Management Mosaic score: 720
Inflection has built an API for conversational AI (currently in beta) that enterprises and developers can use. It also offers a consumer-facing personal AI assistant called Pi.
Co-founder and CEO Mustafa Suleyman previously co-founded DeepMind, an AI research company acquired by Google in 2014. There, he served as chief product officer and head of applied AI for nearly 10 years before becoming VP of AI product management & AI policy at Google.
Fellow Inflection co-founder Karén Simonyan also serves as its chief scientist. Previously, he co-founded deep learning startup Vision Factory, which was acquired in 2014 by DeepMind, where Simonyan then spent 8 years as principal research scientist. There, he led the Large Scale Deep Learning team developing large AI models.
Prior to co-founding Inflection, Reid Hoffman co-founded and served as CEO and executive chairman of LinkedIn. Hoffman is also a partner at VC firm Greylock Partners and has been a board member for OpenAI and Microsoft.
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