🤖 Top 20 AI agent startups

Today’s leaders focus on fast ROI - writing code, handling customer support, and automating enterprise workflows.

The market is scaling faster than expected and new players are already rivaling Big Tech in efficiency.

🖱 AI agent market will more than double this year — from $5B to $13B
🖱 Anysphere (Cursor) leads with $500M ARR, 5x ahead of peers
🖱 Top startups match or exceed Microsoft’s $1.8M revenue per employee
🖱 42% of AI agent firms are already operating at commercial scale
🖱 Half of the top 20 by revenue were founded in just the past 3 years
🖱 Customer support agents generate a 127x revenue multiple vs. the average 52

AI agents aren’t just experiments anymore, they’re becoming real businesses at lightning speed.

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☀️ Meta signs $100M solar deal for AI data center

Meta will build a 100MW solar farm in South Carolina with Silicon Ranch to power its upcoming $800M AI data center.

Both projects are set to go live in 2027, with most equipment sourced from the U.S.

🖱 This marks Meta’s 18th deal with Silicon Ranch, totaling $2.5B+ in renewable investments

🖱 Meta has added over 2GW of solar capacity in 2025 alone

🖱 Recent projects include 650MW in Kansas/Texas with AES and nearly 800MW in Texas with Engie and Zelestra

For hyperscalers like Meta, solar isn’t just green - it’s cheap, fast to deploy, and critical for keeping AI data centers powered.

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📊 VC money is now top-heavy

PitchBook shows how concentrated US venture has become. During COVID, investors spread capital across the long tail - top-10 deals took only a small share.

Now, with AI leading, nearly half of all VC dollars go to just 10 companies.

🖱 OpenAI alone represents ~20% of the 2025 market

🖱 Other giants include Scale AI, xAI, Anthropic

🖱 Billions are piling into a few AI leaders while the rest see shrinking access

The VC pie is getting smaller for everyone outside the top tier of AI.

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🦄 AI’s unicorn wave since ChatGPT

More than 100 AI startups have hit unicorn status since the launch of ChatGPT, a boom that has minted billionaires and reshaped private markets.

🖱 OpenAI and ByteDance lead at $300B valuations

🖱 Anthropic now sits at $62B, xAI at $75B

🖱 Scale AI ($30B), Anduril ($31B), CoreWeave ($19B), and Perplexity ($18B) among other big names

🖱 Canva ($32B) and Databricks ($62B) show how AI has supercharged adjacent categories

The AI cycle isn’t just about models, it’s fueling a new class of giant companies across infra, defense, and consumer tech.

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📈 Hong Kong IPOs bounce back

Financial Times reports that Hong Kong’s listing market is roaring again.

Just a year ago, offices were empty and deal flow was frozen - now companies are lining up for IPOs.

In the first half of 2025, g>the total raised has already surpassed the combined volumes of 2023 and 2024.

After a long drought, Hong Kong is back on the map for public offerings.

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👆 The most valuable private companies as of July 2025

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💻 Lambda secures $480M to scale affordable AI cloud

Lambda, the Nvidia-backed GPU cloud provider, has raised $480M at a $4B valuation to expand its infrastructure and software.

The San Jose–based company positions itself as a cost-efficient alternative to hyperscalers, offering H100 GPUs for just $1.89/hr.

🖱 Round co-led by Andra Capital and SGW, with Nvidia, ARK Invest, In-Q-Tel, and Andrej Karpathy participating
🖱 Funding follows a $320M round in 2024, plus a $500M GPU-backed loan to secure Nvidia’s next-gen H200 and Blackwell chips
🖱 Lambda Cloud already serves 5,000+ customers across healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and government
🖱 Products span on-prem hardware, GPU cloud, and Lambda Chat hosting open-source models like DeepSeek-R1
🖱 Competitive edge: low-cost GPU access + early pipeline to Nvidia’s newest chips

In a world where GPUs are the new oil, Lambda’s bet is clear - democratize access and cement itself as the developer-first AI cloud.

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📊 Paradigm puts an AI agent in every spreadsheet cell

Paradigm, founded by Anna Monaco, reimagines spreadsheets as living systems where each cell can host an AI agent.

Users assign prompts to columns or cells, and 5,000+ agents fetch, analyze, and fill in data, effectively turning spreadsheets into automated workflows.

🖱 Works with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Gemini models, with switching for cost vs. reasoning trade-offs
🖱 Early customers include EY, Etched, and Cognition
🖱 Raised $5M seed led by General Catalyst, $7M total funding to date
🖱 Competes with Quadratic and AI add-ons from Google and Microsoft
🖱 Monaco frames Paradigm not as an AI spreadsheet but as a workflow engine in spreadsheet form

The move shows how familiar tools like spreadsheets can morph into platforms for AI-driven work - hiding radical new workflows inside an interface everyone already knows.

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