The next 10 years will be the decade of data, according to premier Silicon Valley investment firm Andreesen Horowitz. To chart this innovative area, a16z has released their inaugural class of the Data50 — the world’s top data startups and bellwether companies across the most exciting categories in data. Fiddler is humbled to be selected for the AI/ML category!
Methodology behind the list:
“Data50 companies were founded after 2008, have raised new funding in the last two years, and their employee base is growing at at least 30% YoY. Their products are horizontal technologies serving data or data application teams across industries. Rankings are based on a blend of most recent valuation, company size, employee growth over the last two years, years in operation, and current revenue scale."
We highly recommend reading the full analysis by a16z partners Jennifer Li, Sarah Wang, and Jamie Sullivan. A few points stuck out to us as particularly interesting:
“AI/ML is the biggest category by the number of companies, largely because the space is still evolving and requires a new separate set of tools to train, measure, and productionize models.”
Out of the Data50, 15 companies (30%) are in the AI/ML category (out of 7 potential categories).
“Looking at per category investment, the most notable trend is that AI/ML companies are picking up more investor interest than ever, mostly concentrated in the early stage.”
As enterprise AI adoption spans every industry, there is a correlated spike in funding for new AI/ML companies.
“The majority of the Data50 companies were founded after 2014, with a peak around 2019, driven by the explosion of AI/ML tooling.”
MLOps is more critical than ever, and the next generation of AI/ML startups are being built to advance the MLOps lifecycle.
With model performance management at the core of MLOps, we can't wait to help many more companies in their ML journey! Check out our MPM best practices to learn more.
