You may have heard us talk about CB Insights before. What CB Insights does is provide a huge database of private company information that is collected using artificial intelligence. They then sell this data to 100s of firms that need accurate data. Sure, you can go pay $50 a month to Crunchbase and get private company data but you’re getting crowdsourced data as opposed to data collected by AI agents and cleansed by people that don’t live in Mumbai. Just recently, CB Insights held their Innovation Summit and one of the outputs from that event was a list of the top 100 artificial intelligence startups determined by a whole slew of useful metrics:
We’ve talked about a fair number of these companies already, and we’re already sharpening our pencils to make sure that we profile each and every one of them as fast as our little big hands can type. What we thought would be useful to do is to take a look at the top-5 companies in this list by valuation. The way this works is that you can value a startup based on the price a venture capital firm is willing to pay for a certain percentage of equity. If you sold 10% of your company for $100 million then your implied valuation would be $1 billion. We call a startup with a $1 billion valuation a unicorn. In the AI 100 produced by CB Insights, there are exactly 5 unicorns. Here they are.
| Company | Valuation (Billions) | Became Unicorn | Country | Focus |
| Zoox | 1.55 | 5/27/2016 | USA | Autonomous taxis |
| UBTECH | 1 | 7/26/2016 | China | Robots |
| Benevolent.ai | 1 | 6/2/2015 | UK | Drug Discovery |
| Insidesales.com | 1.5 | 4/28/2014 | USA | Big Data for Selling |
| iCarbonX | 1 | 4/12/2016 | China | Healthcare |
Let’s take a close look at each one of these artificial intelligence startups valued at $1 billion or more.
iCarbonx
Founded in late 2015, Chinese startup iCarbonX which has taken in nearly $600 million in funding so far with the intent of “digitalizing everyone’s life information”. We talked about iCarbonX before when they were featured in our article on “The Top-5 Artificial Intelligence Companies in Healthcare“. Since that article, iCarbonX has signed up seven companies to join their “Digital Life Alliance”. They also unveiled their digital health management platform called “Meum” which now needs to be populated with people’s genetic data. The key is getting people to give up that data. This doesn’t seem that different to what Illumina is trying to do with their Helix venture that aspires to become the world’s biggest…