February 13, 2025

Gas pedal

Hi there, 

Here is this week’s Hot or Not.

Hot: OpenAI's valuation

Here are the top-valued private LLM developers based on CB Insights data: 

1. OpenAI ($157B valuation)
2. Databricks ($62B)
3. Anthropic ($60B)
4. xAI ($50B)
5. Mistral AI ($6.2B)
6. Cohere ($5.5B)
7. Inflection ($4B) - pivoted away from frontier model development in 2024
8. Moonshot AI ($3.3B)
9. Zhipu AI ($3B)
10. Minimax AI ($2.5B)

Pure-play developers OpenAI and Anthropic lead in adoption and revenue per recent reports:

• OpenAI: estimated $3.7B in 2024 revenue, projecting $11.6B in 2025 revenue
• Anthropic: estimated $400-$600M in 2024 revenue, projecting up to $3.7B in 2025 revenue

Separate from the kerfuffle around Elon Musk’s recent bid, OpenAI is in talks to raise $40B at a valuation as high as $300B. 

While developers like DeepSeek have shown small players can push performance forward, US developers are betting on their advantages in compute and data to widen their lead as the cost curve shifts.

Not: Silicon Valley insurtech

For the first time since 2018, Silicon Valley is no longer the top hub for insurtech funding. 

The share of global insurtech funding to Silicon Valley-based startups halved from 20% in 2023 to 10% in 2024.

While Silicon Valley's overall startup funding surged 52% YoY amid an AI boom, its diminished insurtech activity could mean missed opportunities for insurance-focused AI innovation.

Get the full breakdown of the trends reshaping the industry in our State of Insurtech 2024 Report.

Hot: Wildfire prevention tech

Wildfires have caused over $100B in economic losses since 2014, per Swiss Re.

With wildfire risks top of mind, we mined the CBI database for companies developing applications from risk preparation to damage assessment. 

Companies and governments looking to understand the current wildfire tech landscape can check out 130 companies across 15 markets here.

Not: Electric slide

Deals to electric vehicle (EV) technology startups plummeted in 2024.

Following 11 consecutive years of growth, EV deals dropped by 61% YoY — the steepest decline on record.

EV turbulence isn’t just noticeable in private market deal volume either.

Notable EV startups and public players filed for bankruptcy last year, while auto incumbents rolled back EV strategies in the face of decreased consumer demand.

Dive deeper into the shakeup in our recently published State of Climate Tech Report.

The +1

Accelerating? Time until AI learns how to make better graphs than this.

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal 

Co-Founder & Exec Chair

P.S. CB Insights tracks 1,400+ markets, including LLM developers. Preview them all with your free trial.

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