Inside the 2025 Forbes AI 50: How 7 AI Startups Are Shaping Content and Industry

In April 2025, Forbes released the 7th edition of its AI 50 list, highlighting the 50 most promising private AI companies worldwide.

Based on the evolution of these AI application companies, Sequoia Capital summarized two major trends:

1. AI is shifting from "chatting" to "execution."

2. Enterprise-grade AI tools are taking center stage.

From legaltech platforms replacing junior attorneys to AI copilots transforming how we code and communicate, 2025 marks a shift from “chatbots” to true business operators.

In Part 1, we highlighted 7 companies leading this movement in creation tools and industry-specific use cases.

Now in Part 2, we continue our deep dive with 7 more companies powering the next wave of productivity — through automation, infrastructure, and intelligent data systems.

III. Productivity & Enterprise Enablement

Glean

Glean is a company focused on developing AI-powered search and chatbots for enterprises, aiming to bring AI into the workplace and enhance business workflows. In the information age, many companies face the challenge of data overload. Employees are inundated with large amounts of unstructured information every day, making data organization a daunting task. The existence of multiple departments can also create information silos, making it difficult for employees to efficiently access and utilize internal company knowledge.

Leveraging connections to over 100 SaaS applications, Glean aggregates company information to provide more comprehensive results. Through AI and its enterprise search platform, Workplace Search, Glean connects to internal data sources and builds an enterprise knowledge graph to help employees search for information more effectively.

Glean’s AI also enables personalized search for each employee, offering targeted interactions and acting as an AI assistant to strengthen internal information flow and improve communication efficiency among employees.

After completing a $260 million Series E funding round in September last year, Glean’s valuation reached $4.6 billion.

WriterLabs

WriterLabs (officially named Writer) is an enterprise-focused generative AI platform designed for marketing and content creation. It helps teams enhance content production efficiency, ensure brand consistency, and automate workflows.

Powered by its proprietary Palmyra large language model (LLM), Writer generates marketing copy tailored to a company’s brand voice and style. Compared to other AI text-generation tools, Writer’s key advantage lies in its custom-built Palmyra model, which contains 20 billion parameters, trained on +800B tokens of Palmyra-Index-Data and is fine-tuned for specialized domains like healthcare and legal, ensuring industry-specific accuracy and professionalism.

The company claims Palmyra outperforms competitors like ChatGPT in accuracy and cost efficiency, with lower API pricing.

As of November 2024, Writer has raised $200 million in a Series C funding round, achieving a $1.9 billion valuation. Its clients include global leaders such as Uber, Salesforce, and Intuit.

Hebbia

Hebbia is dedicated to building AI software for the finance and legal sectors, offering advanced knowledge work automation through data and information organization for enterprises. In professional services such as financial services, law, and consulting, the ability to efficiently find information is critical, as many investigative processes require manual analysis of large volumes of dense documents. However, rampant SaaS adoption within organizations often leads to information overload and disorder, making it time-consuming to locate actionable insights.

Founded to provide neural search capabilities for investment bankers and private equity analysts, Hebbia enables users to solve complex and ambiguous queries. Its core product, Matrix, allows users to upload any type of document-including PDFs, presentations, emails, and images-specify the questions they want answered for each document, and instantly receive detailed insights in a table format similar to Microsoft Excel

In early 2025, Hebbia completed a $130 million Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Index Ventures, Google Ventures, and Peter Thiel. This round brought the company’s valuation to $700 million.

Mercor

Mercor is an AI-powered recruitment and talent-matching platform that leverages artificial intelligence throughout the hiring process to help companies more efficiently source, screen, and pay employees.

Mercor uses AI to review candidate information and conducts a 20-minute AI video interview to assess applicants. The platform then quickly and efficiently recommends the best candidates to companies, ensuring a strong match between employers and talent. Beyond matching, Mercor also manages payroll and ongoing performance tracking, simplifying the recruitment and employment process for both employers and talent.

As a specialized AI company, Mercor has developed its own proprietary AI model, which enables the platform’s reasoning and decision-making to more closely resemble how human recruiters screen resumes and evaluate interviews.

Mercor has raised over $100 million in funding and has reached an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $75 million.

Decagon

Decagon builds AI Agents for large enterprises in customer support and experience. Unlike traditional rigid chatbots, its AI Agent Engine leverages generative AI to truly understand customer needs and resolve issues.

Decagon's core product, AIAgentEngine, uses generative AI technology to handle complex customer inquiries, provide personalized responses, and seamlessly integrate with existing customer support systems.

• Complex Query Handling: Automates tasks like refund processing and account recovery, resolving 70%-90% of inquiries autonomously.

• Personalized Responses: Integrates with internal systems (e.g., Salesforce, Zendesk) to deliver context-aware solutions.

• Omnichannel Support: Unifies chat, email, and voice (via Decagon Voice) interactions with 24/7 multilingual coverage.

• Seamless Integration: Connects to existing tools and workflows without code, eliminating dependency on decision trees.
  

IV. Embodied & Spatial Intelligence

Fiqure Al

Figure AI is a robotics company developing AI-powered humanoid robots. These bipedal robots can perform physical tasks in complex real-world environments, such as warehouses, factories, retail stores, and even homes. Figure AI aims to reduce reliance on human labor and address the growing labor shortage in the United States by deploying robots to fill “jobs that humans do not want to perform.”

Its flagship product, Figure 02, is a robot equipped with voice-based conversational capabilities, visual reasoning, and highly dexterous robotic hands. Figure 02 has already been deployed at BMW’s factory in South Carolina, where it performs tasks such as assembly. As of early 2025, Figure AI is raising $1.5 billion in new funding, bringing its valuation to $39.5 billion

World Labs

World Labs is a spatial intelligence application that leverages Large World Models (LWMs) to enable AI to perceive, generate, and interact with 3D environments. Users can transform a single image into an interactive 3D scene or generate immersive 3D worlds from text prompts.

The core technology converts 2D input into explorable 3D spaces, allowing users to intuitively understand and interact with complex real-world scenarios. Beyond generation, World Labs aims to enable AI to reason and act within 3D environments.

Founded by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, known as the “Godmother of AI” and a Stanford University professor, the company emphasizes that “seeing and doing are deeply interconnected-AI must perceive 3D to act in 3D,” a critical step in model evolution.

As of September 2024, World Labs has secured $230 million in seed funding, with subsequent rounds raising an additional $100 million. Its valuation remains undisclosed.

Conclusion

At GenAIx, we specialize in AI education and enablement — helping organizations that are unfamiliar with AI tools unlock their potential and move confidently into the future.

Whether you're a business leader exploring AI for the first time, or a team looking to integrate AI into daily workflows, GenAIx offers tailored support to accelerate your journey. Our resources include:

• YouTube video tutorials that cover trending tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and enterprise AI solutions — all designed for non-technical users

• Workshops and advisory sessions to help your organization evaluate, implement, and scale AI technologies strategically

• AI Readiness Assessment – 5-Day Challenge: A hands-on, guided evaluation for your team to explore current capabilities, uncover automation opportunities, and build an actionable AI adoption roadmap in just 5 days.

We believe that AI is not just a tool — it's a capability every organization can develop with the right guidance.

We’re here to help. Reach out to us anytime at: clients@genaix.org