Inside the 2025 Forbes AI 50: How 7 Companies Are Driving Scalable AI Impact

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

In this year’s report, AI application companies undoubtedly stole the spotlight. Among the 50 companies, 31 were AI application companies. In addition to familiar names like Perplexity, a new wave of AI application companies also emerged — such as Anysphere, the AI coding platform that assists engineers in writing code (with its flagship product, Cursor), and Speak, an AI-driven language coaching app. This list was compiled in collaboration with Sequoia Capital and Meritech Capital.

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

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

   2025 marks a watershed moment for AI applications. While AI was previously known primarily as a tool for answering questions and generating content, it is now beginning to execute complete workflows. AI is no longer just an "assistant," but becoming an active "executor."

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

   Companies like Harvey, a legal tech firm, can now automate entire legal processes — from document review to client communication — effectively replacing an entire team of junior lawyers. Meanwhile, Sierra and Cursor have achieved a leap from "supporting" to "fully automating" workflows in customer service and software development, respectively.

   In this article, we will introduce some of the standout AI companies that are leading these trends.

I. Next-Gen Creation Tools

Perplexity AI

Perplexity AI is an AI search engine and web search tool dedicated to developing and providing advanced text generation and comprehension technologies. The company focuses on building a conversational search engine powered by large language models (LLMs), aiming to deliver accurate, real-time answers with reliable web citations.

Perplexity AI streamlines research and information retrieval by automatically gathering, analyzing, and summarizing data from current sources, academic papers, and trusted databases. It is especially valuable for students, researchers, journalists, and professionals who need fast and reliable answers without manually sifting through multiple sources.

As of December 2024, Perplexity AI was valued at $9 billion. Its annual revenue for 2024 was estimated to be between $25 million and $63 million, according to industry reports Business of Apps and Sacra.

Runway

Runway is an AI-powered video and image editing platform that stands out as a leader in AI video generation. Its professional-grade output quality sets it apart from other AI video tools on the market. Focusing on “AI + visual creation,” Runway offers more than 30 AI-driven tools and models for video and image editing. Through continuous model iteration and technological innovation, Runway is pushing the boundaries of AI-powered visual effects for the film and media industry.

In 2023, the Oscar-winning film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” featured extensive visual effects, yet its VFX team consisted of only six people. This was not a story of overwork, but rather a testament to the efficiency enabled by Runway’s AI tools, which allowed a small team to produce complex, visually stunning effects. This collaboration not only improved efficiency and reduced labor costs but also fostered greater creativity and innovation in filmmaking.

Runway’s pricing is also highly accessible, with the Standard (individual professional) plan at $12 per user per month and the Pro (team) plan at $28 per user per month.

In April 2024, Runway completed a $308 million Series D funding round, bringing its valuation to approximately $3 billion-slightly lower than the $4 billion figure sometimes cited in media reports

Anysphere (Cursor)

Anysphere, founded in 2022, develops Cursor, an AI-powered code editor that converts natural language instructions into precise code while debugging and answering programming questions.

Cursor is currently a leading programming tool in the field of AI. It can automatically convert users' natural language instructions into precise code, answer programming-related questions, and promptly identify and fix bugs in the code.

Cursor offers three modes:

• Agent Mode: Full AI assistance for beginners

• Edit Mode: AI support for experienced developers

• Ask Mode: Q&A-focused programming guidance

As of March 2025, Anysphere is negotiating a funding round that could value the company near $10 billion, following a $100 million Series B at a $2.6 billion valuation in late 2024

ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs, founded in 2022, specializes in AI voice generation and cloning. Its core technologies enable users to quickly produce natural speech and accurately mimic specific voices.

II. Industry-Specific Disruptors

Harvey

AI has entered the legal sector, and Harvey is a prime example-an AI-powered legal assistant application. Built on OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, Harvey uses natural language to understand lawyers’ instructions and rapidly generate legal arguments and drafts.

This allows complex legal workflows to be completed by AI in a fraction of the time, making it an excellent support tool that greatly improves lawyers’ efficiency. Harvey has made significant strides, including full deployment by Allen & Overy, one of the world's largest law firms, and being adopted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to support 4,000 of its legal professionals.

Early 2025 Harvey is already advancing a $300M Series D, raising its valuation to $3B.

Its core function includes three parts:

• Voice Cloning: Users only need to upload a voice of about 30 seconds to 5 minutes, and then they can directly copy the person's voice, including the timbre, accent and even the mood can be cloned.

• Voice Synthesis: With the voice cloning function, users can generate a natural voice after uploading text again.

• Bi-directional conversion of voice and text: Not only does it convert text into voice, ElevenLabs can also perform voice transcription, realizing bi-directional conversion of text and voice.

As of January 2025, ElevenLabs closed a $180 million Series C funding round, valuing it at $3.3 billion.

Luminance

Luminance is a leading UK legal tech company focused on AI-driven solutions for contract management, review, and negotiation since 2016.

Developed by AI experts from the University of Cambridge, its platform leverages the proprietary Legal Pre-trained Transformer (LPT) model, trained on 150+ million legal documents (including non-public files), ensuring high accuracy for legal professionals. Unlike general-purpose models like GPT, LPT specializes in legal language and workflows. Key Features include:

• Automated contract generation and risk analysis, reducing the time and effort required for manual review

• Compliance checks aligned with regulations

• Traffic Light Analysis for real-time negotiation support

In February 2025, Luminance raised $75 million in a Series C round led by Point72 Private Investments, marking one of the largest funding rounds in European legal AI.

Overall, Harvey is a general-purpose AI legal assistant built on GPT-4 for drafting and legal reasoning, while Luminance is a specialized contract analysis platform powered by a proprietary legal AI model focused on compliance and document review.

Abridge

Abridge is one of the most representative companies in the AI healthcare space. It is an AI-powered medical note-taking platform that uses advanced models to transcribe conversations between patients and clinicians, organizing them into structured medical notes. In the U.S., doctors are required to document every patient encounter, a task so complex and time-consuming that it created the medical scribe profession-about 100,000 scribes, or 10% of the total number of physicians. This comes at a significant labor cost. Now, Abridge is leveraging powerful AI models and algorithms to gradually replace this role. Compared to the traditional transcription cost of $25 per hour, Abridge’s AI solution brings the cost down to just $0.12 per hour, dramatically reducing labor expenses.

Abridge has partnered with U.S. healthcare systems and has become an official part of clinical workflows, showing tremendous potential. In February 2025, Abridge closed a $250 million Series D funding round, with a recent valuation of $2.75 billion.

Speak

San Francisco-based AI learning startup Speak is new to the list this year. Founded in 2016, Speak is an AI spoken language learning app that focuses on using artificial intelligence to help people learn new languages. Utilizing the Chatgpt-4 model released by OpenAI, Speak allows users to learn languages like native speakers.

Language learning can be roughly divided into four parts: listening, reading, and writing, and most native speakers always learn and master a language by listening and speaking. speak uses AI to simulate the way native speakers think about learning, and divides the learning process into three parts.

First, the user will practice listening and speaking, then Speak will repeatedly train the user to master the newly learned vocabulary or phrases, and finally, AI will be used to simulate the real application context, so that the user can understand the language and vocabulary in an immersive way.

Currently, users can only learn English and Spanish on Speak, with plans to launch French soon. Speak currently has more than 10 million users and operates in more than 40 countries.

In December 2024, the company closed a Series C funding round totaling $78 million, bringing its valuation to $1 billion.

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

At GenAIx, we specialize in AI education and enablement—helping organizations unfamiliar with AI tools unlock their potential and move confidently into the future. We also offer a growing library of YouTube video tutorials, making it easy for professionals and teams to learn how to apply AI effectively in their daily work.