CEO
Product Lead
The Heartbeat AI 25 is our quarterly ranked view of the companies that define artificial intelligence today. Early 2026 finds the frontier race genuinely multi-polar — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, SSI and Thinking Machines Lab all plausibly in contention — while NVIDIA has evolved from chipmaker to capital-markets actor via its $100B commitment to OpenAI. Vertical AI (Harvey, Glean, Sierra, Cursor, Cognition) has matured into a real software category, each name hitting $3–10B valuations within 24 months of founding. Below, our ranking of 25 companies, with notes on why each earns its spot and what changed since the last edition.
Our ranked list of the 25 companies that define AI in 2026: frontier labs, infra, applications, and the picks-and-shovels. Curated and maintained by the Heartbeat research team.
The "magnificent seven" stocks are 7 technology stocks that drove a large portion of the market's returns in 2023 and 2024.
