AI Startup Intelligence

Foundation Model Companies

Discover foundation model and LLM companies building general models, domain models, multimodal systems, and model platforms.

Companies tracked: 133Key segments: general LLMs, domain models, multimodal modelsUpdated: September 2, 2026

Foundation Models Market Snapshot

133

tracked companies

visible location clusters

funding signals surfaced

The category is increasingly defined by distribution, inference economics, data access, and vertical specialization rather than model scale alone.

Representative Companies

A crawler-visible sample of companies from the AI Market Watch database.

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Company	Location	Funding	Focus
Adaption Labs Founded 2025	San Francisco, USA	$50.0M	An AI platform focused on 'adaptable intelligence,' building models that continuously learn and evolve in real-time from real-world experience rather than remaining static after pre-training.
Liquid AI Founded 2023	Cambridge, United States	$287.6M	Liquid AI develops efficient foundation models using liquid neural networks, enabling high-performance AI deployment on edge devices with minimal computational resources
Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs) Founded 2025	Paris, France	$1.03B	A next-generation AI research and development lab focused on creating 'World Models' that understand physical reality, causality, and reasoning beyond the capabilities of current Large Language Models.
Reka AI Founded 2022	San Francisco, USA	$168M	Reka is an AI research lab building foundational intelligence for the physical world—natively multimodal omni models and infrastructure for robotics, wearables, video understanding, and real-time physical reasoning.
Agnes AI Founded 2025	Singapore	$20M	Singapore-based model-first AI company building cost-efficient, SEA-focused LLMs and agentic AI infrastructure, powering the Agnes AI consumer platform.
AMI Labs Founded 2025	Paris, France	$1.03B	A frontier AI research company developing world models based on Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) that enable intelligent systems to understand the real world through continuous, high-dimensional sensor data, rather than just predicting text tokens.
Hark Founded 2025	San Jose, USA	$800.0M	A next-generation AI research lab developing human-centric models designed to think proactively and recursively rather than just reactively.
Core Automation Founded 2026	San Francisco, USA	$532M	AI research lab building continual-learning models and new architectures beyond transformer scaling, founded by ex-OpenAI VP of Research Jerry Tworek.
Mirendil Founded 2025	San Francisco, California, USA	$200M	A frontier AI lab building self-improving AI systems that automate AI research and development itself.
AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs) Founded 2025	Paris, France	$1.03B	Paris-based AI research lab co-founded by Yann LeCun building "world models" — AI systems that understand the physical world via the JEPA architecture rather than relying on LLMs.
Baidu Inc. (ERNIE / Wenxin Yiyan) Founded 2000	Beijing, China	~$3.24B	Baidu is a Chinese multinational technology company whose ERNIE (Wenxin Yiyan) large language model family powers its AI chatbot, enterprise AI, cloud, and search products as it pursues a comeback to the AI frontier.
Sakana AI Founded 2023	Tokyo, Japan	~$412M (¥660B cumulative; Series B expanded to ¥32B/$200M)	A world-class R&D lab developing 'nature-inspired' foundation models that are efficient, domain-specific, and created through automated evolutionary algorithms rather than massive-scale training.
Noahs Founded 2020	Copenhagen, Denmark	€1.9 million	Digital retail-food platform offering a marketplace for multiple food brands and smart kitchen technology to streamline retail food operations
Google (Alphabet Inc.) — Gemini 3.7 Flash Founded 1998	Mountain View, California, USA	90000000000	Google (Alphabet Inc.) released Gemini 3.7 Flash, its most intelligent workhorse AI model yet for coding and agents, on August 13, 2026 — a multimodal model with a 1M-token context window priced at half the cost of its predecessor.
Apple Inc. (Apple Intelligence China custom AI model) Founded 1976	Cupertino, California, USA	Not disclosed	Apple has trained a proprietary large language model specifically for the China market, developed jointly with Alibaba's technical support, to power Apple Intelligence features pending/following regulatory approval in China.
OpenAI Founded 2015	San Francisco, United States	$199.6B	AI research and deployment company developing safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) through advanced language models, consumer applications, and enterprise AI solutions.
Tencent (Hunyuan AI Model Family) Founded 1998	Shenzhen, China	IPO	Tencent's Hunyuan (混元) is the company's proprietary, full-stack self-developed foundation model family spanning LLM, image, video and 3D generation, with the Hy3 model released July 2026 and a larger Hy4 model planned.
Sarvam AI Founded 2023	Bengaluru, India	$350.3M	India's full-stack sovereign AI platform building generative AI solutions optimized for India's linguistic diversity, with voice-first, multilingual capabilities supporting 22 Indian languages for population-scale applications.
Sparticle Founded 2019	Tokyo, Japan	$7.0M	An AI-native ecosystem focused on bridging global information gaps through cross-language AI search, real-time simultaneous translation, and enterprise knowledge management (RAG).
BharatGen Founded 2024	Mumbai, Maharashtra, India	$155M	India's first government-backed sovereign multimodal AI initiative developing multilingual LLMs for 22 Indian languages