Radar
226 companies worth knowing
AI labs, agents, space, defense, robotics, fintech — the companies on my radar, mapped by where they actually sit. I keep this list for my own research and share it because most people don’t know half of these exist. Click a bubble, find something you like, go apply — the links go to each company’s live jobs board, and most of them hire well beyond engineering.
SF Bay Area
138Makes NEO, a humanoid robot designed to help people with everyday tasks around the home.
Open-source context-retrieval layer that lets AI agents search and use data from many sources.
Provides hosted search and discovery APIs that power the fast search bars inside many apps and websites.
A self-clearing broker-dealer offering stock and crypto trading as an API that other apps can build on.
AI research lab behind the Claude family of AI models, assistants, and developer tools.
The company behind Ray, open-source software for spreading large AI and computing jobs across many machines.
Makes software and simulation tools that help car, truck, and defense companies develop and test autonomous vehicles.
Builds an operating system for running and managing data centers.
Develops passive, scalable systems that track drones and missiles without using radar.
Builds AI "employee" software for sales teams — its flagship agent, Ava, automates outbound sales outreach.
A platform that helps companies deploy and run their AI models in the cloud quickly and reliably.
Makes evaluation and observability tools that help teams measure, test, and improve their AI products and agents.
Maintains the leading open-source project for AI agents that browse and operate the web, earning 50k GitHub stars in three months.
Runs headless web browsers in the cloud so AI agents and apps can browse and interact with websites programmatically; maintains the open-source Stagehand framework.
Automates medical billing and revenue-cycle work for healthcare providers.
AI software for government and defense procurement.
Develops continual-learning technology so AI agents keep improving over time.
Builds fast, real-time voice AI powered by state-space models, a new alternative to transformer models.
AI-native lending software that helps FDIC-insured banks process small-business loans.
Autonomous security testing for web, API, cloud, and AI systems.
Builds wafer-scale AI chips — the largest computer chips ever made — and a cloud service for very fast AI inference.
Runs an AI-driven background-check platform that companies like DoorDash and Lyft use to screen new hires quickly.
Open-source AI coding agent that works inside the editor, with millions of installs and a large open-source community.
Maker of Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer, and the Windsurf AI-powered coding editor.
Lets developers run a whole team of AI coding agents on their Mac.
Evaluation and observability platform for testing large language model applications, makers of the DeepEval framework.
Open-source AI coding assistant that plugs into developers' editors and IDEs.
AI that autonomously finds and fixes insecure code and vulnerable packages.
Makes AI agents and real-time coaching software for customer-service contact centers.
Builds and operates large AI data centers and a GPU cloud where companies train and run AI models.
Makes an AI-powered code editor that helps developers write and debug software with built-in AI agents.
Designs chips that compute inside memory to run AI inference more efficiently in data centers.
Builds AI customer-support agents that companies deploy to handle their customer conversations end to end.
Makes frontier AI models run directly on any device through efficient edge inference.
Builds intelligent robotic arms that pick, pack, and move goods inside warehouses.
Open-source Rust framework for building web, desktop, and mobile apps from a single codebase.
AI that finds and resolves engineering and operations issues in data centers.
Developing Sohu, a computer chip built exclusively for transformer AI models to make inference much faster.
Makes Daft, a Rust/Python engine for processing huge datasets across many machines, used by Amazon and Together AI.
Makes "Droids" — AI software-development agents that write and maintain code for enterprise engineering teams.
A cloud platform for running generative media AI — image, video, and audio models — at high speed.
Makes AI-powered software for audit and advisory firms to run their engagements.
Builds general-purpose humanoid robots powered by its Helix AI foundation model.
Runs open-source AI models as a fast cloud service so companies can use AI without managing their own GPUs.
Makes a high-performance engine for serving AI models, helping companies run them faster and cheaper.
AI teammates that handle insurance workflows like underwriting and claims paperwork.
Robotics AI company building GEN-1, an embodied foundation model that teaches robots general physical skills.
Enterprise AI search and assistant that helps employees find and use knowledge across all their company's apps, with agents built on top.
Google's AI research lab, responsible for the Gemini models and foundational AI research.
Makes the LPU, a chip designed for lightning-fast AI responses, and sells access through its GroqCloud service.
No-code platform for building AI-powered automations and agent workflows without writing code.
Builds data and reinforcement-learning environments aimed at automating knowledge work.
Builds AI assistants and agents that help law firms and legal teams draft, research, and analyze documents.
Runs AI-agent-driven offensive security testing (red teaming) at scale.
Makes developer tools that help engineering teams use AI coding agents on production codebases.
A B2B payment processor that lets businesses send and receive payments using stablecoins.
Open-source platform for managing secrets, credentials, and privileged access across engineering teams.
Builds production AI agents for mortgage lenders, turning messy lending workflows into automated software.
Develops self-driving technology for long-haul trucking, with an expanding push into defense autonomy.
GPU cloud company offering on-demand compute and clusters for training and running AI models.
Builds popular open-source frameworks for creating AI applications and agents, plus LangSmith, a platform for testing and monitoring them.
Builds a memory framework that lets AI agents remember and learn over time, spun out of UC Berkeley research (originally MemGPT).
Open-source AI gateway routing hundreds of millions of LLM calls a day, used by companies like Netflix, Stripe, and Nvidia.
Makes real-time finance and accounting software that keeps company books and reports up to date.
AI lab behind the Dream Machine video-generation model, building large-scale GPU infrastructure for multimodal AI.
A machine-learning compiler that automatically generates fast GPU code for AI models.
AI research company building frontier code-generation models with extremely long context windows.
Open-source SDK plus cloud infrastructure for building MCP servers and ChatGPT apps.
AI agent for bill-pay platforms that pays invoices using virtual cards.
Runs an AI-powered talent marketplace that connects domain experts with AI labs for model training and evaluation work.
Meta's AI research organization (including FAIR) building frontier models and long-horizon AI research.
Builds the Mojo programming language and MAX platform to make AI software faster and less tied to Nvidia's CUDA.
Space infrastructure company offering in-orbit transportation and services to move satellites where they need to go.
Builds "Agent Infrastructure as Code" — infrastructure tooling for deploying and running AI agents.
Builds a shared context layer that connects individuals, teams, and AI agents.
Biotech company working to extend human healthspan by epigenetically reprogramming cells to make them young again.
A product lab building tools that solve context management for AI systems.
Autonomous driving company that licenses its Nuro Driver self-driving system to vehicle makers.
Develops compact advanced nuclear fission reactors to deliver clean, reliable power, including for data centers.
Open-source AI chat platform for teams and enterprises.
AI research lab behind ChatGPT and the GPT models, building AI assistants, coding agents, and developer platforms.
Builds an open-source platform for agent-powered work and productivity.
Makes Stably, an AI-powered software testing tool, and Orca, an open-source environment for running many coding agents in parallel.
Reinforcement-learning platform for training and improving AI agents.
An open-source alternative to Elasticsearch, built as a Rust extension that adds search and analytics to Postgres.
Building a high-speed cryptocurrency exchange with its own in-house trading technology.
AI-powered answer engine that blends search with conversational AI to answer questions with cited sources.
Makes a popular crypto wallet app for storing, buying, and trading digital assets across multiple blockchains.
Develops foundation models that give robots general-purpose physical skills across many different tasks.
General-purpose autonomy software for industrial vehicles.
Builds infrastructure for distributed AI training, letting researchers pool compute to train models and run reinforcement learning.
Lets developers run any coding-agent harness in the cloud.
Online coding platform where anyone can write, run, and ship software, now centered on an AI agent that builds apps from plain-English prompts.
Real-time AI voice agents that answer and handle phone calls for businesses.
Builds quantum computers — designing and fabricating superconducting quantum processors and offering access to them over the cloud.
Prime brokerage and trade execution for prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, with proprietary execution algorithms.
Runs coding AI agents inside secure sandboxes with observability and guardrails.
AI lab co-founded by Ilya Sutskever with a single stated focus: developing safe superintelligent AI.
Builds AI chips and complete computer systems that companies use to run large AI models.
Makes AI software that helps robotics and hardware companies meet safety and compliance requirements.
Provides the data labeling and evaluation infrastructure used to train AI models, plus generative-AI platforms for enterprises and governments.
Develops Fury, a robotic foundation model that lets military ground, air, and sea vehicles understand commands and act autonomously.
A marketplace where companies buy and sell GPU computing power, traded like an exchange order book.
Runs a marketplace where local home cooks sell homemade meals to people nearby.
A retail company that personalizes apparel shopping and clothing fit.
Builds conversational AI agents that handle customer service for large enterprises, co-founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor.
Infrastructure for running video processing and AI model pipelines at large scale.
Open-source platform for building AI agent workflows.
The largest US drone maker — self-flying drones used for public safety, defense, and infrastructure inspection (60K+ shipped).
Business banking platform serving around 5,000 companies and moving tens of billions of dollars a year across payment rails.
AI agents that investigate fraud and risk cases for financial companies in real time.
Open-source code search and understanding for massive codebases, built for both humans and AI agents.
Runs a publishing platform where writers publish newsletters and readers subscribe to them directly.
AI coding assistant built for JetBrains IDEs.
Low-cost securities-backed lending for financial advisors and high-net-worth clients.
Builds AI agents that autonomously run knowledge work around the clock.
Electric vehicle maker whose AI teams build the Autopilot/FSD driver-assistance system and the Optimus humanoid robot.
Program-verification tools that mathematically check software for correctness.
AI research lab founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati; its first product, Tinker, is an API for fine-tuning AI models.
GPU virtualization — often described as VMware for GPUs — letting more AI workloads share the same graphics hardware.
Cloud platform for running, fine-tuning, and serving open-source AI models on large GPU infrastructure.
Open-source self-healing observability layer that monitors and fixes AI agents.
AI agent for fraud prevention and underwriting.
A multimodal document-parsing API that turns messy PDFs and files into clean data for AI agents.
Popular open-source software that makes training and fine-tuning AI models much faster, with millions of monthly downloads.
Builds AI-powered software and intelligence tools for national-security missions, including agent platforms for defense analysts.
AI foundation models that teach robots new skills in hours instead of months.
Reimagines the terminal as a fast, modern, AI-powered command center for developers, including cloud-based coding agents.
Alphabet's self-driving company, operating driverless robotaxi services in cities like San Francisco, Phoenix, LA, and Austin.
Automated investing and banking service that helps people grow and manage their money without a traditional advisor.
AI research company co-founded by Fei-Fei Li building Marble, software that generates interactive 3D worlds.
Makes a plugin for Claude Code that cuts AI token usage and cost roughly in half.
Enterprise generative-AI platform that companies use to build AI apps, agents, and writing workflows on Writer's own models.
Builds the Grok AI assistant and trains frontier models on Colossus, one of the world's largest GPU supercomputer clusters.
Builds memory infrastructure that helps AI agents keep and use context over time.
Builds specialized retrieval and search infrastructure for AI applications.
Designs energy-efficient computer chips for AI workloads.
Amazon-owned robotaxi company building a purpose-designed autonomous vehicle and the full self-driving stack behind it.
Los Angeles / SoCal
45A fintech platform focused on liquidity for private markets.
Builds autonomous defense systems — drones, sensors, and the Lattice command-and-control software.
Makes standardized, productized satellite buses (Aries, Nova, Comet) so commercial and government customers can launch spacecraft faster.
Asteroid-mining startup building autonomous deep-space spacecraft to prospect and extract metals from asteroids.
Develops the FLEX lunar rover to carry cargo and astronauts on the Moon, including work under NASA's Artemis program.
Develops mass-produced hypersonic strike missiles (Blackbeard), aiming to make hypersonic weapons affordable for national defense.
Builds advanced radar and counter-drone detection systems, plus the command-and-control software that ties them together for the military.
Runs a logistics marketplace that delivers construction materials and supplies on demand.
Builds "physics-first" foundation models that let robots navigate and work autonomously in complex, GPS-denied environments.
Makes space robots — robotic arms and rovers for servicing satellites and doing work in orbit and beyond.
Runs highly automated factories that machine precision parts for aerospace and defense, powered by its own factory software.
Space robotics shop with Mars-rover heritage building drills, arms, and mechanisms for spacecraft; a Blue Origin subsidiary.
Develops rockets for point-to-point cargo delivery.
Builds stratospheric aircraft for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, plus the telemetry and command software behind them.
Builds in-space transportation vehicles — the Mira orbital transfer vehicle and Helios kick stage — to move satellites between orbits.
Builds large, high-power "mega class" satellite buses for commercial and government space missions.
Designs and manufactures hardware systems and components for space and defense programs.
Develops military vehicles, propulsion, and energetics — new kinds of drones and weapons systems for the US Army.
Combines robotic arms and AI to shape sheet metal into finished parts on demand, serving aerospace and defense manufacturing.
Developer tools for infrastructure-as-code, helping teams provision and manage cloud infrastructure.
Builds small, agile national-security satellites for missions like missile warning and Earth observation; a Boeing subsidiary.
Autonomous AI red-team agents that find, exploit, and patch security vulnerabilities in software.
Builds robotic arms and space robotics for satellites and in-orbit servicing; now Rocket Lab's space-robotics arm.
Builds networks of software-defined phased-array ground stations — the antennas and software that connect satellites to Earth.
An embedded integration platform that lets software products connect natively to their customers' other apps.
Builds an open integration layer that connects military radars, cameras, and drones into unified command-and-control systems.
A marketplace and pricing platform for rare coins — like a Bloomberg Terminal for collectible coins — handling tens of millions in monthly volume.
Rocket company known for using large-scale 3D printing to build its launch vehicles.
Space company that builds and launches rockets and spacecraft, from small-satellite launches to complete satellite systems and components.
A language-AI API and SDK that adds writing assistance and text processing to enterprise products.
AI tools for construction and property renovation.
A crypto prime dealer offering institutional trade execution, custody, and algorithmic order routing.
Makes a telemetry and observability platform that helps aerospace and hardware companies monitor and debug their machines.
Builds robots that automate manufacturing for the cannabis industry.
Designs, builds, and launches rockets and spacecraft, including the Falcon and Starship vehicles and the Starlink satellite internet network.
Developing the Meridian broadband satellite constellation alongside its original kinetic (spin-accelerated) launch system.
Builds autonomous surface vessels — self-driving boats — for national-security missions.
Crypto infrastructure for account abstraction (ERC-4337) — tools that make blockchain wallets easier to build and use.
Early-stage company building robotic systems for lunar propellant production and space-based solar power.
Nonprofit research center that provides independent technical expertise to the U.S. government on space and national-security programs.
Space domain awareness company building spacecraft and software to track objects in orbit.
Manufactures pharmaceuticals in orbit and brings them back to Earth in reentry capsules, with multiple reentries already flown.
Building commercial space stations — its first, Haven-1, is designed to host astronauts in orbit.
Works on space-based missile defense, building real-time GPU-powered sensing and perception systems.
A live-shopping marketplace where sellers auction collectibles and goods over livestream, processing thousands of transactions per second.
San Diego
5Builds openpilot, an open-source driver-assistance system that adds semi-autonomous driving features to everyday cars.
Healthcare software that helps autism-therapy (ABA) providers run their practices.
Makes modular drones (Tempest) and portable manufacturing systems so militaries can build aircraft close to where they're needed.
Cybersecurity software built specifically for medical devices.
Builds AI pilot software and autonomous aircraft for defense, including work on the Air Force's collaborative combat aircraft program.
Seattle
2Denver / Boulder
2Austin
3Makes Bullfrog, an AI-powered autonomous gun turret that detects and shoots down hostile drones.
Builds autonomous unmanned boats — sea drones for the Navy and maritime defense.
Designs AI processors and an open, RISC-V-based software stack, led by chip architect Jim Keller.
New York
15Makes software that helps shippers track containers and manage port logistics and fees.
Makes an app that coaches people on English pronunciation and accent.
Makes finance and revenue-operations software for consumer packaged goods brands.
GPU cloud provider that supplies large-scale computing power for AI training and inference.
Builds payments infrastructure that lets online stores accept EBT/SNAP benefits at checkout.
The open-source hub where the AI community shares and runs models, datasets, and apps.
Creators of PyTorch Lightning; offers a development platform and GPU cloud for building and training AI models.
Builds APIs that let apps connect to consumer financial data and manage debt repayment.
A serverless cloud platform that lets developers run code and AI workloads instantly without managing servers.
Operates an electronic trading venue — a "smart market" where institutional investors execute trades.
Makes a vector database — specialized storage that lets AI applications search and retrieve information by meaning.
AI lab founded by ex-DeepMind researchers building Asimov, an AI agent that reads and understands large codebases.
AI research company building video-generation models and creative tools for filmmakers and artists.
Applies AI to clinical-trial workflows, helping match patients and speed up trial operations.
Builds AI that analyzes and improves call-center conversations.
Boston
1AI music generation company — its app turns simple text prompts into complete songs with vocals and instruments.
Other US
5Makes communication and AI tools that help small businesses message customers and win business.
A serverless GPU cloud that lets developers rent graphics chips on demand to run AI workloads.
Builds a general-purpose robot foundation model — an AI brain that can control many kinds of robots.
Builds AI-first automation software for accounting firms.
A trading superapp for prediction markets.
Remote
10AI lab building large language models and an agent platform (North) aimed at enterprise and secure deployments.
Makes the GitLab DevOps platform — one application for planning, coding, testing, and shipping software, with built-in AI features.
Provides on-demand services like rides and deliveries for older adults.
Helps nonprofits discover, track, and manage grants in one place.
Runs a platform that helps companies source custom manufactured parts and hardware.
A public AI-cloud company building large GPU data centers where customers train and run AI models.
Modern fundraising software for political campaigns and nonprofits.
Makes SMS marketing software that helps e-commerce brands text and sell to their customers.
Code search and intelligence platform that helps developers understand large codebases, plus tools that let AI agents work with code.
Develops the Wasmer WebAssembly runtime, letting the same code run fast and safely anywhere.
Updated 2026-07-01 · curated by Karti with an assist from Pepper, my AI chief of staff. Company facts and funding figures are best-effort — verify before you quote them. Know a company that belongs here? hello@karti.ai