Inside The 2024 Cloud 100: The World's Top Private Cloud Companies

Forbes

Category leaders such as DocuSign, PagerDuty, Twilio and Toast have joined the Cloud 100 ranks, scaled into enterprises, transformed their given industries and gone on to IPO. Here's how these esteemed companies, the definitive cohort of top-performing cloud businesses, end up on the list.  Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/lists/cloud100/  0:00 Introduction 0:14 What Is The Cloud 100? 0:47 OpenAI And The AI Boom 2:28 OpenAI's Anthropic  4:50 Perplexity AI 5:46 Non-AI Cloud Companies  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00Hi everybody, I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes.

00:07Joining me now is my Forbes colleague, Senior Editor Alex Conrad.

00:11Alex, thanks for coming on in.

00:13Awesome to be here.

00:14A big congrats to you. The Cloud 100 list has officially dropped.

00:18So first, for the uninitiated, can you tell us what is the Cloud 100 and how does Forbes compile it?

00:25The Cloud 100 is our definitive ranking of the leading private cloud computing companies in the world.

00:31So that's anything from an AI software company to a payments company to a security company.

00:38And we've made this list for nine years in partnership with two venture capital firms,

00:44Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures.

00:47A lot has changed in nine years, obviously.

00:50But something that's changed really in the past year and a half is AI burst onto the scene,

00:55especially when ChatGPT was launched in November 2022.

00:59So how is AI impacting the list?

01:01So last year, OpenAI jumped up to number one and we sort of saw AI starting to be a big part of this list.

01:08And this year, it got even crazier.

01:10We have 16 AI companies on the Cloud 100 list and three in the top 10.

01:15There's OpenAI at number one, there's Anthropic at number five, and there's also ScaleAI at number seven.

01:20So we're seeing AI really dominate because this list values high revenue growth,

01:26employee headcount, industry buzz, as well as increasing valuations.

01:31And AI has all of those things right now.

01:34Sam Altman and OpenAI really joined the national conversation, like I said earlier, with the launch of ChatGPT.

01:42As you said, OpenAI is number one once again.

01:45So tell us about the company and the year that they had.

01:48So OpenAI continues to be the most popular creator of these large language models

01:54with GPT-4 and this GPT-4.0 kind of smaller version.

01:59But it's in a big race with Anthropic and a couple of other companies and also open source,

02:04where we saw last month Facebook launched a new open source model, Lama 3.1,

02:10which is supposed to be almost as good.

02:12So OpenAI is still the most popular and the most revenue generating of these model creators,

02:18but it's in a big race where you could be using ChatGPT, you could be using Anthropic's Cloud,

02:23you could be using other chatbots.

02:25We're still sort of figuring out where that market sits.

02:28Anthropic really skyrocketed this year.

02:31Last year it was number 73.

02:33Now it's number five.

02:35Talk to us about that growth and the year that that company's had.

02:38Anthropic was a spin-out from OpenAI where the founders, including a brother-sister duo,

02:44Dario and Daniela Amadei, wanted to make a safer, more responsible version of AI.

02:50But from the get-go, it ironically was also very business-minded.

02:54OpenAI also now has billions in revenue and is focused on being a business application.

02:59But think of OpenAI as really popular with consumers, maybe tech companies, small companies.

03:05I wrote last month about a company called Airtable, which is also on this list,

03:08which has built on top of OpenAI.

03:10Anthropic is very enterprise-focused where it's looking for those really big companies.

03:14It's been backed and partnered with companies like Salesforce to offer business use cases.

03:20One thing that I find really interesting that we found out in this reporting is that

03:24the CEO of Anthropic likes how it's being used in health care.

03:28So you can imagine companies are starting to use Anthropic's tools to study patient conversations

03:35or come up with a better file because, as I'm sure you know, doctors have so much paperwork to do.

03:41They want to be helping people.

03:42And so a tool like Anthropic's can really speed that up.

03:45And why specifically to our Forbes audience should they know about Anthropic?

03:50I think our Forbes audience, their companies are going to be figuring out how they want to use these tools.

03:56They could be building on top of OpenAI or Anthropic.

03:59They want to be partnering with the right model that fits their business use case.

04:03And what we've seen is some really interesting companies starting to kind of tailor those available models to their work functions.

04:10So if you're a media company like ours, you're going to be exploring with AI,

04:13whether it's in our birdie CMS or some of the other answers we offer.

04:17If you're a retailer, you want AI to be helping you figure out better inventory

04:22or maybe when you should launch a product.

04:24Banks are also playing with it.

04:26Basically any sector, you want to be using AI to speed up processes, get smarter about your business.

04:32And so I think Anthropic and OpenAI are really the two leading players right now to know there.

04:37But there are so many, especially at the back of our Cloud 100 list.

04:40You see companies like Mistral, a French startup.

04:43You see Cohere, which came out of Toronto, Canada.

04:45There's a bunch of AI companies that are really interesting based on what you're trying to do.

04:50Talk about those AI companies a little bit more.

04:52I know you want to talk about, or we talked about OpenAI.

04:55We talked about Anthropic.

04:56Those are two to keep our eyes on.

04:58But you mentioned that there has been a lot, an increase in AI companies on this list this year.

05:03Talk to us about those.

05:05Yeah, so one notable company is Perplexity, which Forbes has had its run-ins with.

05:11As I'm sure you remember, our editor-in-chief called out Perplexity for reappropriating Forbes' work

05:18that we had spent a lot of time on and not giving us a lot of credit in its engine that gives answers.

05:25But Perplexity is building interesting tools, and it is popular.

05:28So despite whatever issues it had with us at Forbes, we still put it on the list.

05:33And then you're also seeing video generation appearing on the list.

05:36So Runway is a New York-based company that's really interesting,

05:39that allows you to basically create a cool AI-generated video from just a prompt.

05:44They're another notable newcomer on this list.

05:46And what about the notable non-AI companies?

05:49I know we're keeping our eye on AI, everything, that new flavor of the month.

05:53But what else aside from AI?

05:55Yeah, you know, it's funny.

05:56Forbes, we obviously publish an AI50 list.

05:58And there is increasing overlap because the cloud includes AI.

06:03But there's a lot of other sectors that are relevant to the cloud.

06:07You see Wiz, which just recently turned down a $23 billion acquisition offer by Google.

06:13It soared up the list this year.

06:15And then we also had a couple of interesting newcomers in fintech,

06:18where we saw Ramp and Brex appear on the Cloud 100 list.

06:21They were initially known for being sort of corporate credit cards.

06:24But as they have more software tools for managing payments, managing spend for a company,

06:29they're really software businesses as well.

06:32And that's why you see them both appear high on the Cloud 100 list this year.

06:35Alex Conrad, once again, thanks for your reporting.

06:38A big congrats to you.

06:40Hope you come back soon.

06:41Can't wait.

06:45Thanks.

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Transcript

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