The AI tech stack in numbers

1,150 AI infrastructure and tooling companies, mapped across 11 themes: how much they have raised, where they are, what stage they are at and how many are hiring. Updated 12 October 2026.

Company data read from the live list on 12 October 2026. Funding from Crunchbase, oldest snapshot 20 July 2026. Free to quote with a link to this page.

1,150

companies mapped

Across 11 themes and 65 sub-sectors. 1,041 are independent and trading, 109 have been acquired.

$445bn

venture capital raised

Across the companies matched to Crunchbase (81% of the map). Excludes debt, which adds a further $108bn in the compute layer.

145

have raised $100m or more

Out of 665 with a disclosed venture round. The median round across themes is $18m.

87%

of all capital sits in one theme

Model Development has taken $388bn of the $445bn raised. Its median round is only $46m, so that total is a handful of frontier labs rather than a well funded field.

67%

are US based

16% are in Europe and the rest are elsewhere, across the 870 companies with a location on record.

58%

are seed or Series A

43% are still at seed. This is an early market: most of these companies have never hired a recruiter.

Who is hiring

Of the 768 companies whose job boards have been scanned, 737 had at least one role open at the last check. That is 737 of the 1,150 companies on the map overall.

By theme

Venture capital excludes debt, acquired companies and the hyperscalers shown on the maps for context.

Theme	Companies	Venture raised	$100m+	Median round
AI Safety, Security & Governance	186	$5.5bn	8	$9m
Model Serving & Compute	166	$22bn	43	$30m
Enterprise AI Platforms & Automation	138	$7.7bn	24	$28m
Agents & Orchestration	99	$2.6bn	6	$15m
Training Data	94	$3.5bn	7	$18m
Observability, Evaluation & Testing	82	$1.9bn	5	$5m
Model Development	78	$388bn	18	$46m
ML Platforms & Data Science	71	$4.1bn	9	$12m
Specialized Modalities	70	$6.4bn	16	$34m
Services	31	$1.0bn	4	$6m
Retrieval & Knowledge	26	$1.5bn	5	$20m

How these numbers are produced

Company counts come from a maintained research list, read live on 12 October 2026. It covers AI infrastructure and tooling. Companies that merely use AI as a feature are excluded.
Funding, location and stage come from a Crunchbase subscription, never from the open web. 81% of the companies on the map are matched to a Crunchbase record, so funding figures describe that 81%, not all 1,150.
Hyperscalers shown on the maps for context are excluded from every funding figure. Acquired companies stay on the maps, marked, but are out of the funding aggregates.
Funding snapshots are refreshed periodically and the oldest currently in use is from 20 July 2026. Company counts and hiring are current.
Nothing on this page is estimated. Where a number cannot be computed honestly it is left off.

I am Ben Jackson. I have recruited commercial teams into this market for 17 years, and I publish these maps because knowing who is in a market is most of the job. If you are hiring sales, marketing, product or delivery people into an AI company, here is how I work.