Now in its fifth year, the IA40 highlights standout private companies building the future of applied AI—from foundational infrastructure to transformative applications.

Madrona today announced the 2025 Intelligent Applications 40 (IA40), the annual list of the top 40 private technology companies pioneering the future of applied artificial intelligence. The 2025 cohort showcases the breakout startups redefining how software is built and used—from agentic infrastructure to vertical AI applications to new consumer interfaces.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250828149539/en/

The winners and rising stars of the 2025 Intelligent Application 40.

This year’s winners were selected through a rigorous nomination and evaluation process led by Madrona and PitchBook, incorporating both quantitative data and expert input from over 70 venture capitalists across 54 firms. More than 340 companies were nominated.

Reflecting the extraordinary pace of innovation in AI, 27 companies are first-time IA40 winners. Just one company—Databricks—has appeared on the list every year since the list’s inception in 2021, a sign of the rising bar for inclusion and the growing diversity of AI leaders.

“The 2025 IA40 celebrates the builders of intelligent systems—not just tools, but reasoning machines that improve with use, integrate deeply into workflows, and collaborate with users,” said Matt McIlwain, Managing Director at Madrona. “We’re now entering an era where the most valuable software is learning, adaptive, and agentic by default.”

The 2025 IA40 winners are:

EARLY:

Distyl

Listen Labs

Exa

CodeRabbit

Gamma

Fireflies.ai

Pylon

Factory

Clarify

Aaru

MID:

Granola

Linear

Mercor

Cartesia

Basis

Prophet Security

HeyGen

Legora

Bolt.new

Dropzone AI

LATE:

Lovable

Cursor

Anduril

Abridge

ElevenLabs

Perplexity

Canva

Applied Intuition

Clay

OpenEvidence

ENABLER:

Anthropic

OpenAI

Databricks

ClickHouse

Vercel

Together AI

CrewAI

Fal

Browserbase

Statsig

EMERGING ENABLER:

Modal Labs

Haize Labs

Braintrust

LangChain

Arcee AI

Winning companies span four funding-stage categories—Early, Mid, Late, and Enablers—with an additional five Emerging Enablers featured as rising infrastructure startups with under $50 million raised.

Across the full 2025 list, companies have raised $119 billion in total. Notably, $86 billion—over 70%—was raised in just the last 12 months, underscoring the accelerating pace of AI investment.

Key themes emerging from the 2025 IA40 include:

• Next-gen user interfaces: Modalities like voice, video, and natural language are enabling more adaptive, human-like interfaces, with companies like HeyGen, Cartesia, and ElevenLabs leading the way.
• Agentic software: OpenAI, Perplexity, and Factory are among those advancing systems that reason, orchestrate, and execute autonomously across workflows.
• Software meets services: Startups like Distyl and Aaru are introducing outcome-based pricing and “service-as-software” models, reshaping the economics of SaaS.
• Developer transformation: Tools like Cursor, Bolt.new, and Lovable are redefining software development, turning coding into a natural language experience.
• Vertical momentum: Companies like Abridge (healthcare), Anduril (defense), and Legora (legal) demonstrate how AI-native products win with depth, data, and ecosystem leverage.
• Enabling infrastructure: From Together AI’s model hosting to Browserbase’s agent access layer to Databricks’ enterprise data platform, the infrastructure stack continues to mature—and scale.

The 2025 winners will be honored at the upcoming Intelligent Applications Summit, held September 30–October 1 in Seattle, hosted by Madrona in partnership with AWS, Microsoft, Google, McKinsey, NYSE, Goldman Sachs, and Delta.

For full details on the winners and evaluation methodology, visit: https://www.ia40.com/the-list

To request an invite to the Summit, visit: https://www.ia40.com/summit

About Madrona

Madrona (www.madrona.com) is a Seattle-based venture capital firm with nearly 30 years of experience investing in early-stage technology companies. Madrona partners with founders from day one, providing long-term support to build innovative, industry-leading businesses for the long run. The firm has more than $3 billion under management, and was an early investor in companies such as Amazon, Snowflake, UIPath, Rover, Redfin, and Smartsheet. Rooted in the Pacific Northwest, Madrona also backs companies across the country, focusing on sectors such as AI, intelligent applications, and life sciences.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250828149539/en/