Companies

A US public university founded in 1861, with campuses in Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma and a medical centre serving its state and region; it says it receives more federal research funding than any other US public university.

Research historyScienceEducation

An independent, non-profit AI research institute in Toronto, launched in 2017 with provincial and corporate funding, with Geoffrey Hinton among its founding scientists.

Research historyDeep learningFoundation models

Verne is a Rimac Group company developing an electric two-seater robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals; with Pony.ai and Uber it launched a commercial driverless service in Zagreb in 2026.

Consumer appsRoboticsEurope

Waymo is Alphabet's self-driving technology company, spun out of Google's autonomous car project in December 2016. It builds the software and sensors that drive vehicles rather than the vehicles themselves.

EnterpriseProduct historyRobotics

WeRide is an autonomous driving company founded in Silicon Valley in 2017 by Tony Han, formerly chief scientist of Baidu's autonomous driving unit. Its WeRide One platform spans L2 to L4 autonomy, and its vehicles run in more than 60 cities.

ChinaEnterpriseRobotics

An annual artificial intelligence conference held in Shanghai since 2018, co-hosted by Chinese government bodies and the Shanghai municipal government, combining forums, exhibitions and signed investment projects.

Research historyChinaEnterprise

Writer is an enterprise AI company founded in 2020 by May Habib and Waseem AlShikh, selling brand-aware agents and governance tools to large companies, and publishing the Palmyra-mini family of small open models.

Large language modelsOpen sourceEnterprise

xAI is an AI company founded by Elon Musk that builds the Grok models and chatbot. It was acquired by SpaceX in 2026 and has since been renamed SpaceXAI and then SpaceXSI.

Large language modelsConsumer appsFoundation models

PARC is a Silicon Valley research center founded by Xerox in 1970, known for Ethernet, laser printing and the Alto personal computer; it became an independent company in 2002 and joined SRI International in 2023.

Research historyEnterpriseHardware & compute

XRCE's computer-vision team competed in the ImageNet challenge and won the 2011 classification task using high-dimensional image signatures, product quantization and linear SVMs; its Fisher-vector methods performed strongly across the 2010–2014 challenges.

Research historyScienceComputer vision

A Chinese consumer electronics and smart manufacturing company built around smartphones, smart hardware and its AIoT platform, listed in Hong Kong in 2018 and extending its engineering into quadruped and humanoid robots.

ChinaEnterpriseConsumer apps

XPENG is a Chinese maker of smart electric vehicles founded in 2014 and headquartered in Guangzhou, which has extended its in-house AI work to humanoid robots, new driving models and robotaxi plans.

ChinaEnterpriseConsumer apps

Yitu Technology is a Chinese computer vision company founded in September 2012 by Zhu Long and Lin Chenxi. It is counted among the "CV four little dragons", alongside Megvii, SenseTime and CloudWalk, that grew out of computer vision in China's early AI industry.

Research historyChinaEnterprise

Zhipu AI, also known as Z.ai, is a Beijing company founded in 2019 as a Tsinghua University spin-out. It develops the GLM model family and related chatbot, video, agent and coding products, and listed in Hong Kong in January 2026.

Large language modelsOpen sourceChina

Zoox is an autonomous ride-hailing company founded in 2014 that builds its own zero-emissions robotaxis, with no steering wheel or pedals, and the software that drives them. It began carrying paying-concept service in Las Vegas after receiving the first commercial exemption for a purpose-built robotaxi.

Consumer appsRoboticsSafety & governance