AfterQuery is a San Francisco applied research lab that builds expert-generated datasets, benchmarks, and reinforcement-learning environments for the world's leading AI labs. The company recruits nearly 100,000 vetted domain experts - in finance, law, medicine, software, and beyond - to teach frontier models how specialists actually think.
Deccan AI is a Mountain View-based GenAI data company that runs the post-training and production layer for frontier labs and enterprises. It builds super-accurate SFT and RLHF datasets, reinforcement learning environments and agentic evaluation pipelines using an elite expert network and a purpose-built quality platform.
Rukesh Reddy is the Founder and CEO of Deccan AI, a Mountain View-based AI data and post-training company that raised a $25M Series A in March 2026 led by A91 Partners with participation from Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures. Built as a 'born GenAI' company in October 2024, Deccan AI serves frontier AI labs and major tech companies - including Google DeepMind and Snowflake - with high-precision training datasets, reinforcement learning environments, and enterprise evaluation suites. Reddy brings over 15 years of experience spanning finance, strategy consulting, and digital transformation at firms including J.P. Morgan, Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte), and Citi, where he led CX and digital transformation for the global retail bank.
Together AI is a San Francisco-based AI acceleration cloud that lets developers and enterprises train, fine-tune, and run open-source generative AI models on a high-performance GPU platform. Backed by $533M+ from General Catalyst, NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures and others, it has become one of the most prominent challengers to the closed-model status quo.
FlexAI is a Paris-based AI infrastructure company building a 'universal AI compute' layer that lets teams deploy, train, and serve models across diverse GPU architectures and cloud providers without wrestling with the underlying hardware. Founded in 2023 by former Intel, NVIDIA, Apple, and Tesla veterans, it raised a $30M seed round in April 2024 and is positioning itself as Europe's answer to the GPU-as-a-service crunch.
Surge AI is a San Francisco data annotation company that produces high-quality human-labeled datasets and RLHF feedback for the world's leading AI labs - OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta and Microsoft among them. Founded in 2020 by ex-Twitter and ex-Facebook ML engineer Edwin Chen, it bootstrapped to roughly $1.2B in annual revenue with around 110 employees and a labeler network reported near one million.
Turing is a $2.2 billion AGI infrastructure company that bridges the global talent gap in AI development. Founded in 2018 by Stanford AI alumni Jonathan Siddharth and Vijay Krishnan, Turing operates across two core missions: supplying frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic with expert human talent for coding, STEM, and reasoning data; and building production-grade AI systems for Fortune 500 enterprises. With a network spanning 4 million developers across 140+ countries, a fine-tuning platform called ALAN, and $334 million raised in total funding, Turing has grown into one of the fastest-scaling companies at the intersection of talent and artificial intelligence.
Sebastian Raschka is a German-born AI/ML researcher, educator, and author who has built one of the most trusted independent voices in the machine learning community. Through his Substack newsletter 'Ahead of AI' (184,000+ subscribers), bestselling books like 'Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)', and 91,000+ starred GitHub repositories, he demystifies cutting-edge AI for practitioners worldwide. After a stint as an Assistant Professor at UW-Madison and a role as Staff Research Engineer at Lightning AI, he now runs RAIR Lab as an independent researcher, writer, and consultant.
Fireworks AI is a generative AI inference platform founded in 2022 by seven engineers — five of whom built PyTorch at Meta — that gives enterprises fast, cost-efficient, and customizable access to hundreds of open-source models. The company's proprietary FireAttention kernels and speculative-execution engine deliver up to 40× faster inference and 8× cost reduction versus alternatives, while its fine-tuning and model-deployment tooling lets companies own their AI stack end-to-end. With $327M+ raised, a $4B valuation, 10,000+ customers including Samsung, Uber, Shopify, and Cursor, and a $315M annualized run-rate as of early 2026, Fireworks AI has become the go-to inference layer for production generative AI applications.
Predibase was a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company (founded 2020, acquired by Rubrik in June 2025) that pioneered efficient LLM fine-tuning and serving at scale. Built by the creators of Uber AI's Ludwig and Horovod frameworks, Predibase made it easy for enterprises to fine-tune and deploy open-source LLMs using LoRA adapters — often outperforming GPT-4 on domain-specific tasks for under $8 of compute. Its open-source LoRAX inference server enabled serving thousands of fine-tuned models from a single GPU, dramatically cutting costs. After raising $28M from Greylock and Felicis, Predibase was acquired by cybersecurity firm Rubrik for over $100M to accelerate agentic AI adoption.
Scale AI is a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo. It provides the data engine, evaluation tools, and AI deployment platforms that power the world's leading AI labs, Fortune 500 enterprises, and US government agencies. By combining a massive distributed workforce with proprietary tooling, Scale accelerates AI development through high-quality data labeling, RLHF, model evaluation, and agentic platforms — making it one of the most consequential picks-and-shovels companies in the modern AI boom, with a $29B valuation as of mid-2025.