Asia’s biggest enterprise AI players: the top 50

Five companies are currently missing from this map due to a technical issue. We apologize and are working to fix this.

Which market holds the biggest potential for AI startups? Likely business-to-business or B2B.

Of the 1,119 startups admitted to Y Combinator cohorts in the past two years, nearly two-thirds target this segment.

Andrew Chen, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, shares this view. In a recent post, he argued that while most consumers still prefer human services, enterprise buyers are under top-down pressure to adopt AI to cut costs.

That’s why Tech in Asia compiled this list of the top 50 AI firms serving B2B customers. Using our data, we ranked the companies by total capital raised, with the cutoff at US$30 million.

Only five of the 50 companies were founded after 2022, the year ChatGPT launched. More than half of the firms on our list were established between 2015 and 2020.

Leading the pack are SenseTime, Megvii, and 4Paradigm – all based in China and each raising over US$1 billion.

SenseTime and Megvii built their reputations on facial recognition tools in a country known for its surveillance strategy. Meanwhile, 4Paradigm provides end-to-end AI products and counts large financial institutions such as Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China Merchants Securities as clients.

Not surprisingly, 19 out of the 50 companies on our list are based in China. Most of them focus on the local market and don’t even have an English-language website.