The Cloud 100

EDITED BY KENRICK CAI AND 
ALEX KONRAD
AUGUST 06, 2024, 06:30 AM
  • With the tech IPO market stuck in the doldrums, familiar faces rule the top of our ninth annual list of the world’s top private cloud computing companies. But a wave of AI challengers – and standouts in fintech, security and vertical software – are looking to close the gap.
    Reporters: Richard Nieva, Kirk Ogunrinde, Rashi Shrivastava and Jacob Wendler. Editorial operations: Elisabeth Brier.
    Disclosure: The 2024 Cloud 100 includes companies that have taken investment from Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, which helped create this list. See our list methodology post for the full breakdown. Data below was obtained separately through Forbes reporting. Rare instances of estimates are courtesy of PitchBook data and marked in our methodology.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE LIST INTRODUCTION
The Standouts
Dario Amodei

Dario Amodei

  • Company: ANTHROPIC
  • Title: CEO
  • Valuation: $18.2 BILLION
  • Type: AI RESEARCH AND PRODUCTS

Anthropic has emerged as the OpenAI challenger with the most staying power. In June, the $18 billion (valuation) AI company released a large language model that cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei boasts “outperforms every competitor” regardless of price. The model, called Claude 3.5 Sonnet, is already hard at work coding apps and digesting legal documents. But Amodei is most excited about health care. Pfizer and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute are early customers, as is DeepScribe, which uses the tool to help doctors organize conversations with patients. “As the models get smarter, they’re going to be increasingly used for the core of the field,” Amodei says.

VIEW PROFILE
Dylan Field

Dylan Field

  • Company: FIGMA
  • Title: CEO
  • Valuation: $12.5 BILLION
  • Type: PRODUCT DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

After seemingly graduating from this list in 2023, Figma has been reinstated as No. 12 after its planned acquisition by Adobe for $20 billion fell through in December due to antitrust concerns. Six months later, in June, the company hosted a “suddenly single” party of sorts at Config, its annual user conference. There, 10,000 attendees watched CEO Dylan Field unveil Figma AI, which makes Figma’s software more accessible to those who don’t know textures from typographies. But the launch wasn’t without growing pains: An accusation went viral on X that Figma’s new feature for generating designs from just a prompt was borrowing from existing apps. Field disputed it but announced he was temporarily rolling it back. “I hate missing the mark,” he posted on the social site.

VIEW PROFILE
Mike Intrator

Mike Intrator

  • Company: COREWEAVE
  • Title: CEO
  • Valuation: $19 BILLION
  • Type: CLOUD-BASED COMPUTE

CoreWeave CEO Mike Intrator never anticipated the huge demand the AI arms race would create for his company’s cloud computing service. “It has overwhelmed us,” he says, and despite buying more chips, “we’re still behind.” Over the past year, the company, headquartered in Roseland, New Jersey, has raised a total of $12 billion in a mix of debt financing and venture capital from Blackstone, Coatue and others to try to satiate that demand, with its valuation catapulting to $19 billion. Key to CoreWeave’s rapid ascent is the large number of prized Nvidia GPUs it acquired for crypto mining back in 2017. It pivoted in 2019 to renting them out to AI startups. By 2023, its business had exploded. With more than a dozen data centers across the United States, CoreWeave is now eyeing international expansion in Spain, Norway and Sweden and is considering an IPO as soon as 2025.

VIEW PROFILE
Eric Glyman

Eric Glyman

  • Company: RAMP
  • Title: CEO
  • Valuation: $7.7 BILLION
  • Type: CORPORATE CARDS AND EXPENSES

After Glyman sold his first company, online flight price tracker Paribus, to Capital One in 2016, he shifted his focus to fintech, cofounding Ramp three years later. The New York City– based startup provides “digital” credit cards, with custom limits and banking features, to tech outfits including Shopify, Discord and Glossier. Ramp helps corporate card users spend less, saving money for their companies. “It’s great to get $1 back on every $100 you spend,” Glyman says. “But the best way to get more in your bank account is not spending that $100.”

VIEW PROFILE
The Full List
USE FORBES LOGOS AND QUOTES IN YOUR MARKETING
LOGO LICENSINGREPRINTS/PLAQUESSPREADSHEET
Read More
More Forbes Lists