There are 28 privately held ML, AI and data companies, that are nearing IPO. Their total valuation is around $119B.

US investor, Matt Turk has put together a list of these so-call unicorns, that compliments his other list of public traded firms. They seem to split into three main groups:

• Databases (eg Airtable, Redis, Couchbase)
• AI platforms (Databricks, Dataiku, Datarobot)
• Process Automation (Celonis, Hypersciene, Instabase)

Many of these companies do not use AI and ML in their products: they make tools to make it easier to use for other businesses - selling picks and shovels in a gold rush. Many are overlapping and competing and it will be interesting to see which take off in huge way and which disappear over the next few years.

🛎️ Why this matters: This list shows where companies have been successful so far in using AI and ML. It's mostly in building tools.