GenAI, Developer-and Data Stack-Focused Companies Dominate List as well as 80% of ET30 founders are Millennials
Five years ago, Wing Venture Capital introduced their annual Enterprise Tech 30—a list of the most promising, private enterprise tech private companies across all stages of maturity. The early-stage focused venture capital firm funds and supports companies that are driving AI-first business transformation as seen in their portfolio companies Cohesity, Pinecone, and Gong.
To arrive at the final list, 96 venture capitalists across 79 venture capital firms having $50 million to $150 billion of assets under management participated in the selection process. Over 15,000 venture-backed enterprise tech companies were evaluated that included segmenting them by early, mid, late and giga stage—based on total capital raised using institutional research.
The List revealed the substantial rise of Generative AI companies and the significant drop of productivity/ collaboration-labeled companies from 19% in 2021 to now just 5%—reflecting the spike that technology had in response to the shift to remote working during the pandemic.
“This year more than ever, we see AI-first and data- and developer- centric companies take center stage on the ET30,” said Peter Wagner, Founding Partner at Wing Venture Capital. “It’s also exciting to see the profound success previous listees have achieved, from IPOs to acquisitions raising billions in follow-on rounds despite an ever-changing economic environment.”
A range of insights about the trends driving the market and the state of enterprise tech emerged:
- Millennial founders and CEOs led the majority of the selected companies with a median age of 38 for both versus 36 in the prior year.
- 27 of the 40 companies (75%) are new to the Enterprise Tech 30 versus 43% in 2022,
- 9 of the 10 early-stage companies and 9 of the 10 Mid Stage companies are new, while three companies Airtable, Databricks, and Stripe have been in the ET30 for all five years.
- Early-stage companies ascended to the Enterprise Tech 30 more quickly with the 2023 cohort having a 2.3 years median time since founding versus to 2.7 years for 2022 and 5.0 years in 2019.
The following are the 2023 Enterprise Tech 30 in four categories based on total capital raised: Giga stage companies have raised $1 billion or more; early-stage companies $35 million or less; mid-stage from $35 million to $150 million; and late-stage includes $150 million or more:
Eartly stage: Langchain, Linear, Dust.tt, Copy.ai, Railwa, Modal Labs, Replicate, Magic, Omni and Chromatic.
Mid-Stage: Pinecone, Replit, Hex, Hightouch, Zip, Stability.AI, MotherDuck, Jasper, Midjourney and Fly.io.
Late Stage: Dbt Labs, Hugging Face, Canva, Cribl, Wiz, Benchling, Rippling, 1Password, Postman and Notion.
Giga Stage: OpenAI, Stripe, Databricks, SpaceX, Snyk, Airtable, Carta, Anduril, Flexport and Ramp.
Not surprising, the media hype about AI now appears well founded as seen in its prominence on the List. When broken down by industry AI models and tools reflected 25% of companies, with 25%, data platforms, ETL and BI 18%, developer and devops tools 10%, security 10%, fintech 8%, and defense/aero 5%.
When looking at the industry of Early and Mid-stage ET30 2023 companies, AI models and tools again led the stage category with 40% of List companies, with 25% data platforms, ETL and BI, 20% SaaS, and 15% dev and devops tools. No security, fintech, or defense/aero companies were identified in early and mid-stages for the ET30 in 2023.
The late and giga stage ET30 2023 companies had a broader distribution among the seven categories in the utilized framework: SaaS (30%), security (20%), fintech (15%), AI models and tools (10%), data platforms, ETL and BI (10%), defense/aero (10%), and dev and devops tools (5%).
When reviewing the ET30 framework that includes sub-categories and tags, by tags, 33% of ET30 2023 companies are generative AI-native (the companies’ origins are rooted in generative AI technology) and an additional 13% of ET30 2003 companies are generative AI-launch (companies having recently launched generative AI features or products).
These numbers reflect a significant change when compared to the mere 3% of ET30 companies in 2021 that were Generative AI.
Wing Venture Capital has again provided a snapshot of enterprise technology, the changes and trends underway, while highlighting the significant rise of AI.
