Connect with us

Published

on

Persephone Kavallines

Welcome to Disruptor 50 in the age of AI.

A whopping 34 of the 50 companies on our twelfth annual CNBC Disruptor 50 list claim that artificial intelligence is “critical” to their businesses. These include companies in industries ranging from cybersecurity to agriculture. Thirteen of the 2024 Disruptors call themselves “generative AI companies,” including five of the top ten on this year’s list.

These companies are upending the classical definition of disruptive innovation that shaped the creation of the Disruptor 50 list more than a decade ago. Mostly gone from the 2024 list is the idea of a better, cheaper innovation. Instead, achieving disruptive innovation with AI requires massive piles of capital investment, inevitably leading to close partnership with the incumbent giants.

Instead of Amazon disruptor Anthropic (which debuts on the 2024 Disruptor 50 List at No. 7), we have “Amazon-backed Anthropic,” which also received a $2 billion investment from Alphabet and is taking on “Microsoft-backed OpenAI” (No. 1 on the list for the second straight year).

More coverage of the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50

The venture capital community also has been investing heavy amounts of cash in any startup that can claim it’s part of the AI revolution. More than $90 billion flowed to AI startups in 2023, according to PitchBook. Among the Disruptors, 17 have raised new funds in the past year. That includes 8 of the 13 generative AI startups, which raised a total of at least $5.5 billion combined.

In all, the 2024 Disruptors have raised $70 billion — a comeback from last year’s $54 billion demonstrating the power of AI — at a total implied valuation of $436 billion, the second-highest valuation ever for the list of 2022’s $500 billion.

The willingness of incumbent giants to invest in these private disruptors also means that many of the companies on the 2024 Disruptor 50 list can afford to wait to go public, even as a long-closed IPO window starts to open. We expect the first-time and second-time Disruptors to be in the mix for many lists to come. 

Here’s how we chose them in 2024:  

All private, independently owned startup companies founded after Jan. 1, 2009, were eligible to be nominated for the Disruptor 50 list. Companies nominated were required to submit a detailed analysis, including key quantitative and qualitative information. 

Quantitative metrics included company-submitted data on workforce size and diversity, scalability, and sales and user growth. Some of this information has been kept off the record and was used for scoring purposes only. CNBC also brought in data from a pair of outside partners — PitchBook, which provided data on fundraising, implied valuations and investor quality; and IBISWorld, whose database of industry reports we use to compare the companies based on the industries they are attempting to disrupt. 

CNBC’s Disruptor 50 Advisory Board — a group of 50 leading thinkers in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship from around the world, then ranked the quantitative criteria by importance and ability to disrupt established industries and public companies. This year, the board again found that scalability and user growth were the most important criteria, followed by sales growth and use of breakthrough technologies (including, most commonly, artificial intelligence and machine learning). These categories received the highest weighting, but the ranking model is designed to ensure that companies must score highly on a wide range of criteria to make the final list. 

Companies were also asked to submit important qualitative information, including descriptions of their core business model, ideal customers and recent company milestones. A team of CNBC editorial staff, including TV anchors, reporters and producers, and CNBC.com writers and editors, along with many members of the Advisory Board, read the submissions and provided holistic qualitative assessments of each company. 

New for 2024, CNBC formed a Disruptor 50 VC Advisory Board, in an effort to leverage the valuable expertise of leading venture capital firms and investors. Each member of this new board assessed a small group of finalists as an additional component of the qualitative review. Importantly, these VCs were not permitted to provide an assessment of any company in their firm’s own portfolios.

In the final stage of the process, total qualitative scores were combined with a weighted quantitative score to determine which 50 companies made the list and in what order. 

It’s our twelfth year, but we still see some “firsts” on this year’s list.

OpenAI is the first company to reach No. 1 in consecutive years, and just the second company to top the list more than once (SpaceX, No. 1 in 2014 and 2018, is the other). OpenAI exemplifies what it means to scale quickly and continue to innovate as it grows, and it remains the world’s most influential and powerful venture backed startup.

And this year features the first ten-time Disruptor in Stripe. The No. 1 Disruptor of 2020 has continued to innovate even as its valuation has been slashed while staying out of the IPO market. The tenth time will be the last time, however. Whether it goes public or stays private, Stripe will “age out” of Disruptor eligibility next year.

Continue Reading

Technology

Elon Musk’s X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

Published

on

By

Elon Musk's X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.

About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.

Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.

The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.

Read more CNBC politics coverage

X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.

Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.

The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.

The site experienced another outage in March, which Musk attributed at the time to a “massive cyberattack.”

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote in a post at the time.

This is breaking news. Check back for updates

Continue Reading

Technology

Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

Published

on

By

Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.

Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images

Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.

Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.

Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.

Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.

“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”

Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.

Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.

“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.

‘AI’s moment to shine’

Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nike already raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.

Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.

Read more CNBC tech news

“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.

Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”

Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.

‘Not a silver bullet’

While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.

“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”

AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.

“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty.  But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.

The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.

“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.

“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”

WATCH: Former OpenAI exec says tariffs ‘present AI’s moment to shine’

Former OpenAI exec says tariffs 'present AI's moment to shine'

Continue Reading

Technology

Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

Published

on

By

Amazon's Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.

On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.

“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”

Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.

A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.

The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”

If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.

Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.

The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”

Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”

While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.

Tesla is promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

WATCH: Tesla’s decade-long journey to robotaxis

Tesla's decade-long journey to robotaxis

Continue Reading

Trending