2025 CNBC Disruptor 50: How we chose companies on this year’s list

Published

4 months ago

June 10, 2025

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The top five companies on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list — Anduril, OpenAI, Databricks, Anthropic and Canva — have a combined valuation of just under $500 billion. This is more than the combined total valuation of almost every past Disruptor 50 list of the last 12 years.

OpenAI, the company that sparked a global arms race for new artificial intelligence capabilities, is the biggest contributor with its $300 billion value. But it is a race in which the other four companies in the top five (and more than two-thirds of the entire 2025 Disruptor 50) are very much key participants.

The piles of cash amassed by these startups is characteristic of a new era of the Disruptor 50 list, an era that began with the 2023 list and very much continues, with the Disruptors using their cash piles to fund their own growth organically, and (notably) inorganically. Databricks has been especially acquisitive, spending billions of dollars to buy other companies in the past year.

But valuation isn’t everything. The eye-popping values attained by the top five companies on this year’s list, and many others throughout the top 50, were technically less important factors in our ranking methodology than other measures of the companies’ growth, scalability, and their overall promise to keep on disrupting in the years to come.

Here’s how we chose the 2025 Disruptor 50:

All private, independently owned startup companies founded after Jan. 1, 2010, 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 their sales, number of users, employee growth (or lack therof), and more. 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 leading thinkers in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship from around the world, along with the newer Disruptor 50 VC Advisory Board, then ranked the quantitative criteria by importance and ability to disrupt established industries and public companies. This year, the two advisory boards found that scalability and user growth were the most important criteria, followed by sales growth and access to capital and community.

New for 2025, we can compare the way the two different advisory boards considered the importance of the list criteria. While the two boards mostly agreed, the VC group thought that the size of the industry being disrupted was much more important than the academics did, with the latter ranking access to capital and community as more important criterion than the group that provides said access.

The ranking model is complex enough to be sensitive to these differences of opinion, and perhaps more than ever, it makes good on the concept that companies must score highly on a wide range of criteria to make the final list.

Nominated companies were also asked to submit important qualitative information about themselves, 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 reporters and editors, along with many members of the Advisory Board, read the submissions and provided holistic qualitative assessments of each company.

In addition, the VC Advisory Board assessed a small group of finalists as an additional component of the qualitative review. Specifically, we asked the VC group to assess some of the companies that would, if selected, be making the list for the first time, as well as to help in the consideration of high-scoring early stage firms, a group with lower valuations but promising business models poised for future growth. 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.

The new generative AI era that began in 2023 has completely transformed the Disruptor 50 List. Twenty of this year’s 50 companies have made the list for the first time, while another 19 were first-timers in either 2023 or 2024. Put another way, only 11 of the 2025 honorees are pre-ChatGPT CNBC Disruptors. But for most of that group (Anduril, Databricks, and Canva chief among them), the embrace of the new era is what has kept them here.

Sign up for our weekly, original newsletter that goes beyond the annual Disruptor 50 list, offering a closer look at list-making companies and their innovative founders.

Technology

Michael Dell says ‘at some point there’ll be too many’ AI data centers, but not yet

Published

3 hours ago

October 7, 2025

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Michael Dell says 'at some point there'll be too many' AI data centers, but not yet

Dell CEO Michael Dell: AI demand is very solid

Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said Tuesday that while demand for computing power is “tremendous,” the production of artificial intelligence data centers will eventually top out.

“I’m sure at some point there’ll be too many of these things built, but we don’t see any signs of that,” Dell said on “Closing Bell: Overtime.”

The hardware maker’s server networking business grew 58% last year and was up 69% last quarter, Dell said. As large language models have evolved to more multimodal and multi-agent systems, the demand for AI processing power and capacity has continued to be strong.

OpenAI’s Sora 2 must stop allowing copyright infringement, Motion Picture Association says

Published

7 hours ago

October 7, 2025

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OpenAI's Sora 2 must stop allowing copyright infringement, Motion Picture Association says

Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images

The Motion Picture Association on Monday urged OpenAI to “take immediate and decisive action” against its new video creation model Sora 2, which is being used to produce content that it says is infringing on copyrighted media.

Following the Sora app’s rollout last week, users have been swarming the platform with AI-generated clips featuring characters from popular shows and brands.

“Since Sora 2’s release, videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service and across social media,” MPA CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clarified in a blog post that the company will give rightsholders “more granular control” over how their characters are used.

But Rivkin said that OpenAI “must acknowledge it remains their responsibility – not rightsholders’ – to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service,” and that “well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

Concerns erupted immediately after Sora videos were created last week featuring everything from James Bond playing poker with Altman to body cam footage of cartoon character Mario evading the police.

Although OpenAI previously held an opt-out system, which placed the burden on studios to request that characters not appear on Sora, Altman’s follow-up blog post said the platform was changing to an opt-in model, suggesting that Sora would not allow the usage of copyrighted characters without permission.

However, Altman noted that the company may not be able to prevent all IP from being misused.

“There may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t, and getting our stack to work well will take some iteration,” Altman wrote.

Disney and Universal sued AI image creator Midjourney in June, alleging that the company used and distributed AI-generated characters from their films and disregarded requests to stop. Disney also sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Character.AI in September, warning the company to stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.

WATCH: OpenAI’s Sora 2 sparks AI ‘slop’ backlash

Technology

Billionaire tech investor Orlando Bravo says ‘valuations in AI are at a bubble’

Published

7 hours ago

October 7, 2025

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Billionaire tech investor Orlando Bravo says 'valuations in AI are at a bubble'

Orlando Bravo: AI valuations are in a bubble

Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo said that valuations for artificial intelligence companies are “at a bubble,” comparing it to the dotcom era.

But one key difference in the market now, he said, is that large companies with “healthy balance sheets” are financing AI businesses.

Bravo’s private equity firm boasts more than $181 billion in assets under management as of June, and focuses on buying and selling enterprise tech companies, with a significant chunk of its portfolio invested in cybersecurity.

Bravo told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday that investors can’t value a $50 million annual recurring revenue company at $10 billion.

“That company is going to have to produce a billion dollars in free cash flow to double an investor’s money, ultimately,” he said. “Even if the product is right, even if the market’s right, that’s a tall order, managerially.”