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.