CB Insights

Who wins the AI data platform wars? New business relationships and hiring insights reveal where the Snowflake versus Databricks battle is headed. Comparing private vs public company competitive landscapes requires predictive intelligence that leverages rare data and proactive signals that uncover what happens between funding rounds.

"The number one AI feature I love is the scouting report. It's my five-minute prep before a call — I can log in, generate it, and instantly know who I'm talking to." — Reed Dailey, Client Relationship Executive at CohnReznick Five minutes of prep. That's what separates Reed from competitors walking into the same meetings. While others rely on LinkedIn profiles and website bios, Reed uses CB Insights to understand: → New executive hires and their mandates → Board-level priorities driving decisions → Market position and emerging threats → Recent capital raises and investor profiles He's not guessing about what matters. He's leading with it. The payoff: 30% reduction in sales cycles across CohnReznick's private equity practice. The best conversations don't start with introductions — they start with insight. See how predictive intelligence changes the game → https://lnkd.in/gGJtZq2G

There’s an app for that ➡️ there’s an agent for that. The AI agent market exploded over 5x from 300 companies to 1,700+ in 8 months. We mapped 400+ leaders to help teams navigate what to build, buy, or partner with. Three patterns jumped out: → Agents race to traction and early success. Agents are the fastest adopted new technology in history. The median AI agent startup is less than three years old. Already, one-third of companies have Mosaic scores – CB Insights' success probability measure – in the top 5% of ALL private companies globally. → Revenue leaders are being crowned faster than ever. The top 20 revenue-generating AI agent companies are 3.8 years old on average. The top of the leaderboard is dominated by software development agents already at scale with specialized workflows and measurable outcomes – a blueprint for other categories. → M&A is on the rise. Acquisitions of agentic startups jumped 3x between Q1’25 and Q3’25. The AI agent M&A landscape reveals enterprise software incumbents racing to embed agentic capabilities before they're disrupted by them. Salesforce and Workday's acquisition pace (4 and 3 deals respectively) signals these platforms recognize AI agents as existential – either they own the agentic layer or risk being disintermediated by it. Acquisitions from AI infrastructure players see agents as the killer app that drives compute consumption. Agentic startups are also serving as external R&D labs for many enterprise leaders. Incumbents know they can't build this fast enough, so they're buying their way into agent capabilities. 60+ acquirers across security, customer experience, automation, and vertical SaaS shows agent capabilities becoming table stakes across enterprise software, not just a feature for the platform giants. This fragmented buyer landscape means AI agent startups have multiple exit paths, but also face a land grab where every software vendor is hunting for agent technology to avoid obsolescence. The firms moving fastest on AI agents aren't starting from scratch. They're looking at which categories already have proven revenue models, then deciding whether to build, acquire, or partner based on how mature the solution is. Which of the 1,700+ agents will accelerate your business? https://lnkd.in/e-CRzbWa

Predictive intelligence is now available in Clay! Leverage the same signals relied on by business development teams at the worlds leading enterprises, professional services firms, and banks to find your next partners and customers. Read more about how you can supercharge your AI GTM workflows in Clay with CB Insights’ predictive intelligence: https://lnkd.in/gtq43XT6

Predictive intelligence, directly in your Snowflake workflows. CB Insights is a proud launch partner for Snowflake Intelligence; putting our predictive intelligence on 10+ million companies directly where you're already analyzing and actioning. Query our signals in natural language: → "Show me vendors with Mosaic scores above 700 in cybersecurity" → "Which high Commercial Maturity companies are expanding into our market?" → "Compare our performance vs. emerging competitors by momentum signals" No platform switching. No data exports. Just ask. Unlock CB Insights' predictive signals combined with your internal metrics, in plain English, with enterprise governance built in. Intelligence doesn't need to live in a separate tab. Your next move first, now embedded in your mission-critical workflows. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gX6kb-jz

Which AI startups are the next breakout companies? Our GenAI signal tracker is your got to source for predictive intelligence on the fastest moving technology shift in history: https://lnkd.in/dAjZvX34

NVIDIA is spinning a $5T web... What do the latest signals show about NVIDIA's moat? 1) NVIDIA's cash compounds their product advantage. Their AI investments and partnerships span nearly every major company including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, xAI, and dozens more. Beyond these tactical alliances, CUDA and NVIDIA's hardware-software ecosystem create deep lock-in. 2) The elephant not in the room... Anthropic. Anthropic's notable absence from NVIDIA's alliances and their commitment to training the next Claude model on Amazon's Trainium chips and scaling to one million Google TPU units is the biggest signal that frontier AI doesn't need NVIDIA. 3) Hiring signals confirm that more companies are hedging their bets and spreading their chips. AI leaders from neoclouds to model makers to chip builders are now recruiting for experience across both NVIDIA and AMD architectures. All said, chip demand still outstrips supply and NVIDIA is the biggest, baddest supplier with a capital war chest and differentiated product. But, as we start to see more diversification, new opportunities are emerging across both silicon and software.

Anthropic. Databricks. Glean. Fabrica Ventures bought into all three in the secondary market — without ever seeing a P&L. Here's how predictive intelligence turns external signals into multimillion-dollar conviction: Fabrica doesn't analyze thousands of companies. They set tight criteria upfront — Series C and beyond, backed by strong funds, showing recurring revenues. That gets them to about 150 companies. Then they apply their quality floor: a Mosaic Score of 800 or above (the top percentile of private companies). What's left are the high-conviction targets worth building a thesis around. Every investment decision starts as a 70-page document built entirely from external signals. No data room. No financial statements. Just predictive intelligence — revenue signals, customer sentiment, leadership moves, market positioning, investor history, and commercial maturity scores. It's how they construct conviction from the outside in. As Co-founder Alvaro Filpo puts it: "We're a small fund. We don't have the luxury of analyzing thousands of companies — we have to get it right." This is what "gray mass density" looks like — capital clustering where top founders, products, and investors converge. When you can predict which private companies will become generational winners, you don't need access to the data room. You just need better signals than everyone else. Read the full case study: https://lnkd.in/ghWe5s3e

AI companies represent 10% of all startups… and 36% of top startups. The higher the success probability, the more AI dominates. AI companies are over-indexed at every tier: ↳ Top quartile: 16.3% AI (+26% since 2023) ↳ Top decile: 26.1% AI (+31% since 2023) ↳ Top percentile: 36.2% AI (+49% since 2023) AI's dominance amongst top startups is growing... fast. What's driving this? This isn't just about funding hype (although AI is dominating there too). Mosaic measures the fundamentals that actually predict a company's success – financial strength, team quality, market health, and momentum. The best AI companies are attracting elite capital, recruiting world-class technical teams, and most importantly, forming the business relationships that prove market traction. The companies winning now are coupling AI capabilities with enterprise distribution and real GTM execution. Track the AI companies dominating startup success for *free* with CB Insights' AI signal tracker: https://lnkd.in/d5HbT7GX

The future belongs to those who act on signals, not press releases. At our Money20/20 panel "Private is the New Public," CB Insights CEO Manlio Carrelli was joined by Nasdaq (Garrick S.), Forge (Vidya E.), Itaú Unibanco (Mauricio Correa), and Tiger Global (Sara Eadie) to discuss how predictive intelligence is turning private-market noise into clarity. For years, private markets were the blind spot of finance. Now, AI is decoding the patterns others miss, revealing tomorrow’s trillion-dollar companies before the headlines ever hit. See what others can’t. Start your free CB Insights trial and explore which private companies are showing breakout signals → https://lnkd.in/ezFRNcnW