GFD Tech 100 Index: Ranking the 100 Most Traction-Rich Tech Companies (Updated Monthly)

In tech, headlines worship funding.

Take Anthropic’s September 2025 raise, covered in Bloomberg. Cognition AI and Figure AI also grabbed press attention for their raises that same month. And when Meta’s AI image partner, Black Forest Labs, announced it was merely in talks to raise more cash, it even made headlines.

Maybe that’s just part of riding the wave of trendy new technologies. After all, artificial intelligence (AI) is often lauded as “a cognitive revolution” and “the new oil.” The moniker that might reflect a core economic truth. The AI industry as a whole is booming. It’s predicted to quintuple in value over the next 5 years.

However, as with any revolution, buzz-derived investment and market momentum don’t last forever. 

And an influx of funds is only one piece of the puzzle that makes a tech company rise to the top.

We’ve begun to notice that plenty of slower starters in less glamorous fields are also making big moves, harnessing brand recognition and growing brand recognition, though they aren’t constantly raising mammoth rounds.

So we wondered, are there better ways to assess a company’s trajectory than relying on funding?

Enter the Green Flag Digital Tech 100 Index.

We started with Crunchbase’s database of thousands of tech companies at all stages of growth, examining whether they’re maintaining and growing their funding momentum, and added our own for monthly web traffic (suggesting product-market fit) and keyword search volume (suggesting brand recognition) to assess which companies are translating their hype into traction.

That created a score that adds a new dimension to typical tech company rankings, speaking to the importance of market impact without erasing the importance of funding altogether.

Now we update our data every month to stay on top of which companies are making moves toward overtaking the competition and skyrocketing forward as players in their fields.

Here are our most recent findings. 

Key Takeaways

• #1 OpenAI pops up from second place with strong funding, including another $6.6 billion this month.
• #2 Mercor, the domain expert marketplace that taps the likes of engineers, lawyers, and physicians to train and assess models, skyrockets to #2 among tech companies, largely due to its recent raise of $350  million. 
• Private companies like OpenAI and Mercor seize 5 of the top 10 spots this month.
• In 3rd place, Oracle makes a bid for the podium as last month’s #1, Meta, falls to 4th place. Oracle hasn’t raised a new round in over 30 days, but its previous strong funding profile and high website score keep it on the charts.
• Among the top 100, 38 are primarily artificial intelligence companies, up ~32% from last month. The share of AI-heavy companies is even heavier among the top ten, where 6 companies are in the category.
• California leads in tech, with 7 of the ten top companies headquartered in the Golden State — all in the Bay Area. New York, NY, Austin, TX, and Tempe, AZ bring one company each to this month’s list.

Which Industries are Leading the Tech Race?

Some industries are more cutting-edge than others. And while those organizations tend to capture more funding, do they also capture the public imagination? 

We allowed companies multiple industry tags, so among the 100 top-scoring companies today, there are actually 191 industries represented, from space travel to text analysis.

Here are the ten industries represented most often:

Ultimately, AI and its adjacent industries combined, from machine learning to generative AI, are commanding an oversized share of top companies. However, they’re clustered among the highest performers more prominently: 6 of the top 10 companies are heavily focused on AI (60%), while just 38 of the top 100 are (38%).

Which Companies Score Highest?

We analyze thousands of companies every month to determine which are leading the way in terms of industry and public momentum.

These are the top 100.

But it can be challenging to compare apples to oranges. Public companies, after all, have the clout and support to outperform the real breakout tech companies. And taken together, while the top 100 boasts 43 public companies, the top ten boasts 5 of them. So let’s throw the public companies off the list and look at the top 100 private companies this October. The first 57 on this list are ranked in the GFD Tech 100 Index.

The Top Private Startups This October

Compare that to the top 100 public companies this October. The first 43 of these are ranked in the GFD Tech 100 Index.

The Top Public Companies This October

Overall, public companies in the top 100 rank 81st in funding, while privates have a higher median—58th. And with top outliers like Amazon and Google racking up more web views than startups can muster (often by hundreds of times), we wanted to see which private companies are swimming in this bigger pond, successfully.

This month, it’s Mercor. They’ve punched above their weight.

With a website rank of #124 overall (competitive even against the public giants), branded search at #23, and funding at #3, Mercor is raising cash, but it’s also turning those dollars into momentum at scale.

Breaking Down The Top Ten Companies

Zooming into the top ten companies today, we see they’re not performing equally strongly in all three categories. Typically, companies grow from funding buzz to web searches and ultimately achieve brand recognition through keyword searches. Here’s how the top ten right now stack up in each area:

In terms of funding, #1 OpenAI ranks #2 for funding, bringing in a new round just a month ago. It has acquired 2 more companies than it had last month, for a total of 9. The company rakes in 1,043,651,673 website visits monthly on average over the past 6 months, with visits down about 2% month over month. Keyword branded search stands out, with a search volume of 9,140,000.

OpenAI brings in formidable monthly search traffic — the most in the top ten, despite the company running its consumer service website at another location (ChatGPT vs. OpenAI).

#2 Mercor  boasts a total war chest of $483,600,000, raising its most recent funds just days ago. It can also boast average website visits over the past 6 months of 1,938,768, with month-to-month growth up slightly. However, keyword searches are increasing — they’re up about 1000% over the last year.

#3 Oracle has raised $25,750,000,000, with its most recent injection of cash 34 days ago (that suggests Oracle would have scored even higher with a more up-to-the-second raise. The software, database, and cloud behemoth has earned monthly web traffic of 24,257,033 over the last 6 months, surpassed only by Apple and Meta in the top ten. Those individual web visits don’t always mean income, but they’re drops in an ocean of B2B visits that often translate into long-term buyers.

#4 Meta falls from #3 in funding to #5, sitting September and October out as far as raising new cash. It has netted $54,608,817,488 including $26 billion 81 days ago. That has allowed for outstanding performance in other ways: Meta’s has made 106 total acquisitions (unscored). More importantly for our assessment, it’s scored an average of 36,014,085 monthly website visits, it’s more popular than most other top companies, especially impressive given Facebook users are logging into another domain than the company’s main site. That site’s branded searches are engaging visitors — with keyword searches up 22% this year.

#5 Anthropic, the AI model behind “Claude,” has netted funding of $33,740,377,627, including $13,000,000,000 2 months ago. And though it’s acquired just one other company, its brand searches are growing, along with its bank account. With an 82% year-over-year branded search traffic rise, more consumers and investors are checking out the company behind the popular model.

#6 Opendoor Technologies breaks the top ten as it announces significant changes to its real estate platform, betting on an AI future with a new CEO. That’s led to an especially strong performance in brand keyword volume searches, ranking it #5 overall. It brought in $362,000,000 34 days ago, for funding totaling $25,749,30,000 overall. Today, brand recognition continues to buoy the organization’s valuation and the number of eyeballs watching it grow.

#7 Uber ranks consistently high across categories, with standout performances in funding and web traffic. Bringing in 85,221,284 visitors monthly, in spite of users primarily looking for Uber on its app. Today, “I’m going to Uber” has become a branded generic term for catching a ride, and brand recognition continues to elevate the organization’s valuation.

#8 Apple is a consumer giant, so it’s noteworthy that it doesn’t sit comfortably in the top ten month after month. This month, Apple makes the cut. Although its most recent raise totaled a formidable $4,500,000,000, the influx came 176 days ago. Its 728,766,264 in average monthly visits over the last 6 months reflect its position as a household name.

#9 LMArena makes the top ten list for the first time this month. This newcomer has never acquired another company. No matter, users are asking for it by name. Along with Opendoor, it’s one of just 2 top ten companies to achieve a keyword branded search score that outstrips its funding score, meaning that users are finding it buzzworthy. It’s only a matter of time before more funders catch up.

#10 Noble Mobile is a healthcare AI brand that automates platforms for hospitals and health systems. Its agents and workforce tools are integrating tasks like scheduling and referrals with patient charts. Founded in 2017, it’s already playing in the top ten, having soared in website rank to #2 overall, with monthly web visit growth bigger companies just can’t match proportionally — almost 400%. Its monthly branded search year-over-year change is up more than 2400%.

Where are the Top Tech Companies Located?

Regardless of what part of the puzzle they contribute, top-performing tech companies are likely to be headquartered in California, and specifically in the Bay Area, with San Francisco and Silicon Valley nurturing 7 of the top 10 companies.

With 15 of the top 25 in the Bay Area, there is little diversity outside the startup north star of Northern California. New York, NY, Austin, TX, and Tempe, AZ, each host a single top-10 tech company. 

Here’s what a map of the top-25 ranked tech companies reveals:

With so many San Francisco contenders and an archipelago of Silicon Valley headquarters, the top 25 are disproportionately clustered around the country’s largest funding ecosystem.

The Final Takeaway? Tech Companies Can’t Live on Funding Alone

Funding may fuel the fire, but it’s not the whole story. By layering digital signals, we gain a better understanding of which well-funded companies are experiencing growth from being truly useful and from building momentum and public presence, ultimately capturing both funding cycles and real people’s internet searches. 

So as tech categories like AI continue to draw investor attention, our index helps spotlight those companies that are succeeding in turning that visibility into velocity and real market presence. 

We’ll be watching to see who keeps climbing.

Methodology

To track industry buzz, we analyzed 1361 tech companies, looking at 3 total categories: funding, monthly website traffic, and global keyword volume to assess which tech companies are riding a wave of sustained energy and which are actually turning that excitement into business progress.

Here’s how we broke it down:

Funding – 50%

Number of Investors

Number of Lead Investors

Most recent funding amount

Total funding amount

Most recent funding

Website Analysis (Traffic) – 25%

Monthly visits

Average visits over time

Percentage of visits (to normalize volume and allow better comparison across companies)

Trend in monthly visits over the past 6 months

Keyword Analysis (Brand Search) – 25%

Search volume

Average keyword volume over time

Search volume percent (to normalize volume and show overall strength)

Keyword volume trend over the past 6 months