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

In tech, headlines worship funding, but that’s only a piece to the puzzle that makes a tech company rise to the top.

For instance, 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. 

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 and spending that cash on newsworthy acquisitions.

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 making acquisitions, but we reweighted these scores, 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.

Now we update our data every 2 weeks 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 Meta, the juggernaut behind Facebook and forays into open-weight frontier models, leads among tech companies, largely due to its early August raise of $26 billion. 
• OpenAI falls to #2 with strong funding totalling $71.4 billion. Its financial backing solidifies its ranking, but OpenAI’s web traffic (ranking #8) and keyword ranking (#12 overall) are also exceptional.
• In 3rd place, Amazon overtakes xAI. Amazon has the lowest funding ranking among the top ten, but it hardly matters as the consumer-focused company ranks #1 in web visits and #1 in keyword ranking. Elon Musk’s xAI, an OpenAI competitor, has some ground to make up in terms of public recognition: it ranks #77 in website analytics.
• Among the top 100, 28 are primarily artificial intelligence companies, while 9 of the top 10 companies are either AI companies or heavily invested in AI (Meta, Amazon). And #7 Coinbase? It’s also an organization with strategic ties to AI.
• California leads in tech, with 8 of the ten top companies headquartered in the Golden State — all in the Bay Area.

Which Companies Score Highest?

We analyze thousands of companies every 2 weeks to determine which are leading the way in terms of industry and public momentum.

These are the top 100.

Breaking Down The Top Ten Companies

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

In terms of funding, #1 Meta boasts a total war chest of $54,608,817,488, raising its most recent funds just weeks ago. In total, it has acquired 104 companies. It can also boast average website visits over the past 6 months of 36,251,800, though month-to-month growth is slightly down. However, keyword searches are stable and total around 2,740,000. 

#2 OpenAI ranks #2 for funding, having raised a total of $71,400,120,000, raising its most recent funds just over 4 months ago. It has acquired 7 companies, and rakes in 1,191,751,651 website visits monthly on average over the past 6 months, with visits up slightly month over month. Keyword branded search stands out, with a search volume of 7,480,000.

Along with #3 Amazon, OpenAI brings in formidable monthly search traffic, totaling more than a million users. Both are consumer-centric companies, but given that OpenAI commandeers its own million users (not just its product website, ChatGPT), OpenAI’s site prominence is impressive.

#3 Amazon has raised $8,108,000,000, with its most recent injection of cash in 2023. Who needs it? The massive consumer eCommerce site has made 106 acquisitions. Its monthly web traffic of 2,819,982,698 cements its power, reflecting that, unlike some up-and-coming B2B companies in the top ten, Amazon is a household name, catering to individuals rather than enterprises. Those individual web visits don’t always mean income, but they’re drops in an ocean of visits in which consumers check out prices and products, all with high buying interest.

Amazon’s branded search volume is 414,000,000, traffic numbers that tower over every other company analyzed, including Google, Netflix, and Roblox. Visits have (barely) trended down month over month, though that may reflect normal, seasonal rhythms. 

#4 xAI ranks #3 in funding, netting $22,412,372,021 including $5 billion just 30 days ago. That makes up for lackluster performance in other categories: xAI has made 2 total acquisitions, and with 25,608,408 monthly website visits, OpenAI sees 44X the number of monthly visitors, with over 20X the keyword volume. That may not impress, but it’s not too shabby for the only organization in the top ten with fewer than 500 employees (xAI reports a team of just 11-50).

#5 Uber breaks the top ten because of solid cross-category rankings, with especially strong performances in funding and keyword volume. Its total funding of ~$33.5 billion has helped fund more than 6 million monthly keyword volume 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 buoy the organization’s valuation.

#6 Scale AI isn’t a large language model itself, but it supplies the tools that power them. Perhaps that’s why its clients, like OpenAI and Meta, are also in the top ten. But though Scale AI has been a unicorn (with a $1 billion valuation) since 2019, it hasn’t surged ahead in acquisitions or website rank.

#7 Coinbase ranks consistently high across categories, with funding, acquisitions, website, and keyword volume all contributing to its recent rise to the top ten. As a consumer crypto trading platform, that commercial buzz has helped keep the organization’s keyword volume a hair shy of much more established companies like Meta, with website visitors #3 in the top ten (behind OpenAI and Amazon).

#8 CoreWeave ranks #4 for funding, raising $2.6 billion just 18 days ago, and racking up total investments of $19.78 billion. That helps counteract the B2B organization’s low website visits and lackluster acquisition profile (it ranks #321).

#9 Block is the fintech powerhouse behind Square, Cash App, and Afterpay. With 14 days since its last funding round, which raised $2.2 billion, adding to its total pot of $4.8 billion, the organization is likely to keep making moves to acquire the competition.

#10 DoorDash squeaks into the top 10 by virtue of its recent keyword search volume metrics, which eased the consumer company past B2B organizations like Oracle and Databricks. Though comparatively weak in acquisitions and website visits, the company’s many loyal and hungry customers are hitting the order button on their phones, as well as proving they know the company’s name, with a keyword volume of over 6 million.

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 193 industries represented, from space travel to text analysis.

Here are the ten industries represented most often:

Ultimately, AI and its adjacent industries, from machine learning to generative AI, are commanding an oversized share of top companies. However, they’re clustered among the highest performers: 5 of the top 10 companies are heavily focused on AI, while just 31 of the top 100 are.

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 8 of the top 10 companies.

With 16 of the top 25 in the Bay Area, there is little diversity outside the startup north star of Northern California. Seattle, WA, and Livingston, NJ, 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 4 total categories: funding, acquisitions, 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 – 75%

Number of Investors

Number of Lead Investors

Most recent funding amount

Total funding amount

Most recent funding

Acquisitions – 1%

Total number of acquisitions

Website Analysis – 5%

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 – 19%

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