GFD Tech 100 Index: Ranking the 100 Hottest Tech Companies in December 2025

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, even though one of these may crash and burn soon. 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.

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

Enter the Green Flag Digital Tech 100 Index: The Most Dynamic 100 Silicon Valley VC-Funded Companies

Unlike other startup ranking lists, we start with widely available company metrics and filter down to the most impactful slices for understanding what companies are truly gaining momentum that’s sustained.

We weren’t happy with many of the lists and scoring we found that weren’t behind a paywall, and many were self-serving for individual VC firms or those who explicitly applied for awards or inclusion.

That’s why we built a 3-pillar scoring system for ranking:

1. Funding (50% weight): a combination of factors that prioritizes amount of funding and recency of funding
2. Website Analysis (Traffic) – (25% weight): this pillar includes a basket of website traffic volume and growth rate
3. Keyword Analysis (Branded Search) – (25% weight): by focusing on branded search, we get a good proxy for brand strenght overall

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, highlighting the importance of market impact without erasing the significance of funding altogether.

We update our data monthly to stay on top of which companies are making moves to overtake the competition and surge forward as leaders in their fields.

Why Filter to Only Silicon-Valley Funded Companies?

By focusing only on Silicon Valley VC firm-funded companies, we are comparing like companies with like companies. Firms funded by Valley VCs fulfill a commonly held set of growth and revenue metrics. This enables better comparisons across various age groups and company maturity levels. While this may result in missing out on some truly dynamic global companies, it allows for a more focused ranking list that feels more cohesive and useful.

On to the good stuff!

Here are our most recent findings.

Key Takeaways

• #1 Paypal soars into the top ten this month with a chunky new round of $6.95B that catapults its funding score to #2.
• #2 OpenAI loses its first-place crown, going 60 days without a new injection of cash, though its website score of #8 means the buzz is going strong for the company behind ChatGPT.
• #3 Oracle remains in the same position as last month, taking its first spot atop the podium. Though it’s a tech giant, Oracle’s B2B positioning means it doesn’t break web and keyword records. But it does use its #6 funding to fuel #2 acquisitions, keeping it on the charts.
• Among the top 100, 4 are primarily artificial intelligence companies, up ~16% from last month (which was up 32% from the previous 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 8 of the 10 top companies headquartered in the Golden State — all in the Bay Area. Austin, TX, and Livingston, NJ, 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 180 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 even more prominently: 6 of the top 10 companies are heavily focused on AI (60%), while just 44 of the top 100 are (44%).

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 44 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 December. The first 56 on this list are ranked in the GFD Tech 100 Index.

The Top Private Startups in December 2025

Compare that to the top 100 public companies this December. The first 44 of these are ranked in the GFD Tech 100 Index. 

The Top Public Companies in December 2025

Overall, public companies in the top 100 rank 91st in funding, while private companies have a higher median — 56th. 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 #2 OpenAI. They’ve punched above their weight.

With a website rank of #8 overall (competitive even against the public giants), branded search at #73, and funding at #10, OpenAI is raising cash, but it’s also turning those dollars into momentum at scale.

Breaking Down The Top 10 Silicon-Valley Startups in the Tech 100

Zooming in on the top ten companies today, we see that 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:

#1 Paypal makes our top ten list for the first time this month, launching itself to the #1 spot on the strength of its #2 ranking for funding. With $12.17B total in its warchest, Paypal’s brought in $6.95B of that just 14 days ago. With a consumer app that brings in users, its web ranking is also above average, ranked #14. That buoys a less standout keyword search ranking of 66.

#2 OpenAI sinks one spot from last month, falling from #2 for funding to #10, though its significant to note the company’s overall raise dwarfs competitors — with a $78B total raise, and the highest website rank in the top ten, OpenAI’s fundraising schedule can lag for a few more months before the company falls out of the top ten.

#3 Oracle has raised $25,750,000,000, with its most recent injection of cash 64 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 25,076,128 over the last 6 months, surpassed only by Paypal, Meta, and Uber 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 steps up from #5 this month, sitting September, October, and November out as far as raising new cash. Nevertheless, it has netted $54,608,817,488 including $26 billion 115 days ago. That has allowed for outstanding performance in other ways: Meta’s has made 108 total acquisitions (unscored). More importantly for our assessment, it has scored an average of ~37,900,000 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 49.55% year over year.

#5 Anthropic, the AI model behind “Claude,” has netted funding of $54,608,830,800, including $13,000,000,000 3 months ago. And though it’s acquired just one other company, its brand searches are growing, along with its bank account. With an 82.89% year-over-year branded search traffic rise, more consumers and investors are checking out the company behind the popular model.

#6 CoreWeave is a cloud provider supporting the infrastructure of the AI revolution, so it’s no surprise that the tech startup appears in the top 10 as it capitalizes on its recent IPO. Not even 3 weeks ago, CoreWeave brought in another $2.50B, bringing its total to $22.33B and floating its funding score to #4 overall. That does a lot to support this non-consumer company’s ranking since infrastructure brands are less likely to enjoy buzzworthy web visits and keyword searches.

#7 Genspark is an agentic AI search engine pushed by a recent Series B into unicorn status. With another $275M just 11 days ago, the startup, led by former Baidu execs, has climbed into the top ten for the first time. And it’s generating some name-brand buzz: its keyword search ranks 32nd, built on the back of a 179.59% year-over-year increase.

#8 Uber ranks consistently high across categories, with standout performances in funding and web traffic. Bringing in 88,049,107 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.

#9 Mercor – Top 10 but Down from November High

#9 Mercor stays in the top ten this month, though it tumbles 7 places, with a total war chest of $483,600,000, raising its most recent funds 35 days ago. It can also boast average website visits over the past 6 months of 3,107,709, with month-to-month growth up slightly. However, keyword searches are where the Mercor story really lies — they’re up a whopping 1558% over the last year.

#10 Kraken – the Crypto Monster Raised $800M

Kraken raised $800M in new investment just 13 days ago, adding to its already sizeable coffers of $1,330,550,000. The cryptocurrency exchange has some work to do to elevate its keyword search recognition, ranked at 330, the lowest in the top ten. But with web traffic averaging 9,261,003 per month and growing, if you’ve never heard of Kanken or searched for it by name, chances are it’s only a matter of time until you will. 

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.

Just Austin’s Oracle and CoreWeave, in Livingston, NJ, buck the trend.

With 14 of the top 25 in the Bay Area, there is little diversity outside the startup north star of Northern California. 

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%

• Branded keyword 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