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

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 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 without erasing the importance of funding altogether.

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 OpenAI, the juggernaut behind ChatGPT, leads among tech companies, largely due to its March 2005 raise of $40 billion. 
• Oracle surges to #2 with an $18 billion raise in late September. The enterprise database software company also ranks #2 in acquisitions, gobbling up 148 other companies in total.
• Meta falls to #3 from the top spot. It ranks #2 in funding, and with strong performances across acquisitions and website metrics, Facebook’s parent company remains a strong performer. 
• Among the top 100, 28 are primarily artificial intelligence companies (or companies that mainly serve model developers), while 5 of the top 10 companies are primarily AI companies. They’re AI-native (OpenAI, Anthropic), model-builder suppliers (ScaleAI, Coreweave), or companies that are heavily invested in AI-power, such as Uber’s stake in matching, ETA, pricing, and maps. 
• California leads in tech, with 7 of the 10 top companies headquartered in the Golden State — all in the Bay Area.

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 more prominently: 5 of the top 10 companies are heavily focused on AI, while just 28 of the top 100 are.

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 OpenAI boasts a total war chest of $71,400,120,000, raising its most recent round about half a year ago. In total, it has acquired 8 companies. It can also boast average website visits over the past 6 months of 1,107,489,321, though month-to-month growth is slightly down. However, keyword searches are stable and total around 9,140,000. 

#2 Oracle ranks #5 for funding, having raised a total of $25,750,000,000, raising its most recent funds — $18 billion — just a week ago. It has acquired 7 companies, and rakes in 24,624,464 website visits monthly on average over the past 6 months, with visits down slightly month over month. Keyword branded search stands out for an enterprise company, with a search volume of $1.5 million.

#3 Meta has raised $54,608,817,488, with its most recent injection of cash 54 days ago. The tech giant behind Facebook might be using it to support its formidable 104 acquisitions. Its monthly web traffic of 35,475,628 cements its power, reflecting that, unlike some up-and-coming B2B companies in the top ten, Meta is a household name. Search volume, while middling for the top 10, is growing at a rate that established startups typically don’t see, with more than 23% change year over year.

#4 Anthropic ranks #4 in funding, netting $33,740,377,627 including $13 billion just 29 days ago. That makes up for lackluster performance in other categories: Anthropic is the new kid on the block, ranking 568th in acquisitions with made 1 total acquisition. With 13,384,337 monthly website visits, it trails to first-to-market OpenAI , which sees sees 83X the number of monthly visitors, with over 16X the keyword volume. That may not impress, but it’s not too shabby for an up-and-coming team with fewer than half the number of employees of their top competitor.

#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 $35,762,450,000 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 Intel may not feel like a “startup,” but it’s still pulling in top funding and ranking #4 overall for acquisitions to power the semiconductor hardware organization and its expansion — especially into chips that are powering AI’s sky-high demand for compute. Just 40 days ago the company brought in $8,900,000,000, which is likely to fuel more acquisitions for their portfolio, already 113 companies strong.

#7 Amazon might not be tops in funding (though its ranking #27), but the well-known eCommerce powerhouse ranks #6 in acquisitions, #4 in website rank, and #3 in keyword searches. In other words, people are looking for Amazon. They’re using Amazon. And finally, Amazon is stalking the competition, as well as useful tools to power their own business goals, and acquiring them at high rates. It’s all in a day’s work for a company that entertains 2,671,790,963 monthly web visits.

#8 xAI, the company through which Elon Musk’s LLM, Grok, has emerged, is a feisty entrant to the top ten. With few employees, 2 total acquisitions, and a keyword search volume that rivals the B2B enterprise companies, xAI has managed to surge ahead in funding, raking in $22.7 billion, including $5.3 billion just 80 days ago.

#9 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.

#10 CoreWeave falls from #4 for funding to #10 as other companies raise recent rounds. But the AI cloud provider that operates data centers is no slouch: it raised $2.6 billion just 42 days ago, and has racked up total investments of $19.78 billion. That helps counteract the B2B organization’s low website visits and lackluster acquisition profile (it ranks #228).

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 18 of the top 25 in the Bay Area, there is little diversity outside the startup north star of Northern California. Los Angeles, CA, Denver, CO, Austin, TX, and Livingston, NJ, each host a single top-10 tech company, while Seattle, WA, is home to 2.

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