The GFD Tech 100 Index is our take on the most dynamic companies growing the fastest across funding, web traffic, and brand prominence this month. January marks the 6th month in a row that the index has been released, with a new set of rankings revealed.
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: 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:
- Funding (50% weight): a combination of factors that prioritizes the amount of funding and the recency of funding
- Website Analysis (Traffic) – (25% weight): This pillar includes a basket of website traffic volume and growth rate
- Keyword Analysis (Branded Search) – (25% weight): by focusing on branded search, we get a good proxy for brand strength 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 OpenAI regains its #1 position — a chunky new round of $1B that lands its funding score at #3 overall.
- # Databricks arrives in the top ten on the strength of its funding. It’s been 17 days since the company raked in an injection of $4B.
- #3 Lovable is also new to the top ten, with its $330M in December, but its #38 website score suggests the buzz is already out on this AI-forward coding platform.
- Among the top 100, 52 are primarily artificial intelligence companies. The share of AI-heavy companies is even heavier among the top ten, where 7 companies are in the category.
- California leads in tech, with 7 of the 10 top companies headquartered in the Golden State — all in San Francisco. Dover, DE, New York, NY, and Columbia, MO, 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 157 industries represented, from space travel to collectibles.
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: 7 of the top 10 are tagged with AI specifically.
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.
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 OpenAI has bobbed between #1 and #2 for the last 3 months, depending on the tides of its funding rounds (12 so far for the large language model). With another $1B in its warchest this month, bringing the total to $79,000,120,000, OpenAI has been able to get its website score to #6 overall, and its keyword score to a #27 ranking, impressive for a company in which the main product isn’t the name of the company itself.
#2 Databricks appears in the top 10 for the first time this month. Its #1 funding score has buoyed less dominant web traffic and keyword scores (#194 and #156, respectively, the lowest among top-5 companies. What Databricks lacks in consumer buzz, it makes up for in enterprise prowess: the data, AI, and business analytics company has helped redefine the lakehouse model that’s bringing data together in 2026.
#3 Lovable is also new to the top 10. While it’s the #14 funding rank (the company brought in an early $330M holiday present) that jets this Swedish vibe coding platform to the top, its web and branded global search volume monthly, and 22,412,828 average monthly visits, it turns out that a lot of people are interested in vibe coding their latest project — with Lovable helping them do it.
#4 Anthropic creeps up from 5th place last month to #4. The AI model behind “Claude” has netted funding of $33,740,377,627, including the top 10s highest most-recent raise: $13,000,000,000 4 months ago. And though it’s acquired just 2 other companies, its brand searches are growing, up almost 50% over 6 months ago.
#5 Kalshi is a fintech firm with solid keyword search chops. With $1,643,244,988 in the bank, they’ll have some firepower to increase a branded search profile that’s already up over 500% over the last 6 months. It turns out the contract market that pushed prediction markets into the mainstream isn’t slowing down anytime soon.
#6 Mercor stays in the top 10 this month, holding tight after an autumn tumble. So while its 4 total funding rounds, including its most recent $350M raised 67 days ago, is one of the lowest in the top ten, its branded web search growth outperforms the other top tech companies this month by a mile. Or rather, by its unprecedented year-over-year growth of 2,377%.
#7 EquipmentShare is an equipment rental behemoth that also stakes its valuation on its fleet management software. Their tech-powered nationwide network is rare for the construction niche, and their upcoming IPO pretty much guarantees we won’t see them on this list of top private companies for long. It’s funding that’s landed EquipmentShare here this time around: with $2.75B added on December 3, it’s been a joyous season for the company.
#8 Scale is the Levi’s of the postmodern age, selling the tools businesses need today to strike gold in AI. It’s no wonder funders are banking on the provider, which ranks #17 in funding this month, buoying a branded keyword surge to #74 — not bad work for a corporate provider.
#9 Anysphere is the company behind Cursor, a vibe coding platform that’s surpassed the saturated market and won over investors with some crazy-vibes valuations (the company has grown from a $9.8B valuation in July to $29.3B in November). This month’s showing is down to its #5 funding score, as the company’s adding more Benjamins to its wallet, bringing in $3,373,400,000 in early December.
#10 Kraken is a mainstream cryptocurrency exchange that’s destined to leave the public list soon. In the meantime, its November IPO registration has kept its reputation high. So while Kranen didn’t raise a venture round last month, they still ranked #24 in funding, and their web and branded traffic continue to soar, making them an all-arounder on the list.
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 nurturing 7 of the top 10 companies.
Just Lovable’s Delaware digs (the vibe coding platform is Swedish), Kalshi’s New York finance HQ, and EquipmentShare, a construction and fleet management company from Missouri, buck the trend.
With 13 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 and 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
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