Top-ranked companies end 2024 up 40% as four AI companies join the Augment Power 20

The private markets closed 2024 with all-around momentum not seen since the pandemic boom in tech, with AI companies pushing prices and market activity to new highs. The Augment Power 20 – our index of the most promising pre-IPO companies – reached an aggregate market capitalization of $1.15T in Q4'24, or roughly one-third of NVIDIA's current market capitalization and 3x Salesforce’s.

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The Power 20 rankings methodology uniquely combines Augment’s marketplace data with fundamentals such as revenue and revenue growth, for a comprehensive scoring of pre-IPO names.

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The fourth quarter saw share price appreciation accelerate nearly across the board. The Power 20 companies averaged 33% share price increases, up from just 5% in Q3'24. The surge was led by the top five companies, which posted average gains of 40%.

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Key highlights from Q4'24:

• As investors scrambled for entry points into market leaders, concentration intensified dramatically, with the top six companies accounting for 31% of all platform activity. This represents a sharp reversal from previous quarters, when investor activity was broadening across the market. SpaceX, Anduril, Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, and Stripe together commanded half of all activity among Power 20 companies – the highest concentration of investor attention since we began tracking these metrics in Q4'23.
• The most active name SpaceX accounted for 10% of all marketplace activity. Meanwhile it posted a 80.5% price increase in Q4'24, reaching an estimated market cap of $370B. This surge came amid a $1.25B tender offer that valued the company at $350B. SpaceX's momentum is noteworthy given its already massive scale – with $14.2B in estimated 2024 revenue and over 14,000 employees, the company still managed 63% year-over-year growth.
• The AI revolution brought four new companies into the Power 20 rankings: xAI (#9), Coreweave (#12), Perplexity (#16), and Glean (#20). xAI saw share prices surge more than 65% as it breached a $60B market cap. This AI-driven transformation was also exemplified by Anthropic (#3), which saw marketplace activity surge 5x quarter-over-quarter while reaching $800M in ARR in September 2024 – representing estimated 700% year-over-year growth. 

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AI-linked companies continued to hit new milestones: 

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• Databricks saw share prices grow 39% and reached a $62B market cap, on the heels of a massive $10B December funding round – one of the largest venture capital raises in history. The company's marketplace activity jumped 56% QoQ. This momentum reflects surging investor interest in Databricks's solutions that help businesses use their data in AI pipelines and downstream LLM-based applications. xAI raised a $6B round, also in December.
• OpenAI reached an estimated $4B in ARR in September 2024 (+248% YoY), just two years after the release of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022. Despite this commercial traction, the company's Augment Price per share declined 9.41% for an estimated market cap $104B. This slide made it one of only two top 10 companies to see a price decrease in the quarter (the other was Ramp).
• Perplexity claimed the quarter's highest share price run-up at 147%, ending Q4'24 with an estimated market cap of $9.1B. This surge closely tracked the company's $500M funding round in December 2024, which valued it at $9B. Perplexity tied with Databricks as the sixth-most actively traded name on the platform.

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Looking ahead to 2025, we're closely watching several emerging companies that showed significant momentum in Q4'24: SambaNova Systems, Lambda, and Figure AI led our "Up-and-Coming Companies" list. Notably, Figure AI began to generate revenue from its humanoid robot shipments in the final days of 2024.

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With new AI firms rising fast, we expect more market transformation and new names to emerge in 2025. 

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Click here to see the Augment Power 20 report, with full rankings and league tables on the most active and biggest price gainers in full-year 2024.

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*Inclusion in the Augment Power 20 does not predict future performance and should not be considered investment advice. Investing in private companies in the secondary market carries risks, including potential lack of liquidity and limited financial information. Chart is based on estimated prices based on observed secondary market trading, bid-ask, and fund-mark data. Past activity not indicative of future results. The revenue figures are based on third-party estimates and are subject to limitations in data availability and methodology. For informational purposes only. Data reflects platform activity including trades and indicative pricing. Private market values may vary significantly. Securities transactions through Augment Capital, LLC, FINRA/SIPC. See these Disclosures for risks and methodology.