Founded by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, who agreed to start the company in a meeting at a Denny's roadside diner in East San…
Founded by Elon Musk in a converted El Segundo warehouse; he spent a third of his reported fortune, $100 million, to get SpaceX going. SpaceX…
A fusion-energy company building pulsed fusion machines designed to recover electricity directly from the plasma — aiming to put the power source of…
An aerospace company bringing back supersonic passenger flight — building Overture, a Mach 1.7 airliner, and the American-made engines to power it.
Founded as a nonprofit artificial-intelligence research lab with the mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of…
A neurotechnology company pioneering implantable brain–computer interfaces — devices that connect the human brain directly to computers, aimed first…
A defense-technology company building autonomous systems and the Lattice AI platform to modernize military capability, founded by Oculus creator…
Founded by a group of researchers who left OpenAI — including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei — as an AI safety and research company focused on…
An AI robotics company building general-purpose humanoid robots to take on physical labor, pairing advanced hardware with an in-house AI system meant…
A nuclear-energy company building small modular reactors to produce cheap, clean power and synthetic fuels independent of the grid, using…
A weather-technology company modernizing cloud seeding to increase rainfall and address water scarcity, pairing radar, autonomous drones, and…
Founded as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company by Hiram Sibley, Samuel Selden and others, and renamed Western Union in…
Organized by Alexander Graham Bell's father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard on the strength of Bell's telephone patent. It evolved into American Bell…
Formed through the J.P. Morgan-orchestrated merger of Edison General Electric and the Thomson-Houston Electric Company. GE became the archetypal…
Founded as the Haloid Company, a photographic-paper maker. It acquired the rights to Chester Carlson's xerography and transformed into the copier…
Founded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) via Charles Flint's merger of four firms, and renamed International Business Machines in…
Founded by the Galvin brothers in Chicago and renamed for its first hit product — the Motorola car radio. It put wireless in the soldier's hand, in…
Founded as Geophysical Service Inc. (GSI), an oil-exploration seismology firm. Reorganized and renamed Texas Instruments in 1951, it became a…
Founded by Stanford graduates Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in a rented one-car garage at 367 Addison Avenue, with $538 in capital and a coin toss to…
Founded by Fairchild Semiconductor veterans Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore (with investor Arthur Rock), beginning in the old Union Carbide building in…
Founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to sell a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, and located in Albuquerque because that was home to Altair…
Founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, starting in the garage of Jobs's parents' Los Altos home. Apple made computers personal and…
Founded as Software Development Laboratories with about $2,000 in capital. Inspired by Edgar Codd's relational-database paper, it became the dominant…
Founded by Stanford staff (and married couple) Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, who commercialized multi-protocol router technology developed at…
Founded by Jeff Bezos in the garage of his rented Bellevue home, initially as online bookseller “Cadabra,” soon renamed Amazon. It became “the…
Founded by Pierre Omidyar as “AuctionWeb,” eBay pioneered person-to-person online auctions and became one of the defining marketplaces of the early…
Founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph as a DVD-rental-by-mail service. Netflix reinvented itself twice — into streaming and then original…
Founded by Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, incorporated in the Menlo Park garage of Susan Wojcicki (later YouTube CEO). Google…
Founded as Tesla Motors by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning; Elon Musk led its first funding round in 2004 and later became CEO. Tesla…
Founded by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg with his roommates, launched from a Harvard dorm room. It became the world's dominant social network.
