The world's most powerful person used to be Vladimir Putin. This year he was defeated by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, according to the Forbes ranking of powerful people who make you question what you've been doing with your life so far. It's safe to say that Mr. Putin knows plenty about power, and he believes that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will not only change the world as we know it, but the global balance of power as well. It looks like other world leaders agree, with China and the US fighting for AI supremacy and the EU scrambling to catch up. Real growth is fueled by cold hard cash, so we've put together a list of the 10 biggest artificial intelligence startups in the world by funding.

You may have heard us talk about CB Insights before. What CB Insights does is provide a huge database of private company information that is collected using artificial intelligence. They then sell this data to 100s of firms that need accurate data. Sure, you can go pay $50 a month to Crunchbase and get private company data but you're getting crowdsourced data as opposed to data collected by AI agents and cleansed by people that don't live in Mumbai. We've talked about a fair number of these companies already, and we're already sharpening our pencils to make sure that we profile each and every one of them as fast as our little big hands can type.