AI's second tier doesn't make headlines - it makes the markets, while nobody's watching.
Together AI doesn't build its own star model like GPT or Gemini. It provides the infrastructure - the cloud, the machines, the pipeline - that other companies run open models on (systems with public code that anyone can download and tinker with, unlike OpenAI's closed models). Customers switch to them because they pay several times less for the same or better work. The company pushed its valuation to $8.3 billion with a round led in part by the investment arm of Saudi state oil company Aramco - petrodollars are now funding the AI pipes directly, beyond the usual chips.
Replit is a browser workshop - you write in plain language what app you want, and AI assembles it, tests it, puts it online, without installing anything on your computer. In half a year its valuation tripled - from $3 billion to $9 billion, because piles of people with zero lines of code behind them are now building their own tools. It's clear where this game is heading - programming is stopping being a closed club with an entry ticket.
Isomorphic Labs is a subsidiary of Google DeepMind, the lab that built AlphaFold - the tool that predicted the shape of almost every known protein. Here the stakes are drugs: instead of a scientist testing piles of molecules by hand in a lab, AI hands over the candidates ready-made. The company has raised $2.7 billion in total investment - and still has zero approved drugs on the market. The promise is huge. The market is still waiting for proof.
Perplexity isn't just another search engine with ads on top. You ask something, it reads the sources instead of you, and returns a cited, ready answer, without sending you off clicking through a pile of sites. It's valued at around $20 billion and has drawn investors as varied as they are curious - Amazon (the online retailer turned cloud empire) founder Jeff Bezos personally, and even footballer Cristiano Ronaldo among the names. The bet is direct - to peel off part of the habit Google has held for decades.
Here's where I stop and think
The second tier isn't second-rate. These companies aren't fighting for your attention with a chatbot - they're fighting for the infrastructure the chatbots sit on, for the way we write code, for the drugs we'll take tomorrow, for the habit of looking things up. OpenAI and Google win the headlines. Together, Replit, Isomorphic and Perplexity win the markets, while nobody's looking that way.
I feel real value here, because these four solve a specific, real problem - they don't promise general artificial intelligence at the end of the rainbow, they just do one narrow job cheaper, faster or more honestly than the old way. I'll say it straight: I'd bet more on Together AI and Perplexity than on half the names you read in your feed every day - because they solve something I'm already paying for, right now.