New Post: Bubble & Build: The 2025 MAD (Machine Learning, AI & Data) Landscape
A market map + 25 crisp ideas for an over‑heated, heads‑down year in AI & data
Anyone who has been near AI this year has felt both: the froth of record funding and the grind of real deployment. Bubbles can be silly; they also finance railroads. 2025 is the year AI shifted from chatbots to systems that actually do work: agents with tools and memory, wired into governed data, powered by reasoning models. That tension—speculation funding infrastructure—frames everything that follows.
Welcome to the 2025 MAD (Machine Learning, AI & Data) Landscape, our eleventh edition since 2012 (an almost annual effort, prior editions here). This is the biggest redraw in recent memory. We made the editorial decision to substantially cut the logo count—from a peak of 2,000+ last year to ~1,150—to make the map legible and, frankly, possible amid an explosion of new companies and products. We also gave more space to the hyperscalers and pure-play category leaders (NVIDIA, Databricks, Snowflake, OpenAI, Anthropic etc) to reflect where market share, distribution, and developer gravity sit today.
Structure-wise, we made major edits. We deleted a few sections (notably folding the former “open source” box into the broader map as open weights/OSS now permeate every layer) and added others, for example an explicit agent stack (agent platforms, agents infra/tooling) and local AI (local/on device LLM runtimes). The result is a cleaner flow from data to infra to ML/AI to agents/applications.
As in recent years, the landscape is available both as a:
PDF (high-res, zoomable) – https://mattturck.com/landscape/mad2025.pdf
website/interactive version (searchable, with data cards) – mad.firstmark.com
With that, here’s our roundup of the 25 ideas for 2025: what’s breaking through, what’s consolidating, and where the next wave of value is likely to accrue.
(Thank you: as every year, the MAD landscape is a team effort. Major thanks to the FirstMark crew – Aman Kabeer (co-author), Leah Levine (logos/logistics), Ben Winn (promotion) and Ryan Sullivan (blog refresh), as well as Paolo Campos (PDF design) and Jonathan Grana (interactive version, which he does as a side/promotional project at Go Fractional)
Macro & Markets
1/ Bubble dynamics without the brakes. The market is frothy again, but this isn’t 1999. Money is plentiful and valuations often stratospheric, with a clear “AI premium”, especially around agents, frontier AI, and anything growing fast (retention concerns notwithstanding). As tends to be the case in paradigm shifts, capex/opex are front-loaded. Demand will need to materialize in a big way if the space is to stick the landing, but habits often take time to change and adoption is uneven. Add the human reality: many teams are running at 996-ish intensity—frenetic sprints that accelerate shipping velocity but raise burnout risk. On the other hand, the paradigm shift is clear, revenue is real, growth is often impressive, unit...