Pokee Named to CB Insights' 10th Annual AI 100 List

Pokee has been named to CB Insights' 10th annual AI 100 list, and highlighted as an enterprise AI company. Here is what this milestone means to us, why the enterprise category matters, and where we are headed next.
A meaningful milestone
We're excited to share that Pokee has been named to CB Insights' 10th annual AI 100 list — and especially proud to be recognized in the enterprise AI category.
This recognition reflects something we believe deeply: the next wave of AI value won't come from chat interfaces or generative novelties. It will come from AI agents that execute — reliably, securely, and inside the environments where serious enterprises actually operate.
That is the future we've been building toward at Pokee from day one.
Why we built Pokee
We started Pokee with a specific conviction: the most valuable AI deployments in the coming decade will happen on-premise and on-device — not in someone else's cloud. Banks, insurers, healthcare systems, law firms, and governments need AI agents that can reason, plan, and use tools inside their own infrastructure, where their data stays under their control.
That is a fundamentally different problem than building a better chatbot. It requires:
- A long-context architecture efficient enough to run on a single workstation or AI PC
- Reinforcement-learning-trained agents that can plan, reason, and orchestrate hundreds of tools
- Enterprise-grade security, persistence, and reliability
- Deep integration with the silicon and hardware customers already own Pokee is enterprise AI agent infrastructure for organizations that can't — and shouldn't — move their most sensitive workloads to the public cloud.
Why the enterprise category matters
The AI conversation has been dominated by horizontal SaaS for the last two years. But the largest pools of value — and the hardest problems — sit inside enterprises whose data, workflows, and compliance constraints don't fit a one-size-fits-all cloud model.
These customers don't want intelligence in theory. They want systems that are useful, reliable, auditable, and capable of running where work already happens — including air-gapped, on-premise, and on-device environments. That is the gap Pokee was built to close.
Being recognized in the enterprise category reflects exactly the work we've spent the last two years on: making powerful agents deployable in environments most AI companies don't even target.
The team and technology behind Pokee
This moment is a reflection of the people and partners behind Pokee. We've been fortunate to build alongside an exceptional team and an investor base aligned with our enterprise and silicon-first thesis — including Point72 Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung NEXT, and SCB 10X, alongside angels including Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel.
Our work today reaches some of the largest organizations in technology, finance, and the public sector. Customers and partners in our orbit include Google, Mastercard, Temasek, Lenovo, Qualcomm, and Intel — organizations that are rigorous about what runs inside their walls, and exactly the kinds of partners we want to build with.
This is also a reflection of the technical foundation the company was built on. Zheqing (Bill) Zhu, Pokee's founder and CEO, completed his PhD in reinforcement learning at Stanford and previously led Applied Reinforcement Learning at Meta AI, where he built Pearl — Meta's first production RL platform, deployed across dozens of product surfaces and powering close to half a billion dollars in annual revenue.
That background matters because Pokee has been built around a deep conviction that reinforcement learning, planning, reasoning, and tool use are the core ingredients of the next generation of AI agents — and that the way to make those agents enterprise-deployable is through a proprietary long-context architecture engineered specifically for on-premise and on-device hardware.
Where the industry is heading
We believe the next chapter of AI belongs to systems that are not only intelligent, but operational — systems that can run inside real organizations, integrate with real infrastructure, and produce real, auditable outcomes. The enterprises winning with AI five years from now will be the ones that brought it inside their walls early, with partners they trusted to build for their constraints rather than around them.
That conviction is what drives our team every day.
Thank you
We are deeply grateful to:
- Our team, for their ambition, rigor, and execution
- Our customers and partners, for trusting us with their most important workloads
- Our broader community, for believing in what we are building We see this recognition as both an honor and a signal. The market is moving toward agents that don't just talk — they act, securely and reliably, inside the environments where enterprises actually run. We are proud to be building in that direction, and we have only scratched the surface of what is ahead.
We're just getting started. Learn more at pokee.ai.