The 14-Layer Taxonomy

From semiconductor equipment and power generation through compute, data, models, robotics hardware, agents, and economic governance, every layer of the machine economy mapped and measured.

  • Layer 0 — Industrial Foundations (8 companies)

  • Layer 1 — Compute (9 companies)

  • Layer 2 — Data (7 companies)

  • Layer 3 — Model (12 companies)

  • Layer 4 — Simulation & Sim2Real (4 companies)

  • Layer 5 — Inference (5 companies)

  • Layer 6 — Inference Verification (5 companies)

  • Layer 7 — Robotics Hardware (6 companies)

  • Layer 8 — Robotics Intelligence (5 companies)

  • Layer 9 — Agent (7 companies)

  • Layer 10 — Distribution (6 companies)

  • Layer 11 — Applications (10 companies)

  • Layer 12 — Economic & Governance (5 companies)

  • Layer 13 — End-State Machine Economy (6 companies)

Three Entity Classes

Public equities, private companies, and protocol tokens — each analyzed through platform economics, competitive positioning, and financial fundamentals.

  • PUBLIC (~40 companies) NVIDIA, CoreWeave, Alphabet, Palantir, Oracle, Snowflake, Adobe, Shopify, Salesforce, Coinbase, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and more. Infrastructure outperforms application in the SaaSpocalypse, while Chinese AI re-rates on DeepSeek momentum.

  • PRIVATE (~30 companies) OpenAI ($852B), Anthropic ($380B), Mistral, Scale AI, Databricks, Figure AI, Anduril, Harvey, Cognition, Hugging Face. The humanoid eruption, revenue traction vs. platform bets, and the IPO pipeline as a systemic event.

  • TOKEN (~25 protocols) TAO, NEAR, ETH, SOL, HNT, RENDER, GRT, FET, FIL, and more. The value capture paradox deepens — Ethereum's settlement thesis tested by L2 margin extraction, DePIN economics remain broken, governance fragility persists.

Key Themes This Quarter

  • 01 — The $24B ARR Frontier OpenAI hit $2B/month in March 2026. Anthropic went from $1B to $14B ARR in 14 months. The fastest revenue ramp in enterprise software history is rewriting what's possible for AI-native business models.

  • 02 — Infrastructure vs. Application Divergence Compute and infrastructure companies (NVIDIA, CoreWeave) continue to re-rate upward while SaaS applications face multiple compression. The market is pricing AI picks-and-shovels as the durable value layer.

  • 03 — Humanoid Eruption Figure AI, Agility Robotics, 1X, and Unitree raised over $3B combined. Robotics Intelligence (Layer 8) posted the highest QoQ valuation growth in the entire taxonomy. VLA models are bridging the sim-to-real gap.

  • 04 — The Token Revenue Paradox Protocol tokens carry billions in FDV on millions in actual fee revenue. Ethereum's post-Dencun mainnet fees collapsed 40% as L2s capture 94% of margins. Helium's DC burn — the purest usage signal in crypto — still generates only $8M/year.

  • 05 — Agentic Coding Goes Vertical Cognition (Devin + Windsurf) went from $10M to $200M ARR. Suno hit $300M ARR in music generation. Harvey crossed $195M in legal AI. Vertical AI agents are proving revenue traction faster than horizontal platforms.

Access the Full Encyclopedia

121-slide deck with company profiles, financial fundamentals, strategic analysis, and quarterly performance tracking across the entire machine economy.