Tech companies
69 Tech companies terms explained simply, ordered from basic to advanced. Start at the top if the topic is new to you.
Basic
Adobe
The company behind Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Acrobat and the PDF format.
Airbnb
A website and app where people rent out their homes, or a room, to travelers.
Alibaba
China's giant of online marketplaces, which also runs a major cloud.
Amazon
An online store with its own delivery network, and the company that runs AWS.
AMD
The chip designer that competes with Intel in CPUs and with NVIDIA in GPUs.
Anthropic
The AI company behind Claude, built around making models safe and useful.
Apple
The company that sells the iPhone and the Mac, plus the services that run on them.
Atlassian
The Australian company behind Jira and Confluence, tools teams use to plan and document work.
ByteDance
The Chinese tech company behind TikTok and its recommendation engine.
Canva
An online design tool that lets anyone make posters, posts and slides from templates.
ChatGPT
OpenAI's chat assistant, the app that brought AI chatbots to the general public.
Cisco
The company that makes much of the network gear connecting offices to the internet.
Claude
Anthropic's family of AI models, and the assistant app built on them.
Cloudflare
A global network that sits in front of websites to make them faster and safer.
DeepSeek
A Chinese AI lab whose open-weight models showed that top AI could be built for less.
Dell
The American maker of PCs for offices and servers for data centers.
Discord
An app for online communities to chat by text, voice and video in shared spaces.
Dropbox
A company that keeps a folder of your files in sync across all your devices.
Duolingo
A language-learning app that turns daily practice into a game.
Figma
A design tool in the browser where whole teams design apps and websites together.
Gemini
Google's family of AI models, and the assistant app that carries the same name.
GitHub
A website where teams store their code with Git and work on it together.
Globant
An Argentine-born company that builds software for other companies around the world.
The search company that gives most products away and makes its money on ads.
Google Cloud
Google's cloud business: computing, storage, data and AI services rented by the hour.
Huawei
A Chinese company that makes mobile network equipment, phones and its own chips.
Hugging Face
The website where people share AI models and datasets, and the tools to use them.
IBM
A century-old computer company that sells software, consulting and mainframes.
Intel
The American company behind most PC and server processors for decades.
Lenovo
The Chinese company that sells more PCs than anyone, from ThinkPads to Motorola phones.
Mercado Libre
Latin America's largest online marketplace, with its own payments and delivery network.
Meta
The company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, paid for by advertising.
Microsoft
The company of Windows and Office, now just as much a cloud company with Azure.
Midjourney
A small AI lab whose service turns a written description into an image.
Mistral AI
A French company that builds AI language models, many of them with open weights.
Mozilla
The nonprofit-owned organization behind the Firefox browser and an open web.
Netflix
A streaming service, and the engineering it built to deliver video to the whole world.
Notion
An all-in-one workspace for notes, documents, wikis and simple databases.
Nubank
A Brazilian bank that lives entirely in a phone app, with no branches.
NVIDIA
The company that sells the shovels of the AI gold rush.
OpenAI
The company that made ChatGPT and turned AI into a household topic.
Oracle
The company behind one of the most used business databases, now also a cloud provider.
Palantir
Software that joins an organization's scattered data so people can act on it.
PayPal
An online wallet that lets you pay or send money with an email address instead of a card number.
Perplexity
An AI answer engine that searches the web and replies with a summary and its sources.
Power BI
Microsoft's tool for turning company data into interactive charts and reports.
Qualcomm
Designs the chips, and owns key patents, that let phones talk to cell towers.
Rappi
A Latin American app for ordering food, groceries and almost anything to your door.
Salesforce
The company that sells, as an online subscription, the software to manage customers.
Samsung
Korean giant that sells phones and TVs, and makes much of the world's memory chips.
SAP
The German company whose software runs the back office of many large businesses.
Shopify
A platform that lets any business set up and run its own online store.
Signal
A private messaging app run by a nonprofit, built to know as little about you as it can.
Slack
A chat app for work, organized in channels instead of endless email threads.
SpaceX
The rocket company that also runs Starlink, internet from thousands of satellites.
Spotify
A Swedish streaming service for music and podcasts, free with ads or paid monthly.
Stripe
A company that lets websites and apps accept online payments with a few lines of code.
Telegram
A messaging app built around the cloud, huge groups and public channels.
Tesla
An electric car maker that treats the car as a computer on wheels.
Uber
An app that matches people who need a ride, or a meal, with nearby drivers.
xAI
Elon Musk's AI company, maker of the Grok chatbot built into X.
Xiaomi
A Chinese maker of phones and smart home gadgets, and more recently electric cars.
Zoom
A video meeting app, and the company behind it, that became a verb during the pandemic.
Intermediate
Arm
The British company that designs the processor blueprints inside almost every phone.
ASML
The Dutch company that builds the machines every advanced chip factory depends on.
Broadcom
An American chip designer behind data center networking, Wi-Fi and custom AI chips.
Databricks
A cloud platform for processing, analyzing and training AI on a company's data.
Snowflake
A data warehouse sold as a cloud service, billed by how much computing you use.
TSMC
The factory that makes the world's most advanced chips for everyone else.