C3

Market position

C3.ai positions itself as an enterprise AI platform vendor and was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: AI Platforms, Q3 2026, following earlier Forrester Wave Leader recognitions for AI/ML platforms in 2022 and 2024. As a public company its market capitalization was approximately $1.6 billion in August 2026, with the share price down materially from its post-IPO highs.

The company emphasizes prebuilt, industry-specific applications built on an ontology-powered platform and grounded in domain expertise accumulated over more than 15 years, combined with generative and agentic capabilities that produce cited answers from proprietary enterprise data and automatically generate governed production applications.

Technology

The core technology is the C3 Agentic AI Platform, an ontology-powered application development and runtime environment for building, deploying and governing enterprise AI at scale, complemented by C3 AI Studio (an integrated development environment), prebuilt AI applications, C3 Generative AI (enterprise generative AI grounded in proprietary customer data returning cited answers), and C3 Code, which uses autonomous agents to turn natural-language requests into production-ready applications with data pipelines, models, business logic, security controls and interfaces. Founder Thomas Siebel is named as inventor or co-inventor on 29 issued patents covering enterprise software architecture, AI systems, large-scale data management and distributed computing.

Go-to-market

The company sells directly to large enterprise and public-sector accounts and works through strategic partnerships with hyperscalers and large systems integrators — including Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud, McKinsey & Company and Baker Hughes — plus a Strategic Integrator Program that lets partners license the platform to build and resell their own applications. It publishes customer stories and industry-specific application portfolios, and has built a federal business led by a dedicated Federal Systems organization.

Large enterprises and government organizations, including defense and intelligence agencies, navies and maritime shipyards, federal, state and local government agencies, manufacturers, oil and gas operators, utilities, and healthcare organizations.

Geography

Headquartered in Redwood City, California, with operations across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia Pacific region and internationally.

History

Founded in 2009 and incorporated in Delaware, the company was briefly named C3 Energy and then C3IoT (C3 IoT, Inc.) before changing its name to C3.ai, Inc. in June 2019. Ahead of its public listing it executed a 6-for-1 reverse stock split on November 25, 2020, and went public on the NYSE on December 9, 2020, pricing 15.5 million shares at $42.00 for approximately $651 million in gross proceeds, alongside concurrent private placements of $100 million by Spring Creek Capital (affiliated with Koch Industries) and $50 million by Microsoft. Shares more than doubled on the first trading day to close at $92.49 for a market capitalization of $8.9 billion and reached an all-time high close of $177.47 on December 22, 2020, before declining substantially in subsequent years. Stephen Ehikian, former acting administrator of the U.S. General Services Administration, was appointed CEO effective September 1, 2025, with Siebel becoming executive chairman; company leadership materials subsequently list Siebel as Chairman and CEO from 2026 and Ehikian as President. In February 2026 the company cut 26% of its workforce and reported a large loss.

Risks & controversies

Following the 2020 IPO the company faced market skepticism and criticism, including over Thomas Siebel liquidating shares worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the months afterward, and an investor lawsuit and short sellers questioning its metrics. The company remains substantially unprofitable, with a fiscal 2025 net loss of $288.7 million and a trailing twelve-month net margin of -187.95%, and it cut 26% of its workforce in February 2026 amid declining revenue, with shares falling 17% on that news and trading roughly 79% below their level five years earlier. Voting control is concentrated: as of April 30, 2025, Siebel and related entities controlled approximately 52.4% of voting power through a dual-class structure in which Class B shares carry 50 votes each.