With less progress being made with the government funded NASA organization, privately funded companies have been joining in the race to mars and have been getting closer by the day.
Notable Componies
Space X
Space X is an American based company specializing in rockets. They were founded in 2002 and since then build 3 large scale space vehicles and at the moment of writing this have recently just done land testing for the Falcon 9 spacecraft.
Virgin Galactic
Virgin Galactic is a company less based on space exploration and more based on traveling and tourism. However, they still do exploration on a lower scale. They hope to get public tourism open for 250,000.
Blue Origin
Blue Origin is a company founded by the same person that founded Amazon.com Jeff Bezos. It is lesser known then most other ones, it got 22 million dollars in its second round of funding.