Since 2023, 259 new unicorns have joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board, adding $605 billion in total value and altogether raising $130 billion, Crunchbase data shows. Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners lead in portfolio counts and funding rounds for these new unicorns. Other top investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Accel and Nvidia, the semiconductor giant at the epicenter of the AI surge.
Each investor has added a dozen or more unicorn portfolio companies in that timeframe.
This most recently funded cohort of unicorns — as well as who’s backing them — is worth monitoring, especially in a tighter funding environment. Many of the startups in this small group of companies are poised to lead in the red-hot AI space or have shown major revenue growth. Just over half of the companies are U.S.-based, while 17% are from China.
HSG, formerly Sequoia Capital China, and Tencent are the two China-based firms that were among the most active. The rest of the top new unicorn investors are U.S.-based, with multistage venture, corporate investors leading, as well as a few growth equity firms. Y Combinator is the single accelerator on the list.
Annual counts drop
The board currently hosts 1,586 private companies altogether valued at $5.9 trillion with $1 trillion in funding raised.
The most highly valued in this newly minted cohort in the AI sector were xAI, Safe Superintelligence, Perplexity, Anysphere and Mistral AI.
From China, the most highly valued companies were in the semiconductor sector, including Yangtze Memory Technologies, GTA Semiconductor and Changxin New Bridge as well as Huawei’s self-driving subsidiary, Yinwang Smart Technology.
Led Series A and B
Multistage investors Andreessen, Sequoia and Lightspeed led or co-led the most Series A and B rounds in the minted unicorns since 2023, Crunchbase data shows. These investments were largely in different companies at Series A and B.
Should these companies exit, early-stage investors will see the highest multiple on proceeds from their investments.
Among this list of leading rounds at Series A and B were multistage venture capital firms, corporate investors and a few private equity firms.
Y Combinator leads with seed portfolio counts
Investing at seed in the most promising companies is the goal of every venture investor. The most-active investors at seed in these unicorns which joined since 2023 were Y Combinator, with nine portfolio companies, and Andreessen and SV Angel 1 with five each. New York-based Lux Capital, Menlo Park, California-based Khosla Ventures, and Berlin-based Global Founders Capital each had four.
The spendiest investors
The largest rounds raised in this cohort went to xAI, which raised $6 billion from a consortium of investors with no lead investor named. Safe Superintelligence raised a $2 billion round and a $1 billion round preceding that led by Greenoaks.
General Catalyst led or co-led the highest count of funding rounds at $100 million and above with 10 investments at a total of $3.6 billion.
From the leading five investors in this cohort, two firms led or co-led rounds of more than $1 billion — Lightspeed and Andreessen led rounds with more than $1 billion in funding. The largest funding Lightspeed led was in Skild AI, and Andreessen led a $414 million funding in Mistral AI.
The power law in venture capital and few exits
The most active investors in all current private unicorns over time were Tiger Global, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, per Crunchbase data. The only firm to drop off the list for this cohort was Tiger Global, which has massively pulled back from private company investments since 2022, due to the slow down in liquidity.
However, very few of these newly minted unicorns have graduated to the Exited Unicorn List. Only six (2%) of these companies have exited, three went public, including CoreWeave, and three were acquired, including Windsurf.
Related Crunchbase unicorn lists:
Related reading:
Methodology
The Crunchbase Unicorn Board is a curated list that includes private unicorn companies with post-money valuations of $1 billion or more and is based on Crunchbase data. New companies are added to the Unicorn Board as they reach the $1 billion valuation mark as part of a funding round.
The unicorn board does not reflect internal company valuations — such as those set via a 409a process for employee stock options — as these differ from, and are more likely to be lower than, a priced funding round. We also do not adjust valuations based on investor writedowns, which change quarterly, as different investors will not value the same company consistently within the same quarter.
Funding to unicorn companies includes all private financings to companies that are tagged as unicorns, as well as those that have since graduated to The Exited Unicorn Board.
Exits analyzed here only include the first time a company exits.
Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.
The board currently hosts 1,586 private companies altogether valued at $5.9 trillion with $1 trillion in funding raised.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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