In The Space Of Months, AI Funding Boom Adds More Than $500B In Value To Unicorn Board And Reshuffles Top 20

The Crunchbase Unicorn Board crested $6 trillion in total value for the first time in August 2025. It only took around 18 months to get there after hitting the $5 trillion mark.

Within a few months of the August milestone, the board added another half-trillion-plus in value, an unprecedented increase, even when compared to the peak market of 2021 and early 2022.  The rapid acceleration in unicorn values highlights the remarkable pace at which the AI sector is driving up revenue — and, in turn, valuations.

Much of the valuation surge on the board — which lists private companies valued at $1 billion or more — was driven by frontier model companies adding hundreds of billions in value, an analysis of Crunchbase data shows.

Notably, there was also an uptick in companies that reached decacorn valuations for the first time and notched significant jumps in value over their previous marks.

Reshuffling of the top 20

These valuation hikes were most noticeable in the 20 most highly valued companies on the Unicorn Board, which has undergone a major reshuffling at the top.

OpenAI added $200 billion in the space of six months in early October after adding $143 billion in the prior six months. With a $500 billion valuation, the San Francisco-based startup is now the most highly valued company on the board, after it leapfrogged SpaceX for the No. 1 spot.

SpaceX itself added $50 billion to its value in September, taking the Hawthorne, California-based company’s valuation to $400 billion.

Anthropic, the fourth most highly valued unicorn after SpaceX and ByteDance, added $121.5 billion in value in the space of six months, valuing the San Francisco-based company at $183 billion as of September.

Meanwhile, Databricks, another San Francisco-based company, added $38 billion in value within nine months, placing the company sixth on the board with a valuation of $100 billion. That ranks it just below China’s Ant Group, which was valued at $150 billion in 2018.

Sydney-based design software maker Canva added $10 billion in value in August in an employee share sale led by Fidelity that valued the company at $42 billion.

New decacorns

Eleven companies have already joined the decacorn club in H2 so far — outpacing the half-year counts we’ve seen since H2 2022.

Of the 11 new decacorns, the company that increased its value by the largest percentage was humanoid robotics company Figure. The San Jose, California-based startup catapulted into the top 20 with a $1 billion funding at a post money valuation of $39 billion. That was up from its March 2024 valuation of $2.7 billion — marking a more than 1,300% increase in 18 months. The funding was led by New York-based Parkway Venture Capital, which also led Figure’s Series A funding in 2023. The company is building out humanoid robots for home and commercial work, and is investing in manufacturing and training its own AI model.

Another unicorn that posted a big valuation surge is cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, which raised $500 million at a $15 billion valuation in September. The San Francisco-based company was last valued in 2019 at $4 billion.

Many of these newly minted decacorns’ ratcheted up by more than $5 billion in less than a year. Along with Figure and Kraken, the following are other new decacorns that have emerged just since the start of the second half of 2025:

• France-based frontier model company Mistral was valued at $13.2 billion in a funding led by Netherlands-based chipmaker ASML.
• San Francisco-based livestream shopping platform Whatnot raised $225 million at $11.5 billion value led by CapitalG and DST Global. Whatnot was last valued at $5 billion in January.
• Ring health tracker Oura based in Finland raised $900 million at an $11 billion valuation led by Fidelity.
• New York-based Bilt Rewards, a commerce network for renters, raised $250 million at a $10.8 billion value led by General Catalyst and GID.
• Colorado-based quantum computing company Quantinuum, part of Honeywell, raised $600 million at a $10.6 billion valuation led by NVentures.
• Palo Alto AI lab Cognition, focused on reasoning and code, raised  $400 million at a $10.2 billion value led by Founders Fund. Cognition, last valued at $4 billion in March, acquired Windsurf in July.
• San Francisco-based Mercor connects human expertise for AI lab training. Mercor raised $350 million at a $10 billion valuation led by Felicis 1. Felicis also led its prior funding in February at a $2 billion valuation.
• Colorado-based Crusoe Energy Systems, which is building AI datacenters, raised $1.4 billion at a $10 billion valuation led by Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners.
• San Francisco-based conversational customer experience AI startup Sierra raised $350 million at a $10 billion valuation led by Greenoaks.

In Q2, five companies joined the $10 billion-plus club. They include Applied Intuition, Helsing, Perplexity, Thinking Machines Lab and Safe Super Intelligence. (Perplexity has since raised multiple rounds to reach a value of $20 billion.)

Markets heat up

While the frontier AI labs are seeing the largest valuation increases, there are a greater number of companies this year joining the decacorn club, second only to counts seen in 2021. We find 82 private companies in the decacorn club as of October 2025 with more than a third that raised funding in 2025 to date. This pick-up in higher counts of new decacorns could be an indicator that the IPO markets warm up in 2026.

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Illustration: Dom Guzman