Editor’s note: This article is part of a series looking at how the venture and startup landscape has evolved over the past 10 years. Read more articles about ultra-unicorns, seed funding, Series B trends, the rise of megafunds and the unicorn backlog over the decade.
Ultra-unicorns — private companies valued at $5 billion or more — are a growing cohort, with 17 companies joining this elite 211-member club so far in 2025.
A further analysis of Crunchbase data finds that alongside active venture firms, private equity investors have played a significant role in funding this group of highly valued private companies, which make up 13% of the overall Unicorn Board but represent the majority of value, accounting for $3.5 trillion of the total $6 trillion collective value.
Among the most active by investment count in $5 billion-plus unicorns, private equity firms represent half of the firms listed, Crunchbase data shows.
We analyzed the investors who amassed the largest count of portfolio companies and those who invested at the highest values. Let’s dive in.
Andreessen leads
Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel have the highest investment counts in $5 billion-plus unicorns, our data shows.
Tiger Global ranked third despite its pulling back massively from investing in private companies since the second half of 2022 and reportedly selling off investment stakes in individual companies. The New York-based firm has invested in ultra-unicorns including Databricks, Scale AI and Shein.
It is worth noting that across this list of leading investors, half are venture capital and half are private equity investors — an indication of how much private equity has invested in this asset class of highly valued private companies.
Private equity investors dominated the list by portfolio counts as they rack up later-stage investments across a wider pool of companies compared to venture capital firms that invest earlier and keep investing in their winning companies.
Portfolio counts were led by Tiger (19% of companies), Coatue (18%), then SoftBank Vision Fund, GIC and venture investor Andreessen Horowitz.
Early investors
Andreessen, Accel and Sequoia Capital hold the top three slots for investment counts in Series A and B rounds, Crunchbase data shows. Those firms have invested in ultra-unicorns including Scale AI, Databricks, Stripe and Klarna.
Andreessen invested in 16 unique companies at early-stage, while Accel and Sequoia each invested in 14 companies.
The list of early investors was dominated by U.S. firms.
Active investors in China — the second-largest market for $5 billion-plus unicorns — were Beijing’s IDG Capital, Hong Kong-based HSG (formerly Sequoia Capital China), and Shenzhen-based Tencent.
Few private equity investors are listed as active at this funding stage.
Andreessen, Accel and Index Ventures — which invested in ultra-unicorns including Figma, Discord and Revolut — led the most rounds from seed through Series B.
Y Combinator leads for seed
At the seed level, portfolio counts are led by Y Combinator by a large margin, with the startup accelerator representing 10% of the seed investments in the $5 billion-dollar-plus club. It was an early investor in Rippling, Scale AI and Deel.
SV Angel 1, which typically invests with smaller checks, ranks second. The San Francisco-based firm was an early investor in Harvey and Notion.
Other seed investors in this cohort in the top five are Initialized Capital — which invests heavily in YC companies — Soma Capital and Homebrew.
Private equity dominates for dollars
SoftBank and Softbank Vision Fund led the largest rounds by amounts in this asset class. (Note: This does not indicate the amount an investor invested in a round, but the overall size of the rounds they led.)
This list was dominated by private equity as well as some Big Tech companies including Meta and Microsoft, which backed Scale AI and OpenAI, respectively. Andressen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital also make the list of leading investments above $8 billion.
Will exits pick up?
To date, six companies valued at or above $5 billion have exited in 2025, compared to nine companies in 2024.
A number of ultra-unicorns have also moved toward IPOs. They include Figma (valued at $12.5 billion), Navan ($9.2 billion) and Klarna ($6.7 billion), which have all filed confidentially with the SEC.
With $482 billion in investor capital placed into these 211 private high-value companies since the early 2000s, a few more listings in 2025 would certainly help alleviate the venture capital liquidity crunch.
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.
For this article, we examined a subset of these companies which are still private and have a current value of $5 billion or more.
Investment analysis is based on disclosed rounds in Crunchbase.
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.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the
Crunchbase Daily.
