A total 195 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in the first half of 2026 ' far surpassing counts seen since the second half of 2022. Already, H1 is above the new unicorn totals for all of 2025, when 193 companies were minted with that status. Among this cohort, robotics and AI neolabs were the leading sectors for new unicorns. Other industries that stand out were in financial services, healthcare and biotech as well as AI infrastructure, AI deployment and devtools, defense, semiconductor and aerospace. H1 new unicorns have added roughly $440 billion in value to the board ' 5% of the board's current value. These companies have raised $80 billion over time, representing 5% of funding raised by still-private, unicorn-valued companies. The most valuable new unicorn this year is China-based open-source model developer DeepSeek, which was valued at $50 billion in its first external financing. Seychelles-based crypto exchange OKX, valued at $25 billion, is the second most...
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