A total of 31 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in January, the largest count of companies to join in a single month since June 2022. Collectively, those companies added $9.3 billion in funding and $58.5 billion in value to the board. In exit news, 9-year-old fintech unicorn Brex was acquired by Capital One for $5.2 billion. That's well below its January 2022 valuation of $12.3 billion but still marks a win for earlier investors seeking liquidity. Among sectors, AI and AI infrastructure contributed the most new unicorns, totaling nine from those two areas. The next-leading sectors, with three new unicorns each, were manufacturing and security propelled by AI. AI was also a major contributor to new unicorns in the semiconductor, defense and autonomous driving sectors. The largest funding last month for a unicorn company was $20 billion to Elon Musk's xAI at an estimated value of $230 billion. Within a month of that funding, xAI in early February announced a merger with...
learn more
