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January Delivers Highest New Unicorn Count In More Than 3 Years
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. And underlining the pace at which some startups are now sprinting to billion-dollar-plus valuations, four of the new unicorns are less than a year old. 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. Of the 31 companies that joined the board, 23 are U.S.-based and two hail from Canada. Germany, France, Belgium, Israel, Japan and India each added one new unicorn to the board last month. 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 another Musk-led company, rocketmaker SpaceX. 11 exits Brex’s acquisition by Capital One was the largest of the four M&A deals for unicorn-valued companies in January. On the IPO side, seven companies went public, the most high-profile of which were MiniMax and Z.ai, both foundation AI model companies based in China. Here are January’s newly minted unicorns. AI AI infrastructure Manufacturing Security Semiconductor Cryptocurrency Healthcare Defense Fintech Fitness Autonomous Driving Social media Education Compliance Energy 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. Illustration: Dom Guzman
Anthropic Raises $30B At $380B Valuation In Second-Largest Venture Funding Deal Of All Time
Generative AI company Anthropic announced Thursday that it raised $30 billion in a massive Series G funding round that values it at $380 billion post-money. The financing marks the largest venture funding deal of 2026 so far and the second-largest of all time, per Crunchbase data, following only rival OpenAI’s $40 billion funding in 2025. GIC and Coatue led the raise, which was also “co-led” by D.E. Shaw & Co. Ventures, Dragoneer Investment Group, Founders Fund, Iconiq Capital and MGX, according to the company. A slew of other backers participated in the round as well, and included previously announced investments from Microsoft and Nvidia. With this round, San Francisco-based Anthropic has now raised nearly $64 billion since its 2021 inception, per Crunchbase. The Claude chatbot developer remains the second-most highly valued generative AI startup behind rival OpenAI, which in October secured financing at a $500 billion valuation. Anthropic is also the fourth-most highly valued private company in the world, per Crunchbase data. It and OpenAI are reportedly both considering IPOs this year. Anthropic’s growth Anthropic says its run-rate revenue is now over $14 billion, a figure it claims grew over 10x annually in each of the past three years since it “earned its first dollar in revenue.” The number of customers spending over $100,000 annually on Claude (as represented by run-rate revenue) has grown 7x in the past year, the company added. Anthropic says the investment will fuel frontier research, product development and infrastructure expansions. “Whether it is entrepreneurs, startups, or the world’s largest enterprises, the message from our customers is the same: Claude is increasingly becoming more critical to how businesses work,” said Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer, in a statement. “This fundraising reflects the incredible demand we are seeing from these customers, and we will use this investment to continue building the enterprise-grade products and models they have come to depend on.” Chris Emanuel, head of the technology investment group at GIC, said in a statement that his firm believes that “Anthropic’s thoughtful approach to AI development is changing the way enterprises operate.” He added: “Our partnership and continued investment reflects our conviction in their visionary leadership team and technical depth as they expand access to advanced AI tools.” Related Crunchbase queries: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Next-Gen Nuclear Funding Looks Livelier Than Ever Following Inertia’s $450M Raise
As global energy demand continues to surge, driven by both rising household consumption and fast-expanding AI infrastructure, startup investors are increasingly turning to nuclear fusion and fission startups to supply our power-hungry era. They’re not afraid to write big checks either. The latest evidence of this was a $450 million Series A that Livermore, California-based fusion power startup Inertia Enterprises announced Wednesday. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round for the 2-year-old company, joined by Google Ventures, Threshold and other backers. Inertia plans to use the funds toward a fusion pilot at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which will involve building the world’s most powerful laser and a production line to mass manufacture fuel targets. The financing is the latest in a string of recent, very large deals around both fusion and nuclear fission. Per Crunchbase data, both funding and deal volume for the space hit a high last year, and 2026 is off to a promising start as well. Headline deals, leading fundraisers It’s mostly funding announcements, but not exclusively. On the fusion front, the highest profile recently proposed deal was Trump Media & Technology Group’s surprising announcement in December that it plans to combine with fusion company TAE Technologies in what TMTG called a stock transaction valued at more than $6 billion. The deal is a long time coming for TAE, which was founded in 1998 and is the oldest operating venture-backed fusion energy company in the Crunchbase dataset. The company has seen at least $1.5 billion in prior known funding to date. Other fusion companies have also been prodigious fundraisers. The leader is Commonwealth Fusion Systems, with $2.86 billion in equity funding, while other standouts include Helion Energy ($1 billion), Pacific Fusion ($900 million) and General Fusion ($357 million). Nuclear fission is another hot area for investment, with over $2.5 billion in funding last year, per Crunchbase. The largest deal was a $700 million Series D in late November for X-energy, a developer of advanced nuclear reactor and fuel technology. Activity looks to be accelerating further this year, with more than $270 million in funding, including a $140 million round two weeks ago for Tennessee-based Standard Nuclear, which manufactures advanced nuclear fuel for new reactors. Public markets too Public investors also appear receptive. Oklo, which develops nuclear reactors, went public in 2024 through a merger with a SPAC launched by Sam Altman. It’s down quite a bit from the height scaled late last year, but still had a recent market cap around $10 billion. Other SPAC deals have also popped up, including One Nuclear Energy, which wants to develop energy parks with small modular reactors to meet data center demand, and Hadron Energy, a developer of light-water micro-modular reactors. Meanwhile Terrestrial Energy, a developer of small modular nuclear plants, completed a SPAC merger in October. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
From AI Hype To AI Math: The Market Just Changed The Rules
For a while, AI felt like a cheat code. Mention AI on an earnings call, announce a bigger data center plan, sign a flashy partnership, and the market filled in the rest. Spend meant ambition. Ambition which meant valuation. That world is gone. Over the past few quarters, markets have quietly flipped from “reward any AI headline” to “show me the economics.” Not because AI stopped mattering, but because it started costing real money. Annual AI-related capex is now pushing past $600 billion, and investors are no longer debating whether AI is strategic. They are debating whether companies are overfunding it relative to their ability to turn spend into cash. That shift does not just affect public stocks. It changes how AI companies should be built, financed and exited. The early signs are out Look across Microsoft, Oracle and even the Nvidia–OpenAI relationship, and you see the same pattern repeating. First come massive commitments, huge infrastructure plans to build capacity well ahead of proven demand. Then comes the uncomfortable question: Are we spending because this makes economic sense or because we fear not to? Hyperscaler capex for the “Big Five” — Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft — is projected to reach around $600 billion in 2026, up roughly 36% year on year, with about 75% tied directly to AI infrastructure, which is also heavily funded by debt. That begs the question: Will these investments be converted into durable cash flows? Microsoft’s recent earnings brought this tension into focus. Capital expenditures jumped roughly two-thirds year on year, exceeding $37 billion in a single quarter, while Azure growth slowed and AI capacity constraints limited upside. The stock fell sharply, losing 21% over the past six months, wiping out hundreds of billions in market value. Oracle faces a different version of the same issue. Demand for AI cloud infrastructure is real. Cloud revenue is growing around 50% year on year, and GPU-related revenue is surging. But Oracle plans more than $50 billion in capex for fiscal 2026 and expects to raise $45 billion to $50 billion through new debt and equity on top of an already leveraged balance sheet. Even Nvidia and OpenAI are not immune. The widely publicized idea of a $100 billion Nvidia-backed infrastructure commitment has died down, with Nvidia clarifying that no firm commitment was ever made. At the same time, OpenAI has been actively diversifying suppliers, exploring AMD, Cerebras Systems and others, to reduce over-concentration risk. If the market is questioning AI overfunding at Microsoft, Oracle and the very center of the AI ecosystem, no one else gets a free pass. What founders should take from this For founders building AI companies with exits in mind, the implications are immediate. Itay Sagie is a strategic adviser to tech companies and investors, specializing in strategy, growth and M&A, a guest contributor to Crunchbase News, and a seasoned lecturer. Learn more about his advisory services, lectures and courses at SagieCapital.com. Connect with him on LinkedIn for further insights and discussions.
‘Why Not?’ How Sales Automation Unicorn Clay Uses Tender Offers To Reward Employees Without An Exit In Sight
Last month, sales automation startup Clay announced its second tender offer in less than nine months. The tender, led by DST Global, will allow employees to sell up to $55 million in Clay shares at a $5 billion valuation. Clay’s back-to-back tender offers underscore a growing shift among high-growth startups: rewarding employees with liquidity long before an IPO is in sight. As companies stay private longer — and hit major revenue milestones at breakneck speed — secondary sales are becoming a tool not just for retention, but for signaling strength. In Clay’s case, the two tenders followed rapid valuation jumps and a sprint to $100 million in ARR, positioning liquidity as a performance-based reward rather than a prelude to exit. “Building a generational business is a marathon, and tenders help equity feel real when top talent has options,” said Nick Bunick, a partner at NewView Capital, who noted that as companies stay private longer and talent competition intensifies, tender offers can be a powerful tool for recruiting, morale and retention. Still, he noted, there tend to be limits. “In the tender offers we’ve participated in, most employees were limited to selling just 10-25% of their vested holdings, and nearly half of founders didn’t sell a single share, signaling long-term conviction,” he wrote via email. “Even modest liquidity can make a big difference, translating to life milestones like a down payment on a first home, a child’s education, or helping a loved one transition into care.” Clay’s previous tender, led by Sequoia Capital, happened in May 2025 at a $1.5 billion valuation. In between the two tender offers, the startup closed a $100 million funding round at a $3.1 billion valuation. In total, New York-based Clay has raised $206 million in equity since its 2017 inception. It has 300 employees, up from 80 to 90 a year ago, and 14,000 customers. Tender offers have become more common as an increasing number of startups choose to stay private longer. Other high-profile examples include payments giant Stripe, which has already undergone a few tender offers and is reportedly considering another that could value it at more than $140 billion. Generative AI company Anthropic is also believed to be working on its own tender offer at a valuation of at least $350 billion. Kareem Amin and Varun Anand, co-founders of Clay. (Photo courtesy of Ava Pelor) In Clay’s case, the motivation was twofold, according to CEO and co-founder Kareem Amin. The tender offers have served as a way to allow new investors to come in, and for employees to feel like their equity is “real.” Crunchbase News recently spoke with Amin to dig deeper into the company’s decision to launch not just one but two tender offers in the past nine months. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Crunchbase News: Before we dig into the tender offers, tell us more about what Clay does. Amin: We help businesses find and grow their best customers. You can think of Clay as an AI go-to-market tool which implements any creative idea you have for sales and marketing. Go-to-market is just a new name for sales, marketing and customer success — the whole apparatus that helps you find customers and grow them, and implement any idea. Our vision is that in sales and marketing, you need to constantly be doing something different that’s unique for you, different from everybody else. Otherwise, it just becomes noise. And we let you implement these strategies. It might be something like personalized landing pages to, “Hey, let’s analyze all the video calls with sales calls that you’ve had, figure out why you lost the customer, and put that into Salesforce.” 1 I like to think of it as “like Figma is for designers, Clay is for go-to-market teams.” So what drove you to do not just one, but two, tender offers over the past year? It’s interesting actually to think of it as the inverse: Why not do a tender offer? Two reasons you don’t do a tender offer is either you don’t have the demand, or you think you’ll demotivate the team. Because we’re growing super quickly, we have the demand, and people want to invest in the company because we’re extremely efficient. Our burn is very, very low. We don’t actually need more primary capital. We haven’t touched the primary capital. So this is a way to allow new investors to come in. This is also a way to bring in new partners without diluting the whole cap table. It’s also a way for employees to feel like their equity is real. And some employees are having some real-life events. People are getting married, people are having kids, and this allows them to be a little bit more comfortable and do things like buy a house or buy a car. There are a bunch of people who’ve told me they’ve worked in startups for 10 years and never gotten any liquidity, and this is their first opportunity. People might only stay at a company because they want liquidity if they don’t like the culture — and they’re just withstanding it for the money. But we prefer people to stay because they want to do the work and they see that the value that they’re generating is real. I actually think it motivates the team. Plus, it makes the ecosystem grow. When you did the earlier tender offer, did you think you would be doing another one in less than a year’s time? No, I don’t think that we were. The way I’m thinking about it is [it makes sense to do a tender offer] every time we hit certain milestones. So we hit $100 million ARR really fast (in December). Tender offers are a way to reward the team each time it performs to a level where we get to the next milestone for the company. I think it makes sense to allow some people to get some of the value that they’ve created. Do you have an exit plan? Sometimes even investors ask this question. And we don’t. It is nonproductive to think about that. You’re only building this type of company if you want to see how big it can be. I always say it’ll be as big as it wants to be, and as long as there are problems for us to solve for customers. That’s what we should be focused on, and the valuations and the exits, those are things that are a result of that. The other way to think about it is we’re basically close to being profitable all the time. Like we can choose to become profitable. (The company touts that it was cash-flow positive for parts of 2025, earning more in interest than it burned.) We want to be in a place where we have options. Going public is a way to fund things so you can do more for customers. So I think whenever I start going down that line, I refocus back on, “Is there work to do for customers? Can we make the product better?” And the answer right now is, yes, we’re nowhere near achieving our mission, which is how we help you finally grow your best customers. And as long as there’s work to do around that, we should keep doing it. Do you think you’re going to be doing any more tender offers in the near future? I think as long as we hit the next set of growth milestones, we’ll consider it. We’re still early in this. There are no exits on the horizon. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Amid Record Robotics Funding, Apptronik Raises $520M Series A Extension To Boost Production Of Humanoid Robot Apollo
AI-powered robotics company Apptronik announced Wednesday that it has raised $520 million in an extension of its $415 million Series A raise in February 2025, bringing the total round to over $935 million. Existing backers B Capital, Google, Mercedes-Benz and Peak6 joined new investors including AT&T Ventures and manufacturing giant John Deere participating in the extension. The Austin-based company says that after its initial Series A announcement, it received “substantial inbound investor interest,” which led it to open the new extension of the round “at a 3x multiple of the Series A valuation.” It did not reveal its new valuation. However, the Austin-American Statesman reported in November that Apptronik had reached a valuation of $5 billion after raising $331 million earlier that month, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company confirmed that the $331 million raised is a part of this Series A extension round. With the latest funding, Apptronik has now raised nearly $1 billion since its 2016 inception. Robotics startup funding hit a record high last year, per Crunchbase data. Startups in the sector raised nearly $14 billion in funding in 2025, up from $8.2 billion in 2024, even topping the $13.1 billion raised in the peak venture funding year of 2021. So far, that momentum appears to be continuing in 2026. Besides this raise, Skild AI, a robotics company building an “omni-bodied” brain to operate any robot for any task, announced in January that it had raised $1.4 billion, tripling its valuation to more than $14 billion. Human connectionsApptronik co-founders Nicholas Paine and Jeff Cardenas with Apollo. (Courtesy photo.) Apptronik was founded on the belief that for humanoid robots to reach mass adoption, the industry had to solve for intuitive, safe human-robot interaction, and improve the cost and ease of manufacturing these robots. The company claims its flagship robot, Apollo, is designed with “approachability at its forefront.” “Its friendly head and face, eye-level cameras, and natural color palette are engineered to make human interactions feel engaging and more natural,” a spokesperson told Crunchbase News. Apollo is designed to “revolutionize” human-robot interaction, initially in industries such as logistics and manufacturing, with future planned expansion into retail, healthcare, and eventually, the home, according to the company. It’s designed to take on physically demanding work and labor-intensive operational processes in manufacturing and logistics and to work alongside human counterparts to transport components, sort and kit, among other tasks. Apptronik has commercial agreements with companies across several industries such as automotive manufacturing, logistics and consumer packaged goods, including Mercedes-Benz, GXO Logistics and Jabil. It also has a strategic partnership with Google DeepMind “to build the next generation of humanoid robots, powered by Gemini Robotics.” The company says it will use the capital to ramp up production of Apollo and expand its global network of commercial and pilot deployments. Apptronik has worked on developing 15 robotic systems, including NASA’s humanoid robot Valkyrie. Apptronik’s business is built on a Robotics as a Service model, which includes the robot hardware, software updates, service and support. The company started out of the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the The University of Texas at Austin and has nearly 300 employees, double its size a year ago. Related Crunchbase queries: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
AI Lab Ricursive Intelligence Lands $300M Series A At $4B Valuation Less than Two Months After Launch
Another day, another AI mega raise. Ricursive Intelligence, a frontier AI lab, announced on Monday that it has raised $300 million in a Series A round of funding at a $4 billion valuation. Notably, the financing comes just two months after the Palo Alto, California-based company’s launch. Ricursive just raised its seed round — a $35 million haul at a $750 million valuation in early December. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the latest round, which included participation from DST Global, NVentures (Nvidia’s venture capital arm), Felicis Ventures 1, 49 Palms, Radical AI and Sequoia Capital. Sequoia led Ricursive’s seed financing. Ricursive co-founders Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini. [Photo courtesy of Finn Baker.] Goldie and Mirhoseini also created AlphaChip, which they claim has been deployed across four generations of Google’s TPU and by external semiconductor companies. “Ricursive is building toward a future where rapid AI and hardware co-evolution becomes reality, unlocking significant gains in performance and energy efficiency,” said Mirhoseini in a statement. Guru Chahal, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said in a release: “Anna and Azalia pioneered a new approach to chip design with AlphaChip. At Ricursive, they’re building a full-stack platform that creates a continuous improvement cycle between AI models and the hardware that powers them. On Jan. 20, Humans&, a new AI lab founded by top researchers from Google, Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI and Meta, among others, announced it had raised a massive $480 million seed round at a staggering $4.48 billion valuation. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Exclusive: Zocks Raises $45M Series B From Lightspeed, QED For AI Assistant To Financial Advisers
Zocks, which has built an AI assistant for financial advisers, has raised $45 million in a Series B funding co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and QED Investors, the startup told Crunchbase News exclusively. All existing backers, including Motive Ventures and 14Peaks Capital, also participated in the financing. The raise comes less than one year after San Francisco-based Zocks raised a $13.8 million Series A. In total, Zocks has raised $65 million since its 2022 inception. Prior to co-founding Zocks, CEO Mark Gilbert spent more than a decade at Microsoft and more than three years as vice president of product management at Twilio. While at Twilio, Gilbert oversaw compliance and was struck by the amount of information and insights that companies were able to extract from their communications. Akos Ratku and Mark Gilbert, co-founders of Zocks. After leaving the company, he teamed up with Akos Ratku to start Zocks, using artificial intelligence to glean information from discussions by organizing meeting notes. “We were focused on very high security privacy areas, and that’s why we started with, and are 100% focused on, financial services,” Gilbert told Crunchbase News in an interview. “And what we found was the conversations advisers were having with clients had very, very valuable information for them.” The industry as a whole, he said, is understaffed and deals with “a huge amount of manual work.” The goal of Zocks is to combine the communications and AI pieces “to help accelerate and grow financial advisers and financial advisory firms.” The raise is yet another example of the fintech sector’s rebound. Global funding to VC-backed financial technology startups totaled $51.8 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase data. That’s a fairly significant increase of 27% from 2024’s total of $40.8 billion raised. Personalized intelligence Zocks launched its offering in February 2024. Today, its software is used by 5,000 financial firms, including Ameritas Life Insurance, Cambridge Investment Research and Carson Group. The startup typically charges per adviser under a SaaS model, both selling directly to advisers and through enterprise contracts. It has seen 8x year-over-year growth in revenue, according to Gilbert. Agentic AI doesn’t just help pull information from conversations with clients, Gilbert said. It also assists them with follow-up, opening accounts, filling out forms and drafting replies to emails “while still having all of the compliance and privacy that financial services needs,” he added. For example, Zocks doesn’t create recordings of the conversations by default. But its agent listens to the conversations and builds tables of information. So if an adviser says, “tell me all my clients who have children that are coming up on college age but have no 529 plan,” the agent can do so. Or an adviser can ask in Zocks: “find me clients with old 401(k)s held outside our management.” “Zocks will surface that list and suggest what to do next that’s personalized to each of those clients,” Gilbert said. “Then the adviser can take that action with one click.” Proactive AI Gilbert believes that Zocks stands out from other offerings in that it uses agents to do a variety of proactive tasks. “There are a lot of systems out there that are called note takers and that’s very helpful for people,” he said. “The big difference for us is that we’re able to do that as well and take this information to help the advisers get more out of it. We’re trying to anticipate their needs.” Put even more simply, the company wants to help advisers identify new financial planning opportunities across their entire client base and act faster by suggesting what to do next based on the data Zocks gets from all the systems it’s integrated with. Currently, Zocks operates primarily in the U.S. and Canada, but has plans to expand to Europe soon. “There’s a shortage of financial advisers and that seems to be getting worse,” Gilbert said. “I think that’s one of the reasons that we’ve seen such a fast uptake.” Investor attraction Arif Janmohamed, partner at Lightspeed, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm was initially attracted to Zocks’ founding team. “Mark and Akos are naturally customer-centric and they deeply understand how to build enterprise-grade products that are delightful to use, while scalable, secure and extensible,” he said. “Their product vision started with a hero-product, but rapidly expanded into platform capabilities that address the complex requirements of mid to larger enterprises while also scaling down to smaller companies and individual users.” Laura Bock, a partner at QED Investors, said her firm was impressed by Zocks’ ability to break into the enterprise segment early, the depth of its technology, and how “seamlessly” it fits into existing workflows. “They’ve earned the trust of several of the largest RIAs in the country and expanded successfully into adjacent verticals like insurance,” she said, “which is difficult to do without a product that truly works in regulated environments.” Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman