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.
An...
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
