38 New Unicorns Added $71 Billion in Value in September

By Nathan Brooks

Thirty-eight companies joined the Crunchbase Unicorn Board in September, adding $71 billion in combined value. Semiconductors, financial services and space technology led the new counts, with the rest spread across biotech, AI infrastructure, AI training, security and frontier labs, according to Crunchbase.

Twenty-one of the new unicorns are headquartered in the U.S. China added six, the U.K. three, and Canada, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Israel, Italy, Finland, Germany and Bulgaria each contributed one.

The pace matters as much as the total. Through September, 311 companies have joined the board this year, putting 2026 on track to become the second-highest year for new unicorn creation. Only 2021, the venture peak, beat it — with counts above 600.

What did September change for investors?

The month's message: chips, payments and spacecraft are where the billion-dollar marks are clustering. And existing board members repriced sharply upward.

San Francisco-based Cognition, which builds AI for software engineering, climbed to a $48 billion valuation — up from $26 billion just four months earlier. Data center provider Crusoe hit $31 billion, up from $10 billion a year ago. Paris frontier lab Mistral reached $24.4 billion in its latest funding, versus $13.7 billion a year earlier.

That's roughly a 3x move for Crusoe in twelve months, and an 85% jump for Cognition in a single quarter. Late-stage AI capital isn't slowing down.

The biggest new entries

Semiconductors dominated the freshman class:

• Fab2 (Austin) closed a $500 million Series A at a $3.7 billion valuation led by Fundomo. The 3-year-old builds compact chip factories and its own manufacturing equipment.
• Celero Communications (Irvine, Calif.) raised a $275 million Series C above a $3 billion valuation, led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and CapitalG. It makes digital signal processing chips for high-speed optical connectivity in AI infrastructure.
• Evas Intelligence (Beijing) raised $298 million at a $2.2 billion valuation building AI chips on the open RISC-V architecture.
• SiMa.ai (San Jose) raised a $150 million Series C at $1.45 billion, co-led by Fidelity and Amplify Partners, bringing total funding to $500 million.

Financial services delivered some of the month's largest checks:

• OG, a Texas prediction-market platform under a year old, reached a $5 billion valuation through a strategic partnership with Robinhood. Robinhood takes an equity stake following OG's separation from Crypto.com; the amount wasn't disclosed. Robinhood's event-contract trading will run through OG's regulated exchange and clearing infrastructure.
• Barq (Saudi Arabia) raised a $329.5 million Series A at $1.85 billion. The 3-year-old payments company has processed more than $117 billion in two years.
• Ridgeline (Nevada) raised a $250 million Series E at $1.43 billion led by founder and chairman Dave Duffield.
• Félix (Miami), a WhatsApp remittance platform for Latino immigrants, secured $200 million: an $87 million Series C led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $1.4 billion valuation plus $113 million in debt from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund.

Space tech sent four companies past the line:

• The Exploration Co. (Munich) raised a $450 million Series C at $2 billion, co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Atomico and EQT, to advance its reusable Nyx spacecraft and Storm rocket engine.
• Hubble Network (Seattle) raised $200 million at $1.6 billion to connect standard Bluetooth devices directly to satellites.
• Open Cosmos (U.K.) secured $346 million at a $1 billion valuation.
• EnduroSat (Bulgaria) raised $205 million at $1 billion to expand standardized spacecraft production in the U.S. and Europe.

Which younger companies moved fastest?

Two AI training-data startups posted the month's steepest ramps. Micro1, a 4-year-old San Francisco company that recruits specialists to create AI training data, raised more than $100 million at a $4 billion valuation — an eightfold increase from September 2025. Forbes reported participants included two frontier AI laboratories and two x.AI co-founders.

AfterQuery hit a $3.2 billion valuation, more than 10x its value five months earlier, according to Forbes. The 1-year-old company, part of Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch, captures professional reasoning in software engineering, law and finance. Its funding amount and lead investor weren't disclosed.

Other notable entrants:

• Covenant (Washington, D.C.) emerged from stealth with $250 million raised across three rounds at a valuation above $1 billion. The 2-year-old develops long-range cruise missiles, with manufacturing in Texas, Germany and Israel. Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, 8VC, Lightspeed and Aleph led rounds.
• CDN77 (London) raised $570 million in its first external financing, led by CVC Capital Partners, at a $1.9 billion valuation after 15 years bootstrapping.
• Anew Labs (Shanghai) raised $290 million at $1.5 billion after spinning off from ByteDance, which retained a 56% stake.
• NIO Power agreed to a strategic transaction giving Geely Auto a 30% stake. Geely contributes its Yiyi battery-swapping operation plus a $95 million investment, valuing NIO Power around $2.4 billion.
• TAR (Austin), less than a year old, raised a $120 million Series A at $1 billion led by Spark Capital for off-grid power systems serving AI data centers.

The Crunchbase Unicorn Board counts private companies with post-money valuations of $1 billion or more, added as they cross the mark in a priced funding round.

With three months left in 2026 and 311 new unicorns already on the board, the September surge suggests the AI-driven repricing cycle has room to run — and that chip, payments and space founders negotiating rounds this quarter hold stronger hands than they did a year ago.