The Full List of 112 Machine Learning Unicorn Startups (2026)
The machine learning industry includes 112 unicorn startups. OpenAI leads the group with a valuation of $500 billion.
Newer companies are also making a mark, with xAI reaching a $50 billion valuation just one year after its founding in 2023. Explore the full list of companies defining the machine learning space.
Below is the full list of 112 Machine Learning unicorn startups at this time.
Top 10 Most Valuable Machine Learning Unicorns
OpenAI develops advanced artificial intelligence models through its work as a research and deployment company. They are the creators of ChatGPT, the popular conversational AI that brought generative AI into the mainstream.
| Valuation | $500B (Joined July 2019) |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Year Founded | 2015 |
| Founders | Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Wojciech Zaremba |
| Funding Amount | $78B |
| Company Size | Major Organization (1,001-5,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Venture Round |
| Top Investors | TPG, NVIDIA, Andreessen Horowitz, Citi, Sequoia Capital |
Anthropic builds large-scale AI systems with a core focus on safety and making them steerable. They are best known for Claude, a family of conversational AI models designed to be helpful, harmless, and honest.
| Valuation | $183B (Joined February 2023) |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Year Founded | 2021 |
| Founders | Daniela Amodei, Dario Amodei, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Tom Brown |
| Funding Amount | $33.7B |
| Company Size | Major Organization (1,001-5,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Series F |
| Top Investors | General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures, Insight Partners, General Atlantic, TPG |
Databricks builds a unified data and AI platform that brings together data engineering, analytics, and machine learning. They are known for pioneering the data lakehouse architecture, which gives teams a single, open foundation for all their data workloads and AI models.
| Valuation | $100B (Joined February 2019) |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Year Founded | 2013 |
| Founders | Ali Ghodsi, Andy Konwinski, Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Patrick Wendell, Reynold Xin |
| Funding Amount | $21.8B |
| Company Size | Enterprise Organization (5,001+) |
| Last Funding Status | Series J |
| Top Investors | NVIDIA, Gaingels, Andreessen Horowitz, Franklin Templeton, Blue Owl |
xAI develops artificial intelligence solutions designed to enhance reasoning and complex problem-solving. Their conversational AI, Grok, is integrated with the X platform to provide users with real-time information and context.
| Valuation | $50B (Joined May 2024) |
| Headquarters | Burlingame, California, United States |
| Year Founded | 2023 |
| Founders | Christian Szegedy, Elon Musk, Greg Yang, Igor Babuschkin, Kyle Kosic, Manuel Kroiss, Toby Pohlen, Yuhuai Wu |
| Funding Amount | $22.7B |
| Company Size | Major Organization (1,001-5,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Corporate Round |
| Top Investors | Tribe Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, Sequoia Capital, NVIDIA |
Cruise develops all-electric, self-driving vehicles designed to navigate complex urban environments. They are creating a ride-hailing service that offers a safer and more accessible transportation option for cities.
| Valuation | $30B |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Year Founded | 2013 |
| Founders | Daniel Kan, Kyle Vogt |
| Funding Amount | $16B |
| Company Size | Major Organization (1,001-5,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Corporate Round |
| Top Investors | General Motors, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Spark Capital, Founder Collective |
Anysphere develops AI solutions to automate writing code. The applied research lab created Cursor, an AI-first code editor.
| Valuation | $29.3B (Joined December 2024) |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Year Founded | 2022 |
| Founders | Aman Sanger, Arvid Lunnemark, Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif |
| Funding Amount | $3.4B |
| Company Size | Mid-Size Team (51-250) |
| Last Funding Status | Series D |
| Top Investors | Thrive Capital, OpenAI Startup Fund, Benchmark, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz |
Scale AI builds a data-centric platform that provides high-quality data for training and validating AI models. They specialize in generating and annotating the massive datasets required for cutting-edge applications, from large language models to self-driving cars.
| Valuation | $29B |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Year Founded | 2016 |
| Founders | Alexandr Wang, Lucy Guo |
| Funding Amount | $15.9B |
| Company Size | Large Team (251-1,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Corporate Round |
| Top Investors | Index Ventures, Founders Fund, Accel, NVIDIA, Wellington Management |
Perplexity's AI-powered answer engine provides accurate, real-time responses to user queries. The platform is designed to synthesize information and cite its sources, offering a conversational alternative to traditional search engines.
| Valuation | $20B (Joined April 2024) |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Year Founded | 2022 |
| Founders | Andy Konwinski, Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho |
| Funding Amount | $1.5B |
| Company Size | Mid-Size Team (51-250) |
| Last Funding Status | Venture Round |
| Top Investors | NVIDIA, Bessemer Venture Partners, Accel, IVP, New Enterprise Associates |
Mistral AI builds open-source and commercial large language models designed for a wide range of applications. Their platform offers powerful AI services and APIs that help enterprises integrate generative AI capabilities.
| Valuation | $14B (Joined December 2023) |
| Headquarters | Paris, Ile-de-France, France |
| Year Founded | 2023 |
| Founders | Arthur Mensch, Charles Gorintin, Guillaume Lample, Jean Charles Samuelian, Timothee Lacroix |
| Funding Amount | €2.8B |
| Company Size | Large Team (251-1,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Series C |
| Top Investors | General Catalyst, Bpifrance, NVIDIA, LocalGlobe, Andreessen Horowitz |
They offer an AI-powered platform designed to help users manage their email, collaborate on tasks, and improve their writing. The platform combines a famously fast email client with powerful AI that provides real-time writing suggestions.
| Valuation | $13B |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Year Founded | 2009 |
| Founders | Alex Shevchenko, Dmytro Lider, Max Lytvyn |
| Funding Amount | $1.4B |
| Company Size | Major Organization (1,001-5,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Private Equity |
| Top Investors | Spark Capital, IVP, BlackRock, General Catalyst, Sozo Ventures |
The Remaining 102 Machine Learning Unicorns
The top ten companies get a lot of attention, but they're only part of the story. Many other startups are also growing fast and have raised billions of dollars combined.
While most of these companies are in the US, founders in China, Canada, and Europe are building billion-dollar businesses too. Here is a look at the other startups making waves in the field.
| Unicorn Startup | Country | Year Founded | Amount Raised | Valuation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Mercor | United States | 2023 | $483.6M | $10B |
 Gong | United States | 2015 | $583M | $7.25B |
 Cohere | Canada | 2019 | $1.7B | $7B |
 Glean | United States | 2019 | $768.2M | $7B |
 Groq | United States | 2016 | $1.8B | $7B |
 Automation Anywhere | United States | 2003 | $1.1B | $7B |
 Snorkel AI | United States | 2019 | $235.3M | $6.35B |
 DataRobot | United States | 2012 | $1.1B | $6.3B |
 RELEX Solutions | Finland | 2005 | $814.6M | $6B |
 Shield AI | United States | 2015 | $1.3B | $5.3B |
 6sense | United States | 2013 | $526M | $5.2B |
 Socure | United States | 2012 | $744.4M | $5B |
 Abridge | United States | 2018 | $757.5M | $5B |
 SambaNova | United States | 2017 | $1.1B | $5B |
 Hugging Face | United States | 2016 | $395.2M | $5B |
 Metropolis | United States | 2017 | $3.5B | $5B |
 Checkr | United States | 2014 | $740.1M | $5B |
 Lightmatter | United States | 2017 | $822M | $4.4B |
 ThoughtSpot | United States | 2012 | $663.7M | $4.2B |
 Fal | United States | 2021 | $447M | $4B |
 o9 Solutions | United States | 2009 | $533M | $4B |
 AlphaSense | United States | 2008 | $1.4B | $4B |
 Inflection AI | United States | 2022 | $1.5B | $4B |
 MEGVII | China | 2011 | $1.4B | $4B |
 Tekion | United States | 2016 | $635.1M | $4B |
 Moonshot AI | China | 2023 | $1.6B | $3.3B |
 HighRadius | United States | 2006 | $475M | $3.1B |
 Lambda | United States | 2012 | $1.7B | $3B |
 Runway | United States | 2018 | $544.5M | $3B |
 StackAdapt | Canada | 2014 | $536.6M | $3B |
 Zhipu AI | China | 2019 | $1.2B | $3B |
 Celestial AI | United States | 2020 | $593.9M | $3B |
 Uniphore | United States | 2008 | $880.9M | $3B |
 Tenstorrent | Canada | 2016 | $1B | $3B |
 DuerOS | China | 2017 | CN¥2B | $3B |
 Physical Intelligence | United States | 2024 | $470M | $2.8B |
 Insitro | United States | 2018 | $643M | $2.44B |
 EliseAI | United States | 2017 | $391.9M | $2.2B |
 Dialpad | United States | 2011 | $450M | $2.2B |
 Skydio | United States | 2014 | $740M | $2.2B |
 Turing | United States | 2018 | $270.2M | $2.2B |
 Yitu Technology | China | 2012 | $401M | $2.17B |
 Baseten | United States | 2019 | $285M | $2.15B |
 Liquid AI | United States | 2023 | $293.1M | $2B |
 H2O.ai | United States | 2012 | $251.1M | $2B |
 Anaconda | United States | 2012 | $233M | $2B |
 Exabeam | United States | 2013 | $391M | $2B |
 Cognite | Norway | 2016 | $338.2M | $2B |
 Modular | United States | 2022 | $380M | $2B |
 Hive | United States | 2013 | $120.7M | $2B |
 OpenWeb | United States | 2015 | $393M | $2B |
 Afiniti | Bermuda | 2006 | $200M | $2B |
 Dremio | United States | 2015 | $410M | $2B |
 Neo4j | United States | 2007 | $805.1M | $2B |
 Cresta | United States | 2017 | $276M | $2B |
 SpreeAI | United States | 2023 | $15M | $2B |
 Alation | United States | 2012 | $315M | $2B |
 Verbit | United States | 2017 | $569M | $2B |
 Preferred Networks | Japan | 2014 | ¥44.6B | $2B |
 Enflame | China | 2018 | CN¥5.1B | $2B |
 Mu Sigma | India | 2004 | $211.9M | $2B |
 Uptake Technologies | United States | 2014 | $218M | $2B |
 Kunlun | China | 2021 | — | $2B |
 Salt Security | United States | 2015 | $271M | $1.4B |
 AI21 Labs | Israel | 2017 | $626.5M | $1.4B |
 Netradyne | United States | 2015 | $352.5M | $1.34B |
 Ada | Canada | 2016 | $192.4M | $1.2B |
 Seekr | United States | 2021 | $164.3M | $1.2B |
 Hailo | Israel | 2017 | $343.9M | $1.2B |
 Rebellion Defense | United States | 2019 | $150M | $1.15B |
 Coralogix | Israel | 2016 | $350.8M | $1.12B |
 People.ai | United States | 2016 | $200M | $1.1B |
 Periodic Labs | United States | 2025 | $300M | $1B |
 Wayve | United Kingdom | 2017 | $1.3B | $1B |
 Anyscale | United States | 2019 | $259M | $1B |
 Augury | United States | 2011 | $369M | $1B |
 Adept AI | United States | 2022 | $415M | $1B |
 Avathon | United States | 2013 | $286.6M | $1B |
 Imbue | United States | 2021 | $232M | $1B |
 Interos | United States | 2005 | $174.9M | $1B |
 G42 | United Arab Emirates | 2018 | $2.3B | $1B |
 Immunai | United States | 2018 | $295M | $1B |
 Phenom | United States | 2010 | $161.4M | $1B |
 CommerceIQ | United States | 2012 | $195.5M | $1B |
 Morning Consult | United States | 2014 | $91M | $1B |
 Scandit | Switzerland | 2009 | $273.1M | $1B |
 Owkin | United States | 2016 | $304.1M | $1B |
 Darwinbox | India | 2015 | $307.3M | $1B |
 Squirrel Ai Learning | China | 2014 | $190.4M | $1B |
 Shift Technology | France | 2013 | $320M | $1B |
 FourKites | United States | 2014 | $241.5M | $1B |
 Dental Monitoring | France | 2014 | $232.4M | $1B |
 Moka | China | 2015 | $144.3M | $1B |
 Viz | United States | 2016 | $291.5M | $1B |
 Haomo.AI | China | 2015 | CN¥1.4B | $1B |
 Xiaoice | China | 2014 | CN¥1.5B | $1B |
 SmartMore Corporation Limited | China | 2019 | $300M | $1B |
 iCarbonX | China | 2015 | $200M | $1B |
 Meero | France | 2016 | $324.2M | $1B |
 Tractable | United Kingdom | 2014 | $184.9M | $1B |
