The Full List of 35 Unicorn Startups in Palo Alto (2026)
Palo Alto is home to 35 unicorn startups, with a strong focus on artificial intelligence and deep tech. The city continues to be a major center for high value technology companies.
The local scene includes Safe Superintelligence, which reached a $32B valuation in its founding year. Other major players like Glean and PsiQuantum are each valued at $7B.
Below is the full list of 35 Palo Alto unicorn startups at this time.
Top 10 Most Valuable Palo Alto Unicorns
Safe Superintelligence was founded with the singular mission of building artificial intelligence that is inherently safe. Their team approaches this by treating safety not as an afterthought, but as the central technical problem to be solved.
| Valuation | $32B (Joined September 2024) |
| Year Founded | 2024 |
| Founders | Daniel Gross, Daniel Levy, Ilya Sutskever |
| Funding Amount | $3B |
| Company Size | Lean Team (11-50) |
| Last Funding Status | Venture Round |
| Top Investors | SV Angel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital |
Glean builds a generative AI work assistant that searches across all of a company's applications. This unified search helps employees instantly find information and discover knowledge from across the entire organization.
| Valuation | $7B (Joined May 2022) |
| Year Founded | 2019 |
| Founders | Arvind Jain, Piyush Prahladka, Prafful Goel, Sharvanath Pathak, Tony Gentilcore, TR Vishwanath |
| Funding Amount | $768.2M |
| Company Size | Large Team (251-1,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Series F |
| Top Investors | Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, Citi, Wellington Management |
PsiQuantum is building a fault-tolerant quantum computer using a silicon photonics platform. This approach uses light particles as qubits and is designed to scale using conventional semiconductor manufacturing.
| Valuation | $7B (Joined July 2021) |
| Year Founded | 2016 |
| Founders | Jeremy O'Brien, Mark Thompson, Peter Shadbolt, Terry Rudolph |
| Funding Amount | $2.3B |
| Company Size | Large Team (251-1,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Series E |
| Top Investors | Blackbird Ventures, Temasek Holdings, BlackRock, Founders Fund, Playground Global |
ClickHouse builds an open-source, column-oriented database for real-time analytical reporting. Their system is recognized for its high performance, allowing users to run complex SQL queries on massive datasets with extremely low latency.
| Valuation | $6B (Joined October 2021) |
| Year Founded | 2021 |
| Founders | Aaron Katz, Alexey Milovidov, Yury Izrailevsky |
| Funding Amount | $750M |
| Company Size | Large Team (251-1,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Series C |
| Top Investors | Insight Partners, Bond, Bessemer Venture Partners, Peak XV Partners, Khosla Ventures |
SandboxAQ develops enterprise software that combines AI and quantum technology to solve complex computational problems. Their solutions are applied across industries like cybersecurity, biopharma, and materials science to enhance security and accelerate research.
| Valuation | $6B (Joined December 2024) |
| Year Founded | 2016 |
| Founders | Jack Hidary |
| Funding Amount | $975M |
| Company Size | Mid-Size Team (51-250) |
| Last Funding Status | Series E |
| Top Investors | US Innovative Technology Fund, BNP Paribas, Paladin Capital Group, NVIDIA, S32 |
Binance.US offers a digital asset marketplace for buying, selling, and trading a wide range of cryptocurrencies. The platform provides a secure and compliant exchange built specifically for customers in the United States.
| Valuation | $5B |
| Year Founded | 2019 |
| Founders | Changpeng Zhao |
| Funding Amount | $200M |
| Company Size | Large Team (251-1,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Seed |
| Top Investors | VanEck, Foundation Capital, Gold House, Bossa Invest, Gaingels |
SambaNova develops an integrated hardware and software platform for enterprise-level artificial intelligence. Their full-stack system is designed to run complex AI models across the entire lifecycle, from training to inference.
| Valuation | $5B |
| Year Founded | 2017 |
| Founders | Christopher Ré, Kunle Olukotun, Rodrigo Liang |
| Funding Amount | $1.1B |
| Company Size | Large Team (251-1,000) |
| Last Funding Status | Series D |
| Top Investors | Temasek Holdings, Celesta Capital, Atlantic Bridge, Walden International, BlackRock |
Hippocratic AI is building a generative AI for healthcare that prioritizes patient safety. The technology is designed to take on non-diagnostic tasks, helping to reduce costs and improve health equity.
| Valuation | $4B (Joined March 2021) |
| Year Founded | 2023 |
| Founders | Alex Miller, Debajyoti Datta, Kim Parikh, Meenesh Bhimani, Munjal Shah, Saad Godil, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Vishal Parikh |
| Funding Amount | $402M |
| Company Size | Mid-Size Team (51-250) |
| Last Funding Status | Series C |
| Top Investors | General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, NVIDIA, SV Angel, Kleiner Perkins |
Inflection AI built Pi, a personal AI created to be empathetic and supportive. The AI studio is now pivoting to an API-first strategy to make its powerful language models widely available to developers.
| Valuation | $4B (Joined May 2022) |
| Year Founded | 2022 |
| Founders | Ian McCarthy, Karen Simonyan, Mustafa Suleyman, Reid Hoffman, Sean White, Ted Shelton, Vibhu Mittal |
| Funding Amount | $1.5B |
| Company Size | Mid-Size Team (51-250) |
| Last Funding Status | Venture Round |
| Top Investors | Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, NVIDIA |
Aptos Labs is the team behind a Layer 1 blockchain designed for safe, scalable, and upgradeable Web3 infrastructure. They provide the foundation for developers to build decentralized applications and ecosystems for mainstream adoption.
| Valuation | $4B (Joined March 2022) |
| Year Founded | 2021 |
| Founders | Avery Ching, Mo Shaikh |
| Funding Amount | $350M |
| Company Size | Mid-Size Team (51-250) |
| Last Funding Status | Venture Round |
| Top Investors | Andreessen Horowitz, Haun Ventures, Apollo, Franklin Templeton, YZi Labs |
The Remaining 25 Unicorns Founded in Palo Alto
The top ten companies are just part of the story in Palo Alto. Dozens of other startups are tackling big problems in fields like AI and healthcare, raising over $7.5 billion to fund their work.
Some are early in their journey while others are already well known. Here’s a look at the rest of the unicorn startups shaping the city.
| Unicorn Startup | Main Industry | Year Founded | Amount Raised | Valuation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Houzz | Design | 2009 | $613.6M | $4B |
 Branch | Marketing | 2014 | $667.1M | $4B |
 Uniphore | AI | 2008 | $880.9M | $3B |
 Plume Design | Hardware | 2015 | $722.4M | $3B |
 Turing | AI | 2018 | $270.2M | $2.2B |
 Medable | Healthcare | 2015 | $506.6M | $2.1B |
 BitGo | Crypto | 2013 | $171.5M | $2B |
 You.com | AI | 2020 | $195M | $2B |
 Modular | AI | 2022 | $380M | $2B |
 Mysten Labs | Crypto | 2021 | $336M | $2B |
 Kriya Therapeutics | Biotech | 2019 | $921.3M | $2B |
 Boba Network | Crypto | 2018 | $115M | $2B |
 Docker | Infrastructure | 2011 | $435.9M | $2B |
 Cresta | AI | 2017 | $276M | $2B |
 Mashgin | Media | 2014 | $73.7M | $2B |
 Salt Security | AI | 2015 | $271M | $1.4B |
 Genspark AI | AI | 2022 | $435M | $1.25B |
 DevRev | AI | 2020 | $150.8M | $1.15B |
 Also | Mobility | 2025 | $305M | $1B |
 Cyberhaven | AI | 2014 | $236.5M | $1B |
 Typeface | AI | 2022 | $165M | $1B |
 Owner | SaaS | 2018 | $182.2M | $1B |
 CommerceIQ | Analytics | 2012 | $195.5M | $1B |
 Wealthfront | Fintech | 2008 | $274.2M | $1B |
 Assured Insurance Technologies | Fintech | 2019 | — | $1B |
