A total of 38 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in September, adding $71 billion in value. Twenty-one are U.S.-based, six are from China and three are from the U.K. Through September, 311 companies have joined the board, putting 2026 on track to be the second-highest year for new unicorns after 2021. Existing unicorns also repriced sharply: Cognition reached $48 billion, Crusoe $31 billion and Mistral $24.4 billion.
Fab2 closed a $500 million Series A at a $3.7 billion valuation to build compact chip factories. Celero Communications raised $275 million at a valuation above $3 billion for its optical connectivity chips used in AI infrastructure. In China, Micronano Core and Evas Intelligence reached unicorn status, with Evas building AI chips on the open RISC-V architecture. SiMa.ai raised $150 million at a $1.45 billion valuation for AI chips used in robots, vehicles and drones.
Texas-based OG was valued at $5 billion through a strategic partnership with Robinhood, which will route its event-contract trading through OG's regulated exchange and clearing infrastructure. Saudi payments company Barq raised a $329.5 million Series A at a $1.85 billion valuation after processing more than $117 billion in 2 years. Ridgeline raised $250 million at $1.43 billion for its AI investment management platform. Félix, a WhatsApp-based remittance platform, combined an $87 million equity round with $113 million in debt.
The Exploration Co. raised $450 million at a $2 billion valuation for its reusable Nyx spacecraft and Storm rocket engine. Hubble Network, Open Cosmos and EnduroSat also crossed the $1 billion mark with satellite-focused businesses. In biotech, ByteDance spinoff Anew Labs raised $290 million, while Precision Neuroscience reached about $1 billion for its removable brain-computer interface . Alzheon and Biossil rounded out the life sciences additions.
Gimlet Labs raised $300 million at a $3 billion valuation to spread AI inference workloads across different chip types, while Verda and CDN77 added cloud and content delivery capacity. Training-data providers saw big jumps: Micro1 reached $4 billion, eight times its September 2025 valuation, and AfterQuery reached $3.2 billion. Naive AI and Arcee AI, a developer of open-weight models , joined as model builders.
Shanghai Zaofu raised about $100 million at close to $3 billion for Level 4 robotaxis, and Lyte AI reached $1.6 billion for robot perception. Angle Health and Thatch became health benefits unicorns, and Geely took a 30% stake in NIO Power. Other new entrants include TAR, Exein, Guardio, CADDi, Kahua, defense company Covenant and food brand owner Medici Brands.