DeepSeek Leads AI Labs Onto Crunchbase’s June Unicorn Board

Crunchbase News reports that 34 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in June, collectively adding more than $110 billion in value. The biggest theme was artificial intelligence: 10 of the new companies were AI labs, together valued at $65 billion. Robotics and AI infrastructure also stood out, with four companies in each sector.

The geographic spread was broad but concentrated in major startup markets. Of the new unicorns, 16 were U.S.-based and eight were from China, with additional companies from India, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and Saudi Arabia.

DeepSeek was the highest-valued new unicorn to join the board this year, according to the article, with a $50 billion valuation. Crunchbase News described the new AI lab cohort as focused on new architectures in model development, robotics, physics, self-learning, open source development and sovereign AI.

Other AI lab names listed include Flourish, PhysicsX, General Intuition, Generalist AI, Bulage, Odyssey, Sarvam AI, Mirendil and Vast. For readers tracking private AI markets, the takeaway is clear: frontier model work is expanding beyond general-purpose chatbots into physical systems, scientific use cases and country-specific AI strategies.

Beyond AI labs, Crunchbase News identified robotics and AI infrastructure as the other leading sectors with multiple new unicorns. The robotics group included companies building physical AI, humanoid robots and industrial arm robotics for manufacturing. The AI infrastructure group included data center, cloud, inference and developer platform companies.

This points to a broader funding pattern: investors are not only backing AI models, but also the systems that train, deploy, power and physically apply them. For operators and investors, the June list suggests demand is forming across the AI stack, from chips and cloud access to robotics intelligence and deployment platforms.

Even with 34 additions, Crunchbase News says the total value of The Crunchbase Unicorn Board dropped by more than $1 trillion in June after SpaceX, its most valuable company, went public. The article also noted exits for Anysphere, Modular and Fin through acquisition activity.

The contrast matters: new billion-dollar startups can add significant value, but major exits can reshape the board even more dramatically. For anyone reading unicorn totals, June is a reminder to look at both inflows and outflows, not just the headline count of new private companies.

The Crunchbase Unicorn Board is described as a curated list of private companies with post-money valuations of $1 billion or more, based on Crunchbase data. New companies are added when they reach the $1 billion valuation mark as part of a funding round.

The methodology excludes internal company valuations such as 409a values for employee stock options and does not adjust valuations for investor writedowns. Crunchbase also notes that funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise stated, with foreign currencies converted at the prevailing spot rate from the date events are reported.