38 New Unicorns Joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board In September

A total of 38 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in September, adding $71 billion in value to the board. Twenty-one of the new unicorns are headquartered in the U.S., with six from China and three from the U.K. Canada, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Israel, Italy, Finland, Germany and Bulgaria each added one new unicorn. Through September, 311 companies have joined the board in 2026, putting the year on track to be the second-highest for new unicorn creation after 2021, when counts topped 600.

Semiconductors, financial services and space technology led September’s new unicorn counts. The broader class also spanned biotech, AI infrastructure, AI training, cybersecurity, robotics, autonomous driving, health insurance, energy and EV infrastructure, AI applications, AI models, manufacturing software, construction software, defense technology and food. For readers tracking venture momentum, the mix points to continued investor focus on capital-intensive infrastructure, AI-linked markets and regulated sectors.

Several companies already on the board stood out for significant valuation increases tied to new raises last month. San Francisco-based Cognition, which develops AI for software engineering, rose to a $48 billion valuation from $26 billion four months earlier. Data center provider Crusoe was valued at $31 billion, up from $10 billion a year ago. Paris-based frontier lab Mistral reached $24.4 billion in its more recent funding, up from $13.7 billion a year ago.

The Crunchbase Unicorn Board is a curated list of private unicorn 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 board does not reflect internal company valuations, such as 409a valuations for employee stock options, and does not adjust valuations based on investor writedowns. Funding values are reported in U.S. dollars, with foreign currencies converted at the prevailing spot rate from the date the relevant financial event is reported.