Crunchbase

The Rise Of The Ultra-Unicorns: $5B+ Startups Are Leading The Private-Market Herd In 2025

Gené TeareGené Teare

Of the nearly 1,600 companies on The Crunchbase Unicorn Board, a small but ultra-elite club of private companies valued at $5 billion or more is growing across multiple metrics, an analysis of the data shows. The trends suggest that the top tier of unicorns is emerging as the dominant force in private markets, even as venture funding for earlier-stage startups remains challenging.

The small cohort of $5 billion-plus unicorns also commands outsized influence — accounting for more than half the board’s total value and funding. With 17 companies newly joining the club in just the first half of 2025 — including high-profile players such as Thinking Machines Lab, Glean and Abridge — this tier is also expanding faster, an analysis of Crunchbase data shows. This year, companies in the club have grown in number, by funding raised and in terms of valuation compared to previous years.

While the $5 billion-plus unicorns make up only around 13% of the board by count, they hold more than half of the board’s value: $3.5 trillion of the $6 trillion cumulative valuation. They also raised half of the $1 trillion total funding to the board’s members.

$5B+ unicorns growing in 2025

Among the most prominent new entrants to the board this year are Thinking Machines, the AI foundation model startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati that raised a seed round of $2 billion at a $10 billion value — by far the largest seed round on record.

They also include AI note-taking company Abridge, genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences, coding company Anysphere, AI enterprise search company Glean, legal AI startup Harvey, defense tech startup Shield AI, data security company Cyera, and India-based stock trading company Groww, among many others.

The 2025 count is on track to far surpass the 19 companies that joined the $5 billion club in 2024.

Unicorn illustration

Funding over time to this cohort peaked in 2021 at $102 billion. In 2022, funding dropped to $41 billion, but has grown year over year to close to $79 billion in the first half of 2025.

However, 73% of funding in the first half of this year went to just two companies, and they were the two largest fundings ever raised by private venture-back companies: $40 billion to OpenAI in a funding led by SoftBank, and $14.3 billion to Scale AI from Meta.

Founded years

The peak years when the current club of $5 billion-plus unicorns were founded were from 2011 to 2018, meaning the majority of these companies are between 7 and 14 years old.

By country

The U.S. leads with 101 companies valued at $5 billion or more. China, India and the U.K. are the next most-active countries with 36, 19 and 11 companies, respectively.

Most relevant value skews to 2021 and onward

Based on an analysis of the valuations accrued, the majority of companies had their most recent valuations priced in the past five years. For 30% of these companies, their most recent valuations were set in the past two years.

Around half of these companies, 106 of them, were most recently valued in the peak market of 2021 and into 2022 — valuations that might not hold up over time.

In 2024, 27 companies received their most recent value totaling $831 billion. They include giants such as SpaceX, Stripe and Databricks.

In the first half of 2025, 34 companies were collectively valued at $699 billion. The most highly valued were OpenAI at $300 billion, Anthropic at $61.5 billion, and Safe Superintelligence at $32 billion.

Exits and outlook

In 2024, nine companies valued at $5 billion or more exited the unicorn board. That pace looks to continue in 2025. In the first half of the year, five companies had either gone public or been acquired, including Chime, CoreWeave and Wiz.

By most notable measures, the $5 billion unicorn club trended up in the first six months of 2025 compared to the past few years. Given current market trends and a still-slow exit market, we expect this cohort to continue to grow.

Methodology

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

For this article, we examined a subset of these companies, who are still private and have a current value of $5 billion or more.

The unicorn board does not reflect internal company valuations — such as those set via a 409a process for employee stock options — as these differ from, and are more likely to be lower than, a priced funding round. We also do not adjust valuations based on investor writedowns, which change quarterly, as different investors will not value the same company consistently within the same quarter.