Almost 90 new unicorns have been minted so far this year — here they are
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- Promethus, co-founded by Jeff Bezos, hit a $41 billion valuation after a $12 billion Series B led by JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock, making it the largest unicorn minted so far in 2026.
- Cowboy Space raised $305 million from Index Ventures to build a space-based power grid for AI compute, reaching a $2 billion valuation.
- Starcloud is developing orbital data centers and hit a $1.1 billion valuation on a $170 million Series A led by EQT and Benchmark Opportunity Partners.
- MiRus became a $4.41 billion medical device unicorn after a $1.5 billion late-stage round from Boston Scientific, focused on cardiovascular and orthopedic devices.
- Nvidia appears as an investor in at least three 2026 unicorns — EXA, Recursive, and Factory — positioning itself across the AI stack from web engines to inference hardware.
- Recursive, an AI research lab founded in 2025, reached a $4.65 billion valuation on a $650 million Series A led by GV and Greycroft, one of the fastest ascents to unicorn-plus status.
- Healthcare is a meaningful secondary cluster: Forus ($1.01B, patient care automation), Vi Labs ($1.64B, health operations AI), and Alloy Therapeutics ($1B, AI drug discovery) all crossed the threshold.
Why it matters: With nearly 90 unicorns minted in just the first half of 2026 and AI capturing the lion's share of mega-rounds, the pace of billion-dollar startup creation has not slowed. The spread — from a $41B Bezos-backed AI engineering startup to space-based compute infrastructure (Cowboy Space, Starcloud) and traditional medical devices (MiRus) — shows investor appetite spans speculative frontier tech and practical verticals simultaneously, with Nvidia threading capital bets across multiple winners.
