Nearly one in four newly minted billion-dollar startups this year operates in artificial intelligence, reshaping private market opportunity for advisors.
SEP 09, 2026
By Steve Randall
Artificial intelligence companies are minting more billion-dollar private startups than any other sector in 2026.
That’s according to new data from BestBrokers, which analyzed company information from the Crunchbase Unicorn Board, PitchBook, and TechCrunch and found that, of the 191 companies that achieved unicorn status this year (startups valued at $1 billion or more) 49 operate in AI, representing 25.7% of all new entrants.
As of August 2026, there are 1,843 unicorn companies globally, with the United States home to 945 of them, more than half the worldwide total.
The AI giants reshaping the unicorn landscape
Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI company behind the Claude chatbot, is now the world’s most valuable unicorn at $965 billion after SpaceX completed its initial public offering.
OpenAI follows at $852 billion, after a record $110 billion investment from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank. Both figures illustrate how rapidly the leading foundation model developers have pulled away from the rest of the private market.
China’s ByteDance, parent company of TikTok, holds a $600 billion valuation following secondary share sales, while India’s Reliance Jio is valued at approximately $128 billion ahead of a potential IPO. In fintech, Stripe holds a $159 billion valuation and London-based Revolut sits at $115 billion following a secondary share sale in July 2026.
For advisors navigating client interest in pre-IPO exposure, the concentration of value at the top of the unicorn stack matters enormously. As InvestmentNews has reported, CAIS and Arch raised fresh capital in August 2026 as advisor demand for private markets infrastructure deepened, with CAIS closing a $170 million Series D round that included participation from Carlyle, Blue Owl Capital, and AllianceBernstein. The platforms are competing to give independent advisors access to exactly the kind of high-growth private companies the unicorn data tracks.
Robotics and defense emerge as the next wave
Beyond AI, robotics ranks as the second-largest sector for newly minted unicorns in 2026, with 26 companies (13.6% of all new entrants) crossing the billion-dollar threshold. The sector is led by Chinese firms AI2 Robotics and X Square Robot, each valued at $3 billion, and U.S. companies Mind Robotics and Generalist, both at $2 billion, according to the BestBrokers report.
Defense and security technology has drawn increasing investor interest in 2026, with 12 startups crossing the $1 billion threshold. Germany’s STARK, which makes autonomous strike drones and secured a €300 million contract with the German armed forces, leads the group at a $3.7 billion valuation. U.S. entrants include Allen Control Systems at $2.2 billion and Mach Industries at $1.8 billion.
The BestBrokers data also points to 18 new fintech unicorns in 2026, including Indian payments infrastructure company Juspay, which reached a $1.2 billion valuation after raising $50 million from WestBridge Capital. The sector’s continued momentum reflects sustained venture interest in the payments infrastructure underpinning digital commerce globally.
What the surge means for advisor portfolios
Advisors are rethinking how private markets fit into portfolio design, moving away from treating alternatives as an incremental add-on and toward integrating them as a structural component of a client’s overall risk and return framework head of portfolio strategy at Nuveen in New York
At the same time, the gap between a unicorn’s private valuation and the price at which public investors can ultimately participate has grown considerably. Anthropic’s trajectory (from a $183 billion valuation in an earlier 2026 funding round to $965 billion) illustrates how quickly those marks can shift, and how difficult it is for most clients to access these companies at earlier stages.
The most valuable new unicorn of 2026 is China’s DeepSeek, valued at approximately $50 billion following its first external funding round – more than 11 times the valuation of the second most valuable new entrant, U.S. AI startup Hark at $6 billion. DeepSeek’s R1 and V3 models attracted global attention earlier in 2026 for achieving competitive performance relative to leading Western AI systems while using significantly fewer computing resources, the BestBrokers report noted.
The United States produced 105 of the 185 newly minted billion-dollar startups in 2026, with China second at 30, the United Kingdom third at 14, and India fourth at seven. Those geographic concentrations carry real portfolio construction implications particularly as BlackRock’s 2026 Thematic Outlook notes that AI remains the dominant growth engine in thematic investing, with thematic ETF inflows reaching $68 billion in 2025, the strongest year since 2021.
The broader picture from BestBrokers’ analysis is of a private market ecosystem increasingly shaped by a small number of very large bets, primarily in AI, while adjacent sectors like robotics and defense generate a longer tail of mid-sized companies that may represent more accessible entry points for advisors seeking diversification within private portfolios.
SPONSOREDDirect indexing webinar targets tax-loss harvesting amid market swings
Northern Trust’s Ken Lassner shows advisors how to convert volatility into after-tax portfolio gains
SPONSOREDWho builds the income when the pension disappears?
Dan Biagini of American Equity says the steady decline of pensions, longer lifespans and a reset in interest rates are rewriting how advisors build retirement income
