Twenty-nine companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in August, adding approximately $63 billion in combined valuation, with more than a third under three years old — a sign that top-funded startups are compressing the timeline to multibillion-dollar milestones.
The highest-valued newcomers were China-based humanoid-robotics firm XPeng Robotics at over $6.3 billion; San Jose photonics company Lumilens at $5.5 billion; and Palo Alto AI model platform River AI and San Francisco semiconductor-startup Source Foundry, both valued at $5 billion.
AI software topped the sector list, spanning model training, assistants, agentic systems, enterprise workflow automation, coding tools and voice transcription. Semiconductors ranked second with five new unicorns; robotics and financial services added three each, while data centers, security and energy contributed two apiece.
Geography broke heavily toward the United States, which accounted for 16 of August's entrants. China added four. South Korea, India, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, Germany and Turkey each contributed one. Nigeria and Indonesia also recorded their first new unicorns of the year.
Nine companies exited the board in August, according to Crunchbase. Three went public — led by Unitree Robotics — and six were acquired, including Hugging Face, OpenRouter and Airtable.
Among the largest rounds, XPeng Robotics raised more than $900 million in its first outside financing at a post-money valuation exceeding $6.3 billion, with IDG Capital leading and Gaorong Capital, Tencent and Alibaba Group participating. The 10-year-old subsidiary of publicly listed electric-vehicle maker XPeng Motors is building the IRON humanoid robot.
Lumilens scored a $700 million Series C at a $5.5 billion valuation, with Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners, Seligman Ventures and Spark Capital leading. The two-year-old photonics company, which builds interconnects for AI computing infrastructure, said it is already deployed inside data centers.
River AI, founded by former xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, announced a $1.1 billion round led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC. The less-than-one-year-old company was valued at roughly $5 billion.
Source Foundry, a one-year-old San Francisco firm founded by Stanford researchers that creates tooling for semiconductor manufacturing, raised $400 million led by hedge fund Situational Awareness, hitting a $5 billion valuation.
Other notable raises included Volta, a Palo Alto AI-infrastructure platform that secured $300 million in equity led by Altimeter Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Azora and Nvidia at a $2.4 billion valuation, alongside $5 billion in debt to fund data-center construction. Sharpa, a two-year-old Singapore robotics company valued at about $3.3 billion, raised roughly $669 million and plans to deploy its robots at a Dairy Queen in Shanghai to handle the full order-to-service process.
Zankore, a full-stack AI infrastructure and neocloud platform, received $800 million in corporate funding led by Ooredoo, which took a 49% stake.
