How did the SpaceX IPO perform?

SpaceX priced at $135 per share on June 11, 2026 and began trading June 12 on Nasdaq under SPCX. It raised roughly $75 billion selling more than 555 million shares, the largest IPO in history. Shares opened at $150, closed the first day at $160.95 (up 19%), and briefly valued the company above $2 trillion. The stock has since fallen back: SPCX traded near $123 on July 22, 2026, for a market cap around $1.58 trillion, below both the debut close and the $135 offer price.

How big was H1 2026 for venture funding?

Global venture funding reached a record $510 billion in the first half of 2026 per Crunchbase, more than the $440 billion invested across all of 2025. Q1 alone was $305 billion, the largest quarter on record, followed by $205 billion in Q2. OpenAI and Anthropic together took $217 billion, or 43% of every venture dollar deployed worldwide. AI companies captured more than 70% of global Q2 funding, up from under 50% a year earlier. PitchBook put US venture at $412.7 billion for H1, with 86% going to AI.

Top 50 AI Funded Startups July 2026 | Complete Rankings

✦ Updated July 24, 2026

Top 50 AI Funded Startups July 2026

Q: Why did OpenAI delay its IPO to 2027?

OpenAI filed a confidential S-1 on June 8, 2026, but the New York Times reported on June 25 that the company is leaning toward waiting until 2027. Advisers presented two options: list in 2027 at a $1 trillion valuation, or list sooner at a lower one. CEO Sam Altman reportedly called any cut to the trillion-dollar target a non-starter. The volatile public tech market and SpaceX's post-debut slide were both cited as factors. CFO Sarah Friar has told associates the company is eyeing 2027.

Q: Did SpaceX buy Cursor?

Yes. On June 16, 2026, four days after its IPO, SpaceX exercised an April option and signed a merger agreement to acquire Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, in an all-stock deal valuing it at $60 billion — the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup on record. Cursor shareholders receive SpaceX Class A stock at a seven-day volume-weighted average price. The deal is expected to close in Q3 2026 pending regulatory approval. Cursor's prior round, a $2.3B Series D in November 2025, valued it at $29.3 billion.

Complete rankings of the most funded artificial intelligence companies. Anthropic filed confidentially on June 1 and is meeting investors for an October listing under ANTH. OpenAI filed a week later but is leaning toward 2027. SpaceX went public June 12 in the largest IPO ever — then spent $60B on Cursor. Global venture funding hit a record $510B in H1.

Top 6 Deep Dives Rankings #7-50 H1 2026 Trends Quick Comparison FAQ Methodology

$700B+

Total Funding Tracked

↑ +$100B from June

$510B

H1 2026 Global VC — Record

↑ Beats all of 2025 ($440B)

43%

Of H1 VC Went To Two Companies

OpenAI + Anthropic = $217B

−25%

SPCX vs. IPO Debut Close

↓ $161 → ~$123 (Jul 22)

Top 6 Most Funded AI Startups

Anthropic

AI safety lab behind Claude — the most valuable private company on Crunchbase’s Unicorn Board since SpaceX listed. Run-rate revenue crossed $47B in May 2026, driven by Claude Code, enterprise API, and hyperscaler resale

🔥 July Update: Confidential S-1 filed with the SEC on June 1, 2026. CNBC reported July 15 that bankers are lining up investor meetings for a listing as soon as October, with institutional investor meetings continuing through the week of July 20. Expected ticker: ANTH. Last private mark $965B post-money from the $65B Series H (May 28). Run-rate revenue disclosed at $47B in May — the trajectory ran $9B (end-2025) → $14B (Feb) → $19B (Mar) → $30B (Apr) → $47B (May). Reuters reported in April that Google plans to invest up to $40B. A Commerce Department export order forced Anthropic to disable its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models worldwide from June 12; controls were lifted June 30 and both returned July 1.

$132B+

Total Funding

$965B

Last Private Valuation

Key Investors

Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia, Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital, Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, D.E. Shaw, DST Global, Fidelity, GIC, MGX, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, ICONIQ, Founders Fund

Anthropic is now the first of the frontier labs to the starting line. Filing a week before OpenAI and holding its October window while OpenAI slipped to 2027 means the first real public price for a frontier model company will likely be set by Anthropic, not by the market leader in consumer AI. Two things will define that price. The first is revenue quality: Anthropic books cloud-reseller revenue on a gross basis, counting total end-customer spend through AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure as revenue, which flatters the top line versus net-reporting peers — the S-1 will force that into the open. The second is durability of the coding franchise, now the single largest driver of enterprise spend and the exact market SpaceX just paid $60B to enter. The June export-control episode also gave investors a live demonstration of regulatory single-point-of-failure risk that no comparable software company carries.

OpenAI

Creator of ChatGPT — 900M+ weekly active users, 50M+ consumer subscribers, and the largest consumer AI franchise in the world. Filed confidentially in June, then blinked on timing

🔥 July Update: Confidential S-1 filed June 8, 2026 — one week after Anthropic. On June 25 the New York Times reported OpenAI is leaning toward waiting until 2027, after advisers warned a volatile tech tape and SpaceX’s post-debut slide would not support a $1T debut this year. Given a choice between a 2027 listing at $1T or a faster listing at a lower price, Sam Altman reportedly called any cut to the trillion-dollar target a non-starter. CFO Sarah Friar has told associates 2027. Annualised revenue is roughly $25B and reportedly flattened between February and spring. SoftBank fell more than 12% on the delay report. New revenue lines in test: ads inside ChatGPT, Shopify and Stripe commerce tie-ups; the Sora video app has been pared back.

$186B+

Total Funding

$852B

Last Private Valuation

Key Investors

Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw, Microsoft, MGX, TPG, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Thrive Capital

The delay is the story. OpenAI has the largest consumer AI business ever built and the weakest near-term case for a trillion-dollar public mark: revenue growth flattened in the spring, GAAP losses are heavy, and management does not project profitability until the end of the decade. Holding for 2027 protects the headline number but hands Anthropic the first-mover advantage in setting the public comparable — and if Anthropic prices well in October, OpenAI’s 2027 book gets easier; if it prices badly, OpenAI is anchored to a mark it did not choose. The SoftBank reaction is the tell on how much of the private cap table is now waiting on that liquidity: SoftBank carries a $40B bridge loan against its OpenAI commitments with repayment due March 2027.

Now public — NASDAQ: SPCX

SpaceX (incl. xAI)

Elon Musk’s aerospace-AI conglomerate. Completed the largest IPO in history on June 12, 2026, then immediately spent $60B of fresh public-market equity buying Cursor

🔥 July Update: Priced at $135/share June 11; opened $150 and closed the first session at $160.95, up 19%, valuing SpaceX above $2 trillion. Raised roughly $75B on 555M+ shares — the biggest IPO ever. It has since round-tripped and then some: SPCX traded near $123 on July 22 for a market cap around $1.58T, below the $135 offer price, against a 52-week range of roughly $120–$226. On June 16 the company exercised its April option to buy Anysphere (Cursor) for $60B in all-stock, closing expected Q3. CFRA opened at Sell with a $115 target; Morningstar’s fair value is far lower; NewStreet initiated at $165. SpaceX lost about $4.9B in 2025 and Q1 2026 capex hit $10.1B, mostly AI.

$75B

IPO Raise (Record)

~$1.58T

Market Cap (Jul 22)

Underwriters & Pre-IPO Backers

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup (lead, 20+ bank syndicate); Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity, Qatar Investment Authority, Kingdom Holding, Nvidia, Oracle, Sequoia

SpaceX is the cautionary comparable the rest of this pipeline now has to price against. The offering itself was a triumph — record raise, 19% pop, roughly 30% of the deal reserved for retail — and the aftermath has been a steady de-rating back through the offer price, which is precisely what spooked OpenAI’s advisers into pushing to 2027. The Cursor deal is the strategic pivot: paying $60B in stock, roughly 3.4% dilution at IPO valuation and about 15x Cursor’s ~$4B annualised revenue, buys distribution to millions of developers and a coding engine for a Grok franchise that Musk publicly conceded “was not built right the first time around.” The governance overhang is unchanged: a dual-class structure leaves Musk with 80%+ voting control regardless of float.

Databricks

Data intelligence platform powering enterprise AI/ML — 20,000+ customers, net revenue retention above 140%, positive free cash flow, and the only profitable company in the AI IPO pipeline. It just took itself out of the 2026 queue

🔥 July Update: CEO Ali Ghodsi told Bloomberg Television on June 4 that Databricks will not go public this year, calling 2026 a “terrible year to go public” amid the crowded mega-IPO calendar. No S-1, confidential or public, as of late July. Annualised revenue disclosed to analysts in June at $6.9B, up more than 80% year over year — an acceleration from the $5.4B / 65% figure reported in February. The Information reported in June that the company is in talks for a new round at a $165–$175B valuation, well above the $134B Series L mark. AI products alone cleared a $1.4B run rate. 800+ customers above $1M ARR, 70+ above $10M.

$7B+

Total Funding (incl. debt)

$134B

Last Confirmed Valuation

Key Investors

Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners, Thrive Capital, Microsoft, Meta, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Nvidia, Blue Owl, MGX

Ghodsi’s June decision looks better every week. Databricks had the cleanest story in the pipeline — $6.9B annualised, 80% growth, positive free cash flow, 140%+ net retention — and chose to sit out a calendar in which SpaceX broke below its offer price and OpenAI blinked on timing. Staying private at a rumoured $165–$175B lets the company raise at a step-up without a public mark, and preserves the option to list into a cleaner 2027 tape. The read-through for the sector is that being IPO-ready and choosing not to list is now a strength signal, not a weakness one. Whenever Databricks does price, it remains the benchmark multiple every subsequent AI SaaS listing gets measured against, and an immediate re-rating problem for Snowflake.

Waymo

Alphabet’s autonomous robotaxi unit at a $126B valuation — 15M paid trips in 2025, roughly 400,000 rides a week, expanding to 20+ new cities plus London and Tokyo in 2026

🔥 July Update: No new round since the $16B raise closed February 2 at $126B post-money — still the largest AV financing on record and nearly triple the $45B mark from 2024. Expansion continues across Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Nashville, Orlando, San Antonio, San Diego and Washington DC, with London and Tokyo as first international markets. Regulatory pressure is now the live variable: NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation and the NTSB both have open investigations after Waymo vehicles illegally passed school buses in Texas and a robotaxi struck a child near a Santa Monica elementary school. Alphabet remains majority owner and no IPO has been announced.

$42B+

Total Funding (incl. Alphabet)

$126B

Post-Money Valuation

Key Investors

Alphabet (majority), Dragoneer, DST Global, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Mubadala Capital, Bessemer, Silver Lake, Tiger Global, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity

Waymo is the clearest case in this list of a company whose next re-rating is regulatory rather than commercial. The demand side is proven — trips tripled to 15M in 2025 and the fleet is scaling toward a stated target of 1M+ weekly rides — but the school-zone incidents put a federal defects investigation directly in the path of a 20-city expansion, and every new market adds a new regulator. The unit economics are still heavy: lidar, onboard compute, charging rotation and cleaning between rides all sit in cost of revenue. The external investor base assembled in February (a16z, Silver Lake, Fidelity, Tiger Global) creates natural liquidity pressure, but with Alphabet holding majority control there is no forcing function on an IPO.

Figure AI

Humanoid robotics leader with commercial deployments at Amazon, BMW and Mercedes — the commercial validation that pulled physical AI into 2026’s breakout funding category

🔥 July Update: No new priced round since the Series D at a $48B valuation. Warehouse deployments and the Figure 03 platform continue to scale, and the wider physical-AI category kept absorbing capital through Q2 and into July — Walden Robotics launched out of stealth with $300M for general-purpose manufacturing and logistics robots, and SkildAI remains the best-funded robotics foundation-model player. Company-reported order pipeline and production-rate figures below are self-disclosed and not independently audited; treat unit and revenue-pipeline claims as company guidance rather than verified results.

$3.2B+

Total Funding

$48B

Valuation

Key Investors

Parkway Venture, Nvidia, Intel Capital, Brookfield, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Bezos Expeditions

Figure is the reference asset for the physical-AI thesis: if humanoids ship at industrial volume anywhere first, it is here, and every robotics round priced in 2026 is implicitly marked against Figure’s $48B. That cuts both ways. The valuation embeds a hardware ramp that no previous robotics company has achieved, against a customer base concentrated in a handful of very large logistics and automotive buyers who can renegotiate or pause at will. The category’s funding momentum is real and broadening — Walden, SkildAI, Boston Dynamics and the AV complex all drew record capital in H1 — but commercial proof at Figure is still measured in pilot-scale deployments rather than audited revenue, and that gap is the whole investment question.

H1 2026 AI Funding Trends: Record Capital, Wobbly Exits

The first half of 2026 was the largest half-year for venture funding ever recorded — $510B globally per Crunchbase, more than the $440B invested across all of 2025, and roughly 36% above the previous half-year record set in H2 2021. But the second half opens on a very different mood than the first. SpaceX’s record IPO pulled the whole pipeline forward in June and then broke below its offer price within six weeks. OpenAI pushed to 2027. Databricks pulled itself out of the 2026 queue entirely. What is left is a market with unlimited private capital and a public window that is suddenly much narrower than it looked on June 12.

📊 $510B In Six Months — And 43% Of It To Two Companies

Q1 2026 hit $305B, the largest quarter on record; Q2 added $205B across 5,000+ startups, the second largest. OpenAI ($122B) and Anthropic (~$95B across two rounds) together took $217B — 43% of every venture dollar deployed worldwide in H1. AI captured more than 70% of global Q2 funding, up from under 50% a year earlier. PitchBook put US venture at $412.7B for H1, with 86% of it going to AI. Deal count did not meaningfully grow; the records came from giant rounds, not broader activity.

🚀 The IPO Window Opened — Then Narrowed

SpaceX (SPCX) priced at $135 on June 11, raised ~$75B, closed day one up 19% above $2T — and traded near $123 by July 22, below its offer. Cerebras (CBRS) debuted May 14 with a 68% pop and has since given back well over half its peak market cap. Those two tapes did the damage: OpenAI slipped to 2027, Databricks ruled out 2026 outright, and Anthropic’s October window is now the sector’s single most important pricing event.

👑 Anthropic Runs First

Anthropic filed confidentially June 1; OpenAI filed June 8. Only Anthropic kept its timeline. Bankers began lining up investor meetings in mid-July for a listing as soon as October under ticker ANTH, at a $965B last private mark on $47B run-rate revenue. Whoever prices first sets the public comparable for every frontier lab — and for the first time in the AI cycle, that will not be OpenAI.

🤝 M&A Came Back Harder Than IPOs

Q2 2026 was the biggest quarter on record for billion-dollar acquisitions: 24 companies bought at or above $1B for $113B in total value, alongside 32 venture-backed IPOs above $1B. The headline deal was SpaceX buying Anysphere (Cursor) for $60B in all-stock on June 16 — the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup ever, at roughly 15x Cursor’s ~$4B annualised revenue, four days after SpaceX’s own listing gave it the currency to pay.

⚡ Inference Infrastructure Is The New Battleground

Capital rotated hard from model training to inference serving in Q2 and July. Baseten raised $1.5B (Series F) and Fireworks AI raised $1.5B within weeks of each other, both for enterprise inference. Together AI raised again in early July. Cerebras signed CrowdStrike and AMD partnerships, expanded manufacturing with Flex, and committed to first European data centre capacity by end-2026. Capacity, not demand, is the stated bottleneck across the board.

🌍 Capital Is Internationalising Even As It Concentrates

The US share of global Q2 funding fell from 83% to roughly 66–67%, even as sector concentration in AI accelerated. European and sovereign vehicles drove much of the shift: MGX closed Fund I at $49B against a $45B target and is developing a 3GW AI campus near Paris; Nscale is building sovereign capacity across Europe; CuspAI raised a $450M Series B in Cambridge, UK on July 20 with UK government participation. DeepSeek is reportedly preparing a filing as soon as this year.

Rankings #7-50: Complete AI Startup List

Perplexity AI

$1.72B total • $22.6B valuation • Series E-6

AI-native search engine with 45M+ monthly active users and $200M+ ARR. Subscription-first model, Comet browser, and Model Council feature comparing GPT and Claude outputs. $750M Microsoft Azure commitment.

Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS)

Public since May 14, 2026 • ~$46–70B market cap • $220/share (Jul 24)

Wafer-scale AI inference chips. IPO’d at $185, opened $350, closed day one +68% — then fell as far as $161 after a Q1 margin guidance controversy on June 23. Q1 2026 revenue $193.4M (+~2x YoY) but an EPS miss; FY2026 guide $855–865M, capacity-constrained. New CrowdStrike and AMD partnerships, expanded Flex manufacturing, first European data centre due by end-2026. $20B+ OpenAI cloud deal; AWS revenue expected from 2027.

Scale AI

$1.9B total • $16B valuation • Series F

AI training data and RLHF platform with Pentagon and defense contracts. Meta led $14.3B investment in 2025 — CEO Alexandr Wang now at Meta. Core data infrastructure for frontier model training.

#10

CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV)

Public since March 2025 • ~$50B market cap • $5.1B 2025 revenue • $50B+ backlog

AI hyperscaler and the sector’s longest-running public comparable. $21B Meta deal, $50B+ backlog, fastest cloud to $5B annual revenue. Perplexity and Cerebras partnerships signed. Now trades as a bellwether for AI infrastructure sentiment alongside CBRS and SPCX.

#11

ElevenLabs

$781M total • $11B valuation • Series D (Feb 2026)

Voice AI leader with $500M ARR (up from $330M at Dec 2025). Sequoia-led $500M round tripled valuation. Enterprise: Deutsche Telekom, Meta, Revolut, Salesforce. IPO targeted 2027-28. Europe’s third-largest AI unicorn.

#12

Shield AI

$2.1B+ total • $12.7B valuation • Series G (Mar 2026)

$1.5B Series G co-led by Advent International and JPMorgan + $500M Blackstone preferred. Valuation up 140% in one year. Hivemind selected for US Air Force CCA program. Projecting $540M+ 2026 revenue.

#13

Mistral AI

$1.6B total • $16B valuation • Series C

European AI champion with open-source LLMs, sovereign AI focus, and French government backing. Europe’s largest AI unicorn by valuation. Evaluating in-house chip design alongside inference expansion.

#14

Nscale

$2B+ total • $14.6B valuation • Series C (Mar 2026)

Nvidia-backed European AI infrastructure. Raised $2B Series C in March 2026 — one of Europe’s largest tech financings ever. Sheryl Sandberg joined board. Building sovereign AI data center capacity across Europe as EU capital deployment accelerates.

#15

SkildAI

$1.4B total • $14B valuation • Series C (Jan 2026)

AI foundation models for robotics — enabling robots to learn and adapt tasks across environments. The foundational model layer for physical AI, now 2026’s most heavily funded emerging category after frontier labs.

#16

OpenEvidence

$460M total • $12B valuation • Series D (Jan 2026)

Medical AI chatbot used by 700K+ physicians. $250M Series D co-led by Thrive Global and DST Global in January 2026. Fastest adoption of any clinical AI tool in physician history.

#17

Vercel

$1.15B total • $11B valuation • Series H

Cloud platform for AI-powered web applications with Next.js and v0 AI design tool. 11M+ developers on platform. Backbone of the AI-native web development ecosystem.

#18

Harvey AI

$776M total • $8B valuation • Series D

AI legal assistant for top law firms. $600M across two rounds in H1 2025. Case analysis, contract review, and legal research at scale. Adopted by Allen & Overy, PwC, A&O Shearman.

#19

Cohere

$1.3B total • $7.2B valuation • Series E

Enterprise LLMs with data privacy focus, customization, and RAG for Fortune 500. Had targeted an H2 2026 IPO; that window now looks contingent on how Anthropic prices in the autumn. Positioned as the enterprise-safe alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic models.

#20

Glean

$620M total • $6.5B valuation • Series F

Enterprise AI search across company data serving 2,500+ organizations with semantic understanding of internal knowledge bases.

#21

Runway

$692M total • $5.3B valuation • Series E (Feb 2026)

AI video generation platform. Raised $315M Series E led by General Atlantic with Nvidia, Fidelity, and Felicis in February 2026. Gen-3 Alpha model driving enterprise adoption.

#22

Decagon

$481M total • $4.5B valuation • Series D (Jan 2026)

Autonomous AI customer support agents. $250M Series D in January 2026 co-led by Coatue and Index Ventures. Tripled valuation in under a year. Replacing tier-1 support at scale.

#23

Ramp Intelligence

$500M total • $6.5B valuation • Series E

AI-powered expense management and CFO automation platform growing 180% YoY. Expanding from spend management to full finance operations automation.

#24

Waabi

$1B+ total • Series C (Feb 2026)

AI-first autonomous trucking. Raised $750M Series C + $250M milestone financing in February 2026. Uber Freight partnership removes key go-to-market risk. Expanding commercial deployments across North America.

#25

Hugging Face

$545M total • $5.1B valuation • Series D

Open-source AI hub with 1.2M+ models, collaboration platform, and inference API powering the global AI developer community. Default model distribution layer for the open-source ecosystem.

#26

humans& (humans-and)

$480M total • $4.48B valuation • Seed (Jan 2026)

AI research lab. Raised $480M seed round backed by Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and GV in January 2026 — one of the largest seed rounds on record, reflecting extreme investor demand for frontier AI talent.

#27

Acquisition pending — SpaceX, $60B

Anysphere (Cursor)

$29.3B valuation (Series D, Nov 2025) → $60B all-stock acquisition • ~$4B annualised revenue

AI-first code editor, the fastest-growing developer product of the cycle. SpaceX exercised its April option on June 16, 2026 and signed a $60B all-stock merger — the largest venture-backed startup acquisition ever. Close expected Q3 2026 pending regulatory approval; Cursor then becomes a wholly owned SpaceX subsidiary. Roughly $2.6B of revenue is enterprise B2B. Will be removed from these rankings on close.

#28

Midjourney

$145M total • $3.2B valuation • Series A

Leading AI image generation with 30M+ users and $250M+ 2025 revenue — largely bootstrapped. V7 model released with improved photorealism and prompt adherence.

#29

Halter

$320M+ total • $2B valuation • Series E (Mar 2026)

AI collars for cattle using GPS and ML for virtual fencing. $220M Series E led by Founders Fund. Largest NZ VC raise ever. Managing 600K+ cows across 5,000+ farms globally.

#30

Poolside

$876M total • $3.5B valuation • Series C

Autonomous software engineering platform. Competitive position materially changed by the SpaceX–Cursor deal, which consolidates the top of the AI coding market under a public-company balance sheet.

#31

Writer

$356M total • $2.3B valuation • Series D

Enterprise AI writing platform with brand governance serving 1,800+ companies. Full-stack enterprise AI deployment beyond writing to workflow automation.

#32

Together AI

$258M+ total • $1.5B last disclosed valuation • new round announced early July 2026

Decentralized cloud for open-source AI model training and inference. Ranked among the largest US venture rounds of the June 27–July 2 week; terms not fully disclosed. Infrastructure layer enabling enterprise deployment of open-weight models without proprietary API dependency.

#33

Baseten

$1.5B Series F (June 2026) • AI inference infrastructure

Enterprise inference serving platform. Its $1.5B Series F was the largest US venture round of the June 18–26 week, part of a sharp Q2 rotation of capital from model training toward inference. New entry this edition.

#34

Magic

$465M total • $1.8B valuation • Series C

AI coding with 100M token context window for full codebase understanding and long-horizon software development tasks.

#35

LMArena

$150M+ total • $1.7B valuation • Series A (Jan 2026)

AI model evaluation and benchmarking platform. Reached $1.7B valuation in under four months. Launched Video Arena on the web. Top branded search demand among AI evaluation startups.

#36

Deepgram

$230M+ total • $1.3B valuation • Series C

Voice AI and speech recognition platform. Growing alongside ElevenLabs as voice AI becomes core enterprise infrastructure for call centers, transcription, and agents.

#37

Temporal

$285M total • $2.8B valuation • Series C

Workflow orchestration for reliable AI applications and distributed systems. Critical infrastructure for AI agent workflows at enterprise scale.

#38

Einride

$285M total • $1.7B valuation • Series D

Autonomous electric freight trucks deployed with Walmart, Maersk, and other logistics majors. Commercial fleets operating in the US and Europe.

#39

Replit

$230M total • $1.4B valuation • Series C

AI-powered coding platform with 40M users and agent-based development. Competing in agentic software development, a category now anchored by a $60B public-market comparable.

#40

Typeface

$235M total • $1.2B valuation • Series D

Enterprise generative AI for brand-consistent content creation at scale. Full brand governance layer for enterprise marketing and communications teams.

#41

Synthesia

$226M total • $1.2B valuation • Series D

AI video with synthetic avatars for enterprise training and marketing. Dominant in L&D and internal communications video production.

#42

Character.AI

$263M total • $1.1B valuation • Series A

AI chatbot platform with billions of messages and viral adoption among Gen Z. Navigating safety challenges and monetization while deepening engagement.

#43

Weights & Biases

$325M total • $1.1B valuation • Series D

MLOps platform for experiment tracking used by OpenAI, Anthropic, and 1,000+ ML teams. The default experiment tracking and model management layer for AI teams globally.

#44

Inferact

$150M total • $800M valuation • Seed (Jan 2026)

AI inference startup. $150M seed co-led by a16z and Lightspeed months after founding. Sonic Inference Engine aggregating 200K+ AI models.

#45

Reka AI

$180M total • $1.1B valuation • Series B

Multimodal AI with vision and reasoning from former Google DeepMind team. Competing in enterprise multimodal inference against Gemini and Claude vision integrations.

#46

Stability AI

$165M total • $1.1B valuation • Series B

Open-source Stable Diffusion and multimodal AI models. Repositioned toward enterprise and API-first use cases after consumer disruption from Midjourney and Adobe Firefly.

#47

Jasper

$165M total • $2.0B valuation • Series A

AI marketing content creation with 120K+ customers and agency partnerships. Navigating competitive pressure from Claude and GPT-integrated marketing platforms.

#48

Luma AI

$108M total • $680M valuation • Series B

Dream Machine video generation and 3D capture technology. Competing with Runway and Pika in AI video with a focus on 3D scene understanding.

#49

Pika

$155M total • $620M valuation • Series B

AI video generation with viral consumer growth. Pika 2.0 includes scene editing and character consistency. Competing with Runway and Luma for consumer video generation.

#50

Replicate

$88M total • $460M valuation • Series B

Platform for running open-source AI models via API with 60K+ developers. Infrastructure layer enabling rapid deployment of Hugging Face and custom models without MLOps overhead.

Top 10 AI Startups: Quick Comparison — July 2026

Rank	Company	Total Funding	Valuation	Category	Key Metric
1	Anthropic	$132B+	$965B (private)	Foundation Models	$47B run-rate; IPO Oct 2026?
2	OpenAI	$186B+	$852B (private)	Foundation Models	~$25B ARR; IPO slipped to 2027
3	SpaceX (SPCX)	$75B IPO raise	~$1.58T mkt cap	AI + Aerospace	Below $135 offer price
4	Databricks	$7B+	$134B ($165–175B talks)	Data Intelligence	$6.9B ARR; no 2026 IPO
5	Waymo	$42B+	$126B	Autonomous Vehicles	~400K rides/week
6	Figure AI	$3.2B	$48B	Robotics	Amazon, BMW, Mercedes pilots
7	Perplexity AI	$1.72B	$22.6B	AI Search	$200M+ ARR; 45M users
8	Cerebras (CBRS)	Public	~$46–70B mkt cap	AI Chips	$193.4M Q1 rev; margin reset
9	Scale AI	$1.9B	$16B	Data Platform	$820M ARR
10	CoreWeave (CRWV)	Public	~$50B mkt cap	GPU Cloud	$5.1B 2025 rev; $50B+ backlog

Ranking Methodology & Data Sources

The July 2026 edition covers the half-year in which private AI funding hit an all-time record and the public market started pushing back. Rankings incorporate verified data through July 24, 2026.

Total Funding Raised (40%) — Cumulative capital across all rounds including equity, debt, strategic investments, and verified secondary sales
Current Valuation (30%) — Latest post-money valuation from primary funding rounds, verified secondary transactions, or public market capitalisation for listed companies
Recent Funding Momentum (15%) — New capital raised and funding velocity in trailing 6 months
Revenue & Market Traction (15%) — ARR, user growth, customer count, strategic partnerships, and commercial validation

H1 2026 context: Crunchbase recorded $510B in global venture funding for the first half — more than the $440B invested across all of 2025, and roughly 36% above the previous half-year record of $375B set in H2 2021. Q1 alone was $305B, the largest quarter on record; Q2 added $205B across more than 5,000 startups, the second largest. OpenAI and Anthropic together took $217B, or 43% of every venture dollar deployed worldwide. AI captured more than 70% of global Q2 funding, up from under 50% a year earlier, with 88% of AI capital going to US-based firms. PitchBook-NVCA put US venture at $412.7B for H1, of which $355.9B (86%) went to AI. Exit markets kept pace for the first time since 2021: 32 venture-backed companies IPO’d above $1B and 24 were acquired above $1B for $113B in total — the biggest M&A quarter on record.

Notable changes vs. the June edition: SpaceX reclassified as a public company (SPCX) after its June 12 listing; the $1.75T IPO target was exceeded on debut ($2.1T close) and has since fallen below the offer price. OpenAI’s IPO expectation moved from September 2026 to 2027 following the June 25 NYT report. Anthropic’s confidential S-1 (June 1) and July investor meetings added; expected ticker ANTH. Databricks updated to $6.9B annualised revenue with the CEO’s June 4 statement ruling out a 2026 listing, plus reported $165–175B round talks. Cerebras updated with Q1 results, the June 23 margin guidance reset, and current trading levels. Anysphere (Cursor) corrected from a badly stale $3.4B mark to its $29.3B Series D and flagged as a pending $60B SpaceX acquisition. Adept AI removed — its founding team was hired by Amazon in 2024 and it no longer operates as an independent venture-backed startup. Baseten added at #33. Waymo updated with open NHTSA and NTSB investigations.

Data quality note: Valuations for entries #11–#50 that carry no dated update in this edition are unchanged from prior reporting and have not been independently re-verified this cycle. Self-reported run-rate revenue figures — including Anthropic’s, which is booked on a gross basis for cloud-reseller revenue — are company disclosures, not audited results. Order pipelines and production-rate claims from private hardware companies are company guidance.

Data Sources: Crunchbase News, PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, CNBC, Reuters, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Forbes, TechCrunch, Sacra, SEC EDGAR filings, company press releases, and public market data. Companies must have raised $20M+ in institutional funding to qualify. Recently listed companies (SpaceX, Cerebras, CoreWeave) are retained for continuity within their ranking cycle.

Last Updated: July 24, 2026 • Next Update: August 1, 2026 • Data Coverage: Through July 24, 2026

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the most valuable AI startup in July 2026?

Anthropic, at a $965B post-money valuation from its $65B Series H in May 2026 — ahead of OpenAI’s $852B last private round. Anthropic became the most valuable private company on Crunchbase’s Unicorn Board once SpaceX listed and left the leaderboard. SpaceX is no longer a startup comparison: it has traded on Nasdaq under SPCX since June 12.

When is the Anthropic IPO and what is the ticker?

Anthropic filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC on June 1, 2026. CNBC reported on July 15 that bankers had begun lining up investor meetings for a listing as soon as October, with institutional investor meetings continuing through late July. The expected ticker is ANTH. No pricing date, offer size, or public S-1 has been released, and the company has not confirmed a date — treat October as a reported target, not a scheduled event.

Why did OpenAI delay its IPO to 2027?

OpenAI filed confidentially on June 8, a week after Anthropic. On June 25 the New York Times reported the company is leaning toward 2027, after advisers warned that a volatile tech tape and SpaceX’s post-debut slide would not support a $1T debut this year. Given the choice between waiting for $1T or listing sooner at a lower price, Sam Altman reportedly called any cut to the trillion-dollar target a non-starter. CFO Sarah Friar has told associates 2027. SoftBank, which has committed roughly $65B to OpenAI and carries a $40B bridge loan due March 2027, fell more than 12% on the report.

How did the SpaceX IPO actually perform?

SpaceX priced at $135 on June 11 and began trading June 12 under SPCX, raising roughly $75B on 555M+ shares — the largest IPO in history. Shares opened at $150, hit $176.52 intraday, and closed at $160.95, up 19%, valuing the company above $2T. It has since given all of that back and more: SPCX traded near $123 on July 22 for a market cap around $1.58T, below the offer price. About 30% of the deal was reserved for retail, and anti-flipping rules keep the float tight for 180 days. Analyst views are unusually split — CFRA opened at Sell with a $115 target, Morningstar’s fair value sits far lower, NewStreet initiated at $165.

Did SpaceX really buy Cursor for $60 billion?

Yes. On June 16, 2026 — four days after its IPO — SpaceX exercised an option secured in April and signed a merger agreement to acquire Anysphere, maker of Cursor, in an all-stock deal valued at $60B. It is the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup on record. Cursor shareholders receive SpaceX Class A stock priced on a seven-day volume-weighted average before close, expected in Q3 2026 pending regulatory approval. If the deal breaks, Cursor receives $1.5B cash plus $8.5B in SpaceX compute. Cursor’s last round, a $2.3B Series D in November 2025, valued it at $29.3B; annualised revenue was around $4B by early June.

Why is Databricks not going public in 2026?

CEO Ali Ghodsi told Bloomberg Television on June 4 that Databricks would not list this year, calling 2026 a “terrible year to go public” given the crowded mega-IPO calendar. No S-1 has been filed. The fundamentals did not deteriorate — annualised revenue was disclosed at $6.9B in June, up more than 80% year over year, with positive free cash flow and net retention above 140%. Instead the company is reportedly in talks for a private round at $165–175B, letting it mark up without a public price and preserving the option to list into a calmer 2027 window.

How big was H1 2026 for global venture funding?

The largest half-year on record. Crunchbase reported $510B globally, exceeding the $440B invested across all of 2025 and beating the prior half-year record of $375B (H2 2021) by roughly 36%. Q1 was $305B and Q2 $205B across 5,000+ startups. OpenAI and Anthropic together took $217B — 43% of all global venture funding. AI captured more than 70% of Q2 global capital, up from under 50% a year earlier. PitchBook put US venture at $412.7B with 86% going to AI. Deal count did not grow meaningfully; the records came from mega-rounds, not broader activity.

What happened to Cerebras stock after the IPO?

Cerebras (CBRS) priced at $185 on May 13, opened at $350 on May 14 and closed day one up 68%, briefly touching a $95B market cap. It has been volatile since. Shares fell sharply on June 23 after Q1 results — revenue of $193.4M beat, but an EPS miss and a gross-margin guide that CEO Andrew Feldman said was “misunderstood” triggered a 16–17% drop, and at least two law firms opened securities investigations. The stock bottomed near $161 and has recovered to roughly $220 as of July 24 on CrowdStrike and AMD partnerships, an expanded Flex manufacturing deal, and plans for first European data centre capacity by year-end. FY2026 guidance is $855–865M, capacity-constrained.

Which AI IPOs are still expected?

Anthropic (ANTH) is the near-term event, with reported meetings pointing at October 2026 — though independent forecasters put the median closer to November or December. OpenAI has filed but is leaning to 2027. Databricks has ruled out 2026 and has not filed. Cohere had targeted H2 2026; that now looks contingent on how Anthropic prices. ElevenLabs is talking about 2027–28. DeepSeek is reportedly preparing a filing as soon as this year. Already public: SpaceX (SPCX, June 2026), Cerebras (CBRS, May 2026), CoreWeave (CRWV, March 2025).

Is the AI funding market in a bubble?

The revenue at the top is real — Anthropic disclosed $47B run-rate, Databricks $6.9B annualised with positive free cash flow, Cursor roughly $4B before its acquisition. The concerns are concentration and the gap between private and public marks. Two companies took 43% of six months of global venture funding. And the first two AI listings of 2026 both fell hard from their debuts: SpaceX below its offer price within six weeks, Cerebras down well over half from its peak market cap. That divergence — record private capital, softening public prices — is the defining tension of the second half, and Anthropic’s pricing is the test that resolves it.

How can retail investors get AI exposure now?

More options than a quarter ago, since three of the biggest names are now listed: SpaceX (SPCX), Cerebras (CBRS) and CoreWeave (CRWV) all trade on Nasdaq through any standard brokerage. Public strategic stakes offer indirect exposure via Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Nvidia. Several ETFs hold private AI positions. Pre-IPO platforms including Forge Global, EquityZen and Hiive serve accredited investors, though SpaceX shares are no longer available there post-listing. Anthropic (ANTH) would be the next direct opportunity if it lists in the autumn. None of this is investment advice — the two 2026 AI debuts so far have both traded well below their first-day highs.

Why aren’t Google DeepMind or Microsoft AI ranked?

This ranking tracks independent venture-backed AI companies with their own valuations and exit paths. Google DeepMind, Microsoft AI, Meta AI and Amazon Bedrock are divisions of large public corporations with no independent valuation. They are, however, major investors across this list — Microsoft and Amazon in OpenAI, Amazon and Google in Anthropic, Nvidia throughout. Recently listed companies (SpaceX, Cerebras, CoreWeave) are retained for continuity within the ranking cycle in which they debuted.