With AI igniting an investor frenzy, every month, more startups obtain unicorn status.

Using data from Crunchbase and PitchBook, TechCrunch tracked down the VC-backed startups that became unicorns so far this year. While most are AI-related, a surprising number are focused in other industries like satellite space companies like Loft Orbital and blockchain-based trading site Kalshi.  

This list will be updated throughout the year, so check back and see the latest powerhouse startups who are now worth over $1 billion.

June

Linear — $1.25 billion: This software development product management tool last raised an $82 million Series C, valuing the company at $1.25 billion, according to Pitchbook. The company, founded in 2019, has raised more than $130 million in funding to date from investors including Accel and Sequoia Capital. 

Gecko — $1.62 billion: This company makes data-gathering robotics that climb, crawl, swim, and fly. Founded in 2013, the company last raised a $121 million Series D, valuing the company at $1.6 billion, according to Pitchbook. The company has raised more than $340 million in funding to date from investors including Cox Enterprises and Drive Capital. 

Meter — $1.38 billion: This company, which offers managed Internet infrastructure service to enterprises, last raised a $170 million Series C, valuing the company at $1.38 billion, according to Pitchbook. The company, founded in 2015, has raised more than $250 in funding to date, from investors including General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Sam Atlaman, and Lachy Groom. 

Teamworks — This sports software company last raised a $247 million Series F, valuing the company at $1.25 billion, according to Pitchbook. The company, founded in 2006, has raised more than $400 million in funding to date from investors including Seaport Capital and General Catalyst.  

Thinking Machines — This AI research company, founded just last year by OpenAI alumn Mira Murati, raised a $2 billion seed round, valuing the company at $10 billion, according to Pitchbook. The company’s investors include a16z and Nvidia. 

Kalshi — $2 billion: The popular prediction markets company, founded in 2018, last raised an $185 million Series C, valuing the company at $2 billion, according to Pitchbook. The company has raised more than $290 million in funding to date, from investors including Sequoia and Global Founders Capital. 

Decagon — This customer service AI agent company, founded in 2023, last raised a $131 million Series C, valuing the company at $1.5 billion, according to Pitchbook. The company has raised more than $231 million in funding to date, from investors including a16z and Accel. 

May

Pathos — $1.6 billion: This drug development company, founded in 2020, last raised a $365 million Series D, valuing the company at $1.6 billion, according to Pitchbook. The company has raised more than $460 million to date from investors, including General Catalyst and Altimeter Capital Management. 

Statsig — $1.1 billion: This product development platform, founded in 2021, last raised an $100 million Series C, valuing the company at $1.1 billion, according to Pitchbook. The company has raised around $153 million to date, from investors including Sequoia, Mardona, and ICONIQ Growth. 

SpreeAI — $1.5 billion: This shopping tech company last raised an undisclosed round, according to Pitchbook, that valued the company at $1.5 billion. The company, founded in 2020, has raised more than $20 million to date from investors including The Davidson Group. 

Function — $2.5 billion: This health tech company, founded in 2020, last raised a $200 million round, according to Pitchbook, valuing the company at $2.5 billion. The company has raised more than $250 million in funding to date, from investors including a16z. 

Owner — $1 billion: This restaurant marketing software company, founded in 2018, last raised a $120 million Series C, valuing the company at $1 billion, per Pitchbook. The company has raised more than $180 million in funding to date, from investors including Headline, Redpoint Ventures, SaaStr Fund, and Meritech Capital. 

Awardco — $1 billion: This employee engagement platform last raised a $165 million Series B, valuing the company at $1 billion, per Pitchbook. The company, founded in 2012, has raised more than $230 million in funding to date, from investors including General Catalyst. 

April

Nourish — $1 billion: This dietitian tele-health company last raised a $70 million Series B, according to Pitchbook, valuing the company at $1 billion. The company, founded in 2020, has raised more than $100 million in funding to date from investors including Index Ventures and Thrive Capital. 

Chapter — $1.38 billion: This Medicare guide health tech company, founded in 2013, last raised a $75 million Series D, valuing it at $1.38 billion, according to Pitchbook. The company has raised $186 million in funding to date, with investors including XYZ Venture Capital and Narya. 

Threatlocker — $1.2 billion: This Orlando-based data protection company last raised a $60 million Series E, valuing the company at $1.2 billion, according to Pitchbook. The company, founded in 2017, has raised more than $200 million in funding to date, from investors including General Atlantic and StepStone Group. 
Cyberhaven — $1 billion: This data detection company last raised a $100 million Series D in April, according to Pitchbook, valuing the company at $1 billion. The company, launched in 2015, has raised more than $200 million in funding to date, with investors including Khlosa Ventrues and Redpoint Ventures.

March 

Fleetio — $1.5 billion: This Alabama-based startup creates software to help make fleet operations easier. It last raised a $454 million Series D at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to PitchBook. It was launched in 2012 and has raised $624 million in funding to date, with investors including Elephant and Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives.

The Bot Company — $2 billion: This robotics platform last raised a $150 million early-stage round, valuing it at $2 billion, according to PitchBook. The company, which was founded in 2024, has raised $300 million to date in funding. 

Celestial AI — $2.5 billion: The AI company raised a $250 million Series C led by Fidelity that valued the company at $2.5 billion, per Crunchbase. The company, based in California, was launched in 2020 and counts BlackRock and Engine Ventures as investors. It has raised more than $580 million in capital to date, per PitchBook. 

Underdog Fantasy — $1.3 billion: The sports gaming company last raised a $70 million Series C valuing the company at $1.3 billion, according to Crunchbase. The company, founded in 2020, has raised more than $100 million in capital to date, per PitchBook. Investors include Spark Capital. 

Build Ops — $1 billion: This software company last raised a $122.6 million Series C, valuing it at $1 billion. Build Ops, which was launched in 2018, has raised $273 million in total, according to PitchBook, with investors including Founders Fund and Fika Ventures. 

Insilico Medicine — $1 billion: The drug research company raised a $110 million Series E valuing the company at $1 billion, per Crunchbase. It launched in 2014, has raised more than $500 million to date in capital, and counts Lilly Ventures and Value Partners Group as investors. 

Olipop — $2 billion: This popular probiotic soda company last raised a $137.9 million Series C at a $1.96 billion valuation. It was founded in 2018 and has raised $243 million to date with investors including Scoop Ventures and J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners. 

Peregrine — $2.5 billion: This data analysis and integration platform, launched in 2017, last raised a $190 million Series C with a valuation of $2.5 billion. It has raised more than $250 million in funding to date, according to PitchBook, with investors including Sequoia and Fifth Down Capital. 

Assured — $1 billion: The AI company helps process claims and last raised a $23 million Series B, valuing the company at $1 billion. It was launched in 2019 and has raised a little more than $26 million to date, with investors including ICONIQ Capital and Kleiner Perkins. 

February 

Abridge — $2.8 billion: This medtech company, founded in 2018, last raised a $250 million Series D at a $2.75 billion valuation, per PitchBook. The company has raised more than $460 million to date in funding and counts Elad Gil and IVP as investors. 

OpenEvidence — $1 billion: This medtech company, founded in 2017, last raised a $75 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation, per PitchBook. The company has raised $135 million to date in funding and counts Sequoia Capital as an investor. 

Hightouch — $1.2 billion: The data platform, founded in 2018, last raised an $80 million Series C at a $1.2 billion valuation, per PitchBook. The company has raised $171 million to date in funding and counts Sapphire Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures as investors.

January

Kikoff — $1 billion: This personal finance platform last raised an undisclosed amount that valued it at $1 billion, according to PitchBook. The company, founded in 2019, has raised $42.5 million to date and counts Female Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and basketballer Steph Curry as investors. 

Netradyne — $1.35 billion: Founded in 2015, this computer vision startup raised a $90 million Series D valuing it at $1.35 billion, according to Crunchbase. The round was led by Point72 Ventures.

Hippocratic AI — $1.6 billion: This startup, founded in 2023, creates healthcare models. It raised a $141 million Series B, valuing it at $1.64 billion, according to Crunchbase. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins. 

Truveta — $1 billion: This genetic research company raised a $320 million round valuing it at $1 billion, according to Crunchbase. Founded in 2020, its investors include the CVCs from Microsoft and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. 

Clay — $1.25 billion: Founded in 2017, Clay is an AI sales platform. The company raised a $40 million Series B, valuing it at $1.25 billion, according to PitchBook. It has raised more than $100 million to date and counts Sequoia, First Round, Boldstar, and Box Group as investors.  

Mercor — $2 billion: This contract recruiting startup raised a $100 million Series B valuing it at $2 billion. The company, founded in 2022, counts Felicis, Menlo Ventures, Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel, and Anthology Fund as investors. 

Loft Orbital — $1 billion: Founded in 2017, the satellite company raised a $170 million Series C valuing the company at $1 billion, according to Crunchbase. Investors in the round included Temasek and Tikehau Capital. 

This post was updated to reflect what Peregine does.

It’s a sad weekend over at Bluesky, where one of the best accounts has disappeared — although we can still hope for its resurrection.

Known as The Louvre of Bluesky, the account in question struck fear into the hearts of bad posters everywhere. While it posted commentary and jokes of its own, its most brutally funny and haunting work came in the form of screenshots capturing rogue Bluesky posts in all their unhinged glory.

It’s hard to write a proper appreciation now that the Louvre has vanished, and it’s truly impossible to create a full taxonomy of the all varieties of poster’s disease it managed to capture in the wild. Perhaps the defining characteristic of posts memorialized in the Louvre of Bluesky — beyond the simple failure to get a joke — was a scolding tone, along with a sense of absolute outrage that someone, somewhere might be having fun on the internet.

Maybe I’m projecting too much onto a screenshot-filled anonymous social media account, but to me, it always felt like the exact opposite of the tedious, ad nauseum complaints that Bluesky is a liberal echo chamber. This wasn’t someone who’d spent a few minutes on the site just to confirm their suspicions and write the umpteenth version of the same op-ed. Whether they loved Bluesky or hated it, whoever operated the account clearly knew the site’s darkest corners; they understood what absolute weirdos its users could be.

The account also felt, at times, like a warning — that any of us, in a moment of weakness, could post something clueless or cringe. Just knowing the Louvre of Bluesky was out there was enough to scare me (not often enough, I’m sure) into deleting a couple of dumb or obvious replies.

So where has the Louvre of Bluesky gone? In a post on Patreon, the account’s author said it would be taken down “temporarily” due to “a loser and a coward” emailing their bosses and their wife’s bosses. They added that they’re “not sure if the account will stay closed.”

It’s not much to go on. I can only hope that like the real museum, the Louvre of Bluesky will be able to reopen soon. But even if it doesn’t, its spirit will continue haunting all of us who remember we’re just a few keystrokes away from being immortalized for a bad post.

In the last week, social media users have shared dozens of stories about encounters with Soham Parekh, a software engineer who seems to have been simultaneously working at multiple Silicon Valley startups — unbeknownst to the companies — for the last several years.

But who is Parekh, how did he pull off his career as a serial moonlighter, and why can’t Silicon Valley get enough of him?

Origins of virality

The saga all started when Suhail Doshi — CEO of image generation startup Playground AI — shared a post Tuesday on X that began: “PSA: there’s a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time. He’s been preying on YC companies and more. Beware.”

Doshi claims that, roughly a year ago, he fired Parekh from Playground AI after he found out he was working at other companies. “[I] told him to stop lying/scamming people. He hasn’t stopped a year later,” Doshi wrote.

That post from Doshi received roughly 20 million views and prompted several other founders to share their run-ins with Parekh as well.

Flo Crivello, the CEO of Lindy, a startup that helps people automate their workflows with AI, said he hired Parekh in recent weeks, but fired him in light of Doshi’s tweet.

Matt Parkhurst, the CEO of Antimetal, a startup that does automated cloud management, confirmed that Parekh was the company’s first engineering hire in 2022. Parkhurst tells TechCrunch that Antimetal let Parekh go in early 2023 after they realized he was moonlighting at other companies.

Parekh also seems to have worked at Sync Labs, a startup that makes an AI lip-synching tool, where he even starred in a promotional video. He was ultimately let go.

At some point, Parekh applied to several Y Combinator-backed startups. Haz Hubble, the co-founder of Pally AI, a Y Combinator-backed startup building an “AI relationship management platform,” says he offered Parekh a founding engineer role. Adish Jain, the co-founder of YC-backed Mosaic — an AI video editing startup — said he interviewed Parekh for a role, too.

TechCrunch has reached out to these companies for comment, but they did not immediately respond.

It turns out that Parekh did quite well in many of these interviews and received offers, largely because he’s a gifted software engineer.

For instance, Rohan Pandey, a founding research engineer of the YC-backed startup Reworkd, told TechCrunch that he interviewed Parekh for a role and he was a strong candidate. Pandey, who is no longer with the startup, says Parekh was one of the top three performers on an algorithms-focused interview they gave candidates.

Pandey said the Reworkd team suspected something was off with Parekh. At the time, Parekh told Reworkd he was in the U.S. — a requirement for the job — but the company didn’t believe him. They ran an IP logger on a Zoom link from Parekh and located him in India.

Pandey recalled other things Parekh said often didn’t add up, and some of his GitHub contributions and previous roles didn’t quite make sense either. That seems to be a common experience when dealing with Parekh.

Adam Silverman, co-founder of the AI agent observability startup, Agency, told TechCrunch his company also interviewed Parekh. Silverman said Parekh sent him a cold DM about a job opening at Agency, and they set up a meeting. Parekh had to reschedule that meeting five times, according to Silverman and emails from Parekh viewed by TechCrunch.

Silverman says he was also impressed by Parekh’s technical ability, but in the interview, he insisted on working remotely. Much like with Reworkd, that was a red flag for Agency.

Roy Lee, the CEO of the “cheat on everything” AI startup, Cluely, tells TechCrunch he interviewed Parekh twice for a role. Lee said Parekh interviews quite well and “seemed to have strong react knowledge,” referencing a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

Lee says Cluely did not end up hiring Parekh. However, several other companies clearly did.

Parekh’s perspective

Parekh made an appearance on the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN) on Thursday to tell co-hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays his side of the story and explain why he’s worked at so many companies.

He admitted that he’s been working at multiple jobs simultaneously since 2022. Parekh claims he was not using AI tools or hiring junior software engineers to assist him with his workload.

All that work has made Parekh a much better programmer, he believes, but notes that it’s taken a toll.

Parekh said he’s notorious among his friends for not sleeping. He repeated several times throughout the interview that he works 140 hours a week, which comes out to 20 hours a day, seven days a week. That seems to be borderline impossible — or at the very least, extremely unhealthy and unsustainable.

Parekh also said he took multiple jobs because he was in “financial jeopardy,” implying he needed all the income he could get from his various employers. He claims he deferred going to a graduate school program he had been accepted to, and instead decided to work at several startups simultaneously.

Notably, Doshi shared a copy of Parekh’s resumé that claims he received a masters degree from Georgia Institute of Technology.

When TBPN’s co-hosts asked why Parekh didn’t just ask one company to raise his salary and help with his financial struggles, Parekh said he liked to keep a boundary between his professional and private life. (But he had also opted for low salaries and high equity at all his jobs, which doesn’t quite add up with his financial crisis story. However, Parekh declined to share more about it.)

Parekh told the hosts he genuinely loved his work, and it was not solely about the money. He says he was very invested in the missions of all the companies where he worked.

He also admitted that he’s not proud of what he’s done, and he doesn’t endorse it.

What now?

Some are calling Parekh a scam artist and a liar, but in classic Silicon Valley fashion, Parekh appears to be trying to turn his viral moment into a business.

Parekh announced his newest employer, which he claims to be exclusively working at: Darwin Studios, a startup working on AI video remixing.

However, Parekh quickly deleted the post after announcing it, as did the founder and CEO of the startup, Sanjit Juneja.

TechCrunch has reached out to Parekh requesting an interview regarding this article, however, he has not yet accepted. Instead, a spokesperson representing him sent TechCrunch a statement from Darwin’s CEO.

“Soham is an incredibly talented engineer and we believe in his abilities to help bring our products to market,” said Juneja.

We’ve seen countless startups turn their viral, often controversial, moments into businesses in the last year. One of the most famous is Cluely, which is known for creating provocative marketing campaigns. It’s rage bait, but it’s attention-grabbing, and it was enough to land Cluely a $15 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz.

Perhaps Parekh will land a similar fortune in the future.

Update: This story has been updated to reflect TBPN’s current name and include additional comments from Antimetal.