As of June 2026, there are currently 1,778 startup companies with a valuation of US$1 billion or more. Jeff Bezos raised $12 billion for Prometheus at a $41 billion valuation. No product yet. That single round tells you most of what you need to know about how 2026 venture capital is pricing ambition. Is a flock of 1778 unicorns now a bubble?

The team at BestBrokers analysed the Crunchbase Unicorn Board alongside PitchBook data on the largest private rounds of 2025 and 2026. The numbers: 137 startups have reached unicorn status this year, 17 of them in June alone. AI produced 34 of those, one in every four new unicorns.

The top of the class is the UK’s Ineffable Intelligence at $5.1 billion, built on a $1.1 billion seed round in April. A seed round. The largest ever raised by a European startup.

• Ineffable Intelligence (AI, UK) – $5.1B

• Recursive (AI, US) – $4.6B

• humans& (AI, US) – $4.5B

• MiRus (HealthTech, US) – $4.4B

• Ricursive Intelligence (AI, US) – $4B

• STARK (Defense, Germany) – $3.65B

• Advanced Machine Intelligence / AMI Labs (AI, France) – $3.5B

• Waabi (AI, Canada) – $3B

• X Square Robot (Robotics, China) – $3B

• Galaxea AI (AI, China) – $2.8B

• Corgi (Fintech, US) – $2.6B

• Flourish (AI, US) – $2.5B

• True Anomaly (Aerospace, US) – $2.2B

• Allen Control Systems (Defense, US) – $2.2B

Full dataset here at BestBrokers.com

When pre-revenue companies price at tens of billions and seed rounds run ten figures, the valuations are measuring conviction more than evidence. This is not an open AI bubble although they may feel the effects anyone going public at this point is entering into different conditions than existed even three months ago.

The conditions are changing when a pre-revenue company, a *pre-product* company, even one headed by Jeff Bezos, is commanding a $41 billion valuation and the unicorn field seems to be running short on arable land. Are we really looking at just a huge flock of unicorns (!!) or are we starting to look at a bubble?

What do unicorns breathe? Eat? Money or data or power or tokens? All of the above?

Whether the revenue arrives to justify and feed them is the 2027 question.