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The $1.25 trillion SpaceX-xAI merger didn’t just create the world’s most valuable private company. It pushed capital concentration in private markets to levels never seen before.
RELATED: Report reveals the largest unicorn startups at the start of 2025
In light of this, BestBrokers has published a recent report exploring the world of private businesses valued at US$1 billion or more, known as unicorns.
For this report, the team at BestBrokers analysed the Crunchbase Unicorn Board’s list of private startups with a valuation of at least US$1 billion, or the so-called ‘unicorns’. Data was also aggregated from PitchBook and several other sources on the largest private company funding rounds and company valuations throughout 2025 and 2026. The full dataset used is available on Google Drive via this link.
OpenAI is the most heavily funded startup in the world
Data shows that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, the world’s most popular chatbot, is also the most heavily funded startup in the world, having raised $169 billion since its launch in late November 2022.
The firm also held the title of the world’s most valuable private company until it was overtaken by SpaceX following the latter’s merger with Elon Musk’s AI venture, xAI. The deal sent the space technology giant’s valuation soaring past the trillion-dollar mark to $1.25 trillion in early February 2026.
These are the Best-Funded Unicorn Startups as of March 2026
- OpenAI – $169 billion raised to date
- Anthropic – $64 billion raised to date
- Waymo – $27 billion raised to date
- Reliance Jio – $20 billion raised to date
- Databricks – $20 billion raised to date
- Ant Group – $19 billion raised to date
- Scale – $16 billion raised to date
- SpaceX – $9 billion raised to date (combined with xAI, the entity has raised $53 billion)
- Stripe – $9 billion raised to date
- Cruise – $9 billion raised to date
- ByteDance – $8 billion raised to date
- Reliance Retail – $8 billion raised to date
- Epic Games – $8 billion raised to date
- Yangtze Memory Technologies – $7 billion raised to date
- Anduril Industries – $6 billion raised to date
- Project Prometheus – $6 billion raised to date
Other highlights from the report
- Five of the 16 best-funded AI startups in the world are AI companies, yet together they account for a remarkable 72% of all funding among these multi-billion-dollar companies. At the very top is ChatGPT’s OpenAI, which has secured a massive $169 billion since its inception in 2015. Anthropic, the company behind chatbot Claude, places second with $64 billion in funding. Elon Musk’s xAI would have placed third, having captured roughly $42 billion in combined equity since inception; however, following its merger with SpaceX, xAI is no longer considered a traditional private unicorn company but a combined entity.
- Beyond the pure AI startups, the infrastructure businesses quietly powering the AI boom are also attracting enormous sums. Databricks, which provides the data infrastructure that AI companies run on, has raised over $20 billion since its 2013 founding and is now valued at $134 billion. Scale AI, a company focused on supplying training data that powers major AI models, has raised $16 billion. Project Prometheus, Jeff Bezos’s new AI and manufacturing venture, raised $6.2 billion from outside investors in late 2025 to develop AI applications across aerospace, automotive, and computing.
- Multiple robotics companies are also among the best-funded unicorn startups. Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving unit, has raised approximately $27 billion since launching in 2009 and is now the undisputed commercial leader in robotaxi services, with a valuation of $126 billion. Cruise, GM’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary, raised $9 billion but saw its ambitions collapse in 2023 when California regulators revoked its operating permit following a serious safety incident involving one of its vehicles.
ByteDance leads Asian startup
- ByteDance is the most valuable Asian startup on the list, sitting at a $480 billion valuation despite having raised a comparatively lean $8 billion in equity. Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, the company behind Alipay, has amassed $19 billion in funding at a $150 billion valuation, a figure made all the more remarkable given that its landmark IPO was blocked by Chinese regulators in 2020, in what would have been the world’s largest-ever public offering. India, too, makes a strong showing: Reliance Jio and Reliance Retail, two of the country’s largest private companies and both owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, have raised $20 billion and $8 billion, respectively.
AI has become the market itself
‘AI has undeniably ceased to be a sector within private markets; it has become the market itself. When five companies absorb nearly three-quarters of the funding on a list of the world’s best-capitalised startups, you’re no longer looking at a trend. You’re looking at a structural shift in how capital flows globally, and the infrastructure companies quietly powering that shift, the data labellers, the cloud platforms, the energy providers are being swept up in it too. The age of diversified venture capital is giving way to something that looks a lot more like a single, all-consuming bet on artificial intelligence,’ says Alan Goldberg from BestBrokers.com.
