4 Startups That Reached $1 Billion Valuations in Less Than 2 Years

Unicorns used to be a rarity in the startup world. Lately, it seems there’s a herd of them running the startup plains. As of July, 2025, there were 1,200 startups across the world worth $1 billion or more, according to CB Insights. And some of those valuations are eye-popping. OpenAI is worth half a trillion dollars. SpaceX is right behind with a $400 billion valuation. And China’s ByteDance is estimated to be worth $300 billion globally (with the as-yet-unformalized U.S. spinoff being valued at just $14 billion).

Numbers like that might lead some people to think that reaching the $1 billion valuation mark isn’t as hard as it used to be. Those people couldn’t be more wrong. Of the roughly 10 million businesses that were started in the past two years, just four have seen their valuation climb above $1 billion.

Global startup funding in the second quarter of this year was down 20 percent from the previous quarter, though 11 percent higher than a year ago. In general, though, founders have been weathering a three-year dry period—and if your startup isn’t an AI play, it can still be a challenge to turn an investor’s head.

So what did these four startups have that others didn’t? All of them are focused on AI, but only one has a product so far. Here’s a look at some of the youngest unicorns in the startup space.

Thinking Machines Lab

Founded in February 2025 by Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former CTO, this San Francisco-based startup, which aims to help people harness the power of AI for their own personal goals, saw a swarm of investors from the get-go. By mid-July, it had raised $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion. Investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Cisco and AMD.

Thinking Machines Lab has no revenue yet and no products. It plans to operate as an open-source entity, saying it plans to “frequently publish technical blog posts, papers, and code” so other AI model developers can integrate Thinking Machines’ learning into their own products. Murati, when describing the company’s purpose, has said she wants it to “advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science, and practical applications.” Recently, reports emerged that Thinking Machines would make custom AI models for companies.

The Bot Company

Cruise Founder Kyle Vogt co-founded this San Francisco-based startup, which aims to create at-home robots to help out with household chores and other daily tasks, with Paril Jain, and Luke Holoubek, former engineers at Tesla and Cruise. That was May of 2024. In March of this year, The Bot Company raised $150 million for the second time, giving it a valuation of $2 billion. Like Thinking Machines Lab, it has no revenue and no products yet, but it reportedly will steer clear of the humanoid design other companies are pursuing.

Lovable

Launched in December 2023, this vibe coding company (a software development process that uses AI to generate code from natural language prompts) became a unicorn just eight months after it opened its doors. Co-founded by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin, this Swedish startup is looking to disrupt the startup world, by letting aspiring tech entrepreneurs just describe their ideas, rather than having to learn to code themselves. The company, which offers free and paid service plans, raised $200 million in a Series A round in mid-2024, putting its valuation at $1.8 billion. It has already announced that annual recurring revenue has topped $100 million.

Safe Superintelligence

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever left that company after reportedly being involved in the failed push to remove Sam Altman as CEO. His next project is Palo Alto- and Tel Aviv-based Safe Superintelligence, founded in June of 2024. The company, which doesn’t have a product yet, hopes to build AI models that have greater intelligence than humans, but which remain aligned with human interests. By September of that year, Sutskever had raised $1 billion, which gave the company a valuation of $5 billion. It secured another $2 billion in April of this year, sending that valuation to $32 billion, rejecting a reported buyout offer from Meta at roughly the same time (though co-founder and CEO Daniel Gross did jump over to Mark Zuckerberg’s company).