For a dozen years, Forbes has partnered with TrueBridge Capital Partners to highlight the companies that are likely to become unicorns in the near future. To qualify, startups must be venture-backed, based in the U.S. and worth less than $1 billion. In a sign of the times: Nearly all this year’s list members use AI in some fashion as they work on everything from bone marrow to biological threats, cybersecurity to creative design. Our track record is striking: Of the 275 alumni of this list, 60% did indeed become unicorns, including household names Duolingo and DoorDash. Another 60 were bought (or were merged). Nearly half of last year’s picks already are worth more than a billion. There have been surprisingly few disasters—just six companies, about 2%, imploded or shut down.

Abby Care

Founder: Havi Nguyen

Lead Investors: Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital

Equity Raised: $45 million

Valuation: $225 million

The daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Havi Nguyen, 26, grew up managing Medicaid for her family while working at her parents’ nail salon. The Columbia University grad, who scored summer internships at Google and Facebook, got the idea for her startup Abby Care while working at a therapy startup, where she struggled to find in-home care for autistic children. She founded the business at in 2021 to help train families of disabled or elderly people to become paid caregivers — using Medicaid funds to pay them for the care they would have provided anyway. Backed by blue chip investors including Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures, the company also gives caregivers access to an app that serves as a one-stop shop for time sheets, charting and asking questions of an AI-powered assistant. Abby Care wants to build a marketplace for clinical caregivers, like Uber did for drivers and Airbnb did for hotels. Says Nguyen, “Why don’t we just reimagine a new care model or health care system where we can leverage the family caregiver or the parent who really understands the patient best?” (Read the full feature story here.)

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American Terawatt

Founders: Ron Bhattacharyay, Ricky Moezinia,Rob Parker, Anton Troynikov (CEO)

Lead Investors: Altimeter Capital, Founders Fund

Equity Raised: $52 million

Valuation: $350 million

This San Francisco–based startup wants to power artificial intelligence data centers more efficiently by building new grids that deliver electricity in the form of direct current (DC). Electronics such as cellphones and computers require stable, nonfluctuating DC power, and commonly convert the alternating current (AC) from household wall sockets via a charging device or internal hardware. Because significant energy is lost in converting AC to DC, American Tera­ watt thinks building a DC-only network of buried transmission lines to connect data centers will save lots of power and aid in the race to build super AI. Led by 38-year-old founder Troynikov, who previously started Chroma (a vector database used by AI models for memory and storage), the firm plans initially to use gear from third-party vendors, with the intent to later make its own converters.

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Clair

Founders: Alex Kostecki, Erich Nussbaumer, Nico Simko (CEO)

Lead Investors: Founder Collective, Kairos, Thrive Capital, Upfront Ventures, Walkabout Ventures

Equity Raised: $69 million

Valuation: $145 million

An unexpected bill—even one for a few hundred dollars—can create a crisis for hourly workers with little savings, Simko says. That’s why in 2019 he cofounded New York City–based Clair to let workers access part of their paycheck before payday. Built on top of existing payroll platforms like ADP, Clair verifies employment and analyzes wages to instantly calculate how much to advance, typically 30% to 50% of daily earnings.

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Cogent Security

Founders: Thanos Baskous, Vineet Edupuganti (CEO), Geng Sng

Lead Investors: Bain Capital Ventures, Greylock

Equity Raised: $53 million

Valuation: $320 million

Cogent’s AI agents identify critical security vulnerabilities, triage them and help IT fix them, says CEO Edupuganti, who worked for AI email security unicorn Abnormal before cofounding Cogent in 2024. Customers include engine oil maker Valvoline, the University of the Pacific and un­disclosed Las Vegas casinos.

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Crosby

Founders: Ryan Daniels (CEO), John Sarihan

Lead Investors: Bain Capital Ventures, Index Ventures, Lux Capital, Sequoia Capital

Equity Raised: $85 million

Valuation: $400 million

At New York City–based AI law firm Crosby, lawyers don’t pore over documents or review contracts. Instead, they manage AI agents that mark up NDAs and service agreements with comments and suggestions. Unlike traditional law firms that bill by the hour, Crosby charges its 130 clients—including AI startups Cursor, Cognition and Clay—a flat fee for each contract its agents review. “We’re not incentivized to keep reviewing over and over again. We get paid once,” says CEO Daniels, a former lawyer who claims his agents find problems in hours, not days or weeks.

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DepthFirst

Founders: Andrea Michi, Qasim Mithani (CEO), Daniele Perito

Lead Investors: Accel, Meritech Capital

Equity Raised: $120 million

Valuation: $580 million

Artificial intelligence is already better than most humans at hacking. That’s what led Depthfirst’s founders to build their own AI models aimed at finding vulnerabilities in critical software and offering patches. Alumni of Google DeepMind, payments giant Block and data analy­tics firm Databricks, the trio have lofty aims to prevent AI-enabled cyber dis­asters with their self-learning systems. Founded in October 2024, the company, headquartered in San Francisco, has more than 20 customers, including big ones such as Lovable, Ripple and ServiceNow.

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Elorian AI

Founders: Andrew Dai (CEO), Seth Neel, Yinfei Yang

Lead Investors: Altimeter Capital, Menlo Ventures, Striker Venture Partners

Equity Raised: $55 million

Valuation: $300 million

To understand the value of Elorian, the AI startup that emerged from stealth in April, its CEO, former Google DeepMind researcher Andrew Dai, suggests thinking about parallel parking. When you’re parking a car, “you’re not reasoning about how to do that in text,” he says. “You’re looking at your mirrors, you’re visualizing. What angle do I need to move my wheels?” An AI with that sort of three-dimensional understanding of the physical world, rather than relying on text like ChatGPT and Claude do, is what Elorian is trying to build. Robotics and engineering are the obvious applications, but it could also be used just to help folks buy a new couch by picturing how it would look in their apartment.

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FleetWorks

Founders: Paul Singer (CEO), Quang Tran

Lead Investors: First Round Capital

Equity Raised: $17 million

Valuation: $75 million

The American freight-hauling industry is enormous, generating $900 billion of revenue last year. But connecting freight brokers and carriers is cumbersome, despite efforts by Uber Freight and others to use tech solutions to streamline things. FleetWorks CEO Singer, an Uber Freight veteran, is convinced that his two-year-old artificial intelligence startup is the game changer. It uses round-the-clock AI agents to phone, email or text drivers who are looking to book hauling jobs. “We’re an always-on dispatcher assistant. We take data from both sides and facili­tate matches for tens of thousands of bookings every single day,” Singer says.

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Flora

Founders: Alex Li, Weber Wong (CEO)

Lead Investors: Hanabi, Redpoint Ventures

Equity Raised: $52 million

Valuation: $260 million

Brooklyn artist Wong was at NYU ITP, a graduate program in which students use technology to make art, when he had the idea of using AI to help creative teams at companies create visual designs. So in 2024, he cofounded Flora, which makes a suite of software tools that designers use with AI models to generate logos, storyboards and product sketches, letting them collaborate in real time on the projects. Creatives at companies such as Nike, Netflix and Levi’s are already using the product. Being part of the art world has been a competitive advantage: “I just like talking to creatives and hearing what they need, and then building it,” Wong says. “Because I know that I would want that too.”

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Fortell Research

Founders: Andrew Casper, Matthew de Jonge (CEO), Igor Lovchinsky, Cole Morris

Lead Investors: Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, Valor Equity Partners

Equity Raised: $163 million

Valuation: $740 million

More than a decade ago, Matthew de Jonge, 38, first had the idea to build a better hearing aid after watching his grandparents retreat into social isolation as their hearing loss made it hard for them to follow conversations. But the technology wasn’t quite there. “In 2015, it felt like science fiction,” de Jonge recalls, describing the challenge to build a device that can discern among different sounds and home in on what’s important, especially in environments with lots of ambient noise, like a cocktail party or a crowded restaurant. After a stint at hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, he worked as a project manager at Butterfly Network, which was developing a pocket-sized ultrasound machine. It was only after the pandemic pushed meetings to Zoom, which uses AI to mute background noises, that he realized a much better hearing aid was finally possible. “Zoom is the easiest version of the problem, and the hearing aid is the gnarliest,” he says. He launched Fortell in early 2021 with former Butterfly colleagues Andrew Casper, 40, and Igor Lovchinsky, 41, as technical founders. It took a bit longer than expected, but the hearing aids, launched in December, are so popular that they’ve been near-impossible to get. Customers like KKR’s billionaire chair Henry Kravis and comedian Steve Martin have forked over $6,800 for the devices, currently available only at Fortell’s Manhattan audiology clinic or by appointment in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Palm Beach, Florida. More locations are planned in Boston, San Francisco and Palo Alto, California. The biggest limit on expansion, says de Jonge, is its ability to hire audiologists to staff new clinics.

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Gumloop

Founders: Rahul Behal, Max Brodeur-Urbas (CEO)

Lead Investors: Benchmark, First Round Capital, Nexus Venture Partners

Equity Raised: $70 million

Valuation: $300 million

Gumloop was founded in British Columbia in 2023 to help nontechnical people solve problems on their own without looping in AI experts or engineers. But the company was nearly stillborn when Brodeur-Urbas’ original founding partner quit out of the blue. Though “sad as hell,” he went that day to a software developers meetup, where he connected with fellow McGill graduate Behal, who became his cofounder and CTO. Gumloop, now based in San Francisco, was later accepted into Y Combinator’s winter 2024 cohort. Its platform is used by the likes of Shopify and Instacart.

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Juicebox

Founders: Ishan Gupta, David Paffenholz (CEO)

Lead Investors: DST Global, NFDG, Sequoia Capital

Equity Raised: $116 million

Valuation: $850 million

AI has made it easier than ever for job seekers to send out applications, with the unintended side effect of burying companies in résumés. Juicebox, out of San Francisco, helps recruiters reclaim the talent search by scraping public information from professional profiles, personal websites and online projects into dossiers. Recruiters can then search for the right candidate. The firm, which was valued at $850 million in March after an $80 million funding round, is currently used by more than 5,000 customers including Ramp and Cognition.

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Lotus Health

Founders: KJ Dhaliwal (CEO), Zekka Nelson

Lead Investors: CRV, Kleiner Perkins

Equity Raised: $41 million

Valuation: $150 million

Dhaliwal, who grew up translating doctor visits into Punjabi for his immigrant parents and suffered two herniated discs at age 18, longed to fix America’s broken health care system. So in 2024, five years after he’d sold his South Asian dating app, Dil Mil, for $50 million to Dating.com, he and his former colleague Nelson cofounded Lotus Health AI with the ambitious goal of making American health care more accessible and affordable for more people. The app, which is trained by medical doctors, provides free virtual-only 24/7 primary care that’s available in more than 50 languages. Its physicians can manage ten times as many patients as a traditional doctor. One big problem for now: The company has no revenue. Dhaliwal says he’s building a user base first and has ideas about how to bring in revenue later.

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Netic

Founder: Melisa Tokmak (CEO)

Lead Investors: Founders Fund, Greylock

Equity Raised: $43 million

Valuation: $450 million

Soon after Melisa Tokmak and her husband bought a house in Mill Valley, California, they got hit with an electricity bill for several thousand dollars. That set off a frantic search to figure out why. Was it the heating? The insulation? Wiring? Most businesses didn’t pick up the phone; others forgot their name or address. Even if they managed to schedule a visit it meant waiting around, ringing up more electric charges, without knowing if anyone would show up (it turned out to be the heating). The experience prompted Tokmak, who emigrated from Turkey on a full scholarship to Stanford, to leave her role as director of engineering at Scale AI to start Netic to bring AI to trade businesses like plumbing and HVAC. Now, when a customer calls, texts or reaches out with a problem, Netic’s agentic system can diagnose the issue and walk them through possible fixes or book someone to come out and handle follow-ups.

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Ossium Health

Founders: Kevin Caldwell (CEO), Erik Woods

Lead Investors: CPMG, First Round Capital, General Catalyst, Vivo Capital

Equity Raised: $158 million

Valuation: $300 million

A decade ago, former McKinsey consultant Kevin Caldwell, 39, had the seemingly crazy idea of setting up a bank of frozen bone marrow from deceased donors. While hearts and lungs must be transplanted within hours of the donor’s death, marrow doesn’t, and Caldwell believed this would allow patients with life-threatening blood cancers to receive treatments pretty much on demand. “There are all these patients with severe, life-threatening cancers who don’t have any other donors available,” he says. Caldwell launched the company with Erik Woods, 53, a cryopreservation (a fancy term for freezing) expert and cofounder of General Biotechnology. The pair then set about convincing non-profits that handle organ donation to send them the spinal columns of deceased donors. Today, San Francisco–based Ossium runs the world’s first bone marrow bank, in Indiana. So far its marrow has been used successfully in 28 transplants, including, recently, its first pediatric patient, a 14-year-old boy.

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Outtake

Founder: Alex Arjun Dhillon (CEO)

Lead Investors: CRV, ICONIQ Growth

Equity Raised: $60 million

Valuation: $375 million+

Palantir alum Dhillon says he came up with the idea for Outtake when a YouTuber asked him for help finding deepfakes that were being used to scam people. With AI-powered fraud exploding, he thought, “Everyone’s gonna need this.” He quit his day job and began scaling a technology that looks at both content and context to identify whether or not it’s legit. It then provides a score, rating the likelihood of its being fake. Customers include OpenAI and Panera Bread.

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Pace

Founder: Jamie Cuffe (CEO)

Lead Investors: Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital

Equity Raised: $55 million

Valuation: $375 million

The majority of losses from extreme weather events went uninsured last year, and not just because insurance companies don’t want to take on climate-related risk because it’s too costly (wildfires in California, for instance). A big reason is because the claims process takes forever, especially in hard-hit places with a large number of claims and the worst wreckage. In the past, human call centers needed to be set up and extra agents trained. The son of an insurance executive, Cuffe started Pace in 2024 to mitigate these inefficiencies and speed up the process. Already its agents handle everything from submissions and renewals to servicing and claims for customers including Prudential Financial.

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Rillet

Founders: Nicolas Kopp (CEO), Stelios Modes

Lead Investors: Andreessen Horowitz, Creandum, First Round Capital, ICONIQ, Sequoia Capital

Equity Raised: $110 million

Valuation: $500 million

With traditional accounting software, businesses often have to wait days or even weeks after a reporting period ends for human accountants to reconcile data before they can assess their full financial picture. San Francisco–based Rillet uses AI agents to fast-track the accounting close, seeking to deliver financials to business leaders in real time. Cofounder and CEO Kopp says he came up with the idea after being frustrated by the need to make decisions on limited information when he was helping build a German banking startup.

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Roadrunner

Founders: Joubin Mirzadegan (CEO), Ajay Natarajan, Eugene Shao

Lead Investors: Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins

Equity Raised: $27 million

Valuation: $200 million

Roadrunner, based in San Francisco, launched in 2025 with the simple aim of trying to save sales teams from the tedious work of pricing customer deals. Now a salesperson can type in what a customer wants, such as products, quantities, delivery options and available discounts, and Roadrunner’s multi-agentic system draws up a customer quote in minutes. Incubated at venture firm Kleiner Perkins, CEO Mirzadegan is also a partner at Kleiner and the creator and host of the popular podcast Grit. Meanwhile its chief product officer, Natarajan, went to Caltech at age 16 and concurrently worked at NASA as an engineer, where he built software now used to help guide the Mars Rover. His earlier startup Athena, an AI platform for high schoolers to optimize their college applications, was acquired last year.

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Valthos

Founders: Kathleen McMahon (CEO), Tess van Stekelenburg

Lead Investors: Founders Fund, Lux Capital, OpenAI

Equity Raised: $30 million

Valuation: $200 million+

AI prognosticators love to imagine doomsday scenarios. Valthos, which aims to identify and thwart biological threats exacerbated by AI—think viral infections or contaminated drinking supplies—is trying to prevent them. The idea is to use AI models to characterize pathogens, so if a mutation is detected, whether it’s natural or engineered, Valthos can put together a dossier on the threat, helping experts put countermeasures in place. The brainchild of CEO Kathleen McMahon, who previously led the life sciences division at Palantir, and Tess van Stekelenburg, a partner at VC firm Lux Capital, the company came out of stealth in October, after it raised $30 million from backers inclu­ ding Founders Fund, Lux Capital and OpenAI. Heavyweight clients including the U.S. Department of Defense and Los Alamos Labs have already signed on. “None of this utopia of human health will exist if we don’t also make sure that these tools are not used in a malign way,” McMahon says. “We have an incredible responsibility.”

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CREDITS

Edited by: Richard Nieva, Luisa Kroll

Deputy Editor: Elisabeth Brier

Reporters: Sofia Chierchio, Andrew Balaban, Tom Brewster, Amy Feldman, Chris Helman, Alan Ohnsman, Rashi Shrivastava and Anna Tong

Editorial Operations: Justin Conklin, Francesca Walton

Creative Director: Alicia Hallett-Chan

Director of Photography: Robyn Selman

Design Director: Fernando Capeto

Design Lead: Philip Smith

Editorial Design: Yunjia Yuan, Macy Sinreich

Photo Research: Gail Toivanen, Amanda Whitlock

Video: Lauren Rivera, Kirsten Taggart, Ivan Clow, Adisa Duke, Chad McClymonds

QA: Kristine Karapetyan

Engineering: Ken Barney

Product: Dmitri Slavinsky

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