The board also reached a new milestone last month: It now includes more than 1,600 unicorn startups, or private companies currently valued at $1 billion or more, according to Crunchbase data.

Among the 13 new companies, six are U.S.-based, two are from Sweden, and one each hail from France, China, Singapore, UAE and Saudi Arabia. Leading sectors for new unicorns in July were AI apps and infrastructure, e-commerce and healthcare.

Five exits

Last month also posted five unicorn exits, signaling that more liquidity could be on the horizon from the board, which still holds a collective valuation just under $6 trillion.

Three unicorns went public in July: San Francisco-based design collaboration platform , Beijing-based autonomous robotics company , and Atlanta-based insurtech .

Two companies were also acquired: California-based —��was bought by AI code generation startup for an undisclosed price after an earlier planned $3 billion acquisition by fell apart —��and Texas-based , which aims to improve payment outcomes for hospitals was acquired by for $1.25 billion.

July’s newly minted unicorns

New unicorn industries in July ran the gamut from media and entertainment to transportation, to AI. Here are last month’s 13 newly minted unicorns, by sector.

AI

• Vibe coding startup raised a $200 million Series A led by . The 1-year-old Stockholm, Sweden-based company was valued at $1.8 billion. The startup said it reached $75 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, in seven months since turning on revenue. After its funding announcement, growth sped up to . Lovable says it has 2.3 million users and 180,000 subscribers.
• Media infrastructure AI provider raised a $125 million Series C led by . The 4-year-old San Francisco-based company was valued at $1.5 billion.
• Multimodal AI solutions lab raised a $110 million Series B from investors and among others. The 3-year-old Sunnyvale, California-based company was valued at $1 billion.

E-commerce

• , a tech platform for booking flights, raised a private equity funding led by . The 24-year-old Uppsala, Sweden-based company owns multiple travel brands, and powers flights for . Etraveli, previously acquired by , was valued at $3.1 billion.
• Quick commerce service raised a $254 million funding led by Saudi Arabia-based . The company delivers groceries and essentials across Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait. The 3-year-old Saudi Arabia-based company was valued at $1.5 billion.

Data and analytics

• , which simplifies management of python and R for data science projects, raised a $150 million Series C led by . The 13-year-old Austin, Texas-based company was valued at $1.5 billion. Anaconda has $150 million in ARR as of July 2025 and says it’s profitable.

Energy

• , a subsidiary of battery provider , is using AI to reimagine its battery business from materials, oversight and recycling. It raised an undisclosed Series A funding. The Fujian, China-based subsidiary was valued at $1.4 billion.

VR/AR

• , developer of a smart contact lens, raised a $250 million Series A led by Hong Kong-based . Prototypes include smart lenses with biosensors for health monitoring, XR/AR content for gaming, and night vision capabilities. The 4-year-old Dubai-based company was valued at $1.4 billion.

Healthcare

• , a note taking scribe that integrates into clinical workflows, raised a $243 million Series C led by and. The 5-year-old San Francisco-based company was valued at $1.3 billion.

Professional services

• Employee experience platform merged with Swiss-based mobile-first deskless employee management software . The deal is backed by London-based , a major shareholder in LumApps. The 12-year-old France-based company was valued at $1.1 billion.

Media and entertainment

• Newsletter publishing platform raised a $100 million Series C led by and . The 8-year-old San Francisco-based company was valued at $1.1 billion.

Networking

• , a digital eSIM�� provider for devices for travelers, raised a $220 million Series C led by . The 6-year-old company operating from Singapore was valued at $1 billion.

Transportation

• spinoff , builder of yet-to-be-launched products in the micromobility and e-bikes sector, raised a $200 million funding led by , after raising from four months earlier.�� The less than 1-year-old Palo Alto, California-based company was valued at $1 billion.

Related Crunchbase unicorn lists:

• (1,602)
• (87)
• (112)
• (102)
• (802)
• (497)
• (211)
• (37)
• (455)

Related reading:

• Startup Funding Stays Flat, But Figma IPO Lights A Spark In The Market
• July’s Most-Active US Investors: Andreessen, Insight And Y Combinator Top Busy Month
• June Hits 3-Year High In Unicorn Births Across AI, Robotics And More

Methodology

The Crunchbase ������Ƶ is a curated list that includes private unicorn companies with post-money valuations of $1 billion or more and is based on Crunchbase data. New companies are as they reach the $1 billion valuation mark as part of a funding round.

The unicorn board does not reflect internal company valuations — such as those set via a 409a process for employee stock options — as these differ from, and are more likely to be lower than, a priced funding round. We also do not adjust valuations based on investor writedowns, which change quarterly, as different investors will not value the same company consistently within the same quarter.

Funding to unicorn companies includes all private financings to companies that are tagged as unicorns, as well as those that have since graduated to .

Exits analyzed here only include the first time a company exits.

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.

Illustration:

The scraping, according to Cloudflare, has surged 18% in the past year. Some publishers, like , are cutting licensing deals with while also trying to choke off what it calls “bad actors.” But here’s the hard truth: All of this defensive maneuvering is like boarding up the windows after the storm has already blown through. AI isn’t breaking in. It’s building something new entirely — and the smart move is to get invited inside.

Don’t get left behind

From where I sit, paywalls, as a concept, are seriously living on borrowed time. They’ve always relied more on friction than loyalty. People subscribed to read one article, forgot to cancel, or clicked out of guilt when their free views ran out. That model was always fragile — and generative AI is exposing the cracks.

Today, most people don’t need to visit 10 different sites to get the news. They want fast, portable summaries. They want context in the same breath as content. LLMs don’t need to copy your article to kill your traffic — they just need to remove the need for it. If ChatGPT can give a clear, concise, accurate answer to “What happened in Gaza this morning?” — most users won’t click through to five full-length op-eds. And if your outlet has banned crawlers, congratulations — you’ve made yourself invisible in the only newsroom that matters now: the one inside the machine.

The fight to protect so-called proprietary content profoundly misunderstands the nature of content (and fully lacks nuance) in 2025. Text is already a remix culture. News sites summarize other news sites. Bloggers paraphrase headlines. Analysts repackage coverage with “insights.” Even the most original scoop gets sliced, quoted and tweeted into a dozen versions within hours.

AI doesn’t change that — it automates it. Fighting that is like fighting email because it made fax machines obsolete. What’s more, AI-generated summaries often increase the visibility of high-quality reporting. If a chatbot cites your outlet regularly, that’s reach. If it gets the gist of your piece exactly right, that’s influence. Banning AI from seeing your work doesn’t stop your ideas from spreading — it just cuts you out of the credit cycle. It’s like a professor trying to stop their research from being cited in academic papers because they didn’t approve the footnotes.

A better path

Publishers should be working to collaborate with AI platforms, not wall them off. Embed metadata that tells LLMs who wrote the piece. Build deals that prioritize your bylines, link back to your coverage, and let your headlines flow through these models with attribution. Become the signal in a sea of synthetic noise.

That’s what . That’s what smart publishers will do with ’s AI Overviews. If a model starts defaulting to , or because those sources made themselves indexable, consistent and AI-friendly, that’s not a loss of control. That’s a win in brand equity, reach and reader trust. You want the machines quoting you, not ghosting you.

Here’s the omnipresent reality: The entire next generation of news consumers will meet the world through AI.��

When a teenager in Kansas asks their AI assistant why the Supreme Court overturned a precedent, or a voter in Arizona asks about a candidate’s housing record, they won’t be thumbing through newspaper archives. They’ll get a verbal summary in eight seconds.

If your journalism doesn’t appear in that summary, you don’t exist in that conversation. It’s not that AI is replacing the value of journalism — it’s replacing the pathway to it. And the publishers who treat AI as an enemy will learn, too late, that they trained their successor not to remember them.

The future of media isn’t behind a wall. It’s in the bloodstream. It’s in training sets, in embedded links, in smart attribution, in being so good that even the robots want to get the story right. There’s no dignity in hiding. And no sustainability in suing your way back to a broken business model. If you want to survive, stop worrying about how to keep the bots out — and start thinking about how to make sure they cite you when it counts.

is the chief strategy officer for. He holds a law degree and has taught entrepreneurship at and the, and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. His writing has been featured in,,,,,,, and many other publications. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize .

Related reading:

• AI Isn’t Just Delivering The News — It’s About To Deliver Your Lawyer, Too
• AI Hijack: The Court Just Legalized The Automation Of Lawyer Identity Theft��
• AI Isn’t the Answer To Our Education Crisis — It’s a Distraction
• Can We Please Still Have Nice Things That AI Hasn’t Touched?
• Stealing Ghibli: How AI Has Crossed The Line Into Creative Theft
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The new round — led by — values the AI video startup at more than $3 billion, per . In June 2023, the company raised a $141 million extension to its December 2022 $50 million Series C from , , 1��and others at a reported $1.5 billion valuation.

Other investors in the new round include Nvidia, , and .

Runway makes software that lets users create videos using text prompts or images. Earlier in the week, Runway unveiled its new AI model, Gen-4, that allows users to create videos with consistent characters and backgrounds.

Last fall, the company signed a deal with production company to create a customized video-generation model.

The startup plans to use the fresh cash to develop AI focusing on its film and animation studio. Founded in 2018, it has raised more than $540 million, .

AI dollars

Big money continues to pour into AI.

Per Crunchbase’s global funding report, AI was the leading sector for venture funding in the first quarter, with $59.6 billion invested. The first quarter marked the strongest quarter for AI funding ever, with an astonishing 53% of global funding going to the AI sector alone.

Of course, that was significantly helped by , which raised the largest private round ever, a $40 billion funding that values the company at $300 billion.

Related Crunchbase Pro query:

Related reading:

• Q1 Global Startup Funding Posts Strongest Quarter Since Q2 2022 With A Third Going To Massive OpenAI Deal����
• Eye On AI: Massive OpenAI Deal Masks AI’s Slow Quarter
• AI Funding Explosion: Inflection AI Nabs $1.3B, Runway and Typeface Also Raise Big

Illustration:

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was founded in 2017 and relatively resembled Cameo with its focus on personalized content from celebrities. In TraceMe’s case, the content would exclusively be from star athletes to engage with superfans. It raised in funding from investors like ’s , CEO and co-founder , and more. Wilson is the executive chairman, .

Then, the company , which offers an online engagement platform for sports fans to make live predictions in real time sports. Users can vote on questions like “How many runs are scored in this full inning” or “which goalie is the first to get three saves?” . There are also real-time prediction feeds where users can broadcast their own thoughts to a fan base.

While Nike did not immediately respond for comment, , based on sources, that Nike “was interested in original TraceMe technology.” It’s unclear what and if Nike will use TraceMe’s technology.

Implications For Nike

Regardless of the technology, the acquisition broadly signals that we could see Nike more aggressively tackling the intersections of editorial content, fan engagement, and technology.

This acquisition, , is part of Nike’s broader M&A efforts.

, Nike has acquired nine companies to date. TraceMe is its second of 2019. The first was , a Boston-based startup that helps retailers optimize their inventory across various stages of the supply chain.

Other acquisitions in the past might be, for some, present-day household names: in 2003, in 2002, and in 1988, per Crunchbase.

Despite how this translates on the street level for Nike, from the balcony we see the current appetite of the mega sports company looking a bit more tech than it did in the early 2000s, in a world where fans are able to stay engaged through feeds, leagues, and apps.

For Nike, this growing trend looks less like brand acquisitions and more like tech, fan-friendly organizations that it can position atop of its core Nike business.