DeepSeek Leads 10 AI Labs Into Unicorn Board, With $50B Valuation

What happened

Thirty-four companies joined Crunchbase's Unicorn Board in June, adding more than $110 billion（約18兆円） in value. Ten were AI labs, collectively valued at $65 billion（約10兆円）, led by Beijing-based DeepSeek at $50 billion（約8兆円） — the highest-valued new unicorn to join the board this year. DeepSeek raised a $7.4 billion（約1.2兆円） Series A, its first external financing, and is said to be planning to list in Shanghai as early as Q2 2027.

Why it matters

The wave reflects a boom in frontier AI development across new architectures (robotics, physics, self-learning, open source) and sovereign AI, signaling investor confidence in specialized AI models beyond large language models. However, the board's total value dropped by more than $1 trillion（約160兆円） in June as SpaceX went public and other major companies exited — including Cursor maker Anysphere, acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion（約9.6兆円）.

What to watch

Of the 34 new unicorns, 16 are U.S.-based and eight are from China; the remainder span India, Germany, the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, and Saudi Arabia. Other notable AI labs include Flourish (neuroscience-based Cortex AI, $2.5 billion（約4000億円）), PhysicsX (physics-informed design, $2.4 billion（約3800億円）), and General Intuition (robotics trained on gaming videos, $2.3 billion（約3700億円）).