A total of 29 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in August, adding around $63 billion in value. More than a third were under 3 years old, highlighting rapid paths to multibillion-dollar valuations. The highest-valued new entrants were China-based XPeng Robotics at over $6.3 billion; San Jose, California-based Lumilens at $5.5 billion; and Palo Alto, California-based River AI and San Francisco's Source Foundry, both at $5 billion.

AI software dominated across model training, assistants, agentic workflows, coding, and voice transcription. Semiconductors followed with five new unicorns. The U.S. led with 16 new unicorns, China added four, while Nigeria and Indonesia each added their first unicorn of the year.

Nine companies exited the board: three via IPO, notably Unitree Robotics, and six via acquisition, including Hugging Face, Open Router, and Airtable. Notable new unicorns include River AI, founded by former xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, which raised $1.1 billion led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC; Instinct, an AI personal assistant, raising $250 million led by Benchmark and Index Ventures; and Lumilens, a photonic interconnects developer, raising $700 million led by Atreides Management and others.