Twenty-eight companies joined the Crunchbase Unicorn Board in April, with AI-focused robotics startups and frontier labs leading for the second consecutive month. Two newly founded London-based AI labs with DeepMind roots made splashy debuts. Ineffable Intelligence, using reinforcement learning rather than human-generated data, raised a $1.1 billion seed round and was valued at $5.1 billion in its first funding. Recursive Superintelligence, focused on continuous learning improvement, secured a $500 million Series A at a $4.5 billion valuation.

The April cohort reflects AI's overwhelming dominance in startup funding—26 of the 28 new unicorns are AI-related. Six humanoid robotics companies, five from China and one from Japan, reached billion-dollar valuations, with many building models for robotic intelligence using simulated data. Beijing-based ModelBest, an open-source model company with on-device smaller models for smartphones and automotive applications, also joined at $1 billion. Geographically, 12 companies are U.S.-based and eight are from China, while the UK, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, India and Japan each added one.

The trend signals sustained investor appetite for AI infrastructure and robotics. Space defense company True Anomaly raised $600 million at a $2.2 billion valuation, while Valar Atomics, developing small nuclear reactors to power AI data centers, reached $2 billion. The concentration of new unicorns in frontier AI labs and robotics reflects capital flowing toward companies tackling fundamental challenges in artificial intelligence development.