Published on the 21/05/2026 | Written by Heather Wright
Most billion-dollar startups emerge outside AI…
Artificial intelligence startups account for 25 of the 98 companies that have hit unicorn status globally so far in 2026, according to new data, with the majority of unicorns – 73 – still being created outside the AI boom.
Robotics, healthtech and fintech account for much of the remaining new entrants according to investing research platform BestBrokers, which pulled May data from Crunchbase, PitchBook and TechCrunch.
“Capital is now flowing heavily into the systems required to support automation, autonomous machines and large-scale AI deployment,”
Mirroring those global trends, Australia and New Zealand’s growing unicorn cohort is being built largely outside the artificial intelligence boom.
The raw data behind the report shows just one new unicorn for A/NZ so far this year: Australia’s Gilmour Space Technologies, with a most recent valuation of US$1 billion and lead investors including Blackbird, Hostplus Superannuation Fund and the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation.
It joins 12 other Australian unicorns across a diverse spread, weighted toward companies solving specific business or industry problems, particularly in fintech, work management and vertical platforms.
Biggest of all for Australia is Canva, with BestBrokers putting the company’s post money valuation at US$42 billion, ranking it the 15 largest unicorn globally. It’s followed by Airwallex (with US$8 billion post money valuation it’s ranked 107 globally), which provides cross-border payments infrastructure.
Workplace focused platforms including HR’s Employment Hero (ranked 548 of the 1,757 unicorns globally) and Culture Amp (551), alongside workplace safety software specialist SafetyCulture (550) form part of the broader group of billion-dollar companies focused on software-driven business processes, built around practical business applications, rather than frontier AI models.
Australia’s other tech unicorns, according to BestBrokers; are Firmus Technologies (AI), blockchain gaming and NFT platform Immutable Systems, corporate learning company Go1, Latitude Financial Services, Judo Bank, Linktree and Deputy.
New Zealand makes the list thanks to agritech’s Halter officially gaining unicorn status in June 2025. As a public company, Xero is not regarded as a unicorn – a category reserved for privately held startups only. In fact, across A/NZ there were 40 tech and tech-enabled companies valued at over $1 billion in April 2026 according to Multiples– that includes the likes of Afterpay, Atlassian, REA Group and Seek.
Diversified mix
The BestBrokers’ report points to a diversified mix of industries contributing to new unicorn formation in 2026.
One in four newly minted unicorns is an AI company with the company saying these businesses are focused on building AI infrastructure and specialised tools built on large language models, reflecting how deeply AI has become integrated into the broader tech ecosystem.
Robotics took second place, accounting for 11.2 percent of new unicorns (and 11 companies as new unicorns). Leading the charge as the most valuable newly minted robotics companies are China’s Sudu Technology which specialises in R&D of general-purpose robot brains to enable robots to operate autonomously across diverse environments while learning and adapting, and Mind Robotics, a US industrial robotics company spun out of EV manufacturer Rivian in November 2025. Each are valued at $2 billion.
Healthtech accounted for 10.2 percent of the new unicorns, with 10 companies, spanning digital health platforms, AI-assisted diagnostics and data driven healthcare services, reaching unicorn status.
Seven fintechs also joined the club, with BestBrokers noting the fintech category is the most geographically distributed with companies from the US, UK, India, Bahrain and the Netherlands hitting the $1b mark, led by Rogo from the US and KreditBee from India.
Spacetech and securitytech (both 6.1 percent), cloud and infrastructure, cybersecurity and enterprise software (all 5.1 percent) and crypto currency and semiconductors (4.1 percent apiece) rounded out the list.
Paul Hoffman, BestBrokers data analyst, says while AI continues to dominate venture capital activity, investors are increasingly shifting their attention beyond foundational models and toward the infrastructure powering the broader AI economy, such as semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, robotics, defence tech and aerospace.
“Capital is now flowing heavily into the systems required to support automation, autonomous machines and large-scale AI deployment,” he says.
AI drives valuations
At the top end of the market, AI companies continue to command the highest valuations, with the world’s most valuable companies – including SpaceX post its xAI merger, Anthropic, OpenAI – heavily concentrated in AI and adjacent technologies.
These companies are attracting some of the largest funding rounds in private market history, pushing valuations into the hundreds of billions of dollars – or in SpaceX’s case $1.25 trillion. Anthropic comes in with a valuation of $900b, a massive step up from the earlier 2026 valuations of around $380b, and coming on the back of a major late-stage funding round. OpenAI ranks third with a $852b valuation following a record-setting $110 billion investment from Amazon, Nvidia and Softbank.
Meanwhile it’s a London-based startup, Ineffable Intelligence that takes the crown as the most valuable new unicorn in 2026. The company, which develops reinforcement learning-based ‘superlearners’ to discover knowledge through their own simulated experience, rather than relying on human-generated data, has attracted over $1.1 billion in venture funding, with a valuation of $5.1 billion.
Says BestBrokers’ Alan Goldberg: “Today’s venture market is rewarding companies building physical systems, compute infrastructure, and industrial-scale AI capabilities, suggesting the next decade of private market growth may look far more like advanced industry than traditional Silicon Valley software.”
