So far this year, 53 companies have reached billion-dollar valuations, putting 2025 on pace to exceed the 80 unicorns minted in all of 2024.

Artificial intelligence is the key driver behind this surge, with AI startups accounting for over half of all new unicorns in 2025 so far. These AI-native unicorns are also breaking the mold, reaching $1B+ valuations on faster timelines, hitting the milestone in 6 years versus the typical 7.

Here’s what today’s unicorn landscape signals about the future of tech:

• 1 in 5 new unicorns are AI agents, with AI taking over the unicorn landscape, representing 53% of all new billion-dollar companies in 2025 so far. Among the newest unicorns, 12 are building AI agents, including Hippocratic AI (healthcare), Cyberhaven (data security), and Parloa (customer support). 
• Newer unicorns generate 83% more revenue per employee than older ones, with $814K per employee on average, compared to the $446K average across all unicorns. This reflects automation-first approaches and leaner operations that avoid the operational bloat older unicorns accumulated during their growth phases. For example, among unicorns born in 2025, the company with the highest revenue per employee is soft drink company Olipop ($1.2M/employee), followed by AI sales agent unicorn Clay ($1M/employee).
• Consumer and fintech companies are most primed to exit, boasting the highest M&A probability scores among the top Mosaic-scoring companies. While payments company PPRO tops the list with a 53% probability of getting acquired in the next 2 years, consumer & retail companies dominate the middle tier with ID.me (41%), Cart.com (33%), and Vestiaire Collective (31%), suggesting acquirers see solutions like identity verification, e-commerce infrastructure, and marketplace platforms as prime M&A targets.

CBI customers: Dive into data on every unicorn

Market map of billion-dollar startups

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By combining AI with physical dexterity, humanoids can perform complex tasks once limited to people, without the expensive facility modifications that traditional automation requires.

While manufacturing and warehousing use cases lead in early adoption, humanoids are expanding into healthcare, retail, and hospitality sectors, signaling widespread potential in industries that need human-like movement and flexibility.

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The humanoid robots market map

Now, our Book of Scouting Reports offers in-depth analysis on every single one of the private companies featured in the market map.

Combining CB Insights’ proprietary data and AI, scouting reports provide insight into each company’s:

• Funding history
• Headcount
• Key takeaways (including opportunities and threats)
• Commercial Maturity score
• Mosaic score

Download the book to see all 49 scouting reports.

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Now, we’re examining the critical metrics behind these winners, revealing potential acquisition targets, partnership opportunities, and emerging competitors before they reshape the market.

Below, we analyzed the 100 winners to understand how the cohort stacks up, the markets we’re seeing emerge, top investors in AI, and more.

Learn more about the AI 100 here

Some highlights from our analysis: 

• AI infrastructure shows a maturity gap despite massive funding. Despite the already enormous amount of capital raised in this category, AI infrastructure still has overall low Commercial Maturity Scores and sees a lot of early-stage activity with a specific focus on efficiency. These AI 100 winners are betting on next-generation solutions like specialized AI chips, novel computing architectures with reduced energy consumption and optimized inference, and infrastructure designed for multimodal workloads that current systems can’t efficiently handle. 
• Autonomous vehicles are accelerating beyond the hype cycle. The auto & mobility market ranks third by Mosaic score, with companies gaining significant commercial traction following Waymo‘s recent success in scaling its robotaxi operations. This momentum validates years of R&D investment and suggests we’re entering a new phase of AV deployment. Read more in our recent autonomous vehicle analysis.
• Multimodal AI is driving the biggest breakthroughs. Voice AI platform Cartesia leads the largest year-over-year Mosaic score jump (+321), alongside other companies pushing beyond text-only models toward integrated voice, vision, and reasoning capabilities. This shift represents the next evolution of AI, especially for embodied AI systems like humanoids, moving from single-modality tools toward systems that can understand and generate across multiple forms of media simultaneously. 

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The accelerator that spotted OpenAI, Airbnb, and Stripe before they became household names is now placing bets across 4 key agentic AI areas: software development guardrails that de-risk “vibe coding”, web-browsing agents, backend workflow automation, and vertical agents penetrating highly regulated industries. 

For strategy teams, this represents both a roadmap of where agentic AI is heading and a curated list of potential acquisition targets, partners, and competitive threats.

Using CB Insights, we mapped the 70+ agentic AI companies in the Y Combinator’s 2025 Spring batch across 18 different categories.

Please click to enlarge.

Note: Categories are not mutually exclusive.

Check out the 140+ startups in Y Combinator’s newest cohort

Key Takeaways  

De-risking AI software development

Software development and testing is the second-largest agentic AI category of this batch, with 11 companies. This reflects the fact that software development AI agents are still booming, with 2025 funding already outpacing 2024 by 3x. Yet this cohort goes beyond coding AI agents,  providing engineering support, QA, and guardrails to make vibe coding less risky. 

A key focus of these companies is to make vibe coding less risky. For example, over half of the startups in this category focus on testing and review. Operative deploys browser agents that can test coding agents. Docket and Propolis use web agents to QA code and products. Startup Cubic reduces code review bottlenecks, and Jazzberry debugs code, both of which are issues becoming more prominent with the rise of vibe coding. 

A handful of companies are developing solutions to support software engineers in vibe coding and automated code generation. Delty is an AI agent that helps with system design and architecture based on deep codebase understanding, and StarSling provides AI agents to augment DevOps. 

These new tools will accelerate the growth of more reliable AI software development, boosting existing leaders in the space such as Cursor who could look to acquire them.

Web-browsing agents gather steam beyond general-purpose use 

Y Combinator’s dominance in web-browsing agents – backing over 50% of the existing market — signals this emerging category’s potential to become critical infrastructure for agentic AI. LLM giants like OpenAI are already building their own browser agents, but this isn’t deterring startups from entering the space

The Spring 2025 batch reveals how these startups are differentiating themselves by targeting high-value, specific applications rather than building general-purpose agents. 

For example,  Kaizen provides browser agents that enable outdated, legacy systems to connect with websites without the need for an API. Operative and Propolis are pioneering the use of browsing agents for software testing and quality assurance, areas where automation has historically struggled.

Agents capable of accessing and browsing the web can access more data and information than what is typically available in a company’s systems. This helps provide more context to agentic systems, improving decision-making, and ultimately autonomy. 

Agents are coming for the backend

Today, most AI agents focus on frontend interactions and applications, with customer service and enterprise workflow being 2 of the most well-funded AI agent markets. This Y Combinator cohort signals how agents are moving to the backend.

Cactus, Combinely, and Hemut are building back-office systems in areas like accounting and reporting. Caucus and Cohesive developed agent-based CRMs that go beyond the traditional enterprise space to target small businesses and government. Odapt allows custom application development in areas like finance and marketing, built on top of existing tools and systems. Cleon and Auctor AI are automating system implementations. 

Currently, these companies focus on narrowly defined, specialized backend workflows. Expanding into more end-to-end workflows will require greater trust in agentic AI applications. 

This trust can be partially built through the ability to benchmark AI agent performance. Kashikoi, Janus, and The LLM Data Company – all part of this Spring cohort – are working on this today. 

AI agents keep making inroads in highly regulated industries

Once an obstacle for new AI applications, the most highly regulated industries have emerged as targets for agentic AI startups. 32% of verticalized AI agent companies are actively deploying solutions, and 23% and 22% are emerging and validating, respectively, suggesting an oncoming growth spurt. 

This impending growth is fully displayed with this batch of Y Combinator companies, particularly in healthcare and financial services, which represent 19% of the agentic AI companies in this year’s Spring cohort. 

Customer service and engagement are common areas of focus within these verticals, with companies like Eloquent AI (financial services), Trapeze (healthcare), and Kaelio (healthcare). Other startups are delving deeper into industry-specific workflows, like Chestnut Mortgage and Approval AI (lending and mortgage), and Bitboard (healthcare operations).

We expect the next generation of industry-focused AI agent companies to go beyond operational support and handle research autonomously. 

A handful of companies in this batch tackle research assistance today, like Bramante Biologics and SynthioLabs in healthcare and Scalar Field for investment research. These startups lay the foundation for a future in which AI agents can proactively source, digest, and deliver information to human users or automate their roles altogether.

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Now, our Book of Scouting Reports offers in-depth analysis on every single one of the AI 100 winners, from infrastructure to horizontal to vertical applications.

Combining CB Insights’ proprietary data and AI, scouting reports provide insight into each company’s:

• Funding history
• Headcount
• Key takeaways (including opportunities and threats)
• Commercial Maturity score
• Mosaic score

Plus, the analysts behind this year’s AI 100 provide their perspective on every one of the winners.

Download the book to see all 100 scouting reports.

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