What Is the Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups List
Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups 2026 is out, and it reads like a preview of tomorrow’s unicorn class. For twelve years running, Forbes has worked with TrueBridge Capital Partners to spot venture-backed, US-based companies that are still under a $1 billion valuation but are tracking toward one. This year’s cohort of 20 companies was published July 28, 2026.
The list’s track record is what makes it worth watching closely. Of the 275 companies picked since the list began, 60 percent went on to become unicorns, a group that includes now-household names like DoorDash and Duolingo. Roughly another 60 were acquired or merged before reaching that mark. Only a small handful, around 2 percent, shut down entirely. Put simply, appearing on this list has historically been a strong predictor of what comes next.
Why AI Owns This Year’s Class
Nearly every company on the Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups 2026 list touches AI in some form, and the range is wider than most people expect. This year’s picks apply the technology to problems as varied as bone marrow banking, biological threat detection, cybersecurity, insurance claims, hearing aids, and creative design software. AI is no longer a category on this list. It is close to a prerequisite.
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The Full List: 20 Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups 2026 Companies to Watch
1. Abby Care
| Founded | 2021 |
| Founder / CEO | Havi Nguyen |
| Lead Investors | Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital |
| Equity Raised | $45 million |
| Valuation | $225 million |
Nguyen grew up helping her immigrant parents navigate Medicaid while working at their nail salon, then interned at Google and Facebook before a stint at a therapy startup exposed her to how hard it is to find in-home care for autistic children. Abby Care trains family members of disabled or elderly people to become paid, Medicaid-funded caregivers, and gives them an app for time sheets, charting, and an AI assistant. The long-term goal is a caregiver marketplace built the way Uber built one for drivers.
2. American Terawatt
| Headquarters | San Francisco, CA |
| Founders | Ron Bhattacharyay, Ricky Moezinia, Rob Parker, Anton Troynikov (CEO) |
| Lead Investors | Altimeter Capital, Founders Fund |
| Equity Raised | $52 million |
| Valuation | $350 million |
American Terawatt wants to power AI data centers more efficiently by building direct-current transmission grids, skipping the energy loss that comes from converting AC power to DC inside every server and device. CEO Troynikov previously founded Chroma, a vector database company. The plan starts with third-party hardware, with an in-house converter business to follow.
3. Clair
| Founded | 2019 |
| Headquarters | New York, NY |
| Founders | Alex Kostecki, Erich Nussbaumer, Nico Simko (CEO) |
| Lead Investors | Founder Collective, Kairos, Thrive Capital, Upfront Ventures, Walkabout Ventures |
| Equity Raised | $69 million |
| Valuation | $145 million |
Clair lets hourly workers draw part of their paycheck before payday, an idea Simko built after seeing how a single unexpected bill can wreck someone living without savings. The platform sits on top of payroll systems like Intuit, verifying employment and earnings to advance roughly 30 to 50 percent of a worker’s daily wages instantly.
4. Cogent Security
| Founded | 2024 |
| Founders | Thanos Baskous, Vineet Edupuganti (CEO), Geng Sng |
| Lead Investors | Bain Capital Ventures, Greylock |
| Equity Raised | $53 million |
| Valuation | $320 million |
Cogent’s AI agents scan for critical security vulnerabilities, prioritize them, and help IT teams close them before attackers find them. CEO Edupuganti previously worked at Abnormal Security, the email-security unicorn, before starting Cogent. Customers already include Valvoline, the University of the Pacific, and several undisclosed Las Vegas casinos.
5. Crosby
| Headquarters | New York, NY |
| Founders | Ryan Daniels (CEO), John Sarihan |
| Lead Investors | Bain Capital Ventures, Index Ventures, Lux Capital, Sequoia Capital |
| Equity Raised | $85 million |
| Valuation | $400 million |
At Crosby, lawyers oversee AI agents rather than reading every contract line by line. The agents mark up NDAs and service agreements, and Crosby charges a flat fee per contract instead of billing by the hour, serving 130 clients including Cursor, Cognition, and Clay. Founder Daniels is a former practicing lawyer himself.
6. DepthFirst
| Founded | October 2024 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, CA |
| Founders | Andrea Michi, Qasim Mithani (CEO), Daniele Perito |
| Lead Investors | Accel, Meritech Capital |
| Equity Raised | $120 million |
| Valuation | $580 million |
The DepthFirst team, alumni of Google DeepMind, Block, and Databricks, builds AI models trained to find vulnerabilities in critical software and ship patches before AI-assisted attackers can exploit them. The company already counts more than 20 customers, including Lovable, Ripple, and ServiceNow.
7. Elorian AI
| Founders | Andrew Dai (CEO), Seth Neel, Yinfei Yang |
| Lead Investors | Altimeter Capital, Menlo Ventures, Striker Venture Partners |
| Equity Raised | $55 million |
| Valuation | $300 million |
Elorian, which left stealth mode in April 2026, is building AI with a spatial, visual grasp of the physical world rather than the text-based reasoning behind models like ChatGPT and Claude. Former Google DeepMind researcher and CEO Dai points to robotics and engineering as obvious use cases, alongside simpler ones like previewing how furniture would look in a room before buying it.
8. FleetWorks
| Founders | Paul Singer (CEO), Quang Tran |
| Lead Investors | First Round Capital |
| Equity Raised | $17 million |
| Valuation | $75 million |
FleetWorks runs always-on AI agents that call, text, and email truck drivers to book hauling jobs inside America’s $900 billion freight industry. CEO Singer, an Uber Freight veteran, says the system facilitates tens of thousands of bookings a day by pulling data from both brokers and carriers.
9. Flora
| Founded | 2024 |
| Headquarters | Brooklyn, NY |
| Founders | Alex Li, Weber Wong (CEO) |
| Lead Investors | Hanabi, Redpoint Ventures |
| Equity Raised | $52 million |
| Valuation | $260 million |
Wong dreamed up Flora while studying at NYU’s ITP program, where students blend art and technology. Flora’s tools let creative teams generate logos, storyboards, and product sketches with AI while collaborating in real time. Brand-side creatives at Nike, Netflix, and Levi’s are already using it.
10. Fortell Research
| Founded | Early 2021 |
| Headquarters | Manhattan, NY (expanding to Boston, San Francisco, Palo Alto) |
| Founders | Andrew Casper, Matthew de Jonge (CEO), Igor Lovchinsky, Cole Morris |
| Lead Investors | Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, Valor Equity Partners |
| Equity Raised | $163 million |
| Valuation | $740 million |
CEO de Jonge started thinking about a smarter hearing aid after watching his grandparents withdraw socially as their hearing faded, but the tech to isolate speech from background noise was not ready until the Zoom era proved AI could mute unwanted sound. Fortell’s $6,800 hearing aids, sold through its Manhattan audiology clinic, have drawn customers like KKR chair Henry Kravis and comedian Steve Martin. The company says the biggest constraint on growth is hiring enough audiologists to staff new locations.
11. Gumloop
| Founded | 2023 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, CA |
| Founders | Rahul Behal, Max Brodeur-Urbas (CEO) |
| Lead Investors | Benchmark, First Round Capital, Nexus Venture Partners |
| Equity Raised | $70 million |
| Valuation | $300 million |
Gumloop lets non-technical teams automate workflows without looping in engineers. The company nearly folded when Brodeur-Urbas’ original cofounder walked away, until a chance meetup connected him with fellow McGill grad Behal. Gumloop went through Y Combinator’s winter 2024 batch and now counts Shopify and Instacart among its users.
12. Juicebox
| Headquarters | San Francisco, CA |
| Founders | Ishan Gupta, David Paffenholz (CEO) |
| Lead Investors | DST Global, NFDG, Sequoia Capital |
| Equity Raised | $116 million |
| Valuation | $850 million |
AI has made it trivially easy to blast out job applications, which means recruiters now drown in resumes. Juicebox scrapes public profiles, personal sites, and project history into candidate dossiers so recruiters can search directly for the right person instead. The company hit an $850 million valuation after an $80 million round in March 2026 and serves more than 5,000 customers, including Ramp and Cognition.
13. Lotus Health
| Founded | 2024 |
| Founders | KJ Dhaliwal (CEO), Zekka Nelson |
| Lead Investors | CRV, Kleiner Perkins |
| Equity Raised | $41 million |
| Valuation | $150 million |
Dhaliwal grew up translating doctor visits into Punjabi for his parents and later sold his dating app, Dil Mil, for $50 million. Lotus Health offers free, AI-trained virtual primary care in more than 50 languages, with physicians able to manage roughly ten times the patient load of a traditional practice. The company has no revenue yet, a deliberate choice while it builds its user base first.
14. Netic
| Founder | Melisa Tokmak (CEO) |
| Lead Investors | Founders Fund, Greylock |
| Equity Raised | $43 million |
| Valuation | $450 million |
Tokmak, who emigrated from Turkey on a full scholarship to Stanford, started Netic after a maddening search to diagnose a mysteriously huge electricity bill at her own home. She left a director of engineering role at Scale AI to build agentic AI customer service for trade businesses like plumbing and HVAC, letting the system diagnose issues over calls or texts and book follow-up visits. Netic runs on a lean 22-person team.
15. Ossium Health
| Headquarters | San Francisco, CA (bank operations in Indiana) |
| Founders | Kevin Caldwell (CEO), Erik Woods |
| Lead Investors | CPMG, First Round Capital, General Catalyst, Vivo Capital |
| Equity Raised | $158 million |
| Valuation | $300 million |
A decade ago, former McKinsey consultant Caldwell had what sounded like a strange idea: bank frozen bone marrow from deceased donors. Unlike hearts or lungs, marrow does not need to be transplanted within hours, so Ossium can offer patients with life-threatening blood cancers faster access than waiting on a living donor match. Ossium now runs the world’s first bone marrow bank and has supported 28 transplants, including a recent 14-year-old patient.
16. Outtake
| Founder | Alex Arjun Dhillon (CEO) |
| Lead Investors | CRV, ICONIQ Growth |
| Equity Raised | $60 million |
| Valuation | $375 million+ |
Palantir alum Dhillon built Outtake after a YouTuber asked for help identifying deepfakes being used to scam people. The platform scores content and context to flag likely fakes, and customers already include OpenAI and Panera Bread.
17. Pace
| Founded | 2024 |
| Headquarters | New York, NY |
| Founder | Jamie Cuffe (CEO) |
| Lead Investors | Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital |
| Equity Raised | $55 million |
| Valuation | $375 million |
Most losses from extreme weather events go uninsured, and a slow claims process is a big part of why, especially after major events like wildfires. Cuffe, the son of an insurance executive, built Pace’s AI agents to handle submissions, renewals, servicing, and claims faster than traditional call centers. Prudential Financial is among its customers.
18. Rillet
| Headquarters | San Francisco, CA |
| Founders | Nicolas Kopp (CEO), Stelios Modes |
| Lead Investors | Andreessen Horowitz, Creandum, First Round Capital, ICONIQ, Sequoia Capital |
| Equity Raised | $110 million |
| Valuation | $500 million |
Traditional accounting software leaves businesses waiting days or weeks after a reporting period closes before human accountants finish reconciling the books. Rillet uses AI agents to close the books in real time instead. Kopp says he got the idea after being forced to make decisions on incomplete financial data while helping build a German banking startup.
19. Roadrunner
| Founded | 2025 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, CA |
| Founders | Joubin Mirzadegan (CEO), Ajay Natarajan, Eugene Shao |
| Lead Investors | Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins |
| Equity Raised | $27 million |
| Valuation | $200 million |
Roadrunner’s multi-agent system turns a sales rep’s deal details, products, quantities, delivery terms, and discounts into a finished customer quote in minutes. The company was incubated inside Kleiner Perkins, where CEO Mirzadegan is a partner. Chief product officer Natarajan started at Caltech at age 16 while working as a NASA engineer on Mars Rover guidance software.
20. Valthos
| Founders | Kathleen McMahon (CEO), Tess van Stekelenburg |
| Lead Investors | Founders Fund, Lux Capital, OpenAI |
| Equity Raised | $30 million |
| Valuation | $200 million+ |
Valthos uses AI to characterize pathogens and flag biological threats, whether natural or engineered, building rapid-response dossiers for experts. McMahon previously led Palantir’s life sciences division, and van Stekelenburg is a partner at Lux Capital. Clients already include the US Department of Defense and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Sector Breakdown: Where the Money Is Going
Group the 2026 class by what they actually do and four clusters stand out.
Trust and security: Cogent Security, DepthFirst, Outtake, and Valthos are all building AI to catch threats before they cause damage, spanning cybersecurity, deepfake fraud, and biological risk.
Enterprise agents replacing back-office labor: Crosby, Rillet, Roadrunner, Pace, and Gumloop are automating work that used to require teams of humans: contract review, accounting close, sales quoting, insurance claims, and internal workflows.
Health and care access: Abby Care, Fortell Research, Lotus Health, and Ossium Health are tackling different corners of a strained healthcare system, from caregiver pay to hearing loss to primary care access to transplant supply.
Physical-world infrastructure: American Terawatt, Elorian AI, Netic, and FleetWorks are pointed at power grids, spatial reasoning, home services, and freight, areas where AI is only just starting to touch the physical economy.
Clair, Juicebox, and Flora round out the list in fintech, recruiting, and creative tooling.
What This Means for US Founders and Investors
The pattern across this year’s picks is capital discipline paired with a real market shift underneath them. Several companies on the list, including Netic and FleetWorks, are staying lean on headcount while chasing large addressable markets. This mirrors what we’ve seen across the broader US startup ecosystem, including companies like Horizon3, which hit a $2 billion valuation by staying focused on a single high-value enterprise security market.
Investors backing this cohort, including Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, and Thrive Capital, appear repeatedly across multiple companies, suggesting a concentrated group of firms is placing early bets on where enterprise AI adoption goes next. From Asia’s AI chip startup boom to the US-based enterprise software wave, the same conviction about AI-driven automation is showing up globally.
This list is one of dozens of signals happening across the US startup ecosystem this month. Track every deal as it happens. Track US Startup Funding at BestStartup US
Key Takeaways
Forbes and TrueBridge released their Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups 2026 list on July 28, naming 20 venture-backed US companies still valued under $1 billion. Nearly all 20 use AI in some form, spanning cybersecurity, healthcare, insurance, accounting, and creative tools. Historically, 60 percent of the list’s 275 alumni have gone on to become unicorns, including DoorDash and Duolingo. Investors like Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, and Thrive Capital back multiple companies across this year’s class, and equity raised across the group ranges from $17 million to $163 million.
FAQ
Sources
Nieva, Richard. “Next Billion-Dollar Startups 2026.” Forbes, July 28, 2026.
TrueBridge Capital. “Three Signals That Define This Year’s Next Billion-Dollar Startups.” Forbes, July 28, 2026.
