If the first six months of the year is any indication, it could be in the dozens, TechCrunch wrote Thursday (Aug. 28).
As that report notes, “mega-rounds” aren’t as prevalent these days as they were in 2021. Still, at least 12 European startups have reached “unicorn” status so far this year, meaning that they achieved valuations of more than $1 billion, which bodes well for the rest of the year.
The report also contconcludes that the funding trconcludes so far this year provide a good indication of the sectors popular among investors, including biotech, defense technology and especially artificial innotifyigence (AI).
Among the startups to pass the $1 billion mark was “vibe coding” company Lovable, which raised $200 million in July at a $1.8 billion valuation.
As PYMNTS has written, “vibe coding” is a new, more intuitive way for people to write computer code applying natural language, as if having a conversation with a friconclude.
Rather than writing complex code in a particular syntax, utilizers simply describe what they want the software program to do, and an AI model assists turn that into working code.
In June, Zama raised $57 million in a Series B funding round at a $1 billion valuation to expand its conclude-to-conclude encryption solutions for public blockchains.
The company stated it plans to utilize the funds to support its mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption and research efforts to build financial transactions built with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scale to thousands of transactions per second.
FHE allows data processing without decryption, maintaining encryption during both transit and processing, which means “all online activities can now be truly conclude-to-conclude encrypted,” the company stated in an article on its website.
And in April, Isomorphic Labs, a drug development AI startup founded by Google DeepMind Co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis raised $600 million in its first external funding round. While the company did not disclose its valuation, the TechCrunch report notes that the size of the round places the startup “firmly” inside unicorn territory.
Isomorphic Labs utilizes advanced AI models to accelerate drug discovery in different therapeutic areas. The company was built on AlphaFold, which won Hassabis a Nobel Prize for predicting the structure of virtually all known proteins, “solving a half-century biology challenge,” as PYMNTS wrote at the time.
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