BEIJING (SCMP): China’s innovation ecosystem has witnessed a resurgence, minting 67 new unicorn start-ups in the first half of 2026 – the biggest increase in almost five years – as AI and robotics kick off a new investment cycle.
The growth translates into an average of one new unicorn – private companies valued at US$1 billion or more – in less than every three days and was the highest since the second half of 2021 when 76 new unicorns were created, according to a Monday report by ITJuzi, a start-up database.
The momentum was tightly clustered around two cutting-edge industries – artificial intelligence and robotics – which together accounted for more than 53 per cent of the cohort. This differed from the previous cycle between 2021 and 2022, when large start-ups spanned multiple sectors including new-energy vehicles, biomedicine and online consumer businesses.
DeepSeek was the biggest star of the past six months. The Hangzhou-based AI firm just closed its first-ever external fundraising at a valuation of about 400 billion yuan (US$59.2 billion), the highest in the past six months and the fourth largest among all unicorns in China, following ByteDance, Ant Group and Shein.
But most of the new unicorns – about 78 per cent – were valued between US$1 billion and US$2 billion, suggesting they were still “in the early stages of growth”, according to the report. No companies fell into the US$5 billion to US$10 billion bracket, which marked a valuation jump between “unicorns” and “super unicorns”.
Almost half of the newcomers, or 32, were founded within the past three years, mostly in 2023 when 14 such start-ups were established. The timing closely aligned with the surge in large AI models following OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in late 2022, which sparked entrepreneurs’ passion for generative AI worldwide.
DeepSeek, for instance, was launched in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng – known for his quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer Quant – to focus on artificial general intelligence research.
Some companies backed by star firms or prominent entrepreneurs achieved unicorn status at a rapid pace this year, including Bulage – or Pragmatics – which reached it within just one month and was founded by former Alibaba Group Holding employee Lin Junyang, a technical leader of the Qwen large-language models.
AgiLink, a robotic hand maker backed by Chinese robotics star AgiBot, crossed the US$1 billion mark in less than five months.
“The valuations of some start-ups are based more on team members’ premiums and market expectations than on actual commercial validation”, ITJuzi warned in the report.
“It remains to be seen whether these rapidly emerging ‘lightning unicorns’ will be able to meet commercialisation expectations within one to two years, and whether market saturation will trigger a valuation correction.”
Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
