Since 2022, .ai has made more unicorns than .com
Published 27 September 2026
Crunchbase tags 51 companies founded in 2022 or later as unicorns. 20 of them run on a .ai domain. 17 run on .com.
We expected .com to win that count comfortably, because it still has three times as many funded startups behind it. Crunchbase has 22,261 funded startups founded since 2022 on .com and 6,342 on .ai. Per funded startup, .ai produced a unicorn about four times as often: 3.2 per 1,000 against 0.8.
The .ai list reads like the last three years of AI news: xAI, Mistral, Perplexity, Harvey, Figure, Sierra, Poolside, Fireworks AI, Together AI, Inflection, Moonshot AI and World Labs. Counting only US companies it is 16 on .ai and 9 on .com.
The .com unicorns are a different crowd. 7 of the 17 are Chinese (Baichuan, StepFun, Agibot, Zhizi Automobile) or Indian (Krutrim, which runs on olakrutrim.com). The American ones include Suno, Cognition, Augment Code, Modular and Saronic. Hippocratic AI put the AI in the name and still bought the .com.
The one ending with a higher rate than .ai is .xyz: 3 unicorns (Monad, Movement Labs, Elixir) from 621 funded startups. That is a crypto story and too few companies to read much into.
How .com lost half the funded startups
Crunchbase's funded startups founded in 2007 used .com 79.9% of the time. For those founded in 2023 it was 47.4%, and it has stayed there since: 47.6% for 2024 and 47.8% for 2025.
.io was the startup ending of the 2010s and peaked with the 2022 cohort at 8.3%. Then .ai took its place in a single year. Among funded startups founded in 2022, 1,237 used .io and 988 used .ai. For 2023 it was 838 on .io and 1,907 on .ai. For 2025 it is 272 against 1,353.
.xyz marks the crypto boom. Funded startups on .xyz went from 9 founded in 2015 to 293 founded in 2022, then fell back to 58 for 2025.
One ending we did not expect: 134 companies use .security, 115 of them funded, and 45 are Israeli. Orca, Aim, Grip and Sweet Security all use it.
| Founded | Funded, with domain | .com | .ai | .io | .xyz |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005.0 | 3,674.0 | 77.5% | 0.2% | 0.3% | 0.0% |
| 2010.0 | 7,019.0 | 79.2% | 0.3% | 0.9% | 0.0% |
| 2015.0 | 15,810.0 | 69.7% | 1.8% | 3.9% | 0.1% |
| 2018.0 | 16,226.0 | 62.0% | 3.7% | 6.2% | 0.2% |
| 2019.0 | 16,188.0 | 60.1% | 4.4% | 5.8% | 0.2% |
| 2020.0 | 18,637.0 | 57.5% | 4.9% | 6.0% | 0.3% |
| 2021.0 | 18,724.0 | 53.7% | 4.9% | 8.0% | 0.9% |
| 2022.0 | 14,883.0 | 50.4% | 6.6% | 8.3% | 2.0% |
| 2023.0 | 12,819.0 | 47.4% | 14.9% | 6.5% | 1.0% |
| 2024.0 | 9,996.0 | 47.6% | 18.0% | 5.5% | 1.4% |
| 2025.0 | 6,533.0 | 47.8% | 20.7% | 4.2% | 0.9% |
How we counted
The source is our copy of Crunchbase, 1,723,352 organisations. We kept the
1,259,355 that have both a domain and a founding year between 1990 and 2026.
"Funded" means at least one funding round recorded. "Unicorn" is Crunchbase's
own unicorn tag; we did not check valuations. The domain ending is the public
suffix from tldextract, so .co.uk counts as its own ending.
The domain is the one the company uses today, not the one it registered at founding. A company that moved to .ai later counts as .ai in its founding year. 548 companies founded in 2012 or earlier now sit on .ai, among them C3 AI (founded 2009, c3.ai) and a 1999 record at momentive.ai, the domain of SurveyMonkey's former parent. Some of the 20 .ai unicorns could have started on another domain; we did not check each one's history. 20 against 17 is a small count, and one reclassified company changes the gap.
The 2026 cohort is only partly filled, so the charts stop at 2025. Companies founded in 2026 are included in the "2022 or later" unicorn count.
Files: tld_by_founding_year.csv (funded startups by founding year and ending, 2005 to 2025), unicorns_founded_2022_on.csv (all 51 unicorns with domain, founding year and country). The YC-only version of this count is in YC broke up with .com in 2022.