Every year, Forbes and TrueBridge Capital Partners play a game that has an unusually good track record. They pick 20 venture-backed US companies, all still under $1 billion in value, and predict which ones will make it. Their record: 60 percent of the 275 companies they have ever named on the Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list eventually became unicorns. DoorDash was on the list. So was Duolingo.
The 2026 class dropped July 28. Twenty companies. Nearly every one touching AI. The full list is worth reading. But these ten are the ones worth talking about.
1. Fortell Research: $740M and Henry Kravis Wears Their Product
Fortell Research makes hearing aids that cost $6,800 and sell through a Manhattan audiology clinic. The CEO started thinking about the product after watching his grandparents withdraw socially as their hearing faded. The tech was not ready until Zoom-era AI proved you could isolate a single voice in a noisy room. Among the reported customers: KKR chair Henry Kravis and comedian Steve Martin. The company’s biggest growth bottleneck right now is finding enough audiologists to staff new locations. They have raised $163M at a $740M valuation.
2. Juicebox: The Unicorn-in-Waiting That Recruiters Are Already Using
At $850 million, Juicebox is the closest company on this list to tipping into actual unicorn status. It turns recruiting from a pile-sorting exercise into a direct people-search by scraping public profiles, personal sites, and project history into searchable candidate dossiers. After an $80 million round in March 2026, they now serve more than 5,000 customers including Ramp and Cognition. They have raised $116M total.
3. Netic: 22 People, $450M Valuation, Started Because Her Electricity Bill Made No Sense
Melisa Tokmak emigrated from Turkey on a full scholarship to Stanford, went on to become a director of engineering at Scale AI, then left to diagnose her own mysteriously large electricity bill. That experience became Netic, an agentic AI customer service platform for plumbers, HVAC companies, and other trade businesses. The AI handles calls, texts, and follow-up bookings. The whole company runs on 22 people. Backed by Founders Fund and Greylock at a $450M valuation.
4. Ossium Health: The World’s First Bone Marrow Bank Came From a “Strange Idea”
Former McKinsey consultant Kevin Caldwell’s original pitch sounded odd: bank frozen bone marrow from deceased donors, the way blood banks work for blood. Unlike hearts or lungs, marrow does not have a narrow transplant window. That means patients with life-threatening blood cancers do not have to wait months for 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. They have raised $158M at a $300M valuation.
5. Crosby: The Lawyer Who Decided Hourly Billing Was the Problem
Ryan Daniels practiced law. Then he built an AI firm where agents mark up NDAs and service agreements and the company charges a flat fee per contract, not by the hour. Crosby serves 130 clients including Cursor, Cognition, and Clay, and has raised $85M at a $400M valuation. Investors include Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and Lux Capital. This is what happens when the person building the product actually lived the problem.
6. Outtake: OpenAI Hired Them to Catch Deepfakes
Palantir alum Alex Arjun Dhillon built Outtake after a YouTuber asked for help identifying AI-generated fakes being used to run financial scams. The platform scores content and context to flag likely deepfakes. Among the current customers: OpenAI and Panera Bread. The fact that the company building AI hired someone else to detect it says a lot about where things are heading. Backed by CRV and ICONIQ Growth at a $375M-plus valuation.
7. Valthos: OpenAI Backed a Bioterrorism Detection Startup. The Pentagon Is Already a Customer.
OpenAI is listed as a lead investor in Valthos, which uses AI to characterize pathogens and flag biological threats, whether natural or engineered. CEO Kathleen McMahon previously ran Palantir’s life sciences division. Current clients include the US Department of Defense and Los Alamos National Laboratory. They have raised $30M at a $200M-plus valuation. This fits a growing pattern of defence-adjacent technology companies attracting serious venture capital in 2026.
8. DepthFirst: Former DeepMind Researchers Racing Against AI-Powered Hackers
The DepthFirst team, alumni of Google DeepMind, Block, and Databricks, builds AI that finds vulnerabilities in critical software and ships patches before attackers can exploit them. The catch: the attackers are also using AI now. Founded in October 2024, DepthFirst raised $120M at a $580M valuation in under 20 months and already counts ServiceNow and Ripple as customers. That timeline is nearly impossible unless the product is working.
9. FleetWorks: Smallest Valuation on This List, Chasing the Biggest Market
FleetWorks has raised $17M. Their valuation is $75M, making them the smallest company on this list. What they are going after: America’s $900 billion freight industry. The platform runs always-on AI agents that call, text, and email truck drivers to book hauling jobs. CEO Paul Singer, a former Uber Freight operator, says the system facilitates tens of thousands of bookings per day. The gap between that $75M valuation and the $900B market is precisely why Forbes noticed them. For founders building AI voice agents, this is what real-world deployment at scale looks like.
10. Abby Care: Built From a Childhood Spent Navigating Medicaid
Havi Nguyen grew up translating doctor visits for her immigrant parents while working at their nail salon, then interned at Google and Facebook before seeing how hard it is to find in-home care for autistic and elderly people. Abby Care trains family members 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. Raised $45M at a $225M valuation, backed by Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Thrive Capital.
What All Ten Have in Common
None of these companies are doing AI for its own sake. Every single one picked a specific, painful, underserved problem and used AI to get there faster, cheaper, or at a scale a human team could not match. Forbes has been publishing this list for 12 years and their hit rate is 60 percent. That is not luck. That is pattern recognition applied to very early signals.
The 2026 class is leaner and stranger than previous years. From bone marrow banks to bioterrorism detection to AI hearing aids for hedge fund chairs, this year’s list is a dispatch from ten markets the tech world mostly ignored until now. If history holds, at least six of these twenty will cross $1 billion within the next few years. The only question is which six.
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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.
