This Week in Unicorn Companies | Key Deals and Moves

Polymarket is raising a new funding round that would value the company up to $15 billion, marking a significant surge from its previous valuation. Founded by Shayne Coplan, Polymarket enables users to trade on the outcomes of real-world events, merging decentralized finance with information markets to harness collective intelligence.

Mercor raised $350 million in a Series C round, bringing its valuation to $10 billion. Founded by Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and others, the company develops AI-powered hiring solutions that help organizations meet growing talent demands across industries. The funding round was led by Felicis, with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst, and Robinhood Ventures.

Whatnot raised $225 million in a Series F round, bringing its valuation to $11.5 billion. Founded by Grant LaFontaine and Logan Head, Whatnot powers the modern social commerce surge through its live video marketplace that connects sellers and passionate buyers in real time. The round was led by Sequoia Capital and Alkeon Capital, with participation from Greycroft, Andreessen Horowitz, Avra, Bond, Y Combinator, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Liquid 2 Ventures.

Fireworks AI raised $250 million in a Series C round, bringing its valuation to $4 billion. Led by CEO and co-founder Lin Qiao, Fireworks AI provides a high-performance cloud platform that enables developers to build, fine-tune, and deploy generative AI applications with sub-second inference at scale. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Index Ventures, and Evantic, with participation from Sequoia Capital, NVIDIA, AMD, MongoDB, and Databricks.

OpenAI is reportedly preparing for an IPO that could value the company at up to $1 trillion, marking one of the largest public offerings in tech history. Founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, Wojciech Zaremba, and others, OpenAI is known for creating ChatGPT and other advanced generative AI models.

Legora raised $150 million in a Series C round, bringing its valuation to $1.8 billion. Led by CEO and co-founder Max Junestrand, Legora’s AI-powered platform empowers legal professionals to review faster, draft smarter, and collaborate globally across 400+ firms and 40+ markets. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with backing from ICONIQ, General Catalyst, and others.

Synthesia raised $200 million in its latest funding round, lifting its valuation to $4 billion. Founded by Victor Riparbelli, Steffen Tjerrild, Matthias Niessner, and Lourdes Agapito, the company’s AI-video platform enables enterprises to turn text into dynamic, multilingual video content at scale. The round was backed by leading investors including Sequoia Capital and Accel.