The Next List 2026: Private Companies to Watch

Finding the next generation of market leaders may require looking beyond today’s most visible private giants. While mega-corn companies like Databricks, Stripe, and Anduril continue to draw investor interest and capital, a new wave of contenders spanning AI infrastructure, defense, and hard tech are working to build the foundation of future technology.

Here, we've compiled a list of companies that have potential for significant growth in the private market in the coming years. To construct our 2026 roster, we grounded our analysis in key quantitative metrics that may indicate a company is positioned for market leadership and growth. Specifically, our framework prioritized private companies that:

• Raised funding in the last 12 months from an investor whose firm is on the Midas List. The Midas List ranks institutional investors based on the exits and private valuations they've achieved over the past five years. Companies that have raised capital from these top-tier investors may have a competitive advantage, given their industry expertise and track record of generating strong returns. Notably, investors who qualified for the 2026 list have backed industry-defining companies, such as Cerebras, SpaceX, and Stripe.
• Raised $100M to $500M in funding in their latest funding round.¹ We focused on companies that have raised enough money to be considered early-mid stage, while still allowing for significant private market growth potential.
• Are valued between $2B and $5B. As private company valuations continue to grow, especially in AI, we’ve increased our minimum valuation criteria from $500M, in our 2025 Next List, to $2B. This change reflects our focus on identifying the standout emerging companies that are large enough to potentially trade in the private secondary market.
• Have been founded within the last 1 to 5 years. This window targets high-momentum, earlier-stage up-and-comers while ensuring companies have moved past initial stealth development and build market traction.
• Are U.S.-based. U.S.-based companies tend to be the most active in the U.S. private secondary market where EquityZen operates.
• Achieved headcount growth of 200%+ in the last 12 to 24 months. In a highly competitive market, acquiring talent is crucial to scale. Companies that have significantly grown their teams may be positioned for continued growth. The companies on our list range from smaller teams with just under 100 employees to larger operations with over 500 employees.

The companies on this year’s list reflect a decisive focus on hard tech, with a majority of companies anchored in Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure, Aerospace & Defense, and Robotics. Breakout contenders across Productivity Software, Fintech, and Cloud Infrastructure demonstrate how AI-native architectures are transforming enterprise workflows across a variety of industries.

Allen Control Systems

• What they do: Allen Control Systems is a defense technology company that builds autonomous precision robotics. The company’s flagship product, Bullfrog, is an AI-powered robotic weapon station developed for anti-drone defense.
• Industry: Aerospace and Defense, Robotics and Drones
• Founded in 2022 in Austin, TX
• Latest funding round: $200M Series B in June 2026 at a $2.2B post-money valuation. Smash Capital led the round with participation from Craft Ventures, Rally Ventures, and others.
• Why it’s next: Allen Control Systems has been recognized by the U.S. military forces, securing federal contracts. For example, in July 2026, the company announced that the U.S. Marine Corps had selected the company’s autonomous weapon system, Bullfrog, to counter low-cost weaponized drones under the service’s Ground Based Air Defense (GBAD) program.
• Key risks: Scaling remains tied to lengthy government procurement cycles, federal defense budget shifts, and evolving regulatory oversight around AI-powered autonomous weapons.

Armada

• What they do: Armada provides a full-stack edge computing platform that integrates satellite connectivity, real-time AI, and modular hardware to enable complex compute workloads in remote regions.
• Industry: Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure
• Founded in 2022 in San Francisco, CA
• Latest funding round: $230M Series B in May 2026 at a $2.23B post-money valuation. Overmatch, Blackrock, and 8090 Industries co-led the round with participation from Johnson Controls, NightDragon, Mitsui, Singtel Innov8, Felicis, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and others.
• Why it’s next: Armada has strengthened its market position through partnerships with major technology companies including Microsoft, Starlink, OpenAI, NVIDIA, and others. In May 2026, Armada announced the company had recorded 540% growth in customer bookings from FY25-26, with Q1 FY27 marking a 2000% increase in bookings growth compared to Q1 the prior year.
• Key risks: The company’s business model carries high capital intensity and hardware supply chain exposure required to manufacture and deploy physical edge computing infrastructure in remote environments.

Corgi

• What they do: Corgi is an AI-native, full-stack business insurance carrier built specifically to design, underwrite, and issue tailored policies to high-growth startups.
• Industry: Fintech (Insurtech)
• Founded in 2024 in San Francisco, CA
• Latest funding round: $106M Series B1 in May 2026 round at a $2.6B valuation. This round was led by TCV with participation from Prime Capital, Zone 2 Ventures, Oliver Jung, Leblon Capital, Kindred Ventures, Quadri Ventures, and others.
• Why it’s next: In May 2026, Corgi raised $160M in Series B funding at a $1.3B valuation, and just three weeks later, raised again at a $2.6B valuation. The company’s press release on the round claims, “revenue has grown at a pace rarely seen in fintech or insurance.” As of January 2026, the company was reported to have surpassed $40M in annual recurring revenue since full regulatory approval in July 2025.
• Key risks: Underwriting loss exposure during tech downturns and ongoing insurance regulatory capital requirements may present significant margin risks for the company.

Cowboy Space Corp.

• What they do: Cowboy Space Corp. is an aerospace infrastructure company aiming to build a network of solar-powered orbital data centers. The company is vertically integrating launch and compute by converting the upper stages of its launch vehicles into space-based AI data centers to bypass terrestrial power grid bottlenecks.
• Industry: Aerospace, Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure
• Founded in 2024 in San Carlos, CA
• Latest funding round: $275M Series B in May 2026 at a $2B valuation. The round was led by Index Ventures with participation from IVP, Blossom Capital, SAIC, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Construct Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Interlagos, and Baiju Bhatt.
• Why it’s next: Founded by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, the Cowboy Space team brings experience from SpaceX, Blue Origin, Astranis, NASA, and NVIDIA. In May 2026, the company announced it is collaborating with NVIDIA to deploy NVIDIA Space-1 Vera Rubin Modules, aiming to bring AI infrastructure to the Low Earth Orbit environment.
• Key risks: Substantial capital requirements, third-party launch schedule dependencies, and complex hardware thermal management in space pose key execution risks.

Decart

• What they do: Decart is a frontier AI research lab building real-time generative models and software optimization tools to enable low-latency AI inference and training. Its Decart Optimization Stack (DOS) aims to cut compute costs and allow developers to port AI workloads across hardware architectures like Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs, and AWS Trainium.
• Industry: Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure
• Founded in 2023 in Wilmington, DE
• Latest funding round: $300M Series B in May 2026 at a reported near $4B valuation. The round was led by Radical Ventures and Jordan Jacobs, with participation from Atreides Management, Nvidia, Valor Equity Partners, Toyota Ventures, Adobe Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, eBay Ventures, and others.
• Why it’s next: Decart claims the company is “generating significant revenue through contracts with cloud providers, AI labs, and the industry’s largest hyperscalers.” The company has also formed significant partnerships, including a commercial agreement and joint go-to-market initiative with Amazon Web Services.
• Key risks: High compute infrastructure costs and aggressive competition from entrenched hyperscalers and frontier AI labs present ongoing margin pressure.

Eon

• What they do: Eon is a cloud data platform that builds automated backup and data management infrastructure for enterprise cloud environments. Its technology aims to allow organizations to securely restore, manage, and convert cloud backup data into active workloads and analytics pipelines.
• Industry: Data & Cloud Infrastructure
• Founded in 2024 in New York, NY
• Latest funding round: $300M Series D in December 2025 at a valuation of $4B. The round was led by Elad Gil with participation from Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks, and BOND.
• Why it’s next: Eon recognizes its founding members as the team that built and led the AWS Disaster Recovery and Migration services. The company also claims to have strategic partnerships with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. In December 2025, the company reported it had more than tripled its revenue over the previous year.
• Key risks: Enterprise growth faces headwind risks from long enterprise sales cycles, complex multi-cloud data privacy compliance, and incumbent backup leaders like Rubrik and Cohesity.

Exa

• What they do: Exa is an AI search engine and data retrieval infrastructure provider built specifically for AI models and autonomous agents. Its search API aims to enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to query, extract, and parse web data with high accuracy and minimal token overhead.
• Industry: Business/Productivity Software, Artificial Intelligence
• Founded in 2021 in San Francisco, CA
• Latest funding round: $250M Series C in May 2026 at a $2.2B valuation. The round was led by a16z.
• Why it’s next: In April 2026, Exa announced a partnership with Google releasing Grounding with Exa Web Search in Private Preview on Google and its Exa Agent as a launch partner on Gemini Enterprises’ new Agent Marketplace. The company claims to power searches for over 400,000 developers and companies like Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter, and Monday.com.
• Key risks: High infrastructure expenses for continuous web crawling and direct platform risk from Big Tech search providers may create significant long-term margin pressure.

FieldAI

• What they do: Field AI builds foundation models and software aimed at enabling autonomous capabilities for physical robots to independently navigate, map, and execute complex operations in industrial environments.
• Industry: Robotics
• Founded in 2023 in Mission Viejo, CA
• Latest funding round: $405M in August 2025 across two consecutive rounds. Investors in the rounds include Bezos Expeditions, BHP Ventures, Canaan Partners, Emerson Collective, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, NVentures, Prysm, Temasek, and others.
• Why it’s next: FieldAI’s team has experience from DeepMind, NASA, JPL, Tesla, NVIDIA, and Amazon. The company has announced collaborations with companies like NVIDIA and Boston Dynamics.
• Key risks: Commercial expansion remains vulnerable to third-party hardware supply chain bottlenecks, site-specific safety certifications, and extended pilot testing cycles in industrial environments.

Generalist

• What they do: Generalist AI develops embodied foundation models designed to power general-purpose robots across real-world environments like factories, warehouses, and homes.
• Industry: Robotics
• Founded in 2024 in San Mateo, CA
• Latest funding round: $400M Series B in June 2026 at a $2B valuation. The round was led by Radical Ventures with participation from 8VC, Union Square Ventures, Norwest, Hanabi Capital, Nvidia, and Bezos Expeditions.
• Why it’s next: Generalist recently released its GEN-1 model, pre-trained on human activity data to achieve policy transfer across diverse robot form factors, which the company claims enables a 99% task success rate and a 3x speed increase.
• Key risks: Ensuring reliable model generalization across unstructured physical environments while navigating strict industrial safety standards may pose deployment challenges.

Impulse Space

• What they do: Impulse Space develops maneuverable spacecraft and orbital transfer vehicles to deliver, reposition, and service satellite payloads across precise orbits beyond low Earth orbit.
• Industry: Aerospace
• Founded in 2021 in Redondo Beach, CA.
• Latest funding round: $500M Series D in June 2026 at a $4.26B valuation. The round was co-led by 137 Ventures and BANNER VC.
• Why it’s next: Impulse Space has announced significant contracts and partnerships with companies such as Anduril and Astranis. In July 2026, Impulse Space announced the company had been awarded a Firm Fixed-Price, Indefinite-Delivery Indefinite-Quantity NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 contract by the United States Space Force’s Space Systems Command.
• Key risks: Commercial execution remains exposed to substantial capital intensity, third-party rocket launch vehicle delays, and complex mission risk.

MatX

• What they do: MatX is a semiconductor startup that designs custom silicon and system architectures engineered specifically to accelerate the training and inference of LLMs.
• Industry: Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure
• Founded in 2023 in Mountain View, CA
• Latest funding round: $500M Series B in February 2026 led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness LP with participation from Spark Capital, Triatomic Capital, Harpoon Ventures, Andrej Karpathy, Dwarkesh Patel, and others. PitchBook reports the company was valued at $4.37B at the time of the Series B funding round.
• Why it’s next: Founded by former Google TPU Chief Architect Mike Gunter and Google PaLM Efficiency Lead Reiner Pope, MatX brings significant silicon engineering experience to the AI hardware market. The company plans to accelerate chip design and transition into manufacturing with TSMC to begin shipping in 2027.
• Key risks: Custom silicon development entails immense capital requirements and long manufacturing lead times, alongside intense market pressure from entrenched giants like NVIDIA and hyperscaler custom ASICs.

Modal Labs

• What they do: Modal Labs provides a serverless cloud compute and container platform built specifically to let AI developers run inference, batch jobs, and agent runtimes natively in Python.
• Industry: Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure
• Founded in 2021 in New York, NY.
• Latest Funding Round: $355M Series C in May 2026 at a $4.65 billion post-money valuation. The raise was led by General Catalyst and Redpoint, with participation from Menlo Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Accel.
• Why it’s next: In June 2026, Modal Labs’ CEO announced the company had surpassed $300M in annualized revenue, following reports from February that claimed the company had annualized recurring revenue (ARR) of approximately $50 million. The company works with integration partners like AWS, Google Cloud, and NVIDIA, as well as AI model partners like Mistral AI and Perceptron.
• Key risks: Sustained profitability relies on maintaining cost-efficiency against always-on GPU hardware while competing against native serverless offerings from major cloud providers.

Nexthop AI

• What they do: Nexthop AI designs and builds custom networking hardware, open-source software, and optical solutions optimized specifically for massive AI training and inference workloads in hyperscale data centers.
• Industry: Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure
• Founded in 2024 in Santa Clara, CA
• Latest funding round: $500M Series B in March 2026 at a $4.2B valuation. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, and others.
• Why it’s next: Founded by former Arista Networks COO Anshul Sadana, Nexthop AI is a contributor to the open networking ecosystem, specifically serving as a SONiC Governing Board member of the Linux Foundation. The company was also named to TechCrunch’s 2025 Disruptors60 List.
• Key risks: High upfront capital expenditure for custom hardware fabrication, competition from industry titans, and technology evaluation from hyperscale cloud operators present ongoing operational risks.

Parallel

• What they do: Parallel develops a suite of advanced APIs that allow AI models to query the open web, extract structured real-time data, and execute complex research workflows as if the internet were a structured database.
• Industry: Business/Productivity Software, Artificial Intelligence
• Founded in 2023 in San Francisco, CA
• Latest Funding Round: $100M Series B at a $2B valuation in April 2026. The round was led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Spark Capital, and Terrain Capital.
• Why it’s next: Parallel, founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, reportedly powers enterprise tools like Harvey and Notion, while having established a major strategic integration with Google Cloud to natively embed its agentic retrieval engine into the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
• Key risks: Operational risk centers on potential web-scraping restrictions and anti-bot protocols, alongside fierce competition from frontier AI labs and cloud providers building native real-time retrieval infrastructure.

Rogo

• What they do: Rogo is an AI-native platform purpose-built for the financial services industry to automate workflows like financial modeling, investment memos, and slide deck generation.
• Industry: Fintech
• Founded in 2021 in New York, NY
• Latest Funding Round: $160M Series D at a $2B valuation in April 2026. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Sequoia, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, BoxGroup, Mantis VC, Jack Altman, Evantic, and Positive Sum.
• Why it’s next: Rogo has seen commercial momentum, with the platform now actively deployed across more than 300 premier financial institutions, including Lazard, Jefferies, and Nomura, and serving over 35,000 finance professionals.
• Key risks: Strict regulatory oversight in financial markets and the accuracy required for investment workflows pose ongoing adoption and operational risks.

Our 2026 cohort of the next companies underscores a clear shift in private market capital toward hard tech, defense systems, and foundational AI infrastructure. For investors, these breakout companies may offer compelling exposure to critical technologies earlier in their lifecycle. However, converting early momentum into long-term enterprise value will depend on navigating heavy capital requirements, complex regulatory environments, and direct competition from entrenched incumbents.

Interested in learning more about the innovative companies active in the private secondary market? Visit our Explore page to see what’s trending now.