Earlier this month I stumbled upon a TechCrunch article on the 86 new unicorns minted in H1 2026. Zero of them were from Latam. I’ve been thinking about what that means.
Here’s a quick overview of the article:
86 unicorns minted in H1 2026
~14 per month average pace
Overwhelmingly US-based
Zero Latam unicorns identified
Dominated by AI across virtually every subcategory
The breakdown by industry:
AI Foundation Models & Research Labs: 11 companies
AI Infrastructure / Chips / Hardware: 8 companies
AI Applications / Tools: 10 companies
Healthcare / Biotech / MedTech: 10 companies
Defense / Aerospace / Space: 9 companies
Robotics / Automation: 5 companies
Fintech / Crypto / Banking: 7 companies
Cybersecurity: 3 companies
Enterprise / Cloud / Infrastructure: 5 companies
Consumer / Other: 7 companies
From a Latam perspective, three takeaways worth unpacking.
There has been one Latam unicorn minted in 2026: Enter. The Brazilian legaltech startup raised $100M, reaching a $1.2B valuation. Enter allows legal teams to manage their full litigation portfolio supported by AI agents. The round was led by Founders Fund and included Ribbit, Sequoia, Atlantico and Kaszek. I shared a detailed point of view in May’s Monthly Download.
Enter didn’t make it into the TechCrunch list. It’s a miss by TechCrunch, but I understand why. Producing one unicorn in six months is a rounding error at their scale of coverage. That’s the harder truth to sit with.
To put a bit of perspective on the numbers this article presents, the unicorns produced globally in these 6 months represent roughly 2x the unicorns Latam has produced since the term was coined.
It’s uncomfortable to accept, but we need more wins that hit the US and global scene. That was the case a few years ago. The last couple of years feel like we took a step back.
Latam has minimal output in the industries generating the most unicorns globally. AI Foundation Models, AI Infrastructure, Defense, and Robotics represent roughly 38% of the list. These are not areas where Latam has meaningful presence.
AI Applications, Healthcare and Cybersecurity feel like emerging categories in Latam. I’ve argued before that AI Applications is where Latam can produce interesting companies, especially when we go vertical. Enter is a case-in-point. Healthcare seems to be having a moment recently, with a handful of companies emerging, backed by US investors. Cybersecurity efforts have been around for some time but are still limited.
Fintech, Enterprise and Consumer are the areas where Latam has been producing winners for some time. Especially Fintech, as I’ve highlighted in recent Monthly Downloads. These represent only 22% of the list.
The fact of the matter is, Latam has no real presence, or is just beginning to develop it, in roughly 80% of the industries attracting the most dollars globally.
Most of the companies in the list are AI native or AI adjacent. No surprises there.
But taking this a step further, the U.S. is operating at a valuation regime we can’t match. Prometheus at $41B without a public product. Hark at $6B pre-launch. This is peak animal spirits. Contrast that with Latam companies that need real revenue to reach a fraction of these valuations.
One additional note worth flagging: Founders Fund, a16z and Khosla concentration is remarkable. These three names appear in dozens of the deals as investors.
The path forward for Latam isn’t chasing the same categories where the U.S. is producing unicorns. It’s finding the verticals that are attractive for US and global investors where we can produce winners that reach US-scale valuations, and doing it consistently enough that we stop being a rounding error.
Enter is proof it’s possible. We need more.
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