The fastest startups to a $10B valuation
Thirty-eight VC-backed companies founded since 2020 have been valued at $10B or more.
Before 2023, three companies had ever reached a $10B valuation within three years of being founded: PDD Holdings in China, Deel in the United States and the biotech Altos Labs. Eight companies founded in 2023 managed it. Four more founded in 2024 and 2025 have already done it without having had a full three years to try, and every one of those twelve is building AI or the infrastructure to run it.
Revenue is the harder number to reach, and it is compressing too. Mercor got to $2B of revenue in under four years, the quickest of any company founded since 2020, and Cursor took about a year longer. Those are revenues Dealroom has checked by hand rather than prices somebody set in a funding round.
Six of the 38 were already worth more than $1B at the first funding round on record, and two of those opened above the decacorn line itself: Prometheus at $30B and Thinking Machines Lab at $12B. They were priced on their founders’ records rather than on anything they had shipped.
Years from founding to a $10B valuation
Founded 2020 or later.
Source: Dealroom.co
Drawn as paths, the fastest of them look like this. Each line starts on the day the company was founded and stops when its valuation first reached $10B, so the steeper the line, the less time it took.
The climb to $10B
The 13 companies that got there within three years of being founded.
Source: Dealroom.co · Magnificent 7 market caps from public market data
That chart covers companies founded from 2020. Widening it to every founding year shows how recent this is: across the whole of 2010 to 2019, two companies anywhere reached $10B within three years of being founded.
Companies reaching $10B within three years of founding
Every VC-backed company that has reached $10B, any founding year, not just the 38 above. The 2024 and 2025 cohorts have not had three years yet.
Source: Dealroom.co
A valuation is a price somebody paid. Revenue is what the business took in, and Dealroom verifies it by hand for the companies it labels thoroughbreds — those confirmed past $1B of revenue. Among them, this is how long the climb to $2B took.
The climb to $2B of revenue
The twelve fastest verified thoroughbreds founded 2010 or later.
Source: Dealroom.co
What this means
The fastest-to-$10B ranking rewards two different things and does not separate them. Four of the ten fastest companies founded since 2020 have no recorded valuation below $1B at all: they were priced into the decacorn range early, on their founders’ records. Read as a ranking of company-building, the list puts them above Mercor, Lovable and Cursor, which climbed there.
The valuations also arrive well ahead of the businesses. Of the eight companies founded in 2023 that reached $10B inside three years, one has revenue past $2B, and that is Mercor. Mistral is next at $1.2B, then xAI at $1B and Cognition at $0.9B; Skild has no verified revenue on record at all. At those figures a $10B valuation is a forecast rather than a multiple of anything.
Widen it beyond the AI era and the quickest to $2B of revenue is PDD Holdings, the Chinese group behind Pinduoduo and Temu, followed by Mercor.