Forget the Unicorns, these 14 “Rocketships” are even more awesome

On average, it takes more than six years from founding to unicorn status. 14 European high-flyers have far undercut this: the "Rocketship Unicorns" reached the billion mark in less than two years.

In numerous interviews with founders whose companies have broken through the magical one-billion dollar valuation, we repeatedly hear so much humbleness: This "unicorn status" is not really worth anything to them, but rather it's about healthy and successful companies, growth, and economic success.

True or not – once a startup is officially a “ unicorn ,” it belongs to a class that is not clearly defined anywhere but is established in everyone’s minds.

Early-stage investor and accelerator Antler has now created a new category for itself: the Rocketship Unicorn. They've also all reached the one billion mark—but at incredible speed.

Lovable , ElevenLabs, and Helsing are obvious examples. Founded after 2020 and already worth billions. They all achieved unicorn status in just two years – almost five times faster than European founders previously achieved. According to Antler, it took an average of 7.2 years in Europe. US founders have always been faster at becoming unicorns – in 1.6 years, in fact.

Neither surprising nor a secret: Rocketships are achieving this lightning-fast growth thanks to artificial intelligence . AI is enabling a completely new pace. Antler notes in its report that founders say 40 percent of the code in these Rocketship companies is now generated by AI, and 85 percent of the companies have already used AI in their first product.

And 90 percent of these founders are developers or engineers themselves. By comparison, before 2020, only 26 percent of unicorn founders were tech founders, on average. The majority were business graduates. For the first time, Europe is even more tech-savvy than the US (with 80 percent of technical AI founders).

According to the Antler study, the following companies are among the rockets that were founded after 2020 and have already reached billion-dollar valuations:

• Lovable , Sweden: AI-supported software development (No-Code/Agentic AI)
• ElevenLabs , UK: AI language technology/text-to-speech
• Helsing , Germany: AI-based defense technology
• Fuse Energy , UK: Energy & CleanTech
• Mistral AI, France: Generative AI and Foundation Models
• Peec AI , Germany: AI-powered marketing and search analytics
• Stability AI , UK: Generative AI, image generation (Stable Diffusion)
• DeepL , Germany: AI-based translation services/language technology
• Tractable , UK: AI for Insurance & Claims Analysis (Computer Vision)
• Greenly , France: Climate and CO2 management/Carbon Accounting SaaS
• Pigment , France: SaaS software for business planning & analytics
• Vay , Germany: Teledriven mobility, AI vehicle control
• Quantexa , UK: AI for Data Analysis & Decision Intelligence
• Exodigo , Israel/UK: AI for subsurface mapping, construction & infrastructure

Despite all the successes, one problem remains, as the Antler Report shows: None of these Rocketship founders are female. In the last five years, there hasn't been a single female founder among Europe's AI unicorns—a worrying record for diversity and equal opportunity in the tech sector. The new rocket wave is therefore primarily a male affair.