DeepFlowTech

Author: Elad Gil (Data Analysis: Shreyan Jain)
Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Deep Tide Briefing: Elad Gil’s team has tracked the global unicorn market-cap distribution for six consecutive years. The 2025 data points to a clear conclusion: the San Francisco Bay Area is becoming a supercluster for generative AI, with 91% of the market value of the world’s AI unicorns concentrated within a one-hour drive. At the same time, the rate at which new unicorns are formed has slowed, but the average valuation of existing unicorns has reached a six-year high. Using hard data, this report shows that the global startup ecosystem’s shifting power center is accelerating toward the United States—and toward the Bay Area.
All data is as of December 31 of the corresponding year. In the following text, “2025” refers to market value at the time of December 31, 2025 / January 1, 2026.
Past two years

Cardano's core vendor Input Output submitted nine funding proposals to the community, totaling $46.8 million, down approximately 52% from $97.5 million last year, to reduce reliance on community funds. The focus is on the Leios consensus upgrade (throughput increased by 10-65 times, targeting 1000 TPS, testing in June, and launching by the end of the year) and the Pogun Bitcoin DeFi lending system (public in Q2). Voting is conducted by about 1,000 elected representatives, with the deadline on May 24. Additionally, the USDCx stablecoin reached a circulation of 14.6 million tokens weeks after launch, with total locked assets rising to $142.7 million.

This article analyzes AngelList's USVC, which requires a minimum investment of $500 from retail investors and allows purchasing shares of companies like OpenAI that can be transferred on the secondary market. The fund is not publicly listed, has no secondary market, a quarterly buyback limit of 5%, and an annual fee of approximately 3.61%, serving as a channel for later investors to take over early insiders' exits. The author points out that this is similar to the high market value, low liquidity crypto model, where insiders profit while retail investors bear high costs and liquidity risks; assessing opportunities depends on whether the initial funds are increasing or decreasing, and if the other party is reducing their holdings, caution is advised when participating.