AI is minting billion-dollar companies faster than before

Europe’s new unicorns are arriving faster in the AI era, with 20% hitting $1 billion within two years since 2023.

Welcome to Eye on AI. AI reporter Beatrice Nolan here. In today’s issue:

• AI is reshaping who builds, and how fast.
• The U.S. government allows the limited release of Anthropic’s Mythos model.
• AI isn’t killing jobs—yet. 
• And California cuts a deal with Anthropic—despite tensions in D.C.

The big news from the weekend is that Anthropic’s Mythos AI model is back—but only for a few.

On Friday, the Trump administration lifted its two-week block on Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model, clearing it for release to more than 100 U.S. institutions, including major companies and government agencies. Fable 5, the public-facing version of the same model family, remains blocked, with talks over its reinstatement ongoing.

Also on Friday, OpenAI got the Anthropic treatment (well, sort of, anyway) over its newest model. The Trump administration asked OpenAI to limit the release of its GPT-5.6 lineup—comprising three models, Sol, Terra, and Luna—to a small group of government-approved partners, citing the models’ advanced cybersecurity capabilities. OpenAI complied while making clear it does not believe “this kind of government access process should become the long-term default.”

We have the full rundown of the news from this week below, but first: AI is fundamentally reshaping who builds billion-dollar companies, and how fast.

AI is accelerating how quickly companies reach unicorn status

The scale of the AI funding boom has been producing numbers that would have seemed fictional five years ago.

Last month, Anthropic, founded in 2021, became the most valuable private company in history after it raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation in May, overtaking OpenAI, which had itself closed a $122 billion round at $852 billion just weeks earlier.

New analysis from venture capital firm Accel, produced in partnership with Dealroom and Revelio Labs and shared with Fortune exclusively, shows that Europe is seeing the same unprecedented speed play out at the startup level.

Of the 86 new unicorns minted in Europe and Israel from 2023 onwards, 20% reached a $1 billion valuation (the threshold for unicorn status) within two years of founding, up from just 5% before the generative AI era. Nearly a third got there in three years or less, against 12% previously. The total number of these ultrafast unicorns has also quadrupled since 2023.

Part of what is driving that speed, according to Matt Robinson, a partner at Accel and cofounder of GoCardless, is that AI is a general-purpose technology—one that can be dropped into almost any sector and immediately create value.

Because the value is clearer, sales cycle times collapse, deal sizes grow, and the time between funding rounds shrinks, he said. In AI, the first company to meaningfully address a given market—whether legal, coding, customer support, or dozens of other verticals—tends to lock in that position, becoming the dominant player others then have to compete against. The window to do that is short, and it is open everywhere at once, which is why the pressure on founders to move fast is so intense, he added.

Another reason companies are moving so much faster in the AI age: They are using their own tech. AI—well implemented— can also mean smaller teams and less overhead, allowing companies to scale faster.

Zhenya Loginov, also a partner at Accel, described the ideal founder in the AI age as a “tinkerer”—someone who is constantly testing new tools, aware of everything emerging, and making sure their whole team operates at the same level. Robinson said the best founding teams are also building on top of the tools—running multiple coding agents at once, automating sales outreach and marketing, and compressing internally what used to take months of engineering time into days.

According to Anton Osika, cofounder and CEO of Lovable, which reached $500 million in annual recurring revenue faster than any European tech company before it, said AI has made it possible for anyone to participate in the software economy in a way that was previously closed to them. That step change in who can build, he said, is what is driving the pace and scale of new companies.

A new kind of founder

There’s also been a shift in who is doing the building. The Accel data shows that founders of Europe’s post-2023 unicorns are twice as likely to have come from Big Tech as their predecessors—23% versus 11%—and twice as likely to hold a doctorate, at 18% versus 9%. Academic founders have also doubled, from 12% to 23%. Microsoft and Alphabet have also overtaken BCG and McKinsey as the most common pipeline for founders.

Loginov said that change reflects the maturation of the European ecosystem and the arrival of large tech campuses in London, Paris, and Zurich, giving a generation of engineers experience on the global technology stage before they go off to build.

The rise of PhD founders is also AI-driven—not because AI companies necessarily require a founder with a doctorate, but because AI has accelerated breakthroughs in robotics, cybersecurity, and autonomous software. Founders working on those frontiers tend to come from labs and universities, and the markets they are opening can be very large, the report said.

Osika said he’s noticed that Big Tech talent is also actively moving to Europe to join companies, including his own. “It’s clear that a lot of top talent is moving here,” he told Fortune, adding that the inflow was proof that category-defining companies could be built on this side of the Atlantic—not just in the U.S., where most of them have historically come from.

With that, here’s more AI news. 

Beatrice Nolan
beatrice.nolan@fortune.com
@beafreyanolan

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com