Data analytics firm Quantexa has entered the unicorn club, reaching a valuation of $1.8bn (£1.5bn) after securing $129m (£103.9m) in Series E funding. Quantexa's funding round was led by GIC, with additional capital coming from Warburg Pincus, Dawn Capital, British Patient Capital, Evolution Equity Partners, HSBC, BNY Mellon, ABN AMRO, and AlbionVC. Several of its backers, including HSBC and BNY Mellon, are also customers of Quantexa. The London headquartered company has developed AI tools to detect and spot fraud and money laundering, along with enterprise intelligence software to assist with business decision-making. The company was previously valued between $800m and $900m in a $153m Series D round in 2021.

In brief Stability AI and Jasper – two startups that make AI software that auto-generates images, text, and other stuff – have each reached so-called unicorn status (valued at over $1 billion) after bagging $101 million and $125 million in funding, respectively. Stability AI, best known for open sourcing the code for its popular text-to-image Stable Diffusion model, threw a glitzy party in San Francisco this week to coincide with announcing its funding. Emad Mostaque, the company's founder, took to the stage announcing plans to build and release more AI tools capable of handling text, audio, and video. Stability's latest funding round was led by Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and O'Shaughnessy Ventures LLC. A day later Jasper, a startup that uses OpenAI's GPT-3 to output text and images, also announced a successful Series A round.

Before you can even think about building an algorithm to read an X-ray or interpret a blood smear, the machine has to know what's what in an image. All of the promise of AI in healthcare -- an area that has attracted $11.3 billion in private investment in 2021, can't be realized without carefully labeled data sets that tell machines what exactly they're looking for. Creating those labeled data sets is becoming an industry itself, boasting companies well north of unicorn status. Today, Encord, a small startup just out of Y Combinator, is looking to take a piece of the action. Aiming to generate labeled data sets for computer vision projects, Encord launched its own beta version of an AI-assisted labeling program called CordVision.

European start-ups are being created and growing at an unprecedented pace these days, attracting the attention of global investors, customers, and corporate partners alike. In the process, they are proving the conventional wisdom wrong: launching a start-up amid the continent's fragmented value pool doesn't necessarily have to be such a challenging proposition. Despite the range of systemic challenges start-ups still face, including regulatory and cultural challenges, growing numbers of dynamic new ventures are thriving. These bold players offer valuable lessons for others aspiring to similar heights--and to a European continent striving to stay economically and technologically competitive with the rest of the world. To better understand how these standouts succeed, we studied the top 1,000 European tech start-ups founded after 2000 in 33 countries, which include 21st-century companies such as Spotify, Adyen, and BioNTech.

Snowflake Computing, which helps companies move their data onto the cloud, leaped to first place from #20 last year and is currently hiring for positions in engineering and sales. Dosist is the first cannabis-centric company to ever make the Top Startups U.S. list. The company is rapidly growing due to the legalization of recreational marijuana (in 11 U.S. states so far) combined with its high-gloss marketing appeal. Samsara combines the power of hardware (think sensors and cameras) with analytical software to boost efficiency in industries like trucking and food production, and it has 180 open roles across everything from engineering to sales to marketing. DoorDash has doubled its employee base every year in its six-year history, and with its recent acquisition of competitor Caviar, the startup is revving up its growth. Brex, another newcomer to the list, is attempting to reinvent B2B financial services, starting with a first-of-its-kind corporate card for startups based on funding rather than credit history. Good American, a fitness fashion line founded by Khloe Kardashian, marks a shift in the retail landscape with its success as a body-positive company offering an inclusive range of sizes. Robinhood, the only company from 2018 to remain in the top ten, continues to grow by recruiting people who share its vision of democratizing the financial system. Peloton Interactive, another newcomer to the list, is shaking up the fitness industry with its live and recorded classes connected to at-home equipment. Compass has become the country's largest independent real estate brokerage, and it's planning to hire hundreds across its product and engineering teams over the next year to help build its end-to-end platform. Nuro, a robotics company in the race to get self-driving right with its small delivery pods, is expanding across all areas of its business with open roles in marketing, communications, engineering, and human resources. Glossier, the online beauty retailer is known for its millennial pink packaging, generated $100 million in sales last year and is now valued at $1.2 billion. When hiring for one of its 43 open positions, Glossier stresses the importance of transferable skills over beauty industry expertise.

Darktrace has become a rarity in the British tech scene: a Unicorn. The cybersecurity company, which provides what it calls a network "immune system" powered by artificial intelligence, hit a $1.25 billion valuation last month, two sources close to the deal told Forbes. The new valuation came after a secondary round of financing in which former investors sold off their stakes. Vitruvian Partners, sources said, is the acquirer of the stock. How did Darktrace find itself at the vaunted Unicorn status?