Atlanta has six active unicorn companies as of May 2026, with a combined private-market valuation of approximately $21.2 billion. The list is led by Flock Safety, which reached an $8.4 billion valuation in April 2026, and includes OneTrust, Calendly, Greenlight, Stord, and the newly minted Hermeus — which crossed $1 billion in April 2026 on a $350 million Series C. Atlanta’s metro area also produced two of the largest tech exits of the past decade — Mailchimp’s $12 billion sale to Intuit and SalesLoft’s $2.3 billion private-equity acquisition by Vista — making the broader “$1B+ club” considerably larger than the active unicorn count suggests.
This is the first definitive 2026 ledger of Atlanta’s billion-dollar companies, with founders, founding years, sectors, valuations, total funding raised, and current operational status verified against company announcements, SEC filings, and the funding data published in Q1 and Q2 2026.
The Complete List: Atlanta’s Active Unicorns (May 2026)
| Company | Founded | Founders | Sector | Valuation | Total Funding | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flock Safety | 2017 | Garrett Langley, Matt Feury, Paige Todd | Public-safety AI / surveillance | $8.4B | ~$1.0B | Active, Atlanta HQ |
| OneTrust | 2016 | Kabir Barday, Alan Dabbiere | Data privacy & governance | ~$5.3B (PE talks $10B+) | ~$1.1B | Active, Atlanta HQ |
| Calendly | 2013 | Tope Awotona | SaaS / scheduling | ~$3.0B | $350M+ | Active, Atlanta HQ |
| Greenlight | 2014 | Tim Sheehan, Johnson Cook | Family fintech | $2.3B | ~$556M | Active, Atlanta HQ |
| Stord | 2015 | Sean Henry, Jacob Boudreau | Cloud supply chain | $1.5B | $325M+ | Active, Atlanta HQ |
| Hermeus | 2018 | AJ Piplica, Skyler Shuford, Michael Smayda, Glenn Case | Hypersonic aerospace / defense | $1.0B | ~$500M | Active; HQ relocating to El Segundo, CA — Atlanta facility retained |
Two earlier billion-dollar Atlanta companies — Mailchimp (acquired by Intuit for $12B in 2021) and SalesLoft (acquired by Vista Equity Partners at a $2.3B valuation in 2021) — are no longer venture-backed unicorns but are essential context for any honest read of the market.
Flock Safety — $8.4B
Flock Safety is now Atlanta’s most valuable private company. Founded in 2017 by Georgia Tech alumni Garrett Langley, Matt Feury, and Paige Todd, the company builds AI-powered automated license-plate readers and the analytics layer law-enforcement agencies use to query them. As of April 2026, Flock has surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue, a 70% year-over-year increase.
The company’s $8.4 billion valuation, reported by Bloomberg and TechCrunch in April 2026, follows authorization of roughly $200 million in new shares at a per-share price 6% above its March 2025 Series F round, which was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Greenoaks at $7.5 billion. Flock has now raised close to $1 billion in total venture capital across five primary lead investors.
“Flock Safety’s mission is to eliminate crime. We are a society on the precipice of an opportunity to use technology to deter, detect, and solve crime to a degree that has never been possible before.”
— Garrett Langley, Co-founder and CEO, Flock Safety (Series D announcement)
Flock’s growth has not been frictionless. The company’s expanding municipal contracts have made it the focus of organized civil-liberties protests across multiple U.S. metros throughout 2026, and the policy debate around mass-scale ALPR networks will shape its next chapter. For a full operator’s-eye view of how Langley built the company, see our profile: Garrett Langley & Flock Safety: Inside Atlanta’s $8.4B Surveillance Empire.
OneTrust — ~$5.3B (with private-equity talks reportedly above $10B)
OneTrust, founded in 2016 by Kabir Barday and Alan Dabbiere, is the world’s most widely deployed privacy, security, and data-governance platform — the software almost every Fortune 500 company touches when GDPR, CCPA, or DPDP comes up. The company employs roughly 2,500 people as of April 2026 and has raised approximately $1.1 billion in total funding.
OneTrust’s last official valuation marker was a $4.5 billion down round in July 2023, following a $5.3 billion peak in 2020. The far more interesting data point is what’s happening in 2025–2026: multiple reports place OneTrust in active sale discussions with Vista Equity Partners, Thoma Bravo, Blackstone, KKR, and Silver Lake at deal sizes “north of $10 billion.” If a transaction closes in that range, it would be Atlanta’s largest enterprise-software exit since Mailchimp.
“Trust is the new currency of business. Companies that fail to operationalize trust will lose customers, partners, and regulatory standing.”
— Kabir Barday, Founder and CEO, OneTrust
OneTrust is the quietest of Atlanta’s giants — there are no consumer brand campaigns, no protests, and its founders rarely speak publicly. That is precisely the profile of a company built for an enterprise category that values discretion. It is also the Atlanta unicorn most likely to change status in the next 12 months.
Calendly — ~$3B
Calendly was founded in 2013 by Tope Awotona, a Nigerian-born former Dell EMC sales rep who maxed out four credit cards and drained his savings to build a meeting-scheduling tool out of Atlanta Tech Village. By January 2021, that tool was a $3 billion company after OpenView Venture Partners and Iconiq led a $350 million round. Calendly now serves more than 20 million users across 230 countries.
Calendly hit an estimated $270 million in ARR at the end of 2023, growing roughly 46% year-over-year, and has continued expanding its enterprise motion through 2026 — the playbook Awotona has publicly described as “hybrid PLG,” where product-led growth funnels into structured enterprise contracts. The company has not raised since 2021, which is itself a signal: Calendly is capital-efficient and generating cash.
Awotona’s personal trajectory is the headline-friendly version of the Atlanta startup origin story. Forbes most recently estimated his net worth at approximately $1.4 billion, and he remains one of only a handful of Black founders ever to build a SaaS company past the $1 billion mark. Calendly is also, alongside Mailchimp, the strongest evidence that Atlanta can produce a category-defining consumer-grade SaaS brand.
Greenlight — $2.3B
Greenlight, founded in 2014 by Tim Sheehan and Johnson Cook, is the Atlanta unicorn most people meet through their own children. The company’s debit card and app for kids and teens — paired with parent-controlled spending rules, chore systems, and a built-in investing product for minors — has made it the default family-finance app in the United States.
Greenlight reached a $2.3 billion valuation in April 2021 on a $260 million Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from TTV Capital, Drive Capital, and others. Total funding to date is approximately $556 million. As of February 2026, the company employs 659 people and has continued to add products across the family-finance category, including credit-building tools for older teens.
Greenlight has not announced a new equity round since 2021, which makes its 2026 valuation a question that PitchBook and Tracxn treat as static at $2.3B. With consumer fintech multiples compressed across the board since 2022, a fresh primary round in 2026 would re-rate the company in either direction. The IPO question is open.
Stord — $1.5B
Stord, founded in 2015 by Sean Henry (then 18 and a freshman at Georgia Tech) and Jacob Boudreau, is Atlanta’s cloud-supply-chain unicorn — a platform that combines warehousing, fulfillment, freight, and last-mile delivery for direct-to-consumer brands competing against Amazon’s logistics scale. Henry took the Thiel Fellowship to drop out of Georgia Tech and build the company full-time.
Stord raised $200 million in a 2024 round at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Kleiner Perkins and Founders Fund. The company has continued an aggressive M&A strategy through 2026 — its January acquisition of CEVA Logistics subsidiary Shipwire is one of multiple integrations Henry has signaled in public CNBC and trade-press interviews. Stord now serves more than 1,500 employees and roughly 20,000 customer brands.
What’s notable about Stord is that it’s the rare Atlanta unicorn building infrastructure in the physical economy. While Flock builds AI on top of cameras, Stord builds software on top of pallets, trucks, and dock doors. That kind of category — capital-intensive, operationally heavy, geographically distributed — is exactly the kind of business Atlanta’s logistics-heavy economy is positioned to produce.
Hermeus — $1.0B (new in April 2026)
Hermeus is Atlanta’s newest unicorn and the most kinetic story on this list. Founded in 2018 by AJ Piplica, Skyler Shuford, Michael Smayda, and Glenn Case, the company is building unmanned hypersonic military aircraft. In March 2026 it successfully tested its Quarterhorse Mk 2.1 aircraft at the White Sands Missile Range. In April 2026 it closed a $350 million Series C ($200M equity, $150M debt) led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Canaan, Founders Fund, RTX Ventures, In-Q-Tel, the Georgia Tech Foundation, and Cox Enterprises — crossing the $1 billion valuation threshold.
In the same announcement, Hermeus disclosed that it is relocating its corporate headquarters from Atlanta to El Segundo, California — the defense-tech corridor anchored by SpaceX and Anduril. The company says it will retain a production and engineering facility in metro Atlanta. We include Hermeus on this list because it was founded in Atlanta, hit unicorn status while still headquartered in Atlanta, and continues to operate substantial Atlanta operations — but the headline number deserves the asterisk.
“We will continue to operate in Atlanta. Production and engineering are not going away. What we’re doing is following the talent base for what comes next.”
— AJ Piplica, Co-founder and CEO, Hermeus
Hermeus is the proof point that Atlanta can incubate hard-tech and defense-tech companies, not just SaaS and fintech. It is also a warning shot: when the founder base for a category lives elsewhere, the headquarters often follows.
What Atlanta’s Unicorn Cluster Says About the Ecosystem
Three structural facts jump out of this data.
First, sector diversity. Atlanta’s six unicorns span public-safety AI, privacy software, scheduling SaaS, family fintech, supply-chain logistics, and hypersonic aerospace. There is no single dominant vertical the way fintech defines New York or AI infrastructure defines San Francisco. That breadth is partly the legacy of Atlanta’s Fortune-500 base — Coca-Cola, Delta, UPS, Home Depot, Cox, NCR — which has produced operators and customers across nearly every B2B category.
Second, capital is showing up. Atlanta startups raised $756.5 million in 2025, a 23% year-over-year increase despite a national venture-funding pullback. Series A activity alone totaled $72.4 million in 2025, with average deal sizes of $9–12M. Series B+ totaled $119.7 million, concentrated in fewer breakout companies — a pattern consistent with how unicorns get built. For a full ledger of every round closed this year, see our Atlanta Startup Funding Tracker: Every Series A, B, C in 2026.
Third, the Atlanta Tech Village effect is real. David Cummings — founder of Pardot, SalesLoft, and Terminus, with a combined approximate $1 billion in exits — opened the 103,000-square-foot Buckhead hub in 2013. Atlanta Tech Village now reports that ATV-affiliated startups have raised more than $3.2 billion and created 10,000+ jobs over its first decade. Calendly was an early tenant. Two of our six unicorns directly trace their formative early years to that building.
“Atlanta’s unicorn density isn’t an accident — it’s the compounding return on a decade of building dense, repeatable infrastructure for founders. When you have a Fortune 500 customer base, a 103,000-square-foot startup hub, and a generation of operators who’ve already built and exited, the next unicorn is a question of when, not if.”
— Eshan Ravuri, CEO, Angry Digital Inc. (publisher of ATL Rank)
Atlanta vs. Peer Markets
How does Atlanta’s six-unicorn count stack up against the cities it competes with for talent and capital? The honest answer: better than the narrative suggests, but with a clear ceiling.
| Market | Active Unicorns (2026) | Headline Companies |
|---|---|---|
| Austin | ~30 | ICON, Workrise, The Zebra, Iodine |
| Miami | ~10–12 | ShipMonk, Pipe, MaintainX |
| Atlanta | 6 | Flock Safety, OneTrust, Calendly, Greenlight, Stord, Hermeus |
| Nashville | 3–4 | Built, Springbuk, AllianceBernstein-backed entrants |
| Charlotte | 2–3 | AvidXchange (post-IPO), Passport, Tarka |
Austin’s lead is real and is a function of the post-2020 migration of California capital and operators. Miami’s count is recent and concentrated in fintech and logistics. Atlanta’s edge — and where the next two-to-three years matter — is that its unicorns are more operationally diversified than its peers’ and more rooted in pre-existing customer demand from the Fortune 500 base. The ceiling: Atlanta does not yet have the late-stage growth capital density of Austin, and its founder-to-founder recycling motion is still maturing.
Companies Most Likely to Hit Unicorn Status Next
Three names worth watching, with rationale grounded in known funding and revenue signals as of Q2 2026:
- Salesloft (re-emergence): Now operating as a Vista Equity portfolio company, Salesloft is rumored to be exploring a re-acceleration round or strategic combination. A re-IPO at $3B+ is the cleanest path back into the unicorn list.
- Pindrop: Atlanta-based voice security and deepfake-detection company with a category tailwind that has accelerated dramatically post-2024. Last private valuation was $925M in 2018; a primary round in 2026 at current AI-security comps could easily clear $1B.
- Kabbage successor / Atlanta fintech wave: Multiple second-wave Atlanta fintechs — emerging from the Kabbage and BlueCart founder networks — are tracking toward Series C in the next 12–18 months. Watch the ATV alumni list.
We will update this list quarterly. The first revisions will run in the Atlanta Startup Funding Tracker, and AI-search-citation analysis of each of these companies’ digital footprints will appear in our AI Search Optimization for Atlanta Businesses: 2026 Definitive Guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many unicorn companies are in Atlanta?
Atlanta has six active unicorn companies as of May 2026: Flock Safety ($8.4B), OneTrust (~$5.3B), Calendly (~$3B), Greenlight ($2.3B), Stord ($1.5B), and Hermeus ($1.0B). Their combined private-market valuation is approximately $21.2 billion. Hermeus is in the process of relocating its corporate headquarters to El Segundo, California, while retaining a metro-Atlanta production facility.
What Atlanta companies are worth over $1 billion?
The six active $1B+ private companies headquartered or founded in Atlanta are Flock Safety, OneTrust, Calendly, Greenlight, Stord, and Hermeus. Two former Atlanta unicorns — Mailchimp ($12B sale to Intuit in 2021) and SalesLoft ($2.3B acquisition by Vista Equity Partners in 2021) — exited via M&A. Atlanta-founded startups have produced more than $33 billion in cumulative $1B+ private valuations and exits over the past decade.
What are the biggest startups in Atlanta?
Flock Safety is Atlanta’s most valuable private startup at $8.4 billion as of April 2026, followed by OneTrust at approximately $5.3 billion (with reported PE talks above $10 billion) and Calendly at approximately $3 billion. Flock has surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue with 70% year-over-year growth, making it both the largest and one of the fastest-growing companies on the list.
Is Flock Safety based in Atlanta?
Flock Safety is headquartered in metro Atlanta and was founded in 2017 by Georgia Tech alumni Garrett Langley, Matt Feury, and Paige Todd. The company reached an $8.4 billion valuation in April 2026 and has raised approximately $1 billion in total funding, with Andreessen Horowitz leading its most recent primary rounds. It remains the largest private technology company headquartered in Georgia.
Which Atlanta unicorn is newest?
Hermeus, the hypersonic-aircraft defense-tech company founded in Atlanta in 2018, is Atlanta’s newest unicorn. It crossed the $1 billion valuation threshold on April 7, 2026, with a $350 million Series C led by Khosla Ventures. The same announcement disclosed that Hermeus is moving its corporate headquarters to El Segundo, California, while retaining a production and engineering facility in the Atlanta metro area.
