Pre-IPO market rankings

Concentration surges

The top six-ranked names accounted for 47% of all activity across the Augment platform, up from 40% in Q4'25. We track concentration among these six because they have occupied the top of the rankings, trading a rank or two between them, for two years.

xAI exits the rankings, signaling more AI consolidation

xAI's merger into SpaceX, announced February 2nd, 2026, is the largest exit-via-acquisition in Power 20 history. The deal folded xAI's Grok platform, data center assets, and engineering team into SpaceX's operations, with plans to build orbital AI data centers combining Starlink infrastructure with xAI compute. xAI had sat at #7 in Q4'25 and was one of Q4's strongest performers, with 73% price growth. Its departure continues a trend of AI consolidation first flagged in the Q4'25 report, following Groq's deal with NVIDIA and Scale AI's exit earlier in 2025.

Power 20 continues to diversify away from pure-play AI

Using our strict "AI-first and AI-native" definition, 7 of the 20 Power 20 companies are AI companies in Q1'26 (Anthropic, OpenAI, Crusoe, Cursor, Perplexity, Cerebras, and ByteDance), down from 8 in Q4'25 after xAI's departure.

This decline largely reflects the consolidation trend rather than a diminished AI story: AI companies still accounted for more than half (51.2%) of the Power 20's aggregate market cap and 38.1% of Power 20 activity, just slightly down from last quarter.

Defense and aerospace maintain ~⅓ of Power 20 activity

SpaceX, Anduril, Shield AI, and Saronic accounted for 35.5% of Power 20 activity in Q1’26, up from 30.8% in Q4’25 (when the defense category had three representatives). Defense-tech continues to be one of the most active categories in pre-IPO markets. Q1’26 news events included the announcement of Anduril’s major contracting vehicle with the US Army for counter-drone and command-and-control tech, worth potentially up to $20B, and SpaceX’s IPO momentum. Saronic’s entry at #20 gives the defense sector four representatives, the most in Power 20 history.

Saronic (#20), a Company to Watch last quarter, enters the Power 20 for the first time, replacing xAI, driven by a 57.0% price gain and continued overall momentum in the defense-autonomy category. Saronic is building autonomous surface vessels for the US Navy and allied governments. While robotics hardware-focused companies have also seen rising activity, names like Agility and Figure AI offer weaker revenue signals. Saronic was selected based on defense-tech momentum, clear revenue traction, and stronger price signal.

Prediction markets hold steady

Kalshi (#13, up 5) and Polymarket (#19) continued to hold Power 20 positions, together accounting for ~8% of Power 20 activity. Polymarket was among the most liquid names on the platform this quarter, confirming sustained institutional interest in prediction market platforms.

Most active companies on Augment in Q1'26

Includes overall bid-ask and trading activity on the Augment platform during all of Q1'26. Any ties in bid-ask activity are broken by upranking the name with the stronger trading profile.

Largest price gains

Cerebras's per-share Augment Price growth of 172.7% was by a significant margin the highest among Power 20 companies and the strongest single-quarter price gain since Kalshi's 150.6% in Q4'25. Shield AI (+60.8%), Anthropic (+59.4%), Saronic (+57.0%), and Neuralink (+55.2%) rounded out the top five for price jumps.

Four of the 20 Power 20 names posted negative price changes in Q1'26: OpenAI (-22.0%), Canva (-16.1%), Rippling (-10.9%), and Perplexity (-5.3%). This is up from just one negative name (Perplexity) in Q4'25. The higher incidence of negative price moves and overall lower average price gains this past quarter may signify the beginnings of rationalization in prices after several quarters of exuberance.

Highest % Augment Share Price Movers in Q1'26

Companies to watch

Based on overall activity on the Augment platform in Q1’26, price movement, commercial traction, and news, these are the six up-and-coming names to watch in the beginning of 2026. They are ranked in the table below according to overall activity in the quarter.

• X-energy: Nuclear remains a credible future category inside these rankings, and X-energy took a major step toward public markets in Q1. The advanced small modular reactor developer filed a draft registration statement for a Nasdaq IPO (ticker: XE) on March 20th, 2026. X-energy generated $109M in revenue in 2025 and is seeking to raise roughly $300M in the offering. The company's Xe-100 high-temperature gas-cooled reactors are positioned at the intersection of nuclear and AI infrastructure, with deployment agreements alongside Amazon ($500M commitment), Dow (Texas facility via Fluor), and Talen Energy (gigawatt-scale assessment in Pennsylvania). If the IPO proceeds, X-energy would exit the Companies to Watch list, but the broader nuclear-for-AI theme it represents is likely to persist in secondary markets.
  
  Reflection AI: One of the more interesting new AI names in the data, with meaningful activity in Q1 despite a still-limited public market footprint. Founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, Reflection raised $2.5B at a $25B valuation in Q1 2026 with backing from NVIDIA, JPMorgan, Sequoia, and DST Global, a remarkable trajectory from its $545M valuation at founding in March 2025. The company is building frontier open-weight foundation models and autonomous coding agents, positioning itself as an American-led open-source champion, and an alternative to the Chinese models that today still dominate the open weight and open source model markets. Execution and business model remain in question, especially since its flagship open model was still in development as of March 2026.
• Glean: A former Power 20 company, but a near-miss for the rankings in Q1’26, despite its +45.3% price appreciation and respectable commercial scale. But the market for Glean, in Q1’26, was too thin vs. that of other contenders to earn it a top-20 slot. Glean raised a $150M Series F at a $7.2B valuation in February 2026, having doubled its ARR to $200M in roughly nine months during 2025. The enterprise AI search platform expanded its ecosystem through partnerships with Dell, Snowflake, and Workday, and launched Agentic Engine 2, which claims adaptive planning capabilities. Glean could enter the rankings again if liquidity deepens.
• Harvey: Harvey's fundamentals are scaling fast enough to keep it firmly on the watch list. The legal AI startup raised $200M at an $11B valuation in March 2026 (co-led by GIC and Sequoia), with ARR at $195M by the end of 2025. Harvey now counts over 1,300 customers across 60 countries, including DLA Piper, HSBC, and NBCUniversal, with 25k+ custom AI agents deployed on its platform. Legal AI is a large, visible, and commercially legible category for investors, and Harvey is the clear category leader, though competition from Legora, Spellbook, and others is rising..
• Armada: An edge computing and modular data center company building portable, self-contained AI infrastructure for deployment in remote and austere environments: military forward operating bases, oil fields, disaster zones, and rural areas. These are all markets underserved by hyperscaler buildouts. Armada's modular units are designed to bring GPU compute to the data source rather than routing data back to centralized clouds. The company has raised over $200M in funding, with defense and energy customers driving early revenue. As demand for distributed AI inference at the edge grows, particularly in defense and industrial contexts, Armada represents a differentiated infrastructure play worth monitoring.
• ‍Skild AI: A robotics foundation model company building general-purpose AI for robots. Skild raised a $1.5B Series C at a $14B valuation in January 2026, led by SoftBank's Vision Fund with participation from NVIDIA, Coatue, and Lightspeed, making it one of the most valuable robotics AI startups globally. Skild's approach, training a single foundation model across dozens of robot form factors, positions it as a potential platform layer for the robotics industry. With the humanoid robotics category attracting significant capital (Figure AI, Apptronik, Agility), Skild's model-layer bet could enjoy software-style unit economics while benefiting from the enormous TAM being pursued by robotics hardware companies.

Methodology

For further detail, the ranking methodology includes 8 metrics in total. Companies were ranked by the following factors, normalized to a 0 to 1 scale:

• Total volume as measured by the size of bid and ask orders on the Augment platform in Q1'26.
• Total activity was based on the number of bid-ask orders and the number of trades. Trades weighed 2x, whereas bids and asks weighed 1x.
• Companies' revenue and revenue growth estimates are collected from Sacra, a third-party market data provider (please see "Revenue estimates" section at the bottom of this page for more detail). Companies' metrics were normalized and ranked on a 0 to 1 scale according to revenue and revenue growth in 2024 and 2025.
• Spreads were measured as the negative of volume-weighted average price (VWAP) price differences between asks and bids, as a percentage of the asking price, for each name in Q1'26.
• Price change was measured as the % difference ending Augment Price for each name in the previous quarter and the ending price in the current calendar quarter.

Share prices provided in this report are derived from Caplight, which aggregates secondary market data and uses a proprietary algorithm to estimate pricing. To ensure the most accurate reflection of the end of quarter price, Augment may apply a market-based adjustment to the Caplight price. These adjustments are made when our internal desk observes verifiable trade data, firm bids/offers, or actionable indications of interest (IOIs) that deviate materially from modeled estimates. This dual-track approach aims to reconcile historical data with prevailing market prices.

In the next step, all the percentile ranks were added together with adjustments made to account for companies with gaps in the data, e.g. missing 2024 and/or 2025 revenue. Price spread, revenue growth, and the previous quarter's aggregate rank are weighted approximately twice as much as the other factors, while revenue dollar amount is weighted one-tenth as much.

Unlike our Power 20 ranking, our "Up-and-Coming Companies" list is based on fewer factors, namely price movement, activity, and activity increases QoQ. The activity includes transactions involving SPVs and forwards. The ranking is meant to identify companies seeing noticeably elevated buy and sell interest in the quarter compared to previous quarters.

Our overall activity rankings, “Most Active Companies in Q1'26” also include transactions involving SPVs and forwards, as well as trades. The ranking is meant to identify companies seeing noticeably elevated buy and sell interest in addition to trading activity in the quarter compared to previous quarters. For this measure, trades and bid-ask activity are weighted equally. The “Highest % Price Increases in Q1'26” table excludes companies with low activity, meaning companies with less than 3 bids or asks in the quarter.