New AI Infrastructure Unicorns: Exa, Modal, and TurboPuffer Cross Billion-Dollar Threshold

Summary

Latent Space's AINews highlighted three AI infrastructure companies that have crossed unicorn status in May 2026, all targeting different layers of the AI application stack. TurboPuffer reached $100M ARR with under $1M raised total and is profitable — positioning the company as the magnet for context retrieval ("the magic happens when AI draws in just the right context"). Exa closed a $250M Series C at a $2.2B valuation, focused on AI-powered search infrastructure that serves agent and applicati