November 10, 2025 – New Orleans, Louisiana minted its first tech unicorn, the billion-dollar research software startup Lucid, in 2021. At the time, The Idea Village’s Jon Atkinson told Hypepotamus that such events were the “first turn of the flywheel” for the city’s startup ecosystem.
As we look towards 2026, there are plenty of signs that such a flywheel is spinning even faster. One such metric pointing in that direction is startup exits. New Orleans has produced eleven notable recent exits according to Startup Nola‘s database. That includes Gilded (acquired in 2023), TurboSquid (acquired in 2021 by Shutterstock), and Levelset (acquired by Procore).