Unicorn Analysis: Understanding the Herd 🦄
Unicorn companies, those valued at over $1B, have experienced significant change over the last few months. Many have IPOed like Cloudflare (up 12%), Crowdstrike (up 92%), and Datadog (up 33%) while others are going through valuation readjustments. Below are 5 data points on the current U.S. unicorn herd.
- There are 192 U.S.-based unicorns, with enterprise businesses representing 43% of the companies.
2. While there are more enterprise companies, consumer businesses represent more enterprise value. In turn, the average consumer startup is valued higher ($3.7B) than the average enterprise startup ($2.5B).
3. There are 7 unicorns with open source business models, only ~9% of enterprise unicorns. 6 of the 7 startups operated at the infrastructure / developer layers of the stack, while Automattic (Wordpress) was the only application layer open source project. We believe open source business models will continue to gain share over closed-source companies.
4. There are only 2 startups with API business models, Stripe and Plaid. This business model provides the data, functions, and app as an API. They’re products that are sold to developers to delight end users.
5. 24 startups’ names start with S and are worth $118B. A and C tie at second place with 19 each.
