Why Are There So Many Unicorns?
Data on the World’s Private Companies
Published in
9 min readOct 1, 2019
Once upon a time, when a company reached a billion-dollar valuation, the event was so rare that a special term was needed. The exceptional company was called a “unicorn”. Now in 2019, a list of global unicorns contains over 400 such firms. Clearly these mythical creatures are not as magical as they once were.
Still, there is much that we can learn from these extraordinary animals. By combining the CBInsight unicorn list with data from Crunchbase, I was able to see a few trends among these companies. Below I present data on global unicorns as well as some reasons for why they have proliferated so wildly.
1 — Unicorns Can Be Worth Way More than a Billion Dollars
The following chart shows the top 20 unicorns by private market valuation.
