The Full Taxonomy for Startups
We Talk about Unicorns, but there’s also Dragons, Pegasus, and even Ponies
You could call the startup scene a zoo at this point as investors overwhelmingly use animal names as metaphors to describe the plethora of startups in the market today. The most well-known term today would be unicorn, coined by Aileen Lee, the founder of seed-stage fund Cowboy Ventures, in this TechCrunch article detailing what Lee and her team called the “Unicorn Club”.
It contained a list of 39 U.S.-based tech companies that started since 2003, valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors. These companies were overwhelmingly rare as unicorns form about 0.7% of venture-backed consumer and enterprise software startups in the U.S., at the time of Lee’s article.
Today, there are more than 400 unicorns around the world, with many originating from the East such as Bytedance (China), Didi Chuxing (China), One97 Communications (India), Grab (Singapore) and Go-Jek (Indonesia). Valuations today are no longer sitting around single-digit billions as companies like those aforementioned are boasting a valuation over $10 billion—Bytedance is already valued at $78 billion.
That makes them a high-value decacorn, with only $24 billion to go before you can call them a hectocorn—only if…
