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So far, 2017 is shaping up to be a pretty good year for technology unicorns. Private investors are minting about one new unicorn a week this year, roughly the same pace as 2016. More existing unicorns are going public. And for those remaining private, capital continues to flow in while disclosed valuations are mostly holding up.
Overall, at least 24 companies have joined the unicorn club in the first five months of the year, according to the Crunchbase Unicorn Leaderboard, which tracks the universe of private, venture-backed companies valued at $1 billion or more.
In 2016, 50 newcomers joined the board, and 2015 had a record-setting 95 new entrants.
Industries and geographies
This year’s newcomers represent a wide variety of sectors and business models.
There’s fintech (Paytm, a mobile commerce provider, and Robinhood, a zero-commission stock-trading platform), smart building (Katerra, a construction logistics startup and View, maker of smart glass) and bikes (Ofo, a bike-sharing business, and Peloton, maker of exercise cycles and content), to name a few. Of course, there’s also enterprise software (CrowdStrike, for cybersecurity, and Symphony, a corporate messaging platform) and consumer internet (question-and-answer sites Quora and Zhihu). See the full list here.
Unicorns based on geography are less varied. The overwhelming majority of new entrants to the billion-dollar-valuation list hail from either the United States or China. In the U.S., there were 13 new unicorns, while China produced at least eight so far this year. India and the U.K. each had one.
Historically, the lion’s share of unicorns have been U.S.- or China-based, so 2017 doesn’t represent a notable deviation from the norm. Out of 231 companies on the unicorn board, 121 are headquartered in the U.S. and 66 are based in China.
Finding the exit
While newcomers are joining the unicorn board, longstanding members are going public or selling to acquirers. IPOs, in particular, are up, with the sums raised far exceeding 2016 levels.
So far this year, at least five companies on the unicorn board have gone public: Snap, Cloudera, Okta, MuleSoft and China Rapid Finance. By comparison, there were five unicorn IPOs in all of 2016.