Unicorn (finance)

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A unicorn (English: Unicorn ) refers to a startup -Unternehmen with a market valuation, in front of a public offering or an exit , of over one billion US dollars . The term established itself in the 2010s. The magazine Fortune lists in June 2016 a total of 174 Unicorn startups, including some European and German companies. The news site Venture Beat even reported 229 unicorns in January 2016, but companies that have already been bought up are also listed there.

Because of the abundance of companies and the actual rarity of the mythical creature of the same name, there was the idea in English usage to "refine" this further and to speak of decacorns , for example, and thus to companies with a valuation of over 10 billion US dollars describe. So far, however, this has not really caught on.

The number of start-up companies with high ratings, which has been rising steadily since 2010, is due, among other things, to the fact that the companies go public much later or are sold to other companies. While the average for an IPO at the time of the new economy boom was four years, it rose to 11 years at the end of 2016. The companies can continue to finance themselves sufficiently through venture capital .

Companies

As of January 2020, the biggest unicorns worldwide are Ant Financial , ByteDance , Infor , Didi Chuxing , Juul Labs , The We Company , Lu.com , Stripe , Airbnb and SpaceX .

German unicorns

As of December 2016, Germany had the following companies with a valuation of over 1 billion US dollars:

Former German unicorns

Before they went public or were sold to an investor, the following companies were also so-called unicorns:

Swiss unicorns

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Aileen Lee: Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups. In: techcrunch.com. TechCrunch, November 2, 2013, accessed December 20, 2016 .
  2. ^ The Unicorn List 2016. In: fortune.com. Fortune Magazine, accessed December 20, 2016 .
  3. ↑ John Koetsier: There are now 229 unicorn startups, with $ 175B in funding and $ 1.3T valuation. In: venturebeat.com. Venture Beat, January 18, 2016, accessed December 20, 2016 .
  4. ↑ Jillian D'Onfro: There are so many $ 10 billion startups that there's a new name for them: 'decacorns'. In: businessinsider.com. Business Insider, March 18, 2015, accessed December 20, 2016 .
  5. ↑ Oliver Voss: Unicorns: The fear of unicorn dying. In: WiWo.de. WirtschaftsWoche, December 25, 2015, accessed on December 20, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Thomas Klemm: Why the “unicorns” don't want to go public. In: faz.net. FAZ, October 30, 2016, accessed on December 21, 2016 .
  7. ↑ Jastra Ilic: World's Ten Largest Unicorns Worth Close to $ 550bn. In: learnbonds.com. February 18, 2020, accessed on February 22, 2020 .
  8. ↑ a b Stephan Dörner, Nina Trentmann: On the hunt for Germany's “unicorns”. In: welt.de. Die Welt, February 1, 2016, accessed December 20, 2016 .
  9. ↑ These 10 new unicorns come from Europe. In: startupvalley.news. Startup Valley News, June 20, 2016, accessed December 20, 2016 .
  10. ↑ Fintech: Switzerland now has a “unicorn”. In: finews.ch . August 22, 2019. Retrieved August 22, 2019 .
  11. ↑ a b c Start-ups are booming thanks to foreign investors. In: finews.ch. January 28, 2020, accessed February 24, 2020 .