Two years ago, on November 2, 2013, Aileen Lee published her now-famous post about private company unicorns titled “Welcome to the Unicorn Club,” coining the term that would stick for referring to $1B+ valuation startups. A lot has changed since, and we’ve written quite a lot about the supposedly rare beasts along the way, not to mention launching a real-time unicorn tracker to list all the current unicorns, predicting 50 future unicorns with The New York Times, and hosting a tournament of startup unicorns.
To mark the two-year anniversary, we collected a few data points from the CB Insights unicorn archives:
- The first article we wrote about “unicorns” was actually in November 2013, but it was about “unicorn exits” (companies that exited for $1B or more).
- At the end of 2013 there were 43 unicorns, at year-end 2014 there were 80 unicorns, and currently at the end of October 2015 there are 141 unicorns.
- We wrote about Unicorns 3 times in 2013, 8 times in 2014, and 36 times in 2015.
The full trend in unicorn posts, below.
Below, in reverse chronological order, is the bulk of our research on unicorns since November 2013.
The Increasingly Crowded Unicorn Club In One Infographic – 10/26/2015
Wounded Unicorn: Sentiment Analysis Highlights How Badly Theranos Has Been Destroyed In The Press – 10/16/2015
How Would Kleiner Perkins’ Internet Leaderboard Look With Unicorns Included? – 10/13/2015
Forget Billion-Dollar Valuations: These 10 Companies Raised $1B Or More In A Single Round – 10/1/2015
50 Future Unicorns – 8/23/2015
The Value Of Every Unicorn Combined Is Still Less Than One Apple – 8/17/2015
Unicorns Globally: US, Asia Widen Lead Over Europe As Unicorn Breeding Grounds – 8/6/2015
The Websites of 13 Unicorn Startup Companies Before They Became Billion Dollar Companies – 7/28/2015
Among Corporate VCs, Salesforce Ventures Counts The Most Unicorns – 7/22/2015
These Investors Are The Best Unicorn Hunters – 7/21/2015
Unicorn Companies Have More Than Quadrupled In Combined Value – 7/15/2015
Unicorn Power Law: The Top 10 Unicorns Are Worth More Than The Next 70 Combined – 6/23/2015
The Periodic Table Of Unicorns – 6/16/2015
Your Startup Has a 1.28% Chance of Becoming a Unicorn – 5/25/2015
Uh Oh VCs – Unicorn M&A Exit Volume Falls Off a Cliff in 2015 – 5/24/2015
Unicorns Are Breeding Like Rabbits: Set to Double 2014′s Record Pace – 5/21/2015
Completing Chris Dixon’s List of New York’s Future Unicorns – 5/6/2015
The Value of Every US Tech Unicorn Combined is Still Less Than One Facebook – 4/12/2015
Uber and Slack Have Significantly Higher Valuation Multiples Than Other Unicorns – 4/7/2015
Unicorn Infographic: The Most Capital Efficient Billion Dollar Startups – 3/22/2015
How Much Equity Are Unicorns Giving Up? – 3/19/2015
Which Venture Capital Firms are Best at Spotting Unicorns Early? – 3/2/2015
Backdoor Unicorns – Which VCs Got Into Tech’s Largest Exits Through Pre-IPO M&A? – 2/24/2015
How Quickly Are Unicorn Startup Valuations Increasing? – 2/20/2015
Unicorns Breeding Like Rabbits – Tech’s Billion Dollar Valuation Club Gets Crowded in 2014 – 1/29/2015
Mega Unicorns – The Quickly Growing $10 Billion Valuation Club – 1/25/2015
I Wannabe a Unicorn So Freakin’ Bad. New Billion-Dollar Valuations Spike in H1 2014 – 7/8/2014
The Exceedingly Rare Unicorn VC – 11/21/2013
Want more Unicorn data? Login to CB Insights or sign up for free below.
If you aren’t already a client, sign up for a free trial to learn more about our platform.