2021 saw valuations boom, funding skyrocket and new unicorns be born. It was a year of investor optimism after a year of drudgery, and the numbers match that optimism. We looked at research firm CB Insights’ State of Venture report to check out the numbers of new unicorns — that is, billion-dollar startups, once rare enough to garner themselves a nickname suited for a fictional creature — for ourselves as the year comes to an end.
2021 saw valuations boom, funding skyrocket and new unicorns be born. It was a year of investor optimism after a year of drudgery, and the numbers match that optimism. We looked at research firm CB Insights’ State of Venture report to check out the numbers of new unicorns — that is, billion-dollar startups, once rare enough to garner themselves a nickname suited for a fictional creature — for ourselves as the year comes to an end. Note that while the numbers demonstrate trends on the whole, the data does not capture VC trends through the end of the year, so we’ll get an even better snapshot of VC funding after the new year.
2021 saw three straight quarters of more than 100 unicorn births. In the third quarter, 127 new unicorns got their horns, and in total before the end of the year there are now 848 unicorns, according to CB Insights. This year's new unicorns include Hong Kong fintech startup FTX, Canada's Dapper Labs, the Winklevoss Brothers’ crypto exchange Gemini, healthtech startup Cerebral, BetterUp, Zapier, Clubhouse, Noom, ConsenSys, Calendly, Contentful, Hopper, Gorillas, MasterClass, and more.
Globally, the spread of new unicorns tracks with which geographic areas tend to raise and deploy more capital.
In the U.S. in the third quarter of 2021, for example, there were 69 new unicorns. In total, according to CB Insights, the number of tech unicorns with a valuation of over $1 billion has reached 936, with a combined total value of $3.049 billion. During the same time period Asia saw 30 new unicorns, for a total of 271 unicorns. Europe saw 15 new unicorns, for a total of 100. Latin America saw 5 new unicorns, for a total of 22. In December 2021, there are 35 startups with a valuation above $10 billion, spread out across different countries and industries.
Achieving a private-market billion-dollar valuation used to be hard, but now we can find out how quickly it takes the average company to grow to that degree. CB Insights tracks low long it tends to take a company to get to unicorn status. In 2021 the average time to reach a billion-dollar valuation increased to four years and nine months, up slightly from last year.
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