The number of unicorns has almost doubled in 2021, with 457 companies turning unicorns this year, taking the tally to 917. The surge in unicorns was led by growth in digital banking and overall digitization due to Covid-19; 123 Fintechs & 104 Internet Softwares & Services firms turned unicorns.
1. Year Wise Trend of Unicorns Basis Category Wise - Fintechs are the winners.
If we look at the trend of private companies turning into unicorns each year, till 2018, the most unicorns were E-commerce & D2C brands & Internet Software Services were at second number.
Come 2019, and we can see that due to a digital explosion in financial services, several Fintech brands have started growing as unicorns. Due to increased digitization during a pandemic by November 2021, the two types of companies achieving unicorn status categories were Fintechs & Internet Software Services.
2. Country Wise Category Wise Mix of Unicorns
Looking at the mix of unicorn categories in top countries (with more than ten unicorns), the US is the leader with 469 unicorns, followed by China (169), India (48) & the UK (34). While the US has more share of Internet software and services & Fintechs, China is dominated by E-commerce/ D2C & Artificial Intelligence unicorns.
Indian unicorns consist of Fintechs and E-comm, but the UK mainly has Fintech unicorns. Germany's top categories are Fintech and Travel and Israel by Cybersecurity and AI.
3. Top 20 Unicorns Across the Globe
The top 3 unicorns a per valuation are ByteDance ($140 B), SpaceX ($100 B) & Stripe ($95 B).
4. Category Wise Top Unicorns
Below is the list of top unicorns in each category worldwide.
5. The trend of Country Wise Number of Unicorns
The US has been a leader for several years except in 2017 & 2018 (where China took the lead). The UK held the third position from 2017-2019.
a) Since 2020, India has witnessed tremendous growth in the number of unicorns, mainly led by E-comm, Fintechs & Internet Software
Digitization is growing across the industries; we might keep seeing this surge in unicorns, mainly in countries with large populations like the US, China, and India.