Meaning
In business jargon, a privately held startup company valued at more than one billion US dollars. The name plays on the mythical beast's rarity: when the word was coined, only a tiny fraction of venture-backed software startups ever reached that valuation, though such firms now number well over a thousand worldwide and the word is often used with mild irony. Neutral-to-wry business jargon; increasingly tinged with scepticism about inflated private valuations. Regional use: General business English worldwide; rooted in US venture capital.
Origin
Coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, founder of Cowboy Ventures, in a TechCrunch essay published on 2 November 2013 titled Welcome to the Unicorn Club: Learning from Billion-Dollar Startups. Studying US software companies started since 2003, she found just 39 worth over one billion dollars, roughly 0.07 percent of venture-backed startups of that era, and reached for the mythical creature to stress how rare such outcomes were; her author biography credits her with coining the business term. The label caught on fast: Fortune ran The Age of Unicorns in January 2015, the herd passed one hundred companies by 2018, about 340 new ones appeared in 2021 alone, and trackers such as CB Insights counted roughly 1,200 by 2024. It also spawned a family of extensions, including decacorn for ten-billion-dollar startups and soonicorn for those seen as close behind.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- decacorn
- soonicorn
- tech unicorn
Usage Examples
- The payments startup became a unicorn after its latest funding round.
- Investors joked that unicorns had stopped being rare and started forming a herd.
- Before it was a unicorn, the company was three engineers sharing a desk in a co-working space.