A report from CB Insights for The New York Times reveals the 50 companies that could reach a valuation of $ 1,000 million in the coming years.
Among the ranking are startups such as Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, which even surpass this valuation and emprendimientos related to services and technology continue to stand out.
It is worth noting that this report is made annually at the request of the New York Times to the consulting firm, and this year included a diversity of companies (315 in total) that predominantly focus on the technology and services area and are strong candidates to become the next unicorns. The term ‘Unicorn’ is applied to those companies valued at more than one billion dollars before their release to the stock market.
It is estimated that among the 315 candidate companies this year, the select club could exceed the joint assessment of the sum of 10,000 million dollars.
The current technological landscape has made what seemed extremely normal a decade ago seem normal. However, as the report points out, the ecosystem that has allowed the rapid growth of firms such as Uber is no longer what it used to be.
The majority of these new technology companies have benefited from the democratization of smartphones and the reduction in services in the cloud, monopolizing existing businesses such as taxis, meals, hotels and taking them into the pockets of customers.
Uber is a disruptive example of these ventures. It is estimated that it could reach a valuation of 120,000 million dollars. But, according to the CB Insights report, the model does not allow for more. As these pioneering companies have matured and are preparing to go public, the easy opportunities to enter industries that had not been updated are running out.
CB Insights generates the report based on a set of complex data such as financial health and the strength and size of the market served by a company, to identify 50 new companies that could be on track to reach a valuation of one billion dollars.
The highlight of this list is that most of the companies that have the potential to develop as ‘Unicorns’ are professional software developers, which focus on some sectors that were still to be exploited, such as agriculture, banking or biotechnology.
In its web portal, the firm indicates that of the 50 future unicorns on the list, 5 are in India, 4 in China, 3 in Latin America, 3 in Europe and 2 in Australia. They also indicate that the United States houses the majority of future unicorns (66%), followed by India (10%), China (8%) and Brazil (4%) with the largest presence in the list according to the number of companies present. .
One of the best placed is, for example, Benchling, an invention of the engineer Sajith Wickramsekara who developed to banish the obsolete technological tools used by the molecular biology laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when he was a student.
Your company offers a tool specially designed for researchers to record their reports and share it as a team. Today around 140,000 scientists use Benchling ‘software’, including academics from Harvard, MIT or pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer or Regeneron.
Another of the prominent companies that appear in the list of new unicorns is Farmers Business Network that charges farmers $ 700 per year, to analyze their farms, their supplies and their crops. More than 7,700 farms in the USA already use the system.
Among the US firms leading the ranking stand out the 23andMem DNA analysis firm, the AllBirds shoe manufacturer, BuzzFeed, the DoorDash food delivery service, the Gusto human resources solutions platform, the Squarespace website development system and the brand of Warby Parker lenses.
The report also indicates that within the American geography, the State of California with 22 startups has the most presence in the list of the top 50 unicorns.
Companies such as Clear Tax, which develop software for tax filing and investment management; They cover a new sector that applies data analysis and new types of ‘software’ to specific industries that until now had been using old tools.
Deputy, another program that helps companies manage staff schedules; or Miaoshou Doctor and Kry, two companies that develop services to connect doctors and patients.
“Many of these sectors are big industries that we need in our lives and in business, and they need to be modernized,” according to Kirsten Green, an investor with Forerunner Ventures.
Although most of these firms are exotic because of the type of business they do, this does not mean that their model is not less lucrative. According to the report, some of these companies could reach the threshold of 1,000 million valuation quickly, because the ‘startups’ are growing faster than ever. Funding rounds of 100 million or more that were previously unusual, have become common.
In relation to Latin America, only three companies stand out, of which two correspond to Brazil with CargoX with its Internet logistics model and QuintoAndar, a real estate software company.
The other escalafon is for Grow Mobility de Mexico, a recent merger of the Grin scooters and the Brazilian yellow bicycles. This latest brand aims to be the largest platform for urban micromobility and 2.0 services, and the third with the largest presence globally.
Although the ‘startup’ seems an American invention, even specifically Californian and hence the state with the greatest presence in the ranking, these types of companies are increasingly common outside of this territory. But in the US, they have simply sought a new audience: the millennials.
Generation Y, corresponding to those born between 1980 and 2000, has specificities that some companies are knowing how to exploit with mastery, especially in the female segment. This is the case of Zola, who takes the business of wedding lists to the new times; or Glossier, who makes beauty and skin care products that insist on “democratizing beauty”.
The report also chooses some companies that revolve around the microeconomies of the latest generation of unicorns such as Uber and Airbnb.
Among the most outstanding are Chekr, a company that facilitates registration as a driver on the Uber or Lyft platforms; or Earning, which provides free cash advances to Uber workers, who can withdraw immediately after a trip.