So, how does a company achieve ‘unicorn’ status? Well firstly the company must be a startup and secondly its valuation must exceed the $1 billion dollars mark (based on fundraising). This equates to £0.6 billion.
The name ‘unicorn’ alludes to the fact that a startup reaching the dizzy heights of $1 billion is a rarity, or at least it used to be a rarity! However, unlike the mythical horned horse, we are seeing an ever increasing number of billion-dollar startups springing up, seemingly, with each passing week!
Many people believe the explosion in the number of unicorns means we’re in a bubble and this is somewhat understandable when you consider the valuation of some of these startups! However, there are many others who believe that these valuations are entirely justified…
On the latest list of unicorn startups provided by leading technology media platform TechCrunch, something of particular note is the presence of a number of storage startups. There are nine in total and these are listed in valuation order below:
1. Dropbox – a file sync ’n’ share storage company
Valued at $10.35bn, Dropbox has received $600m in funding.
2. Cloudera – a Big Data, Hadoop and analytics company
Valued at $4.1bn, Cloudera has received $1.94bn in funding.
3. Pure Storage – All-flash arrays
Valued at $3.23bn, Pure Storage has received $470m in funding.
4. Nutanix – Hyper-converged infrastructure appliances
Valued at $2.14bn, Nutanix has received $312m in funding.
5. MongoDB – Scale-out, distributed databases
Valued at $1.35bn, MongoDB has received $311m in funding.
6. Infinidat – Relatively old-style but re-invented high-end enterprise arrays
Valued at $1.2bn, Infinidat has received $230m in funding.
7. Actifio – Copy data management
Valued at $1.1bn, Actifio has received $208m in funding.
8. Simplivity – Hyper-converged infrastructure appliances
Valued at $1.03bn, Simplivity has received $277m in funding.
9. Tintri – VM-centric hybrid array
No figures have been given yet.
TechCrunch has also published a list of emerging unicorns list. They list 37 private companies, all of which have a valuation between $500m and $1bn. Of the 37 companies, however, there is only one storage company: Delphix, which has a valuation of $981m, with $120m funding.
These valuations create a lot of discussion since they are agreed on by the startup and its investors, hence why many are saying we are entering a valuation bubble again. However, as more and more of these companies are IPO’d, this bubble theory may dissipate but then again it might not…we will have to wait and see!