What’s worth $1 billion? Drones, HR benefits software, and the offerings of 106 other private companies worldwide who have “unicorn” valuations, according to a private business data provider CB Insights.
The New York-based company has created a real-time unicorn tracker to keep record of the number of startups that received $1 billion or higher valuations worldwide. Chinese drone maker DJI was the most recent entrant to the group after it raised $75 million from Accel Partners on May 6 for an $8 billion estimated value.
In total, 15 companies reached the $1 billion mark between mid-April and mid-May, according to CB Insights. For all of 2015, 29 companies have become unicorns, already nearing the total number—38—that reached that status in 2014.
The company had planned to merely produce a research brief about the number of “unicorn” companies, but a few more had already received high valuations by the time CB Insights had finished, co-founder and CEO Anand Sanwal wrote in an e-mail. “It’s become almost a joke internally about how many new unicorns we’ll track per day,” he wrote.
Car-service provider Uber and Chinese electronics company Xiaomi are the two highest-valued private companies in the world, with $41 billion and $46 billion valuations, respectively. Others include mobile-based delivery service Instacart ($2 billion valuation), HR software Zenefits ($4.5 billion), and peer-to-peer lender Prosper Marketplace ($1.9 billion), according to CB Insights.
Back in Febraury, The Wall Street Journal published a database of its own, which included 73 companies that had $1 billion valuations. That was up from 40 a year earlier.
