According to analyst CB Insights, Chinese AI company Bytedance is the highest-valued startup – currently a private, up-and-coming company – in the world. The venture which is valued at US$75 billion is running content platform Toutiao in China, which uses machine learning to tailor a newsfeed for each individual viewer out of traditional and new media sources.
The second highest-valued startup according to CB Insights is also from China – ride-hailing service Didi valued at US$56 billion. U.S companies now make up only 40 percent of the top 10, down from 60 percent a year ago when Juul Labs and WeWork still made the top 10.
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The remaining four U.S. startups, Stripe, Airbnb, Space X and Epic Games are valued at between US$15 billion and $36 billion. U.S. fintech company Stripe is also one of the list’s fastest climber, growing its valuation from $22.5 billion to $36 billion.
A total of 24 companies in the ranking were valued at US$10 billion, making them decacorns. According to CB Insights, there more than 400 unicorn startups (companies valued at US$1 billion or more) in the world as of May 2020.
The top 10 list of decacorns also includes Indian E-commerce platform PayTM and Singaporean ride-hailing app Grab. Further down the list, UK data center provider Global Switch (rank 19), Indonesia’s answer to WeChat, umbrella app Go-Jek (rank 20), Brazilian fintech provider Nubank (rank 21) and a second player from India, hotel startup Oyo (rank 22), make appearances.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Global startups – Statistics & Facts
Published, Dec 3, 2019
Many of the world’s most valuable companies had humble beginnings as startups. In the olden days, it was extremely difficult to create a large and successful business without a tremendous amount of capital to open a factory or buy a fleet of trading vessels, for instance. Today groundbreaking innovations can occur in a basement, a garage, or a college dorm. As a result, new startups pop up every day all around the world, each of them hoping to get acquired by a larger company or make it big in their own right. However, for every wildly successful startup, there are thousands which fall into obscurity, which is why startups valued at a billion dollars or more are facetiously referred to as “unicorns”, a reference to their elusiveness.
As of October 2019, the most valuable startup worldwide was the Chinese content platform Toutiao, which was valued at 75 billion U.S. dollars.
Although most of the top valued startups are based in the United States or China, Latin America and the Caribbean is currently the most active world region for startups. Almost 30 percent of the population of Guatemala is involved in a business start up, compared to about 16 percent in the United States. Thailand, South Korea, and Turkeyalso boast high levels of early entrepreneurial activity.
Investment in startups has become very popular in recent years, with more and more investors recognizing the potential fortune to be made from supporting the right startup. Between 2012 and 2017, startup funding across all industries grew by at least 50 percent, with some industries like advanced manufacturing and robotics reporting nearly 1,400 percent more funding in 2017 than 2012. In 2013, the total funding for artificial intelligence startups amounted to about 1.7 billion U.S. dollars, which grew to over 15 billion dollars by 2017.
Although it takes a team to create a successful startup, it is not uncommon for the media to fixate on the founder or the head of a successful start up, such as Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg to name a few. Stanford University and Harvard University have the highest number of alumni who founded unicorns worldwide.
This text provides general information. Statista assumes no liability for the information given being complete or correct. Due to varying update cycles, statistics can display more up-to-date data than referenced in the text.
