Unicorn

A unicorn is a private startup company with a valuation of $1 billion or more. The term was coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee in a 2013 TechCrunch article, chosen to reflect how rare such companies were at the time. As of the mid-2020s, there are over 1,000 unicorns globally — the status has become less rare but remains significant. The emergence of unicorns reflects the increasing scale of venture-backed companies and the availability of massive growth capital. The $1B threshold is somewhat arbitrary but serves as a proxy for the scale of success required to generate meaningful returns for large VC funds. Variants: decacorn ($10B+, e.g., Stripe, SpaceX), hectocorn ($100B+, e.g., OpenAI). Many unicorns have struggled post-IPO when public markets applied more rigorous valuation scrutiny.