The ten "unicorns" most valuable of 2024, illustrated in a revealing graphic about the tech industry

Unicorns exist. With the dotcom fever, dozens of startups who began to operate in completely new and unknown terrain. An idea had tremendous value, but only a few survived and even fewer became large companies. Within these emerging companies, there were the “unicorns”, a term that was coined in 2013 to describe the startup that achieved a valuation of 1,000 million dollars.

In Spain we had a few (not all of them ended well) and, although countries can change (tell Sweden), few have managed to establish themselves after the initial ‘boom’ as a large company. Uber and Meta would be two examples of success, but there are many others that derailed. One that is growing like crazy is OpenAI, which with its most recent round of financing, has achieved a valuation of more than 150 billion dollars.

Now, it has other startups ahead to be the most valued, and in this graph prepared by VisualCapitalist We can take a look at the 10 most valuable “unicorns” of 2024:

Ahead of the company that is setting the pace in artificial intelligence applications, we have SpaceX. Elon Musk’s company continues to show muscle in its extraterrestrial operations and even NASA has had to resort to it in emergency situations. The Pentagon also has ties to SpaceX and Elon Musk is moving very well both in space exploration and in the deployment of Starlink, his satellite Internet system.

And, above the two North American companies, we have one from China. It is the only one in the TOP 10 of “unicorns” and it is none other than ByteDance, the owners of TikTok. Already in 2020 we were talking about this company as the startup most valued in the world, a condition that it has not lost despite all its setbacks with governments such as the United States or Europe.

All of these pressures on TikTok came from the United States government, as it suspects that the Chinese government can access the data of the platform’s users. And what really worries North American authorities is that 50% of Americans use the app and 14% of adults say they get information through it.

All three are far, far away from the rest of the 10 most valuable “unicorns” of this year. We leave you the list below with the data of Carbon Finance , CB Insights and Bloomberg:

The value of the “unicorns” amounts to more than 3.8 billion dollars and what the table shows is that cases like ByteDance, Revolut, SHEIN or Canva are… exceptions. More than half of the list is made up of North American companies.

Only time will tell if, apart from being “unicorns” that are shining due to their valuation, they manage to establish themselves in the market or if one of them will deflate, something that has regularly happened with other large companies. startups (with earthquakes, in some cases).

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