With 21 unicorns, India third on list of billion-dollar tech start-ups; US, China lead

China-based Hurun Research found 494 unicorns in the world, based in 25 countries and 118 cities.

India, with 21 unicorns, stands a distant third to China and the US in the inaugural Hurun Global Unicorn List 2019, a ranking of the world’s billion-dollar tech start-ups compiled by the China-based Hurun Research Institute.

China, with 206 unicorns and the US, with 203, dominate the list with over 80% of the world’s known unicorns, despite representing only half of the world’s GDP and a quarter of the world’s population.

Hurun Research found 494 unicorns in the world, based in 25 countries and 118 cities. Set up seven years ago on an average, they are worth $$3.4 billion on average and $1.7 trillion in total. Valuations are a snapshot of June 30, 2019.

Indian unicorns are led by payments solutions platform One97 Communications ($10 billion), followed by cab aggregator Ola Cabs ($ 6 billion), online educator Byju’s ($6 billion), and travel-stay finder OYO Rooms ($5 billion).

Hurun Report chairman and chief researcher Rupert Hoogewerf said, “These are the industries that are disrupting the world economy, initiating the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and widely considered to hold the key to the future. Not surprising that many of the world’s top young talent want to work in these sectors.”

Hangzhou-based Ant Financial is the most valuable unicorn in the world with a valuation of $150 billion. Founded in 2014, Ant Financial’s main business is the online payment platform Alipay, which was spun out of Alibaba. In June 2018, Ant Financial raised $14 billion in a round led by GIC and Tamasek, to value the business at $150 billion.

Beijing-based content discovery platform ByteDance is the second-most valuable unicorn at $75 billion. Founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming, ByteDance runs AI-powered news-aggregation platform Jinri Toutiao and more famously, video-sharing application TikTok. Bytedance has raised $4.3 billion to date in three funding rounds.

Beijing-based cab-hailing platform Didi Chuxing is the third most valuable unicorn in the world at $55 billion.

Fourth comes New York-based Infor with $50 billion valuation builds at SMB and Enterprise ERP software cloud products. Founded by Jim Schaper in 2002, Infor has raised $4 billion in four rounds of funding with the latest coming in January, when it raised $1.5 billion.

E-commerce and fintech make up 31% of the world’s unicorns, followed by cloud and AI. The world’s unicorns span 25 industries, with the ‘Big 5 Industries’ making up half of the total.

Sequoia is far and away the world’s most successful investment platform at finding and investing into unicorns, investing into one in five of the world’s known unicorns, followed by SoftBank, Tencent, Tiger, IDG, Goldman Sachs and Alibaba. Hoogewerf says, “Unicorns are supposed to be hard to find, but investors like Sequoia, Softbank and Tencent make it look easy.”