Startup companies by value
🦄 & runner-ups
BY Jan Strozyk
Published July 16, 2018
"Unicorn, noun - a start-up that is valued at one Billion dollars or more" (Merriam Webster). When serial investor Aileen Lee coined the term Unicorn for a billion-dollar-valuation more than five years ago, these companies where rare - not as rare as the term suggests, though. Over the past years, startups have evolved into well-known brands and hidden champions have developed serios valuations. This analysis tries to make use of data to show which industries are the biggest and which region is the most fruitful (Spoiler: It's the Valley).
The data
The data set used for this small project was scraped obtained from Angel.co. The site claims to provide information on more than four million companies, but it comes with a big asterisk: Most of the information appears to be crowd sourced and while cleaning the data, I found entries that were inconsistent. It should work out for a fun project like this one though.
It's all about the Unicorns, right? Initially, I narrowed my focus to only include companies that are, according to the angel.co data, valued at one billion US-Dollars or above. But to make it a bit more fun, I included the top runner-ups as well: Companies worth 500 Million US-Dollars or more. This gave me a total of roughly 400 companies to look at.
Two Top Tens
Let's start with the obvious: The top 10 🦄 and the top 10 runner-ups
NOTE: Some of the data is outdated. Google is probably worth more now, for example. It is just a project!
SOURCE: angel.co
It is quite clear from the first graph that the United States are the dominant country in the world, even though the ranking is lead by a Chinese company. For a better perspective on how yuuuuge the US-share really is, let's take a look at the distribution of all companies in the data set by country. Note that the following two charts count the number of companies, regardless of their size.
The Billion-Dollar-Companies by country
There are about 160 companies in the data set that are worth more than USD 1 billion - 127 of which were founded or are headquartered in the United States.
The Runner-ups by country
The distribution for the runner-ups is almost the same. 116 out of 140 companies worth between USD 500 million and USD 1 billion are US-American.
It is Cali v. the rest
Ok, it is clear that the US do have the most companies. But what about the distribution of funding? If we take a closer look at where the money goes, the results are staggering: California is by far the most dominant state of all - more startup funding goes to the West Coast State than to all other countries combined. The valley is very much alive.
NOTE: Once again - the data accuracy is to be taken with a grain of salt.
People buy things only, really!
How do these companies make money (assuming they do, as at least some of these are highly risky ventures). The chart reveals that a physical product still beats software and social networks. However getting these products to the actual customer is the biggest market of all: E-Commerce is wins, if it comes to total funding by industry.
Dot-Com or not Dot-Com?
Finally, the data set reveals the answer to one intriguing question: Did the Dot-Com bubble burst? Some serious mathematical calculations and intense data wrangling later, I can state (with confidence): No.
Company website top-level-domains compared