With a total of 67 unicorns, India ranked third on the global list but was a far cry compared with the two giants – the US and China – who reigned with 703 and 340 high growth start-ups. The drop-outs from the unicorn chart in 2023 were Byju’s and PharmEasy, according to a report by The Hurun Research Institute.
There are a total of 1,453 unicorns in the world, with the world minting one unicorn every two days over the last year. TikTok owner ByteDance retained the title of being the world’s most valuable unicorn worth $220 billion, despite threat of a US ban, while the total value of the world’s unicorns reached $5 trillion, which is equivalent to the GDP of Japan.
The data is for January 2023-January 2024, compared with January 2022-January 2023.
OpenAI posted the fastest valuation rise with an addition of $80 billion in value, followed by SpaceX, which added $43 billion.
“India’s start-up ecosystem has slowed, primarily fuelled by lack of investment into start-ups despite the recent stock market record highs. Another factor is that founders from India produced more offshore unicorns than any other country, co-founding 109 unicorns outside of India compared with 67 in India,” Hurun India founder and chief researcher Anas Rahman Junaid said.
“Of the unicorns founded outside of India, significantly all were in the US (95), led by the Bay Area, with four in the UK, three in Singapore and two in Germany. While it’s encouraging to see the rise of Krutrim, India’s first AI unicorn, there remains a substantial gap when compared to the US and China, which lead with 60 and 37 AI unicorns, respectively,” he added.
About 430 unicorns saw their valuations rise, of which 171 were new ones, while 170 saw their valuations drop, of which 42 were ‘demoted’ as their valuation no longer made the cut of $1 billion.
“The most active city for unicorns outside of the US and China was London, followed by Bengaluru, Paris and Berlin,” Hurun Report chairman and chief researcher Rupert Hoogewerf said.
Tiger Global took the title of the ‘World’s Most Successful Unicorn Investor’ for the first time, investing into 205 unicorns. SoftBank, under Masayoshi Son, was second with 169 unicorns, followed by HongShan, which made history as it overtook Sequoia, historically a titan in the field.
Sequoia dropped down to fourth, after carving out its Chinese and SE Asia & India operations. Sequoia’s Chinese partnership rebranded as HongShan, whilst its SE Asian and Indian partnership rebranded as Peak XV and also made the Top 50. Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16Z, under Ben Horowitz, was fifth.