What will happen to the hundreds of unicorns who haven't raised since 2021?
~84% of US unicorns use Carta (pretty sweet!). And as we are seemingly back to minting new $1B+ valuation startups every week, I wanted to look back at our last crop of unicorn companies.
Data below shows the last financing for each US unicorn on the platform. So 75 unicorns that use Carta have not raised since Q4 2021, for instance.
And for this analysis I included bridge rounds as financings. So when I say "have not raised" I mean literally no new money into the company (at least in equity financing, maybe they took out a bunch of debt).
Now maybe a lot of these unicorns got religion on profitability, turned the ship on a dime from grow-at-all-costs to grow-fast-but-make-money...but I'm skeptical. Some surely did, many who were still early stage would have found that pivot insanely difficult
Of course those rounds in 2021 were often jumbo rounds, so they had money to trade for time in many cases.
They haven't closed down or been acquired or they wouldn't be on this list.
But the clock is ticking now. We're 15 quarters from Q4 2021.
Have these businesses re-accelerated to match the AI native startups that are zooming upwards in 2025?
Really interesting to watch who grew into strength and who couldn’t keep pace here.
#startups #unicorns
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