Look at the bottom-right of the infographic: the social networking apps. Facebook and LinkedIn are no longer unicorn startups: they are mature companies with a substantial presence on the stock market. Instagram is owned by Facebook, so why list it as a separate unicorn? That's double-counting the valuation of Instagram. Same for WhatsApp. In the "Big Data" section, there is Palantir. Palantir hasn't been a startup for several years now.

This infographic is garbage.

The rest of the article is an eye-rollingly superficial summary of irrelevant statistics. "6 years: the median time to become a unicorn". That's not a reflection on unicorns, that's a reflection on the technology market over the past decade.

Their definition: every company younger than 25 years valued over 1 billion (?)

tristanj in this discussion linked to the document where they state that.

(On completely tangential side, and as a good comparison when speaking about wealth creation, Mike Bloomberg seems to recently got personally 11 billion richer in one and half years, if Forbes is to be believed, even if his company isn't public and is more than 30 years old, so I'm really curious how.)

If that's their definition... then where is Google? They're worth $500B, yet they aren't in the list.

So not only do they have this ridiculous definition, but they can't even follow their own rules.

Edit: Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Netflix, PayPal also qualify. Also excluded.

They should add these.. it'll make for a better click-bait headline. That's $1T in additional value right there.

They don't follow their own definition then. Maybe they mean every software company? (But then why include hardware companies in the graphic?)

Here are some fun facts I gathered in the last few minutes:

* There are 2,266 companies listed on US Exchanges currently with a market cap above $1bn

* 874 of these companies have IPOed since January 1, 2001.

Unfortunately I could not query when these companies were founded, but is it possible that many of these companies were founded in the last 25 years? I think that's possible. In which case this graphic is probably missing quite a few companies...

That is a rediculous definition.

Since the images in the article are rather small, I found the original document (linked at bottom) and scaled up some of the more interesting charts. They're assuming companies that IPOed in the last few years are still considered "Unicorns", which I find rather questionable. Anyway, it is quite nice to see all these companies in one place so here's the all the interesting charts:

The unicorn club http://i.imgur.com/UCXLaYY.jpg

New unicorns of 2015 http://i.imgur.com/JnDuOgj.jpg

21 decacorns http://i.imgur.com/NPLpYDd.jpg

13 European unicorns http://i.imgur.com/FZd02hD.jpg

33 Chinese unicorns http://i.imgur.com/aaSOJAT.jpg

And finally the original document (PDF) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxFGUJc2Cr8rb3hFUVZ2Nk45QzQ...

Hi my name is Philippe Cases and I am the CEO of Spoke Software who published the landscape and Ebooks on which John Koetsier based his article. The goal of our EBook and of John Koetsier’s article is to give some numbers around this Unicorn phenomenon and show a long-term perspective. Reading through the comments, I would like to point out few things: 1) A unicorn is a company that reached the US$ 1 Billion mark from a private transaction. We went back until 2000 to identify all the unicorns we could, independently of what status they are now. We may have missed some but the goal was to identify when, where geographically and where in the technology landscape, unicorns appeared; 2) About 25% of the companies that have the Unicorn Status have been either acquired or went public so they are technically beyond the unicorn stage but we still want to know what they will become and it is important to identify that they were unicorns at one point. 3) We also want to know which unicorns got sold below market like Gilt or Fab and which company is going under and we also want to track companies like Facebook or Alibaba who are now worth several US$ 100 billion. 4) Facebook, Zalando and LinkedIn did receive US$ 1Billion dollar valuation while private. Palantir is a Decacorn as well. Skyscanner is now a unicorn but we only saw a press announcement of this status in 1/2016; 5) We don’t expect to be fully exhaustive at this point and people have pointed 14 unicorns that we hadn’t identified and we are in the process of adding them to the landscape. SpaceX is part of the landscape already and we are checking for Tesla. Google never reached the US$ 1 Billion valuation while private so isn’t part of the unicorn. I hope this helps and let me know if you have any questions. I would be happy to answer.

This article is full of incorrect data: Etsy and Groupon are already public. Instagram, Whatsapp acquired by Facebook, Yammer by Microsoft.

The industry definition of a unicorn: a non public company, that took less then 10 years to have a market value of over $1B. Which is why - ironically - the company I work at, Skyscanner is never listed as a unicorn on any of these lists. This is because it took them 11 years to reach the >$1B valuation mark.

Disappointed with the quality of this Venturebeat article.

I agree with you! Zalando went public in October 2014. Hudson’s Bay has agreed to acquire Gilt Groupe for $250 million in cash. PCH International acquired Fab for an undisclosed sum...

For reference the market cap of all US publicly traded companies is about $19T [1]. Including names like Apple, Google, Amazon... Still funny name as "startup" those $1.3T companies.

[1] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-the-map-of-the-world-...

Wouldn't Tesla and SpaceX count as decacorns? This infographic is infuriatingly low-res, so I can't even tell if they're here.

Higher resolution images on that page would be nice. So we can actually see who the unicorns are!

CA is the best nurturer in the world!They provide the best culture and atmosphere. In my country (Singapore), people are less willing to think out of the box. A lot of citizens obey the old rules. This slower the pace of innovation in my country. I hope people can see the possibility of finding new solutions!