- Supercell sold 81.4% stake to Tencent in 2018 with a valuation of $10.2 billion.
- Wolt was acquired by DoorDash in 2021 with a valuation of $8.1 billion.
The list is much longer with startups that currently generate revenues of tens or hundreds of millions in a year that have not been sold.
The exits were somewhat less exciting to founders than these numbers suggest. Supercell sold 51% to SoftBank already in 2013 for 1.1B EUR. And Wolt’s purchase price was paid entirely in DoorDash stock which was down 75% by the time the lockups expired.
Startups generating low-hundreds of millions in annual revenue just aren’t unicorns anymore, unless they happen to be AI.
There's plenty of interesting and fast growing startups still left here. For example Supermetrics, Varjo, Smartly, Iceye, Aiven to name a few. IMO you are being pessimistic.
The start of the startup investment pipeline in Finland has been flowing pretty well. The outputs at the end of the pipeline have been more questionable. Silo’s acquisition is a positive example of activity at that end.
$665M USD isn't a staggering number by Silicon Valley standards, but it's very significant for a nation of five million people that hasn't seen global startup successes like neighboring Sweden with Spotify and others.
[1] The actual level of depression is somewhat hard to track because Finns are always pessimistic regardless of how well they're doing. (This also makes them the happiest people on Earth in polls. The situation right now is never quite as bad as one had expected beforehand, so when a pollster calls to ask, the conclusion must be that they're pretty happy with things overall at that specific moment, but surely everything is going in the wrong direction anyway.)