A Unicorn is a company valued by at least 1 Billion USD. I built a python gradio app that visualizes the relationships between venture capital firms and invested companies using CB Insights Data from September 2024. I was able to show the dominance of the top 5 Venture capital firms Y Combinator, Accel, Venrock, and Andreeseen Horowitz owning companies with an aggregate valuation > $500 Billion USD!
Private valuations can be misleading because unicorns routinely go bankrupt(for example Convoy) much more than mature, public companies. Private company investors might be slow to "mark down their investment value" if the value of the company has recently dropped. No one likes to look bad, and having to mark down your company's value is not enforced in private markets as it is in public markets where the value of a company follows closely its listed price on stock indices.
The key takeaway from this data visualization exercise is that few firms dominate most sectors. Companies like SpaceX, Bytedance(Ticktok) and Databricks make up a significant fraction of all private companies in terms of market value. san Francisco is the King of Enterprise Software and California is much larger than all other states combined in terms of the number and aggregate valuation of private unicorns.
One key limitation of the Python gradio app is that it doesn't render well on Mobile, with the network diagrams overlapping too much. To solve this, I built a new version using React, which renders much better on mobile. This app serves two purposes:
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For job hunters, it identifies companies with strong product-market fit backed by reputable investors to target in their job search
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For startup founders, it highlights which investors support competitors, enabling refined pitch strategies.
Filters
- Country
- Industry
- Companies
- Investors
- Valuation Range (in billions)
- 1–5
- 5–10
- 10–15
- 15–20
- 20+
