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What downturn? 11 companies became unicorns in Q1

At the end of the rainbow, you'll find a unicorn made of solid gold.

Image Credit: Bitterjug via photopin cc

With no IPOs taking place in the first quarter of 2016, much attention is now focused on unicorns. Will they be able to maintain their billion dollar valuations, or will they would be picked off one at a time, succumbing to valuation markdowns and volatile public markets?

Even with a healthy resetting of many tech company valuations underway, eleven firms attained unicorn status in Q1 and had a combined worth of more than $21 billion, according to VB Profiles. The incoming unicorns are diverse, ranging from Anaplan,an enterprise business platform which may be eyeing an IPO, to Dada, a Chinese mobile application company that focuses on providing last mile logistics services, to Africa’s first unicorn, the Africa Internet Group, which runs Jumia, the continent’s largest ecommerce company.

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Of note is the companies’ Funding To Valuation index, which is calculated by dividing their worth by the amount of funding prior to their unicorn valuation. This can help gauge how much of a company’s unicorn value is genuine as opposed to being “pumped up” by late stage funding. (Disclosure: VB Profiles is a cooperative effort between VentureBeat and Spoke Intelligence.)

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Source: VB Profiles

These new unicorns, backed by fresh capital and strong internal rates of return, join the ranks of more than 200 other companies which VB Profiles estimated were backed by $175 billion in funding and whose combined values topped $1.3 trillion at the end of 2015.

A high resolution of The Unicorn Club landscape is available here.

 

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