A private company valued at over US$1bn, unicorn companies have become a celebrated part of the technology world over the past decade.
A unicorn company refers to a privately held startup that has reached a valuation of over US$1bn. The term was coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee in 2013, drawing an analogy to the rarity of such companies, akin to the mythical creature, the unicorn. These companies are often seen as highly successful and innovative, attracting significant attention from investors, the media and the business community. Examples of unicorn companies include Uber, Airbnb and SpaceX.
From visual collaboration platforms helping change the way the world works to companies pioneering breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, Technology Magazine shines a spotlight on the Top 10 unicorn companies in the enterprise tech world, sorted by their most recent valuation.
10: Airtable
Valuation: US$11.7bn
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
CEO: Howie Liu
Based in San Francisco, California, Airtable’s platform enables any team – regardless of technical skill – to create apps on top of shared data and power their most critical and unique workflows.
Founded in 2012 by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas, Airtable says its technology is relied upon by more than 80% of the Fortune 100. With its next-generation app platform, teams can easily design and deploy flexible and engaging apps that power critical workflows and make valuable data actionable across the enterprise.
9: Deel
Valuation: US$12bn
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
CEO: Alex Bouaziz
Founded with the mission to empower companies to eliminate hiring borders, Deel is one of the world’s fastest-growing SaaS companies and helps tens of thousands of companies expand globally with unmatched speed, flexibility and compliance. The company’s all-in-one Global People Platform simplifies the way organisations onboard, offboard, and everything else in between.
Co-founded by MIT graduates Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang, Deel is built to scale with organisations of all sizes, from small teams to enterprises like Shopify, Nike, Klarna and Cloudflare.
8: Bitmain Technologies
Valuation: US$12bn
Headquarters: Beijing, China
CEO: Jihan Wu
Since its foundation in 2013, mining-chip giant Bitmain has been the world's leading manufacturer of digital currency mining servers, serving customers across over 100 countries and regions. The company's R&D centre is situated in Singapore, and it has multiple branches and subsidiaries across the globe including Hong Kong, the US, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, the UAE, Lithuania and Paraguay.
With a core vision of creating a better digital world, BITMAIN provides superior hash-rate efficiency technologies, contributing to the ongoing innovation and development of Web 3.0.
7: Brex
Valuation: US$12.3bn
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
CEO: Henrique Dubugras
Brex is the AI-powered spend platform for modern companies, from startups to enterprises. Combining corporate cards, expense management, travel, business accounts and bill pay, Brex makes it easy to control spend before it happens with unprecedented efficiency and accuracy.
Founded by Brazilian entrepreneur Henrique Dubugras, Brex has tens of thousands of customers, including some of the most successful, high-growth companies, such as DoorDash, SeatGeek, Coinbase, ScaleAI, MasterClass, Indeed, Allbirds and Superhuman. Its mission is to empower employees anywhere to make better financial decisions.
6: Celonis
Valuation: US$13bn
Headquarters: Munich, Germany
CEO: Alexander Rinke & Bastian Nominacher
Since 2011, Celonis has helped thousands of the world’s largest and most esteemed companies yield immediate cash impact, radically improve customer experience and reduce carbon emissions. Its Process Intelligence platform uses industry-leading process mining technology and AI to present companies with a living digital twin of their end-to-end processes.
Celonis’ solution enables organisations to have a common language for how the business runs, visibility into where value is hiding, and the ability to capture it. Celonis is headquartered in Munich, Germany and New York City, USA with more than 20 offices worldwide.
5: Anthropic
Valuation: US$16.05bn
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
CEO: Dario Amodei
With heavy investment from Amazon and Google, Anthropic is the developer of Claude, a rival chatbot to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Founded by Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s former VP of Research, and his sister, Daniela Amodei, who was OpenAI’s VP of Safety and Policy in 2021, the company has also received funding from Salesforce and Zoom.
It recently announced the latest iteration of its Claude tool, Claude 3, which is capable of answering more questions and understanding longer instructions, while meeting the company’s commitment to responsible AI.
4: Miro
Valuation: US$17.5bn
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
CEO: Andrey Khusid
Founded in 2011 by Andrey Khusid, Miro’s collaborative online platform is designed to facilitate visual collaboration and creative brainstorming, allowing teams to collaborate in real time.
Miro provides a vast array of templates, tools, and integrations to streamline various processes such as brainstorming, project management, user story mapping, and design thinking. Today, more than 60 million users in 200,000 organisations including Nike, IKEA, Deloitte, WPP, and Cisco depend on Miro to improve product development collaboration.
3: Canva
Valuation: US$25.4bn
Headquarters: Sydney, Australia
CEO: Melanie Perkins
Online visual communication platform Canva is one of the world's biggest privately owned companies. Launched in 2013, more than 135 million people around the world use Canva to unlock their creativity and achieve their goals.
Founded by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams on the belief that design shouldn't be complex, more than 15 billion designs have since been created at a rate of more than 200 new designs every second. The company is based in Australia with offices and teams around the world.
2: Databricks
Valuation: US$43bn
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
CEO: Ali Ghodsi
A leader in data and artificial intelligence, Databricks combines the best of data warehouses and data lakes to offer an open and unified platform for data and AI.
With origins in academia and the open-source community, Databricks was founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow. Today, the company has reached decacorn status and has established several recent partnerships to boost AI and data innovation.
More than 9,000 organisations worldwide — including ABN AMRO, Condé Nast, Regeneron and Shell — rely on Databricks to enable massive-scale data engineering, collaborative data science, full-lifecycle machine learning and business analytics.
Headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the world and hundreds of global partners, including Microsoft, Amazon, Tableau, Informatica, Capgemini and Booz Allen Hamilton, Databricks is on a mission to simplify and democratise data and AI, helping data teams solve the world’s toughest problems.
1: OpenAI
Valuation: US$80bn
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
CEO: Sam Altman
OpenAI is one of the most influential companies today, with its innovations helping rapidly change the world of generative AI (Gen AI).
Formed in October 2015, OpenAI continues to lead in the field of Gen AI development and research. In June 2020, it announced GPT-3, a language model trained on trillions of words from the Internet. The company’s release of ChatGPT in late 2022, initially as a research preview, has rapidly accelerated interest in Gen AI, with the tool capable of interacting conversationally, answering follow-up questions, admitting its mistakes, challenging incorrect premises and rejecting inappropriate requests.
Following previous investments in 2019 and 2021, in January 2023 Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, intended to accelerate AI breakthroughs. The technology giant reportedly holds a 49% stake in OpenAI.
In March 2023 OpenAI announced the launch of GPT-4, the latest iteration in its deep learning model, which it says ‘exhibits human-level performance’ on various professional and academic benchmarks from the US bar exam to SAT school exams.
In February 2024 it was reported that the company had reached the US$2bn revenue milestone, with valuing the San Francisco-based startup at more than US$80bn.
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