Day: November 15, 2023

Battery Ventures’ OpenCloud 2023 report included this chart of private unicorns (more than 1000) vs software IPOs in the last ten years (176).

Some thoughts:

• The unicorns are at last round valuation (often from 2020-2021). Public cross-over investors like Fidelity has already written down the valuations of highly valued companies like Reddit and Discord. I.e. many unicorns at last round valuation really aren’t unicorns today.
• Many unicorns were unicorns in name and structure (i.e preference shares and other terms) only, not in performance (with something like $50+ million in revenue/ARR, good gross margins and strong growth required)
• Many startups that build great products and grow revenue fast to $50-100 million and beyond will remain unicorns and become even more highly valued

Battery Ventures’ OpenCloud 2023 report has some interesting benchmarks for startups. Nothing completely new, but data points on e.g. ARR Growth, cost ratios for Sales & Marketing, Research & Development and General & Administrative as well as Magic Number and Burn Ratio.