Despite recent surges in the valuations of generative artificial intelligence company OpenAI and Elon Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX, ByteDance remains the world’s highest-valued company, according to CB Insights’ complete list of unicorn companies. is a unicorn with a valuation of $225 billion. In January 2024, OpenAI ranked 10th on the list and has seen its internal valuation more than double since then, while the rest of the top eight companies have seen only modest movement since the beginning of the year.
The rest of the top list is made up of companies from the apparel (Shein and Fanatics), fintech (Stripe and Revolut), and software (Databricks) sectors. OpenAI and Databricks are the only companies focused on AI, but ByteDance has also recently focused on generative artificial intelligence. Following in the footsteps of Western companies such as Meta and Alphabet, the company launched a large suite of language models in May this year under the brand name Doubao, according to media reports. This will likely further cement its position as the world’s most respected unicorn.
The term unicorn refers to a company that is not traded on any stock exchange and at the same time has a valuation of more than $1 billion. There are currently approximately 1,200 such companies worldwide, according to CB Insights data. CrunchBase lists 1,549 such companies, including Alibaba’s fintech arm Ant Group and Reliance Retail, a subsidiary of India-based multinational conglomerate Reliance Industries. This includes Reliance Jio.
CB Insights’ exclusion of these three companies may be related to the fact that the parent company is listed, even though the shares of the mentioned subsidiaries are not available on the stock exchange. The use of the term startup for such companies is also questionable. That’s because the term is typically reserved for small companies that rely on external funding, and not for companies like SpaceX, ByteDance, or, more recently, OpenAI.
The latter is rapidly moving up the ranks not only in terms of valuation, but also in terms of revenue. The company’s annual revenue doubled to $3.4 billion from the end of 2023 to June 2024, according to CEO Sam Altman’s comments at an internal meeting reported by The Information.
