What is a unicorn company?
In venture capital, a unicorn company is a privately-held startup company that is valued at more than $1 billion. It’s a term that’s become common in the investing community.
In 2019 there were 354 active unicorn companies globally building on the previous year’s high of 348. By the end of 2019, there were 439 active unicorn companies, including 139 new startups. In 2020, 162 new companies around the world achieved unicorn status, putting the total number of active unicorn companies at 538. 2021 saw a staggering 355 new unicorn companies and ended the year with an active total of 537 companies, almost the same as the year prior.
Stories from the champions in Unicorn Companies
Gelato
In April 2020, Gelato, a company providing services to e-commerce companies, became Estonia’s eigth (and Norway’s ninth) unicorn. Gelato’s platform, with over 100 production partners in 32 countries, helps e-commerce companies link to producers close to the location of purchasers. One of the company’s founders, Mike Arbuzov, is from Estonia and Gelato also has a company registered in Estonia.
ID.me: exporting the main idea behind Estonia’s digital success
Digital ID-s are a big thing in the United States with millions of dollars invested in the identification businesses; one of the most recent success stories being ID.me. The company is valued at 1.4 – 1.6 B U.S dollars after its latest funding round that included participation from CapitalG, the independent growth fund of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc.
If you are a Californian and log on remotely to update your address or change a registration with the local DMV, there’s a good chance you’re using ID.me. And you are not the only one as the number of people using this service is growing rapidly with about a million users added every two weeks.
ID.me was founded in 2010 as TroopSwap, a military-focused solution verifying U.S Armed Forces veterans for discounts. The Estonian co-founder and CTO Tanel Suurhans came on board in 2013 – and this was the time when things started to change towards the ID.me we know today. What co-founder Suurhans brought along besides great technical skills and experience from various software projects in Estonia (including planning and executing the modernization of the largest digital content management and publishing platform used in the Baltics), was the real-life experience of using secure digital identity and e-signatures, solutions that are natural to Estonians and can be considered the key cornerstones of e-Estonia. And naturally this proved useful when co-founding a service such as ID.me.
Playtech: becoming world’s largest online gaming software supplier
Playtech is the world’s largest online gaming software supplier, founded in Tartu, the second largest city of Estonia, in 1999. The mastermind behind the start of Playtech was Cypriot-Israeli entrepreneur Teddy Sagi that wanted to bring together the best minds from gaming, technology, and multimedia to create a company without a rival. Naturally he chose Estonia for the company’s location.
It only took two years for Sagi and his team to launch the company’s first casino – but this was just the beginning as several technology and media usage trends were taken advantage of on the way, innovating the way online gaming software is run through and through.
Just over two decades later, Playtech is on the FTSE 250 Index and listed on the London Stock Exchange. Playtech now owns over 300 gaming brands, has more than 150 global licensees and runs its offices in 19 countries around the world.
