Which Funds Catch American Unicorns Early?
Like everyone else blabbering on about unicorns, I catch myself reading the posts, too — and many LPs I talk to often just want to know, “How many unicorns do you have?” I’m partially joking, but it’s directionally true. These are the companies which drive the outsized returns. However, I wanted to ask a slightly modified question and see what public data sources would reveal. I wanted to focus on America, on consumer companies that have grown to a $1Bn of private market value since 2008., and specifically on the institutions which were able to invest relatively early — not later stage investors. Here’s the list I came up with, based on a conversation on Twitter. (Disclaimer: Please let me know if I missed any company or fund, happy to amend this!)
Since 2008, the following consumer-facing companies (U.S. HQ’d only) have been formed and reached a private market valuation of at least $1Bn. I’ve also included the only the institutional funds (even if small) who were in the round before a $100M pre-money valuation, give or take, based on public sources — note, 1) I may have not listed a fund, so please correct me if I need to, and 2) I am not listing individuals:
Uber / Lowercase, Benchmark, Structure, Founder Collective, Kapor, First Round, *AngelList
Pinterest / Bessemer, FirstMark, High Line
Whatsapp / Sequoia
Instagram / Baseline, a16z, Benchmark, Lowercase
Waze / BlueRun, Magma, Vertex
Oculus / *Kickstarter, Formation8, Spark, Matrix, Founders Fund, Big Ventures
Nest / Shasta, Kleiner Perkins
Tinder / none (*Benchmark now on BoD)
Living Social / Revolution, Grotech, USVP, Lightspeed
Groupon / NEA, Accel, SV Angel
Houzz / Advent, Sequoia
Square / Khosla, First Round, SV Angel
Snapchat / SV Angel, Lightspeed, Benchmark
Wish / XG Ventures, Caffeinated, Felicis, Digital Garage, CRV, AME Cloud, Formation 8, GGV
Instacart / Y Combinator, Khosla, Canaan, Sequoia, *Funders Club
Tango / Hambrecht
Assuming this list and rundown is true, what can we glean from it? Well, no surprise, Benchmark and Sequoia are both early and swinging big; First Round and SV Angel caught a few, as did Khosla and Lowercase, then there’s actually plenty to go around for the rest, as many firms have one — and two companies above were actually part of crowdfunding platforms (while one was on Kickstarter, but no equity was sold there). Finally, consumer is what grabs everyone’s attention and what the tech and popular media focus on, but relative to enterprise & B2B startups, there are just fewer consumer companies (16 since 2008, by this case in the U.S.) that reach $1B status — however, the total market cap of the consumer companies is much larger, hence our collective obsession and fascination of tracking such things. Oh, and LPs care, too 😉 By the way, if I only started counting from 2010 onward, the list for consumer would drop from 15 to only 10, and a good portion of them have been acquired already. Of course, there are many more in the pipeline, and if I checked on this list in a year, there will be more.
