If the current pace of exits persists, it would take 30 years for every U.S. company on The Crunchbase Unicorn Board to go public or be acquired.
That was the finding from an analysis of exits over the past year. And while it may sound disheartening, it’s actually an improvement since we last measured it nearly a year ago, when the unicorn backlog stood at 49 years.
Exit activity has picked up lately. Over the past year, 25 private, venture-backed companies valued at $1 billion or more 1 have gone public or gotten acquired, per Crunchbase data.
Some of these exits were very large
Two of these were enormous exits that came in the past couple months.
In the public market, we saw AI cloud infrastructure provider CoreWeave carry the largest tech IPO in years with its March debut. It’s performed well since, with shares up more than 20% from the initial price.
In the M&A market, meanwhile, Google announced in March that it plans to acquire cybersecurity unicorn Wiz for $32 billion, in what could rank as the priciest acquisition of a private, venture-backed startup ever. (The deal will require regulators’ approval, and has not yet closed.)
The past year also delivered a few other large exits, albeit of a smaller magnitude than CoreWeave and Wiz. On the IPO market, both precision medicine developer Tempus AI and home services provider platform ServiceTitan made their debuts this past year and were recently valued around $10 billion apiece.
Other exits were not so lucrative
Other exits did not appear to provide much in the way of returns.
Cybersecurity provider Noname Security, for instance, took a haircut from its peak valuation. The Silicon Valley company raised a Series C at a unicorn valuation in 2021 and sold to Akamai Technologies last summer in a deal valued around $450 million.
More recently, Candy Digital, a digital collectibles startup, sold to metaverse branding platform Futureverse last month. The price was not disclosed, but since Futureverse is not a unicorn, it’s probably safe to assume it’s not a unicorn-scale exit.
Waiting for more exits
For now, we’re waiting to see if more unicorns make it to exit. With the tech IPO market mostly frozen at the moment, public markets likely won’t be providing returns in the near term. However, optimists are still open to the idea of a pickup in new offering activity late this year, or early next year.
As for M&A, large-cap tech acquirers certainly have the cash for unicorn-scale acquisitions. Whether they’ll choose to part with that cash, however, remains to be seen.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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