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Thanks for subscribing to Trendline. Happy 2023 to all of you!

Today, we are looking at the world’s largest Unicorns (startups with >$1B valuation)

WSJ reported (Link) recently that OpenAI - the company behind viral AI tech like ChatGPT, Dall-E etc., is looking to sell shares at a valuation of $29B (😲)

That makes OpenAI, the 10th most valuable startup in the world.

Private companies valuations can be tough to gauge if they haven’t raised recently.

Nevertheless, I collated info from public media reports to make the infographic below of 10 largest Unicorns globally.

Over last 12-18 months, valuation of some of these companies has been marked down from their peak, but some others are still due for a correction:

• SpaceX and OpenAI are currently in talks to price their equity, and Fanatics raised recently in Dec-22

• Epic Games (creator of Fortnite) raised in April 2022

• Shein, ByteDance (Creator of TikTok), Stripe and Databricks have already written down their peak valuations. Some recent reports show that ByteDance will likely be further marked down (Link)

• Revolut and Canva last raised in 2021 and are due for a correction (Note: one of Canva’s investor - Blackbird, has already written down their stake in Canva by 36% (Link)

While there are many impressive companies on this list, OpenAI really stands out

1. Together with Revolut, its the youngest company in the list

2. It has very few employees. Less than 500 according to most sources.

3. It has managed to raise in a very tough environment for tech companies

4. It has very little revenue - though the company projects to hit $1B revenue by 2024 (Link)

Next few years promise to be very interesting for OpenAI and other AI tech companies.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! 👋