With Productboard Valuation, Number Of Unicorns Hits 1,000

There are now 1,000 companies that can be considered “unicorns,” meaning startups now worth $1 billion or more, according to a Bloomberg report Wednesday (Feb. 9).

Per data from CB Insights, the 1,000th on record is Productboard, a California product management company which recently got new funding valuing it at $1.7 billion.

The term “unicorn,” Bloomberg notes, comes from a decade ago when startups worth that much were much rarer, something the article terms that “only the luckiest of founders and investors would ever glimpse with their own eyes.”

But with a thousand companies gaining the distinction, Bloomberg writes that things are changing and that this is all proof of the private markets being “overheated.” The report says that part of this might come from the change in the world to a more digital way of living — software companies are becoming more valuable, and things like Amazon Web Services make it easier to start a tech business.

While companies worth what many of the more valuable unicorns are — such as ByteDance, SpaceX and Stripe — could have gone public by now, entrepreneurs don’t feel as much of a need to do so because of the ease of raising money from private funders. Additionally, by staying private, they can avoid scrutiny and the loss of control that comes when companies become public.

Another company that recently became a unicorn was lending platform Happy Money, which recently attained a $1.1 billion valuation after a Series D-1 for $50 million.

See also: Lending Platform Happy Money Valued at $1.1B

CEO Jeff Winner said the funding showed the strength of the business and that it would likely continue to grow. He added that the funding would allow Happy Money to boost its development and expansion of products, including its end-to-end lending application programming interface (API).