Unicorn
TLDR
A private company valued at over one billion US dollars.
Definition
A unicorn is a privately held company with a valuation above one billion US dollars, as measured at its most recent priced equity round. The term was coined by Aileen Lee in 2013 to describe how rare this class of company was at the time; the label has since become a standard industry category despite being far more common now.
Why it matters
Unicorn status matters less as a technical threshold and more as a signal. It indicates that the company has cleared the bar where traditional public-market investors take notice, where cross-border talent becomes recruitable, and where acquisition offers become strategic rather than tactical.
Belgium has a small set of companies that have reached this bar, including Collibra (data governance) and Odoo (open-source business software). Both are reference points for the next generation of Belgian scale-ups.
Mechanism
A unicorn valuation is set by a priced equity round where investors agree to a price per share implying a post-money valuation above one billion dollars. The valuation is a paper number until the company exits; many unicorns have later marked down valuations significantly in down rounds or secondary transactions.
Related
- Parent: Scale-Up Stage
- Sibling: Venture Capital - the funding path that typically produces unicorns
- Related: Open Core (Odoo is an example), B2B SaaS (Collibra is an example)