Looking for new clients or a new business sector to pitch your freelance services to? Then one of the most effective ways to beat the competition is knowing where to look.
What are unicorns?
Unicorns are companies valued at $US1bn, which make them good starting places for freelancers looking for new clients or project types. They are no longer cash strapped startups, but rather growing fast and economically sound.
One such place to start your unicorn job search is on Crunchbase News, which is launching The Crunchbase Emerging Unicorn Board, a curated list of startups on the path to “achieving billion-dollar valuations” also known as unicorn status.
The companies profiled will all be private and valued at $500 million or more, but less than $1 billion.
The good thing is that the Emerging Unicorn Board is continuously updated. The board currently hosts more than 300 companies, but Crunchbase said it believes there are many more companies that should be added to this pre-unicorn list. That’s good news for job-seeking freelancers and project contractors.
Another way to keep track of companies that are growing is to track the most active venture capital firms invested in unicorn startups, the industries they work in and the countries that are home to the most unicorns. According to Crunchbase these include:
- Most active investors: Accel tops the list as the most active investor in emerging unicorns by funding rounds, with 69 rounds. Andreessen Horowitz and GV follow, each with 48 funding rounds in this current crop of emerging unicorns. Tiger Global and Lightspeed Venture Partners round out the top five most active investors with 46 and 44 investments, respectively.
- Leading industries: The leading industries for emerging unicorns mirror trends we find for unicorn companies overall. Financial services, commerce and shopping, and data and analytics are among the leading sectors for emerging unicorn companies.
- Leading countries: The US dominates the emerging unicorn list with 158 companies on this board. India has the second-highest count with 31 companies, and China with 26.
Already, more than 50 companies have joined the Emerging Unicorn list in 2022. The most recent of these include:
- London-based trade finance platform Stenn;
- Sunnyvale, California-based reality display company DigiLens;
- Tel Aviv-based cloud security company Coronet;
- Boston-based contract management platform LinkSquares; and
- San Francisco-based decentralized finance company Parallel Finance.
Which unicorns are hiring in London? (google.com)
Other companies to watch include:
Former emerging unicorns Pensando, Wealthfront and The Athletic were all acquired for prices above their most-recent private valuations. And despite a challenging IPO market, Forge, Lepu Bio and Knightscope all went public.
Berlin-based Choco, a supply chain ordering platform for restaurants, meanwhile, recently exited the emerging list to join The Crunchbase Unicorn Board.
