How many unicorns are just ponies now? – Nob6

An investor in Instacart, Capital Group, has repriced its shares in the company, lowering its estimation of the value of the online grocery delivery service. The news follows other, similar repricings by companies like Fidelity, which also own a stake in the decacorn.

It’s really not surprising that one more investor agrees Instacart’s 2021 valuation was too hot. It filed to go public in May a couple months after a new 409a valuation reduced its own internal valuation.

The scale of the repricing, however, is leaving us scratching our heads. If Instacart, which was able to raise aggressively during the pandemic, is actually worth a fraction of what investors calculated last year, what about other unicorns? How many billion-dollar startups aren’t worth that much today? More simply, how many unicorns have now effectively been dehorned ahead of their next funding rounds?

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This question is important, because we often note the sheer number of unicorns, and their value, in the market. Crunchbase, for example, counts 1,372 unicorns today worth some $4.6 trillion. For reference, tech’s big five (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet) are worth just under $6 trillion today.