The World's Most Valuable Startups

As most investors know, startups are relatively new businesses, usually on the search for a scalable model. Most commonly, these companies have less than 50 employees, and are valued at less than $1 billion. However, a few of them are worth considerably more.

The Wall Street Journal lists startups valued at $1 billion or more by venture-capital firms. The current list includes 108 companies, which they call “Unicorns;” most are based in the United States (72) or Asia, while only nine of them are based out of Europe.

In an article published Tuesday on Statista, Data Journalist Mathias Brandt looked into the world's most valuable startups as of August 2015, as ranked by the Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones VentureSource. The list “includes companies that are privately held, have raised money in the past four years and has at least one venture-capital firm as an investor.”

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As the graph above illustrates, Uber, the famed and disruptive five-year-old startup that runs an app that matches drivers with users looking for a ride (providing a sort of private taxi service), remains the world's most valuable startup. After its latest round of funding, Uber is worth roughly $50 billion. Second in line is Chinese electronics maker Xiaomi, with a value of approximately $46 billion, trailed by the lodging rent out site Airbnb, worth $25.5 billion.

List Leaders

Completing the top five are software and services company Palantir ($20 billion) and the popular conversation app, Snapchat ($16 billion). Also included in this list are Elon Musk’s SpaceX ($12 billion), Pinterest ($11 billion) and Dropbox ($10 billion).

Image Credit: Public Domain