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Saturday, January 27, 2024

It was 2015 when Fortune first wrote a cover story about the rare, high-flying startups that had managed to scoop up more than $1 billion in the private markets. At the time, there were only 80 of these companies.

Flash forward to today, and there are more than 1,200 of them. That’s thanks to a decade of low interest rates, successful IPOs, and enticing venture capital returns. Tack on to that the pandemic-induced tech boom in 2020 and the extraordinary $2 trillion stimulus.

But everything has changed in the last two years. Macroeconomic forces like rising interest rates and war around the globe have refashioned every link in the chain of the startup ecosystem. And those changes are now rippling through the private markets in what has turned into a reckoning for startups—and especially for Silicon Valley’s most elite and prized darlings: the unicorns.

A handful of these unicorn darlings have already shut down and called it quits. But most of the pullback has been quietly playing out behind the scenes. Until now.

You can read the story here.

Jan. 25, 2024

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