The US and China share the world cup (5 and 4, respectively) with the Indian Flipkart as the last of the list. The 'unicorns' have received funding in excess of $ 1 billion.
The sharing economy is a hybrid market model in which the peer-to-peer sharing of access to goods and services occurs. Many such transactions are facilitated by a company who generally play the role of matching those providing a service or good and those requiring it. The economic performance of many such firms has been particularly impressive in recent years.
Unicorn is the nickname of those companies that have received more than $ 1 billion in financing from private investors. Without having left the stock market, they are often using technology revolution to develop a new product or service.
According to data coming from CB Insights through Statista, the US and Chinese companies are the ones that receive the most money. The ranking shows the clear American dominance, followed by the Chinese market. No Spanish company appears in the top 10 of the most financed startups in the world.
This statistic shows a ranking of startup companies valued at one billion U.S. dollars or more by venture-capital firms worldwide, as of December 2016. As of December 2016, Uber was valued at about 68 billion U.S. dollars by venture-capital firms, followed by China Xiaomi. Ride-sharing firm Uber increased their global gross booking volume from 2.93 billion U.S. dollars in 2014 to 3.63 billion in just the first half of 2015. Moreover, there is ample space for expansion as demonstrated in the United States where 33 percent of adults claimed to have never heard of ride-hailing apps in December 2015.
The performance of firms such as Uber and AirBnb (4th with 30 billions) goes some way to explaining the frequency of startups who seek to profit from some aspect of the global sharing economy. Moreover, the number of sharing economy users in the United States is set to increase to 40 million in 2020. A key factor in the success of startups will be their ability to gain access to customers from across a variety of age groups. Convincing people to abandon a traditional market model is a central challenge for such firms but as AirBnb have proven the payoffs can be enormous. The fact that 10 percent of those aged 50-64 in the United States had used online home-sharing services as of December 2015 compared with 11 percent for those ages 18 to 29 shows such market penetration is possible.
