China's ByteDance leads world's largest unicorns

Beijing Byte Dance Telecommunications Co. Ltd. is the world's most valuable unicorn with a post-money valuation of $180.0 billion, data from S&P Global Market Intelligence shows.

A unicorn is a privately held company valued at more than $1 billion.

OpenAI LLC developer of the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, ranks second with a valuation of $157.0 billion. Ant Group Co. Ltd. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. round out the four unicorns with a valuation exceeding $100 billion.

Among top unicorns, ByteDance, which owns the TikTok Inc. social media platform, is also the largest by head count. The company employs 19,486, according to Market Intelligence data as of Feb. 13. Head count grew consistently as the company raised more capital.

"Head count growth in a unicorn company is generally in anticipation of, or in response to, significant market demand," Conor Moore, head of private enterprise at KPMG, told Market Intelligence in an emailed statement.

"If a company's market offering is gaining significant traction, companies will likely significantly increase its sales and marketing efforts to further accelerate revenues. If a company believes it has a game-changing technology that will gain significant traction upon launch, it will likely be hiring large numbers of engineers. Both of these circumstances can also be a function of need for speed to market and gaining an advantage over competitors," Moore said.

Research and development staff comprised the largest portion of the head count until 2016, according to Market Intelligence data. Notably, while the proportion of R&D head count to total head count was decreasing, sales and marketing head count was growing. The largest portion of sales and marketing was in 2019 at 21%.

As of 2024, R&D accounts for 30% and sales and marketing accounts for 13% of the total head count. Titles that are not descriptive enough to assign a specific role comprised about 33% of the head count.

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Unicorns across the globe

North America had the largest number of unicorns, totaling 748. These companies have an aggregate post-money valuation of $3.144 trillion.

Next is Asia-Pacific with 435 total unicorns worth $2.423 trillion. Europe has 241 unicorn companies collectively valued at $894.38 billion.