Unicorn companies are heading to the Middle East

Pioneer Investors – Ahmed Al-Falasi, the UAE Minister of State for Entrepreneurship and Small and Medium Enterprises, at a conference in Dubai, said that UAE aims to attract 20 startups which are called “Unicorn Companies” by 2031.

Unicorn is a general term for privately owned startups that are valued at more than $1 billion.

“Unicorn” was used for the first time in 2013 by the American financial expert “Eileen Lee” for the Silicon Valley companies that made a huge leap and the value of their shares exceeded the billion-dollar barrier.

At that time, there were only 39 companies that fit this description. The number of unicorn companies in the world, according to “CB Insights”, reached about 603 companies last March.

The most prominent unicorn companies are Uber, Xiaomi, Dropbox, Pinterest, and Snapchat, and among the Arab companies are Souq.com and Careem. Some companies get out of this classification if their value increases, as happened with Uber and Xiaomi.