Despite the global startup ecosystem still struggling to achieve gender parity among founders and CEOs, there is still a remarkable cohort of women building and running billion-dollar-valued companies. These leaders are demonstrating that women are not just activiely engaging in role within tech and business innovation, but are also leading valuable startups on a global level.
What Exactly Constitutes a Unicorn?
A “unicorn” is a privately held company that has a status and valuation of a billion dollars or more. As unicorns are fairly rare, each female-led unicorn is a prominent example of breaking the gender bias in entrepreneurship and venture capital.
What Industries Produce the Most Unicorns?
Unicorns are primarily found in software and tech driven industries like fintech, e-commerce, health tech and SaaS. These fields tend to have the ability to scale rapidly to serve global markets, which provides more opportunity to reach a billion-dollar valuation quickly. Other rising sectors are artificial intelligence, digital consumer platforms and green tech.
Can Small Markets Produce Unicorns?
Unicorns from small markets are possible but come with challenges such as restricted access to capital and small domestic markets. However, many small country unicorns such as Australia’s Canva and Israel’s Papaya Global have focused on targeting global markets. Small markets often have highly connected startup ecosystems and creative problem-solving, which, along with global expansion, can lead to the creation of billion-dollar companies regardless of geographic restrictions.
5 Female-Founded Unicorns
Female-led unicorns remain uncommon, often facing funding gaps and a male-dominated industry, which makes celebrating the remarkable accomplishments of these five women founders or co-founders all the more important:
1. Canva: Visual Creativity Platform
Canva, founded by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, has become one of the most successful global graphic design platforms. They provide millions of users with seamless and user-friendly graphic design software. With their most recent funding rounds, Canva has grown to be valued in the tens of billions, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world with a female tech co-founder.
2. Bumble: Dating Empowered By Women
Bumble is a dating and social networking app created by Whitney Wolfe Herd, who became the first female to take a tech unicorn public. Due to the app’s unique design in which a woman makes the first move, Bumble became a unicorn and reached a successful IPO with a valuation of almost $14 billion. Nowadays, Herd sits Chief Executive Officer of the company.
3. Papaya Global: Global Payroll and HR
Among the most prominent female-led SaaS unicorns, Eynat Guez co-founded Papaya Global, which is now a $3.7 billion cloud-based global payroll and human resources solution.
4. Chief: A Place For Executive Women to Connect
Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan co‑founded Chief, a private network aimed at supporting and connecting senior executive women. The company was valued at over $1 billion and in 2022, it reached ‘unicorn’ status.
5. Nykaa: Beauty and Commerce Powerhouse
Falguni Nayar founded Nykaa which is India’s number one beauty and lifestyle e-commerce platform. The company gained tremendous acclaim when it became the first Indian company with a solo female founder to become a unicorn after its highly successful IPO.
