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China’s Zhongguancun, a high-tech business hub in Beijing, released its 2015 report on the unicorn club on Feb. 29.
A unicorn is generally defined as a privately held startup that has a $1 billion valuation – something rare, just like a unicorn.
American seed investor Aileen Lee coined the Silicon Valley term “unicorn” in a TechCrunch article "Welcome to the Unicorn Club: Learning from Billion-Dollar Startups" as profiled in a New York Times article.
Since Aug. of 2015, Beijing Changcheng Institution for Enterprise Strategy has been searching for unicorns and aims to set up unicorn models to push forward innovative development.
Altogether 40 enterprises qualified as unicorns after the institute analyzed the data from all reviewed enterprises.
Under the criteria only Zhongguancun-registered unlisted companies worth $1 billion with a history of less than ten years and receiving private equity investment are eligible.
Statistics show that most of the unicorns were founded after 2010 and that they underwent vigorous development at the initial stage.
Of the 40 unicorns, three of them are valued at over 10 billion dollars, including Xiaomi, the Beijing-based smartphone maker, Meituan-Dianping, China's largest online-to-offline company, and Didi Kuaidi, China's largest mobile-based taxi-hailing platform.
