Some time ago, in November 2013, the founder of the successful venture capital firm CowboyVC, Aileen Lee, began to popularize the word “unicorn” -a term referring to companies or startups that achieve a valuation of some US$1 billion or more during their growth stages-.
However, in 2015, when unicorn companies became more common, a Business Insider article first referred toturn to the decacorns, that is, private equity firms that are worth more than $10 billion and stand out from the rest of the unicorns. Its prefix “deca” of Greek origin means “ten”.
The existence of the decacorns is due to the great explosive growth of scientific-technologically based enterprises at a global level.
According to data from the platform specialized in business analysis, CB Insights, there are currently 36 decacorns in the worldamong which stand out: inTech Stripe; Uber transportation platforms; Didi; the social network Pinterest; the common workplace network WeWork; and the online gaming platform Epic Games.
In Latin America we also have two well-known decacorns: MercadoLibre, the Argentine e-commerce platform, which reached this category in 2017; and Nubank, the Brazilian fintech that created a “neobank” with an international card backed by Mastercard that has no annual fees or commissions.
Entrepreneur Roberto Musso, expert in entrepreneurship and innovation and president of Digevo, explains that the denomination of decacorn is due to the explosive growth of venture capital -risk capital- around the world. According to CB Insights, At the end of 2021 there were already 959 unicorns, so it was necessary to differentiate the most explosive and already mature and consolidated ones.
“In the end, these are labels that are put on companies to make them showy, but the sign underneath is that something very big is happening at an economic level thanks to digitization,” says Musso.
Digevo’s president says that another reason why this term was coined is because of the high liquidity in the market, in addition to a business model already tested by venture capital investors, so the Growth in valuations has been explosive.
Some potential decacorns according to the digital group are: Rappi, in the Colombian region; Kavak, a Mexican car sales platform; Bitso, the cryptocurrency fintech; and the Chilean NotCo, a foodtech that develops foods for mass consumption from plant products.
The Chronicler – RIPE
