Meet the unicorns: 5 NC startups valued above $1 billion, with three in Triangle
In the business world, a unicorn is a private startup that achieves a valuation of more than $1 billion. North Carolina now has five such businesses according to a report on Southeastern startups released Wednesday by the Atlanta-based venture capital firm Panoramic Ventures.
Cary’s Epic Games far and away leads the pack with a valuation of $31.5 billion. The creator of Fortnite raised $2 billion last spring from Sony and the Lego Group’s parent company Kirkbi, which Epic said it will put towards building up its kid-friendly metaverse.
The second largest unicorn in the Triangle, and the state as a whole, is Pendo, which helps clients collect data on how customers use their products. The Raleigh-based business is valued at $2.6 billion and has discussed future plans to go public (though those plans are on hold).
North Carolina doesn’t have the most unicorns in the American South: Florida is home to 13 and Georgia has eight. And overall, the region has seen a tremendous rise in startup investments in the past decade, Panoramic Ventures found, with funding jumping from $3.1 billion in 2012 to more than $19 billion last year.
“That strong momentum has continued into 2022,” the report reads. “Barring unforeseen events, 2022 looks to at least match, if not exceed, 2021 numbers.”
Jupiter(One) rising
The Triangle’s newest unicorn is JupiterOne, a Morrisville company that helps businesses secure their cloud-based systems from cyberattacks. Last spring, JupiterOne topped the $1 billion threshold after securing an additional $70 million in funding.
JupiterOne was formed in 2018 by Erkang Zheng, a North Carolina State University graduate who spoke with The News & Observer in June about his company’s meteoric growth.
“It was just less than two years ago, actually, when we had our first round of fundraising, and we were tiny — we were nothing and our valuation was nothing,” Zheng said.
The two other North Carolina unicorns are Tresata and Printful, both Charlotte-based companies valued at $1 billion according to Panoramic Ventures.
In recent years, two Triangle companies have lost their status as unicorns due to acquisitions: In 2019, Raleigh’s open-source software firm Red Hat was acquired by IBM for $34 billion. A year later, the Chapel Hill gene-therapy company AskBio was bought by the pharmaceutical giant Bayer for $4 billion.
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.
This story was originally published October 12, 2022 at 1:50 PM with the headline "Meet the unicorns: 5 NC startups valued above $1 billion, with three in Triangle."
