Is building a unicorn an overnight success, or is it a long-term endeavor? And how much does venture capital influence the timeline? To uncover the answers, the Stanford Graduate School of Business Venture Capital Initiative team and I analyzed the journeys of thousands of U.S. venture-backed companies. More than 1,500 of them became unicorns. Here’s what the data reveals.

For founders launching today, the data indicates that the journey to unicorn status would likely conclude around mid-2031, with the typical timeline averaging 6.6 years from founding.

However, there are significant outliers in both directions.

Companies such as Inflection AI and World Labs reached unicorn status within months of their inception, while Anthropic and xAI achieved the milestone in just one year. Facebook and Character.ai followed suit in two years.

On the other end of the spectrum, Domestika and Citadel Securities took two decades to achieve unicorn status. The ultimate test of patience belongs to Keyfactor and Kiteworks, which took 22 and 25 years, respectively, to join the ranks.

Chart source: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilyavcandpe/

The timeline of venture funding has its own rhythm. Early institutional backing is typical for (not so) soon-to-be unicorns. Of nearly 1,000 startups that achieved unicorn status through private funding rounds, 453 secured their first venture round within months of founding, and another 281 did so by the end of their second year.

After that, the numbers drop significantly — if you’re building something with unicorn potential, investors typically recognize it early. That said, late-stage success is still possible. Companies such as Grammarly and A24 are standout examples of thriving despite raising later in their journey.

Securing your first funding round is just the starting point. Most startups achieve unicorn status between two and seven years after their initial round, with the peak period typically falling three to eight years after founding. More than 100 companies reached this milestone during each of these peak years, with years four to five seeing the highest concentration.

However, achieving unicorn status is no guarantee of lasting success. Some companies ascend rapidly but struggle to sustain their momentum — WeWork‘s dramatic journey from a $47 billion valuation to bankruptcy in 2023 serves as a good example.

As for the number of funding rounds, most unicorns require around five, although there’s significant variation. We found 125 companies managed to achieve unicorn status after fewer than two rounds, while 331 needed eight or more rounds, with three companies requiring as many as 18 rounds.

Our data suggests that while rapid growth is certainly possible, these cases remain atypical. Some companies such as Inflection AI and World Labs achieved unicorn status within months, but the unicorn path typically demands extraordinary patience. Both founders and investors should embrace patience, even though today’s successes may come faster than in the past.

Most unicorn stories we read about focus on rapid success, and perhaps the pace of transformation is accelerating. While it took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users, ChatGPT crossed 100 million monthly active users just two months after launch.

This stands in stark contrast to historical patterns. It took more than 65 years for electricity to reach 90% of U.S. houses, and the telephone remained a luxury for three quarters of Americans after decades of availability. The pattern for most ventures still involves early losses and periods of slow growth before potential returns, but the timeline may be compressing.

Consider how rapidly transportation transformed: In the early 1900s, horses dominated city streets, yet within just half a dozen years, cars had become the primary mode of urban transport — perhaps an early hint that when transformation comes, it can reshape our world with surprising speed. For founders and investors, the light at the end of the tunnel is that these transformations will be shaped by startups that have yet to become future unicorns.

Ilya Strebulaev is the foremost academic expert on venture capital. As the founder of the Venture Capital Initiative and a professor of private equity and finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he teaches a popular class on venture capital, his research has been widely published in leading academic journals and featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg and the Harvard Business Review. He frequently leads workshops and executive sessions for senior business and government leaders around the world and has consulted for companies and investors on the venture industry trends and corporate innovation. In 2023 he was named a Top Voice on LinkedIn. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilyavcandpe/).

Note on methodology and sources: For this study, we define unicorns as VC-backed, U.S.-based companies that achieved a confirmed $1 billion-plus post-money valuation in a primary private round or had a liquidity event (such as an IPO or an acquisition) at a confirmed $1 billion-plus valuation between 1997 and 2024. While some industry observers consider only “private path” companies to be “true unicorns,” this distinction may not always be relevant. For early-stage investors and founders, both paths represent significant success outcomes. When analyzing startup success rates or founder achievements, both types should be considered unicorns. However, for specific analyses — such as studying how long unicorns remain private — focusing solely on private-path unicorns makes more sense.

To construct our unicorn list, we started with “unicorn candidates” from well-known sources such as Crunchbase and TechCrunch, as well as from datasets that report private funding round and liquidity event details, such as Crunchbase, PitchBook and VentureSource. We then manually confirmed and cross-checked the location and funding details to decide on the inclusion of each company in our final unicorn list. This process resulted in a total of 1,516 unicorns.

Illustration: Dom Guzman