Only nine companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in November, together adding $11.7 billion in value to the board, amid a slower funding environment for startups.

Financial services dominated the list of new unicorns minted last month, with three companies — in buy now, pay later; rebate management; and lending — from the sector galloping onto the board.

The companies were from across the globe. Two new unicorns each joined from the U.S. and China. The U.K., India, Saudi Arabia and the Cayman Islands each contributed one.

So far in 2023, 86 companies have joined Crunchbase’s unicorn list. This compares to 318 companies that joined in 2022 and 617 during the peak funding market in 2021.

Here are the companies that joined the Unicorn Board in November, by sector.

Financial Services

• Buy now, pay later shopping app Tabby, based in Saudi Arabia, raised a $200 million Series D funding at a $1.5 billion valuation. The shopping app operates across the MENA market. The funding was led by Wellington Management.
• Business rebate management tool Enable, which was founded in London and is now headquartered in San Francisco, raised a $120 million Series D funding at a value of $1.1 billion. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
• India-based lending platform InCred raised a $60 million Series D funding at a billion-dollar valuation. The company provides loans to consumers, small and medium-sized businesses and students.

Web3

• Cayman Islands-based Wormhole, a blockchain messaging tool, raised $225 million in the form of token warrants at a $2.5 billion valuation, the largest round in the Web3 sector this year.

Transportation

• Wuhan, China-based Xingji Meizu is a developer of smartphone technology to empower smart cars. It raised $276 million at a $1.4 billion valuation. The funding was led by Harvest Global Investments and Asia Investment Fund.

Fashion

•  U.K.-based Castore, a tech-enabled sportswear brand, raised a $184 million private equity round led by Raine Ventures. The company was valued at $1.2 billion in the deal.

Cybersecurity

• Israel-based Cybersecurity BioCatch, which helps banks and fintech identify fraud and money laundering from biometric data, raised a $70 million secondary market transaction led by Sapphire Ventures that valued the company at $1 billion.

AI

• Beijing-based 01.AI, an open-source large-language AI company, raised an undisclosed funding amount at a value of $1 billion. The funding was led by Alibaba Cloud. Notably, 01.AI reached this value within eight months of its founding.

Hardware

• Chinese smart-device developer Rokid, headquartered in Redwood City, California, raised a strategic funding from NetDragon which valued the company at $1 billion.

Related Crunchbase unicorn queries

• The Crunchbase Private Unicorn Company List (1,491)

• Unicorns in the U.S. (729)
• Unicorns in Asia (477)
• European unicorns (201)
• Emerging unicorn leaderboard (381)
• Exited unicorns (439)

Methodology

The Crunchbase Unicorn Board is a curated list that includes private unicorn companies with post-money valuations of $1 billion or more and is based on Crunchbase data. New companies are added to the Unicorn Board as they reach the $1 billion valuation mark as part of a funding round.

The unicorn board does not reflect internal company valuations — such as those set via a 409a process for employee stock options — as these differ from, and are more likely to be lower than, a priced funding round. We also do not adjust valuations based on investor writedowns, which change quarterly, as different investors will not value the same company consistently within the same quarter.

Funding to unicorn companies includes all private financings to companies that are tagged as unicorns, as well as those that have since graduated to The Exited Unicorn Board.

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.

Illustration: Dom Guzman