In 2013, when Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures first coined the “unicorns” term describing startups valued at $1 billion or more, she named 39 companies in the U.S fitting the definition.

In the spring of 2014, when I first set to compile a list of unicorns from around the globe as part of my work at InVenture Partners, the final list consisted of 83 companies, 56 of them in the U.S.

Over the next few years, this number continued to increase at an alarming pace, with CB Insights now highlighting 186 companies, and CrunchBase Unicorn Leaderboards listing 224 unicorns and 43 exited unicorns as of February 25th, 2017.

Still, those lists, while highly interesting, don’t necessarily provide the depth of insight offered in the original article by Aileen Lee. I thought it might be interesting to revisit the topic today, and explore what unicorns from around the world have in common and what differentiates them from each other.

To do that, I set to compile a list of companies that qualify to be called “unicorns” that carries as much information as possible. This list includes all startups co-founded since...