Indian founders, US unicorns: Charting billion-dollar startups

Image Credit: Visual Capitalist

Unicorns are, by nature, rare. After all, it’s hard to grow a company to a value of US$1 billion.

But they’re less rare in some places than others, and according to many estimations, the US is home to the most companies of this kind.

A lot of those unicorns weren’t founded by US nationals, but by immigrants. In fact, as the chart above from Visual Capitalist shows, more than half of the 582 US-based unicorns have at least one immigrant founder.

The chart was made using data up to May 2022 from the National Foundation for American Policy, so it is somewhat dated. However, the data still provides some valuable insights.

For a start, India topped the list comfortably, with 66 founders of US-based unicorns – 12 ahead of runner-up Israel.

As for Southeast Asian nations, the Philippines had three founders on the list, while Singapore had just two.