These 44 founders have lost half their wealth and are nearly $100 billion poorer than a year ago. Twelve are no longer billionaires.
By Matt Durot
Last January, credit card startup Brex raised $300 million from a string of A-list investors, nearly doubling the company’s valuation to $12.3 billion and making its Brazilian cofounders– 26-year-old Pedro Franceschi and 27-year-old Henrique Dubugras–the world’s youngest self-made billionaires.
“I think it’s easy for people to think that we’re already successful,” Dubugras told Forbes at the time. “We are, and we aren’t. We’re obviously happy about what we’ve achieved, but there’s so much more to come.”
It’s certainly far too early to write-off the long-term success story that could be Brex. But a year later, Forbes estimates the company’s value has fallen to $6.4 billion–nearly 50% less than 12 months ago. Francheshi and Dubugras, meanwhile, are no longer billionaires–worth an estimated $900 million apiece, down from $1.5 billion.
Biggest Losers
The fortunes of these unicorn founders tumbled the most since March.
Sources: Unicorn valuations based on pricing data provided by ApeVue, Caplight Technologies and Notice, as well as Forbes reporting.
They are in good company. In March 2022, near the peak of the startup funding frenzy, 44 founders of unicorns–private companies valued at over $1 billion–were worth a total of $190 billion, according to Forbes’ estimates. A year later, with crypto tumbling and private markets going the way of their tanking public counterparts, Forbes–in consultation with prominent VCs, investors and data providers–has revalued the world’s billionaire-backed unicorns. The results are stark: Half the wealth of the billionaires behind unicorns has been wiped out, leaving this elite group of startup visionaries $96 billion poorer than they were a year ago. Twelve of them are no longer billionaires. And that excludes a dozen Chinese unicorn founders who face their own unique set of issues (political and otherwise).
“That was a different time in the world, where I may have been worth X on paper, but that was kind of funny money,” says Matt Murphy, a partner at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures, of the run-up to the bubble’s peak. “I think it’s going to take a little bit of detox, because in the world of venture, people got so intoxicated by that, and everyone needs to come off the valuation drug. That’s gone, it’s over and it’s not coming back, so let’s get back to things that are more historically reasonable and refocus on building great companies in a more operationally efficient way.”
Some unicorns have already cut their own valuations. Online payments startup Checkout.com proactively slashed its internal mark to $11 billion in December, after investors valued the company at $40 billion in January 2022. That knocked down the fortune of its Swiss founder and CEO Guillaume Pousaz, briefly Europe’s richest tech entrepreneur, to $7.2 billion from $23 billion.
No Longer Billionaires
Billionaires in March, these dozen entrepreneurs have since fallen below the cut.
Sources: Unicorn valuations based on pricing data provided by ApeVue, Caplight Technologies and Notice, as well as Forbes reporting.
Irish payments giant Stripe, founded and run by brothers Patrick and John Collison, did the same, cutting its internal valuation on at least three occasions to $63 billion this month, after investors valued the company at $95 billion in March 2021. The brothers are now worth $6.9 billion apiece, down from $9.5 billion. Apoorva Mehta’s Instacart and Ali Ghodsi’s software startup Databricks also marked themselves down in October.
Swedish buy-now, pay-later startup Klarna, cofounded by former billionaires Victor Jacobsson and Sebastian Siemiatkowski (worth an estimated $600 million and $500 million, respectively – down from $4 billion and $3.2 billion), was the only unicorn with founders on Forbes’ billionaires list to already raise a new round at a lower valuation– a so-called “down round”— that revalued the company at $6.7 billion in July 2022, after it had raised at an astonishing $45.6 billion valuation just nine months earlier.
But these half dozen companies were the exceptions. “Everyone’s hiding behind the two to three years of runway that they had from the cash they raised and avoiding those down rounds,” says Menlo Ventures’ Murphy. “We’re a year into this now, and if you’re a [venture-backed] company, you do not want to be down to less than a year or less than six months of cash. So, our belief is that the market has to pick up later this year.”
Murphy says that layoffs are one way companies are “rightsizing to make their cash last even longer.” Among unicorns who have cut staff: 26-year-old Alexandr Wang’s ScaleAI, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss’ cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, as well as Brex, Klarna and Stripe.
Full List
Forbes revalued the fortunes of these 44 unicorn founders.
Sources: Unicorn valuations based on pricing data provided by ApeVue, Caplight Technologies and Notice, as well as Forbes reporting.
Until now, Forbes valued VC-backed companies by taking the valuation from their last funding round, no matter when it was, and typically discounting it by 10% due to a lack of liquidity and financial transparency. The new Forbes methodology brings venture-backed company valuations more in line with the recent tumult in public markets and internal and external markdowns these unicorns are facing.
If a company has raised money in the last three months, like Michael Rubin’s online retailer Fanatics or Palmer Luckey’s defense startup Anduril, Forbes used its most recent valuation from that funding round. In the absence of recent funding rounds or internal markdowns, Forbes worked with three private market pricing data providers–ApeVue, Caplight Technologies and Notice–to revalue 30 unicorns that account for the bulk of billionaires’ (and former billionaires’) fortunes. In most cases, Forbes averaged the data providers’ current valuation estimates for each unicorn, which are based on the performance of comparable public companies, secondary market activity and publicly reported mutual fund marks. Based on this analysis, Forbes estimates that there are now 32 unicorn billionaires outside China, down from 44 in March, who are worth a combined $94 billion.
Not everyone agrees with our new approach. When told that Forbes was knocking down UK fintech Revolut’s valuation to $13.8 billion (from $33 billion) and its cofounders Nik Storonsky’s and Vlad Yatsenko’s fortunes to $3.3 billion (from $7.1 billion) and $500 million (from $1.1 billion), a spokesperson pushed back. “We do not engage in speculation on our valuation. Since our last funding round, in which we were valued at $33 billion, Revolut’s profitable business has continued to perform strongly in all markets across the globe.”
Of course, how much a unicorn is worth has real world consequences for these companies well beyond the fortunes of their creators. “Whether or not the founder is a billionaire anymore probably is not the most important thing to them, unless they’re massively leveraged against their [previously] high valuation,” says venture capitalist Eric Paley of Founder Collective. “There’s ego involved in all of this, but the biggest problem is displacement and a crisis of confidence. In a way, it’s psychological, because I believe you would have been way better off climbing from a $1 billion valuation to a $5 billion valuation, than to go from $1 billion to $10 billion and then back to $5 billion.”
“Now all your employees’ options are underwater and they may decide to go somewhere else they believe is on the upswing and not the downswing,” Paley adds. “Similarly, investors may look at it like ‘who would want to be an investor in that company?’ All these people are struggling with what the company was and they’re tied to that in their minds.”
Note: this story was updated at 12 p.m. EST on January 27, 2023 to distinguish Checkout.com’s and Stripe’s internal valuations from the valuations assigned to them by external investors.
IMAGE CREDITS
BIGGEST LOSERS
Sam Bankman-Fried: ANTHONY BEHAR SIPA/USA NEWSCOM. Guillaume Pousaz: HORACIO VILLALOBOS/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES. Nik Storonsky: HARRY MURPHY/SPORTSFILE FOR WEB SUMMIT/GETTY IMAGES. Barry Silbert: JOE BUGLEWICZ/BLOOMBERG. Cameron Winklevoss: MICHAEL PRINCE FOR FORBES. Tyler Winklevoss: MICHAEL PRINCE FOR FORBES. Cliff Obrecht: CANVA. Melanie Perkins: DAVID FITZGERALD/SPORTFILE FOR WEB SUMMIT/GETTY IMAGES.
NO LONGER BILLIONAIRES
Alexandr Wang: CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK FOR FORBES. Henrique Dubugras: KELLY SULLIVAN/TECHCRUNCH/GETTYIMAGES. Pedro Franceschi: BREX. Prasanna Sankar: RIPPLING. Alex Atallah: SASHA MASLOW FOR FORBES. Devin Finzer: SASHA MASLOW FOR FORBES. Sebastian Siemiatkowski: KLARNA. Barry Silbert: JOE BUGLEWICZ/BLOOMBERG. Sam Bankman-Fried: TOM WILLIAMS/CQ-ROLL CALL, INC/GETTY IMAGES.