2021 has been a frenetic year for startups. So much so that the number of unicorns—companies valued at over US$1 billion in their early funding stages—was approaching 1,000 as of September of this year. According to the Crunchbase database, their combined valuation has surpassed US$3.4 trillion (million million), an increase of US$1.4 trillion in less than a year.

As of September, the highest-valued unicorns were the Chinese companies ByteDance (owner of TikTok) and Ant (affiliated with Alibaba) and the U.S. companies Stripe and SpaceX.

By geographic region, U.S. unicorns have raised the most funding (US$99,000 million, 50% more than the previous year), followed by Asia (US$51,000 million, a marginal increase from last year). In Latin America, US$10,000 million was raised, four times more than in 2020. Crunchbase’s list of Latin American unicorns as of September included 22 companies, including Chile’s NotCo.