2021 has been a frenetic year for start-ups. So much so that the number of unicorns—companies valued at over US$1 billion in their early stages of capital raising—was approaching 1,000 in September this year. According to the Crunchbase database, they have reached a combined value of over $3.4 trillion, an increase of $1.4 trillion in less than a year.

The most valuable unicorns as of September were China's ByteDance (owner of TikTok) and Ant (linked to Alibaba) and the US companies Stripe and SpaceX.

By geographic region, US unicorns raised the most funds (US$99 billion, 50% more than the previous year), followed by Asia (US$51 billion, a marginal increase over last year). Latin America raised US$10 billion, four times more than in 2020. Crunchbase's list of Latin American unicorns as of September included 22 companies, including Chile's NotCo.