Aileen Lee coined the term “unicorn” for a privately held startup valued at over $1 billion.
Lee introduced the expression in a 2013 essay titled “Welcome To The Unicorn Club,” published while she was a venture capitalist at Cowboy Ventures. She used the mythical animal to emphasize how unusual billion-dollar private technology companies were at the time.
The word quickly became standard startup and investment vocabulary. It originally referred to a rare private company reaching a valuation above $1 billion, although the growth of venture funding later produced terms such as decacorn for a company valued above $10 billion.
A unicorn valuation is not the same as revenue, profit, or cash held by the company. It usually reflects the price investors accept in a funding round or another private transaction, so valuations can change as market conditions change.