Top 10 Startups That Reached $1 Billion in Record Time — the Fastest Unicorns Ever

Melanie Perkins started Canva in 2013 in Perth after being turned down by roughly a hundred investors, on the premise that most people who need a design are not designers. Its browser-based, template-first editor reached a $40 billion valuation in a 2021 secondary share sale, making it one of the largest private software companies outside the United States.

Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with about $100 million from the sale of PayPal. Its first rocket, Falcon 1, failed on three consecutive attempts before reaching orbit on the fourth in September 2008, by which point the company was nearly out of money. It has since become the largest launch provider in the world and operates Starlink, by a wide margin the biggest satellite constellation ever flown.

Airbnb reached a $1 billion valuation in under three years. Starting in 2008 with air mattresses in the founders' apartment, it hit the mark by 2011 and went public in December 2020 at roughly $47 billion despite a pandemic that had decimated travel. Brian Chesky's strategy of designing for “11-star experiences” became a standard product-thinking reference, and Airbnb now has around 4 million hosts worldwide.

Uber launched in San Francisco in 2010 as UberCab, a black-car dispatch app, and opened up to mass-market ride-hailing with UberX in 2012. It became the most valuable private company in the United States before listing on the NYSE in May 2019, and its treatment of drivers as independent contractors rather than employees has been litigated or legislated over in nearly every market it entered.

ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, was founded in 2012 and was valued at $75 billion in its 2018 funding round, at the time the most valuable startup in the world; it passed $100 billion soon after. TikTok's algorithm-driven content discovery became the most copied feature in social media, forcing Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat to launch near-identical products.

Shein reached a $66 billion valuation in its 2023 funding round, down from a reported $100 billion peak the year before. The model is small-batch, algorithm-driven production: thousands of new styles listed daily in tiny initial runs, with only what sells getting reordered - which is how it carries enormous variety without the inventory risk that variety normally implies.

Figma put a design tool in the browser with multiplayer editing, which turned a design file into something a whole team could open rather than an artifact one person owned. Adobe agreed to buy it for $20 billion in 2022 and abandoned the deal in December 2023 under UK and EU regulatory pressure, paying a $1 billion break fee; Figma went public on its own in 2025.