Europe’s unicorns have risen to €447.4B in total value, report finds

The cumulative value of Europe’s active unicorns now sits at €447.4bn — 3% higher than in 2023, according to a new report from Pitchbook.

The report also found that unicorn deal value continued to show signs of recovery during the second quarter of 2024. Specifically, it jumped from €1bn in Q1 to €2.4bn in Q2.

The continuous valuation growth of 2024 implies a 12.3% increase for the full year from 2023.

Deal count is following the same upward trend. The first half of the year has already seen 28 unicorn deals compared to 39 for the whole of 2023.

The medial deal size stands at €98.7mn, with AI dominating the largest rounds. These include funding rounds from machine translation startup DeepL and Stable Diffusion’s developer Stability AI.

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There are now 141 active unicorns in Europe, with eight newborns making the list so far in 2024. The majority (87) of them operate in the IT sector, followed by 16 in financial services, and 15 in the B2B market.

Across the entire startup ecosystem, it’s the early-stage median deal sizes that have seen the biggest growth, increasing by 43.9% to €1.8mn at H1 2024. Early-stage median valuations also rose to €17.3 (up 17.3% from 2023).

Pre-seed continues to remain the most resilient part of the market valuation-wise, while late-stage valuations saw small declines.

Looking at sectors, fintech deal sizes and valuations still lead other verticals, followed by SaaS and AI and machine learning.