Of course, this raises one important question: Does this mean we’re going to have to start calling them “tricorns”?
The $3 Billion Companies
Box, Hubspot, RingCentral, Mulesoft, Xero, and Zendesk all make the list, as noted by Jason Lemkin of SaaStr in a recent blog post that pulls stats from Bessemer’s Cloud Index. The top dogs in the industry — Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow — together add up to a valuation of more than $130 billion. This growth has been quick, too: Salesforce has grown its worth 40 times over since 2005, going from around $2 billion to $80 billion today. All this doesn’t mean it’s easy. Multiples of a company’s revenue aren’t as impressive in SaaS today as they once were, Jason notes. Still, it’s an indicator that this particular industry has grown far beyond the vaunted financial ceiling that whoever came up with the term “unicorn” had in mind. Unicorns were once rare enough that they rivaled their mythical namesake. Now their three-times-larger cousins are in the dozens. “We’ll be at 30 soon enough. 30 public cloud companies worth $3b or more. Up from 0 in 2005.”
