Leif Hartwig explains why unicorns exploded from 39 to 1,200 in eight years while venture funding barely grew 25%. The mismatch leaves thousands of high-value startups hunting for capital through word-of-mouth. His team is building AI tools to match founders and investors more efficiently.
In the last 8 years, we've seen unicorns, those are billion-dollar private companies, grow from 39 to 1,200. So the market has grown 2,200%. In the same time period, venture funds have grown from 800 to 1,000, only 25% increase. So the market outkicked its coverage. But where do you find this money? So it's been this word-of-mouth kind of thing. That's why Right now we're seeing so many people trying to do what we're doing and democratizing, as you said, or digitizing this process. And we're not only doing it with our matching feature, but we're working with a company right now to add some great AI features that not only look at the quality as well as predictability of future success, which is really exciting stuff.
