Dead Silicon Valley Unicorns Pile Up as ‘Unicorpses’

Now more than a year into the tech “correction,” the denial phase is over. There appears to be a broad consensus that lower valuations are here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. But for well-capitalized private companies, it can take a while for the dominos to fall. We’ve started to see once highly valued businesses sell for disappointing outcomes or shut down altogether. There’s a term for these erstwhile unicorns that have seen their valuations crash: unicorpses.

We’re starting to see businesses that were valued at hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars on paper, evaporate. While last year saw ill-fated failures for fintech business Fast and crypto money mis-manager FTX, the pace of unicorn deaths seems to be accelerating. Just last week we saw the fire sale of truck software business Embark, which went public in 2021 via a SPAC, valued at $4.25 billion. It sold to a private buyer for just over $70 million. Then there was the case of Plastiq, a highly valued lending and payments business that was supposed to go public via a SPAC last year, but failed to list. The company has now filed for bankruptcy. Not to mention, Elizabeth Holmes finally went to jail this week for her famously fraudulent business, Theranos.