Storage Unicorn (Private Firms at More Than $1 Billion in Valuation) – December 2017

This is the second edition of the Storage Unicorn biannual report established by Condor Consulting Group.

As a reminder, to be listed in this club, a private enterprise must reach a $1 billion valuation.

A bit of background with various milestones:

• The original TechCrunch article in 2013 by Cowboy Ventures founder Aileen Lee with 39 companies from all sectors,
• An update published in 2015 announced 84 companies, still very wide,
• Another article in StorageNewsletter.com about Storage Unicorn published March 1, 2017,
• The first edition of the Storage Unicorn report published in June 2017,
• Various iterations from CB Insights with today 222 enterprises for a total of $768 billion valuation.

Methodology
The first key factor is the nature of the solution offered by candidates; it has to be storage related with data management considerations. We then don’t consider companies related to big data and Hadoop. We wrote our report with of course the storage related topic in mind with additional considerations such data protection, software-defined storage, storage hardware, cloud evolution and technologies such flash, NVMe, etc. No real surprise but we have to consider new technology waves and fast growing companies in every segment.

Our selection process identified several companies that sometimes belong to the same category. For instance in the CB Insights report, Actifio, Domo Technologies, MarkLogic, OVH, Palantir, Qualtrics and Uptake are listed in the Big Data segment. Same remark for the Internet Software and Services list with Anaplan, Apttus, Docker, Dropbox, DT Dream, GitHub, Infor, Medallia and Rubrik. We applied filters to eliminate companies outside the storage landscape.

We eliminate public companies as this list is dedicated to private firms only. A company, potential candidate to our ranking, is no longer considered if they did an IPO since the last report, here since June 2017.

Other factors are related to financial information as we collect from various sites such Crunchbase, Pitchbook, CB Insights, Dealroom and others, plus investors, press and analysts.

We leverage different formulas and tools we built for years to establish this unicorn list. 

The Club

Being listed in the report is a huge achievement for companies and company leaders; it represents the grail for some of them especially if the company is the first one to join in a special category. Maintaining the position is also a key attribute as it confirms the role, the success and the business growth.

Two players were added: Cohesity and Veeam.

Based on our methodology, we removed Datto recently acquired by Vista Equity Partners and merged with Autotask Corporation. We also eliminated Kaminario.

We established the list with 8 storage companies: Actifio, Cohesity, DDN Storage, Dropbox, Infinidat, Rubrik, Veeam and Veritas Technologies.

Two players (DDN Storage and Infinidat) belong to the storage hardware category, five (Actifio, Cohesity, Rubrik, Veeam and Veritas) to the data management space with a clear data protection flavor and one (Dropbox) to the internet storage.

All are US companies even if we can associate also Infinidat with Israel. None of them come from Europe or Asia; this is the reality as there is no players from there regions who deserve yet to be listed based on their technology, product, team, market adoption, business success and revenue trajectory even if some leaders continue to cultivate utopia and wrong business projections.

Future
We continue to track closely the storage market with this unicorn dimension. We also maintain a list of candidates and we confirm that few fast growth storage companies should appear in the June 2018 edition.