The overall worth of European unicorns has risen to 447.four billion euros, in keeping with the report

The cumulative value of active European unicorns is currently €447.4 billion, according to a new report from Pitchbook – 3% more than in 2023.

The report also found that the value of unicorn deals continued to show signs of recovery in the second quarter of 2024. Specifically, it increased from €1 billion in the first quarter to €2.4 billion in the second quarter.

Continued valuation growth in 2024 implies a 12.3% increase for the full year from 2023.

The number of deals is also following the same upward trend. In the first half of the year there were already 28 unicorn deals, and in the whole of 2023 there were 39.

The average transaction size is €98.7 million, with AI dominating the largest rounds. These include funding rounds of machine translation startup DeepL and stable diffusion developer Stability AI.

The

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

Across the startup ecosystem, early-stage average deal sizes saw the largest growth, increasing 43.9% to €1.8 million in the first half of 2024. Average early-stage valuations also increased to €17.3 (up 17.3% from 2023).

In terms of valuation, the pre-seed segment remains the most stable part of the market, while late-stage valuations have seen slight declines.

Looking at sectors, fintech deal sizes and valuations continue to be higher than other industries, followed by SaaS, AI and machine learning.