Consumer tech is bound for a comeback among unicorns, but maybe not just yet

Ten years after Cowboy Ventures’ founder Aileen Lee gave unicorns their nickname, she and her team are back with fresh analysis on private companies worth more than $1 billion.

So much has changed in unicorn land since 2013 that it deserves the kind of thorough recap that you can read here. But there’s a point that’s worth zooming on: the shift to enterprise, and what could happen next.

As the number of unicorns boomed from 39 to more than 532, Cowboy found that their very nature also changed. “The pendulum swung hard to enterprise, with 78% of unicorns today focused on B2B, the inverse of 2013,” Lee and her team member Allegra Simon wrote.

But spending more than a decade in tech teaches you something: to be ready for the pendulum to swing back. Hence Cowboy’s prediction that “given the hard shift to enterprise,” we can “hope and expect more exciting consumer unicorns will be born in coming years.”