In 2019, nine Israeli startups became unicorns, bringing the total unicorns in the country to 20, and 16 startups completed a financing round of $100M or more
Israel now has 20 unicorns, privately-held tech companies worth more than $1 billion. Only the US, China and UK have more unicorns.
Context & Ripple Effects
The nine new unicorns landed in a year when global unicorn creation actually contracted — worldwide, the count fell to 142 from 158 in 2018, and unicorn funding dropped to $85.1B from $139B, per Crunchbase's year-end tally. Against that backdrop, Israel adding nine to reach 20 total — fourth only to the US, China and the UK — marks it as a disproportionate winner of a shrinking pool of late-stage capital.
The trajectory held after 2019: Israeli startups went on to raise $10.5B in the first half of 2021 alone with 30 rounds of $100M+, surpassing all of 2020 (Bloomberg), and the unicorn population kept climbing toward the 13 counted that June. The 2019 cohort was the inflection point where Israel's startup output shifted from seed-stage volume to billion-dollar companies.
First-order effects
- Sixteen Israeli startups closing rounds of $100M+ in a single year means late-stage capital became the default financing path for Israeli scale-ups, not an exception reserved for a few breakout names.
- Founders and early employees at the nine new unicorns now hold concentrated paper wealth in private markets, deepening dependence on continued private funding rather than exits.
Second-order effects
- As the WSJ later documented, the unicorn boom fed directly into Tel Aviv's housing market and living costs, tightening the talent market for every employer competing for the same engineering pool.
- With global unicorn creation down but Israel's share up, international growth-stage funds had to compete harder for allocation into Israeli rounds, pushing round sizes and valuations upward locally even as they fell globally.
Third-order effects
- Tech hardened into a structural pillar of the Israeli economy — the Innovation Authority later reported the sector at 16% of national employment and still raising $9B after October 7, third only to Silicon Valley and NYC (Reuters) — meaning the country's macro resilience now tracks its private-tech funding cycle.
- If the pattern holds, small ecosystems like Israel's consolidate their position by producing outsized shares of the world's largest private companies, reinforcing the broader concentration of frontier capital in a handful of geographies.
The trend: Late-stage venture capital is concentrating into fewer, larger rounds in a handful of small geographies, with Israel converting that shift into a durable pipeline of billion-dollar private companies.