Highest valued e-commerce startup companies globally 2023

Six out of the ten most valued e-commerce and direct-to-consumer unicorns worldwide are Chinese businesses. SHEIN, a Chinese fashion e-commerce platform headquartered in Singapore, is the e-commerce startup with the highest valuation worldwide, at no less than 66 billion U.S. dollars as of December 2023. SHEIN overtook Xiaohongshu, also known as "Red" or "Little Red Book", a social e-commerce platform headquartered in Shanghai, which was the most valued e-commerce startup as of December 2021. The Jacksonville-based online retail company Fanatics ranked second in 2023, with a valuation of 31 billion dollars.

How do e-commerce unicorns compare?

For comparison, the most valuable fintech unicorn in the world in the last quarter of 2022 was valued at 95 billion U.S. dollars. When observing the distribution of unicorns worldwide, financial services ranked second, behind software, the sector where most unicorns operate globally. However, the e-commerce and shopping sector wasn’t far behind, ranking in fifth place, and accounting for just over six percent of unicorns around the globe.

Unicorns in the U.S. and Canada

In the United States and Canada, the distribution of unicorns across industries in 2021 varied to a much greater extent than that globally. The technology and telecommunications sector harbored nearly a quarter of all unicorns found in those countries, while the share of unicorns active in the e-commerce sector was slightly lower than the worldwide percentage.