A startup company, start-up or startup is a company, a partnership or temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. These companies, generally newly created, are in a phase of development and research for markets. The term became popular internationally during the dot-com bubble when a great number of dot-com companies were founded. Lately, the term startup has been associated mostly with technological ventures designed for high-growth. At the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to be successful and influential. Some startups become big and they become unicorns, i.e. privately held startup companies valued at over US$1 billion. The unicorns are concentrated in a few countries, mainly the US, China, India and EU. Some of the largest unicorns are Ant Financial, ByteDance, DiDi, Uber, Xiaomi, and Airbnb.
