Pablo Tirado wrote an interesting article for the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio where he analyses the startups ecosystem in Chile.

According to him, successful startups are been classified under three different names. The first name, Unicorn, refers to the most successful startups, those that are valued for over USD 1.000 million. Centaurs are those startups valued for over USD 100 million and Little Ponies are the startups that have reached values higher than USD 10 million.

There are over 1.000 startups in Chile. 36 of these startups can be classified under the names just mentioned. The Chilean Corporation of Production Promotion (Corfo)  states that nowadays there are one Unicorn, four Centaurs and 31 Little Ponies in Chile. Meanwhile, there are around 143 Unicorns in the world, and the largest one is Uber with USD 51 thousand million.

Chile aims to develop lots of Unicorns, and the State provides support to successful startups. However, there are certain barriers that make it difficult for a Unicorn boom to happen. The first is the size of the Chilean market. According to experts, to reach the size required to be considered a Unicorn, Chilean companies need to go international and that complicates operations.

In addition, the entrepreneurship ecosystem is not mature and a real venture capital industry that provides support to fast global growth has not been developed yet.

Anyway, a possible option to improve the situation is to generate public policies to develop a dynamic entrepreneurship ecosystem that includes venture capital and links to different networks. For instance, universities could stimulate research that aims to solve problems from a multidisciplinary approach. This could the starting point of innovative startups.

The existence, mainly of Unicorns, but also of Centaurs and Little Ponies is vital as they generate most of the return over investment of the venture capital sector, which finances the technological entrepreneurship industry.

Source: Economía y Negocios