This statistic shows a ranking of startup companies valued at one billion U.S. dollars or more by venture-capital firms worldwide, as of February 2018. As of February 2018, Uber was valued at about 68 billion U.S. dollars by venture-capital firms.
A ranking of the largest 100 companies globally based on market value can be accessed here.
Additional information on the growth of the sharing economy
The sharing economy is a hybrid market model in which the peer-to-peer sharing of access to goods and services occurs. Many such transactions are facilitated by a company who generally play the role of matching those providing a service or good and those requiring it. The economic performance of many such firms has been particularly impressive in recent years. Ride-sharing firm Uber increased their global gross booking volume from 2.93 billion U.S. dollars in 2014 to 3.63 billion in just the first half of 2015. Moreover, there is ample space for expansion as demonstrated in the United States where 33 percent of adults claimed to have never heard of ride-hailing apps in December 2015.
The performance of firms such as Uber and AirBnb goes some way to explaining the frequency of startups who seek to profit from some aspect of the global sharing economy. Moreover, the number of sharing economy users in the United States is set to increase to 40 million in 2020. A key factor in the success of startups will be their ability to gain access to customers from across a variety of age groups. Convincing people to abandon a traditional market model is a central challenge for such firms but as AirBnb have proven the payoffs can be enormous. The fact that 10 percent of those aged 50-64 in the United States had used online home-sharing services as of December 2015 compared with 11 percent for those ages 18 to 29 shows such market penetration is possible.
