Immigrants make a significant contribution to the development of the unicorns businesses (especially large startups). Foreign founders were involved in the creation of 40% of such companies in the world, according to experts of the Russian Cluster Observatory of the Institute of Statistical Research and Knowledge Economy of the National Research University Higher School of Economics.

A startup, the value of which has reached $1 billion in ten years since its foundation, is not listed on the stock exchange, and at least three-quarters of the company is owned by the founders, is called a unicorn.

The authors of the study – titled “Relocation as a driving force of innovation activity: A global study of the international migration of unicorn firm founders” –  examined data from 1,357 such companies in 49 countries.

Depending on the predominant direction of founder migration, the researchers divided countries into three groups:

  • Countries that attracted unicorns from abroad
  • Countries that created such companies on their own
  • Countries that lost all the founders of their unicorn companies.

Russia belongs to the last group, 38 people who created a unicorn company left the country. By this indicator, Russia far surpasses other similar countries.

40% of unicorns are created by foreign founders․

Experts identified the country of origin of more than 3,000 founders of such startups and the universities where about 2,700 of them studied. They studied migration trends by comparing the founders' countries of birth and the places where they registered the companies that became unicorns. They found that foreign founders were involved in the creation of 40 percent of these companies.

The first group above includes countries with at least seven unicorn companies, and more than 50% of them were founded by migrants. This group includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Singapore, Switzerland, Mexico, and Indonesia. Factors attracting unicorn companies, the researchers believe, are the developed venture capital market in these countries, the presence of leading universities, research organizations and business schools, as well as high-level and frequently cited scientists, Nobel Prize winners and Fields Prize winners.

The second group includes countries with the same number of startups as the first group, but the share of unicorns founded by immigrants is less than 30%, i.e. these countries are dominated by local founding entrepreneurs. They are China, India, France, Israel, Korea, Australia, Japan and Sweden. The authors of the study note that the country's spending on research and development is important for the independent creation of unicorn companies.

Finally, the third group consists of countries that do not have unicorn companies but have more than eight founders. These are Russia, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Ukraine and Iran. By this indicator Russia has surpassed the other countries in this group. Thirty-eight such entrepreneurs left the country, such as Nikolay Storonsky, co-founder of fintech startup Revolut, and Sergey Belousov, founder of IT startup Acronis. For comparison, we note that 20 future founders of "unicorns" left Ukraine, 11 each from Romania and Iran, and 10 from Poland.

What contributes to this outflow?

The authors of the study note the low indicators of such parameters as GDP per capita, the number of large high-tech companies, the volume of high-tech exports, the number of applications for international patents, the availability of supercomputers, as well as intellectual property in the country contribute to this outflow degree of protection and the rule of law.

Evgeny Kutsenko, one of the authors of the study, said that Russia is an absolute donor when it comes to the migration of unicorn companies. At least four incumbent operators (Acronis, Revolut, OCSiAl, InDriver) and two former unicorns (Arrival and Yandex) have completely left Russia or registered their headquarters outside the country.

The authors of the study note that universities are a significant resource for both growth and attraction of unicorn companies; most of the founders of such companies graduated from the world's leading universities, every third entrepreneur studied in the country where he subsequently moved. The twenty universities that produced the most unicorn graduates accounted for about 40% of the total. These are universities in the United States (13), Israel (3), Great Britain (2), India (1), and China (1).

The Armenian company Picsart also became a unicorn in 2021. Founded in 2011 by Hovhannes Avoyan, Artavazd Mehrabyan and Mikayel Vardanyan, the company raised another $130 million last year and is now valued at $1.5 billion. According to Wikipedia, Picsart is headquartered in Miami, Florida, USA. According to January-September of this year, there are 67 IT companies on the list of Armenia's top 1,000 taxpayers. Picsart is in the second place with AMD 3,1 bln of taxes paid and Synopsis Armenia is in the first place with AMD 3,3 bln of taxes paid. Picsart also recently announced that 1 million images are created every day using the AI Image Generator tool.