The Takeaway
The Morningstar PitchBook Unicorn 20 Index delivered strong performance in 2025, rising 107.3% compared with a 17.4% return delivered by the broadly diversified public proxy, the Morningstar US Market Index.
Late-stage private AI leaders such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Figure AI, and xAI delivered outsized gains, reinforcing that much of today’s innovation-driven growth is occurring before companies enter public markets.
Trading volumes rose 72% year over year, enabling more frequent valuation updates for private companies, though liquidity remained concentrated among a small group of category leaders.
Many of today’s most dynamic companies are scaling rapidly, raising significant capital, and creating substantial value long before entering public markets, if they list at all. As leading venture capital backed firms such as OpenAI, SpaceX, and Stripe remain private for longer, late-stage venture has emerged as one of the fastest growing and most influential segments of the modern equity landscape. Its scale and market impact increasingly rival those of public incumbents, yet it remains largely absent from traditional benchmarks. This growth has been fueled in part by the expansion of secondary markets, which are creating new access points for investors.
Through the lens of the Morningstar PitchBook Unicorn 20 Index, which tracks the world's largest and most liquid unicorns, we explore key trends, performance drivers, and the growing role of late-stage private companies in defining today’s modern equity markets.
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