The Morningstar PitchBook Unicorn 20 Index, which tracks the performance of the world’s largest and most liquid private companies, rose 107.3% in 2025, compared with 17.4% for the Morningstar US Market Index. While a structural overweight to the technology sector relative to the broad market contributed to this outperformance, recent insights from Morningstar Indexes suggest that private market exposure played a much larger role than sector positioning alone.
Private Markets Pop in 2025: Unicorn 20 Index Returns
A closer look at performance attribution helps tell the story. When removing sector effects by adjusting the Morningstar US Market Index sector weights to mirror those of the Unicorn 20 Index, tech sector allocation was found to have contributed just under 4 percentage points of additional performance in 2025 to the broad US public market index returns.
Instead, returns were driven primarily by exposure to well-known private companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, FigureAI, and xAI. Rising valuations for these companies were driven by strong primary capital inflows and aggressive repricing in the secondary market.
A Banner Year for Unicorns: Unicorn 20 Index Top 10 Constituents
Sandy Beharry – Associate Director of Private Market Indexes, Morningstar, said:
“Performance for the Morningstar PitchBook Unicorn 20 Index in 2025 highlights both the return potential in private markets and the low correlation of late-stage venture-backed companies relative to their public market counterparts. More broadly, the year underscored how artificial intelligence is reshaping where equity value is created, with several of the index’s strongest contributors among the leaders in that space.”
For a deeper dive, you can access Morningstar Indexes new paper— Spotlight On the World’s Largest and Most Liquid Unicorns ―on the Indexes website.
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