Flutterwave moved to 36th place on Y Combinator's list of most valuable startups

On July 1, 2021, Y Combinator (YC), a US seed-stage accelerator, announced its YC Top Companies list, over six months after its previous publication.

"YC companies raise money year-round — resulting in the YC Top Companies list being outdated nearly as soon as it's published," the accelerator says in a statement. To prevent this, the list will be updated every six months, in February and July, going ahead."

The list now includes 163 companies having a valuation of $150 million or more, with 6 and 157 companies being public and private, respectively. There are now around 40 private enterprises worth over a billion dollars (Unicorns).

The companies on the list have a collective market capitalization of $400 billion. Airbnb is the most valuable public firm in the country ($93 billion as of press time on the New York Stock Exchange), while Stripe is the most valuable private company ($95 billion).

While public company valuations are easily accessible on the stock market, the famous accelerator rates private firms based on valuations from recent fundraising rounds.

While YC acknowledges that valuations are a bad way to assess firms, it claims that it is the most often used criterion for comparing startups. Other variables, like revenue, are frequently kept hidden.

It also emphasizes that the list is not exhaustive, as YC alumni may choose to opt-out for any number of reasons.

The unicorn status of Flutterwave places it among the very best.

In 2018, when Y Combinator released the inaugural ranking of its most valuable firms, no African company cracked the top 101.

Flutterwave, a Nigerian financial firm that received $20 million in total, was ranked 97th out of 102 YC businesses in 2019. According to this rating, it is worth slightly more than $150 million.

Flutterwave was the sole African business on the list again in 2020. Despite collecting $35 million in a Series B round, it fell 18 positions to 115th place out of 132 firms.

Despite a $200 million acquisition from Stripe, Nigerian fintech Paystack was omitted from the 2020 list.

Until YC's recent update, Flutterwave had been the sole African country to appear since 2019.

Flutterwave entered YC's top 40 companies in 2020 after raising a $1 billion Series C round in March 2021.

What's new this time? Even though Flutterwave is now three times as valued at $3 billion, it climbed four spots to 36th place on YC's most recent list.