Glossier and Rent the Runway joined a small group of female-founded billion-dollar companies last week. The Wall Street Journal reported that the beauty company now has a $1.2 billion valuation and the fashion rental company announced that it has a $1 billion valuation.
Glossier raised a $100 million Series D funding round led by Sequoia Capital, bringing their total funding to $186.4 million, according to Crunchbase. Rent the Runway raised a $125 million Series F funding round co-led by Franklin Templeton Investments and Bain Capital Ventures, bringing their total funding to $541.2 million, according to Crunchbase. The valuations make Glossier and Rent the Runway part of an elite group of “unicorn” companies — privately held companies valued at $1 billion or more. Recent “unicorns” include Uber, WeWork, Airbnb, Warby Parker, Pinterest and Zocdoc, according to CB Insights.
Glossier founder and CEO Emily Weiss and Rent the Runway cofounder and CEO Jennifer Hyman and cofounder Jennifer Fleiss are part of an even smaller subset of female founders running billion-dollar businesses. Of the 134 U.S. venture capital-backed “unicorn” companies as of May 2018, there were just 14 with a female founder, according to Pitchbook. Weiss, Hyman and Fleiss join founders like 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey, Cloudflair’s Michelle Zatlyn, Nextdoor’s Sarah Leary and Houzz’s Adi Tatarko. More female founders are likely to join the club. CB Insights and the New York Times collaborated on a list of 50 future unicorns earlier this year, and the U.S. startups with female founders included Zola, Front and Faire.
There may also be more women ringing the bell at Nasdaq in 2019. When asked if she has initial public offering plans, Weiss declined to discuss dates or other specifics but told the Wall Street Journal, “We are certainly in a position where…we are able to do that.” Hyman also wouldn’t comment on dates for a possible sale or initial public offering, but told Bloomberg, “We have many strategic paths forward, obviously one of them is becoming a public company.” Hyman mentioned that Franklin Templeton and T. Rowe Price would be valuable partners for an initial public offering because mutual funds often back later-stage startups before companies sell shares to the public.
Stitch Fix, Eventbrite and Care.com are three recent female-founded companies to become publicly traded. When Katrina Lake took Stitch Fix public in 2017, Hyman was excited because it could pave the way for more women. “I want her to have a huge positive outcome because it does something really important for female entrepreneurs and, specifically, founder-CEOs,” she told Recode, “I want her to have this success because we work in an industry where pattern recognition is still the name of game. So the more people like [Lake] — and hopefully people like myself — who deliver results, the more other women are going to get opportunities.”
