Over the course of the pandemic, About You, whose founders included mail order empire heirs Michael and Benjamin Otto, became one of investors' favourites in the German e-commerce sector.

In July 2018 Aarhus-based Heartland, a holding company of the large clothing company and About You supplier Bestseller, had acquired a 29% stake in the online fashion retailer as part of a capital increase. This transaction valued the start-up, which was only founded in 2014, at more than 1 billion dollars. It was Hamburg's first „unicorn“.

Six years later, About You is no longer part of the unicorn herd, and is struggling to survive. Since an IPO in June 2021, the stock market value has plummeted by more than 80%. The market capitalisation of the company, in which Otto AG still holds a 36% stake, and which was listed on the SDax until the end of 2022, has slumped to 560 million euros.

„At its peak, About You was worth around 4.5 billion euros in July 2021,“ notes Nikolas Westphal, Head of Germany at tech investment boutique Clipperton in Berlin.

For a long time, About You co-founder and co-CEO Tarek Müller was seen as the Otto Group's „beacon of hope“ and the „face of the Group's digital transformation“. In the meantime, things have become much quieter around the 36-year-old. This is not surprising, as many investors have lost money. The hype surrounding online fashion and About You in particular, which arose during the pandemic, seems to be over for good.

The online clothing retailer is not an isolated case. According to Clipperton's data, German companies ranging from About You, to the biopharmaceutical company Curevac, the delivery service Flink, the electrical appliance rental company Grover, the Amazon shop buyer Seller X, the e-scooter rental company Tier and the Swiss insurance fintech Wefox have one thing in common: these seven young companies were once unicorns. But they lost this status in 2024 because their valuation fell below the billion-euro mark. The ex-unicorns Infarm, Gorillas, Nucom Group, Deposit Solutions, Home 24 and Trivago had already crashed earlier.

According to Clipperton, the number of unicorn companies in German-speaking countries has fallen to 54 this year. Only one new unicorn was added in 2024 – the corporate fitness network provider Egym from Munich. The reasons for the relegation from the unicorn league are as varied as the companies themselves. But to a certain extent, it is always about the hangover after the valuation hype during the pandemic, when economic stimulus programmes worth billions and the open money spigot of the central banks drove up company valuations.

„The reasons are of course always company-specific, but in general, I think we can say that the former unicorns have suffered particularly from the gloomy consumer climate and the higher cost of capital,“ says Westphal. „Especially in the current market environment, the companies that are best positioned are those that can access external capital, but don't have to.“

In addition to About You, the ex-unicorns also include Curevac. Founded in 2000, the biotech company from Tübingen was expected to develop the decisive vaccine against coronavirus. In March 2020, the then CEO Daniel Menichella met with US President Donald Trump. Subsequently, it was speculated that Trump had endeavoured to secure the rights to the potential vaccine exclusively for the USA during the meeting with Menichella. In June 2020, the German government therefore acquired a 23% stake in Curevac via the state-owned development bank KfW for 300 million euros. At the time, the company was valued at around 1.3 billion euros, putting it in the unicorn class. The IPO on the US technology exchange Nasdaq took place in mid-August 2020. With an issue price of 16 dollars and gross issue proceeds of 245 million dollars, the company was valued at 2.3 billion dollars. At its peak, Curevac was valued at 24 billion dollars in December 2020, according to Clipperton.

However, when the development of a sufficiently effective coronavirus vaccine initially failed, disillusionment followed. In July of this year, Curevac sold the rights to the mRNA vaccine development to the pharmaceutical company GSK. In the past twelve months, the company's market capitalisation has halved to 620 million dollars. The largest shareholder is the biotech venture capitalist Dievini Hopp, owned by SAP founder Dietmar Hopp.

The case of Flink is somewhat different. The unicorn status of the start-up from Berlin, which was founded in 2020, has fallen victim to the cut-throat competition among delivery services. In a financing round in December 2021, Flink received around 750 million dollars and was therefore valued at just under 3 billion dollars. In the financing round in May 2023, the company received a further 150 million euros from existing investors at a significantly lower valuation of around 1 billion euros. This year, the investors, including Rewe, provided a further 100 million euros at a valuation of less than 1 billion euros. A merger with the Turkish competitor Getir, which had already swallowed up the Berlin start-up Gorillas, has not yet materialised.

The existence as a unicorn was particularly short-lived for Grover, the electronics equipment rental company from Berlin. According to interim CEO and co-founder Linda Rubin in an interview with „Gründerszene“, the company received a valuation of less than 1 billion dollars in a 50 million euro financing round this year, which was led by the Cool Japan sovereign wealth fund, among others. Just two years earlier, Grover had exceeded the billion-dollar mark and was valued at 1.3 billion euros in April 2022, according to Clipperton. Since its foundation in 2015, the young company has received 1.4 billion euros in investments. However, sales are stagnating and higher interest rates are making it more expensive to finance the purchase of devices.

Seller X has also found itself in a difficult situation. The start-up was founded in 2020 as an e-commerce star during the pandemic. The main creditor – US asset management giant Blackrock – even wanted to auction off the start-up in September with a starting bid of just 100,000 euros. However, the sale of the defaulting debtor by auction was cancelled. Instead, Blackrock applied to the Federal Cartel Office to take over Seller X, which buys up small Amazon businesses and then optimises them. At its peak in June 2023, the company was valued at 1.6 billion euros, according to Clipperton.

The fate of Berlin-based scooter rental company Tier is hardly any better. The company, which was valued at 1.8 billion euros in November 2021, was recently valued at just 60 million euros following its merger with competitor Dott. The Swiss insurance fintech Wefox has also lost more than 80% of its value. It was valued at 4.5 billion euros in July 2022. According to Bloomberg, the latest rumours of a takeover by a sovereign wealth fund from Abu Dhabi point to a valuation of only 550 million euros.