HKUST’s Unicorn Ecosystem and Unicorn Day — a scorecard of 10 unicorns and nearly 1,900 active startups

In a sentence: At its Unicorn Day in June 2025, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) disclosed that, as of May 2025, over 1,800 active startups had been founded by HKUST members, including 10 unicorns and 17 IPO or M&A exits.

A university barely three decades old, with a full-time student body under 20,000, each year calibrates its entrepreneurship ecosystem with the same set of numbers — how many active startups, how many of them valued above US$1 billion, and the cumulative tally of listings or acquisitions. These figures are not back-of-the-envelope estimates; they are HKUST’s official, publicly disclosed scorecard, updated annually at its Unicorn Day. This piece does not retell how the Entrepreneurship Center works or how DJI and Googol Technology got their start (those two threads are covered in HKUST entrepreneurship and the unicorn ecosystem (Part I)^※ and (Part II)^※). Instead, it answers a more fundamental question: how exactly are these numbers counted, where are they published, how have they moved year by year, and — crucially — how should they be read.

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# How are “over 1,800 startups, 10 unicorns, 17 exits” counted?

The latest scorecard, issued on HKUST’s Unicorn Day on 13 June 2025, states: as of May 2025, over 1,800 active startups had been founded by HKUST members, including 10 unicorns and 17 exits via IPO or M&A^※. These three numbers must be unpicked separately, because their statistical boundaries differ.

The first figure — “over 1,800 active startups” — is bounded by “founded by HKUST members.” “Members” encompasses faculty, staff, current students, and alumni. “Founded” covers projects launched while at the University as well as companies set up years after graduation. In other words, this is not a register of university-run enterprises or university equity stakes; it tallies every currently operating company that an HKUST person led the founding of. That is why a modestly sized, mostly STEM university can report a four-digit startup stock: it measures the radiation of people, not the assets of the institution.

The second figure — “10 unicorns” — uses the standard valuation threshold. A unicorn is a private startup valued at US$1 billion or above. HKUST’s 10 are those among the “member-founded active startups” that meet this bar; many also appear on third-party lists, allowing cross‑checking (detailed below). Valuations are inherently dynamic, fluctuating with funding rounds and market conditions. Once a company lists or is acquired, it moves from the “unicorn” column to the “exit” column, so this number can go down as well as up.

The third figure — “17 exits” — tallies capital‑market realisations. In venture-capital parlance, an exit refers to the two main routes by which investors get a return: an initial public offering (IPO) or a merger/acquisition (M&A). HKUST counts 17 cumulative cases among its member-founded firms that have completed either event. Unlike the active‑startup and unicorn tallies, the exit figure is a lifetime aggregate that only ever increases — making it the strongest measure of how many ventures have run the full course.

Putting the three together, HKUST has essentially built a public-facing, year‑on‑year dashboard from the three dimensions of stock (active startups) + peaks (unicorns) + realisations (exits), turning an otherwise fuzzy ecosystem into quantifiable, comparable metrics.

All three metrics share the “founded by HKUST members” boundary; the cut‑off is May 2025, released in the HKUST press announcement ahead of that year’s Unicorn Day.

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# Where and how are these numbers disclosed each year? Unicorn Day as the disclosure platform

To read the scorecard properly one must first understand the platform that carries it. Unicorn Day is HKUST’s annual innovation and entrepreneurship gathering, launched in 2023 and co‑organised by the Office of Knowledge Transfer (OKT) and the Entrepreneurship Center. Held in early summer on the Clear Water Bay campus, its most distinctive ecosystem function is not the number of pitching sessions staged but the institutionalised, annual disclosure of the three statistical snapshots — before or around each edition, HKUST issues an official press release updating the latest “active startups / unicorns / exits” figures. This turns a collection of achievements that would otherwise be scattered across individual company fundraising news into a public, trackable, year‑on‑year ledger.

According to HKUST records, the first Unicorn Day was held on 23 May 2023^※, drawing around 600 guests from business and government and showcasing nearly 90 HKUST startups together with about five unicorns or listed companies. The same occasion saw the launch of the HKUST Founder’s Club, which offers training, investment matching, and business‑matchmaking services to alumni entrepreneurs. HKUST also disclosed the scale of government matching funding: since the Innovation and Technology Commission launched the Technology Start-up Support Scheme for Universities (TSSSU) in 2014, HKUST‑related startups have received a cumulative total of about HK$400 million, benefiting close to 500 startups^※.

The event format has since stabilised year after year: an innovation forum and keynote speeches in the morning, parallel investment‑pitching sessions in the afternoon, a concentrated round of major partnership signings towards the close, and a tie‑in with international entrepreneurship competitions. This fixed “forum + pitching + signing + competition” structure makes Unicorn Day both a shop window for external engagement and an annual ecosystem “stocktake.” For how the Entrepreneurship Center and the HK$1 Million Entrepreneurship Competition act as the funnel upstream of this stocktake, see HKUST entrepreneurship and the unicorn ecosystem (Part I)^※.

# What does the name “Unicorn Day” itself signify?

Branding a university event with the word “unicorn” is a deliberate act of self‑positioning. “Unicorn” is the venture‑capital world’s term for a private company valued above ten figures, inherently rare; naming the annual flagship event “Unicorn Day” elevates the fact that “we already produce unicorns in batches” from a line in a press release into the marquee and the promise of the occasion. It simultaneously declares the record already achieved and sets a high bar for each year’s scorecard — the event’s name reminds the outside world that this ecosystem is measured not by how many workshops were held but by how many ten‑figure companies have been built. That “naming by outcome” stands in contrast to process‑named mechanisms such as the Entrepreneurship Center and the HK$1 Million Entrepreneurship Competition: the former tallies the fruit, the latter cultivates the soil.

# The Founder’s Club: channelling the scorecard back into sustained support

Unicorn Day is not a one‑off number‑release exercise; its first edition also gave birth to a permanent mechanism. According to HKUST, the inaugural 2023 Unicorn Day announced the establishment of the HKUST Founder’s Club^※, aimed at alumni entrepreneurs and offering training, investment‑opportunity matching, and business‑matchmaking services. This design plugged a gap in the ecosystem: the HK$1 Million Entrepreneurship Competition mainly serves early‑stage teams that are “yet to form up,” whereas the Founder’s Club serves alumni entrepreneurs who are “already on the road.” The two mechanisms extend support from the campus into the alumni phase. In effect, Unicorn Day not only presents the scorecard to the public; behind the scenes it re‑enlists founders who have already succeeded, giving today’s unicorns the chance to become tomorrow’s investors and mentors for the next crop of startups. That closed loop of “alumni giving back” provides one institutional explanation for the sustained net growth in the active‑startup stock.

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# How much has the scorecard grown over three years?

Lining up the numbers disclosed at successive Unicorn Days reveals the growth rhythm of this dashboard. According to HKUST’s announcements by year: the first edition (May 2023) reported 1,645 active startups, 9 unicorns, and 11 exits^※; the second edition (2024) rose to about 1,747 active startups, 10 unicorns, and 13 exits^※; the third edition (May 2025 snapshot) stood at over 1,800 active startups, 10 unicorns, and 17 exits^※. Of the three dimensions, the most solid expansion is in exits — from 11 to 17, an increase of six in two years — signalling a steady accumulation of companies that have run the full course.

The active‑startup stock grew from 1,645 to over 1,800 over the same two years, an annual increment of roughly one hundred — a gentle but sustained upward line. The unicorn tally fluctuated modestly between 9 and 10, precisely corroborating the earlier point that “unicorn” is a dynamic number that can transfer out: new companies cross the billion‑dollar line while older unicorns leave that column upon listing and are re‑recorded as exits. Looking one more year ahead, by the 2026 Unicorn Day announcement^※ the same‑footing figures had moved further to over 1,900 active startups, 11 unicorns, and 22 exits — the exits column adding a further five in a single year. The full year‑by‑year table has already been set out in the ecosystem mechanisms piece^※ and is not reproduced here.

The significance of this growth curve lies less in any single impressive absolute number than in the fact that it is published by the same organiser, on the same definitions, at the same annual rhythm — consecutively. That turns “HKUST’s entrepreneurship ecosystem is expanding” from a stock phrase into a verifiable time series that can be compared from one year to the next.

It is worth noting a minor within‑year definitional adjustment. The 2025 Unicorn Day in June reported “over 1,800 as of May 2025”; only a month or two later, another HKUST release updated the figure to “as of July 2025, over 1,900 active startups founded by HKUST members, alongside 10 unicorns and 17 exits”^※. The two numbers are not contradictory — the unicorn and exit tallies stay the same; it is simply that the active‑startup stock crossed the 1,900 round‑number threshold in those two months. This neatly illustrates that “active startups” is a high‑frequency, dynamic stock: quoted in different months of the same year, it can land in different hundreds. Quoting without specifying the exact cut‑off (May Unicorn Day snapshot versus July release) can easily produce an unnecessary discrepancy over “1,800 or 1,900.”

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# Who are the “10 unicorns”?

HKUST’s official announcements provide only the number of unicorns, not a name‑by‑name list. Pinpointing the specific companies requires cross‑checking against third‑party rankings. The most frequently cited list is the “Unicorns HK 2021” compilation released by the Hong Kong X Foundation (part of Sequoia China). According to a March 2022 report from the HKUST School of Engineering^※, six of the 18 companies on that list have direct ties to HKUST engineering faculty or alumni. Those six, combined with companies that have exhibited as “unicorns” at successive Unicorn Days, roughly delineate the main body of HKUST‑linked unicorns.

The detailed entrepreneurial histories of these companies — how Frank Wang started in an HKUST dormitory, the genealogy of five unicorns emerging from Prof. Li Zexiang’s hands, how SmartMore reached unicorn valuation inside 18 months — are unfolded one by one in the representative companies piece^※; this section serves only as a cross‑referenced roster. Two statistical points warrant emphasis here. First, the official “10” is a dynamic snapshot; a given year’s list may not completely match another year’s (after Googol Technology listed, it moved from unicorn to exit). Second, third‑party lists may define “HKUST connection” slightly differently from HKUST’s own “founded by members” criterion — for instance, a founder may hold affiliations with HKUST and another institution simultaneously, leaving room for interpretation. Cross‑referencing therefore requires care.

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# What traceable entries sit inside the “17 exits” ledger?

Exits are the hardest of the three numbers — an IPO or M&A is a public capital‑market event that can, in principle, be traced one by one. Yet HKUST again supplies only the cumulative total (17), not a full itemised list. Among the representative cases that can be independently confirmed through documentary sources, the clearest is Googol Technology.

Googol Technology was co‑founded in the late 1990s by Prof. Li Zexiang and Prof. Ko Ping‑keung of HKUST’s Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, positioning itself as the Asia‑Pacific region’s first high‑tech enterprise specialising in motion controllers and control systems. According to a report from the HKUST School of Engineering, Googol Technology listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange’s ChiNext (Growth Enterprise Market) board on 15 August 2023^※, roughly twenty‑four years after its founding — one HKUST‑affiliated IPO exit with a clear, publicly verifiable timeline. It also bears out the “column‑switching” logic described earlier: the moment Googol became a listed company, it was removed from the “unicorn / active startup” valuation tallies and re‑recorded in the cumulative “exit” column.

Another hardware company often cited as an HKUST incubation outcome is APT Electronics. According to a third‑party encyclopaedia entry^※, APT is an HKUST‑incubated high‑tech enterprise, established in 2006; its technical lineage can be traced back to Micro Crystal Advanced Optoelectronics, founded at HKUST in 2003, with a principal business in LED optoelectronic products for smart vehicle vision, high‑end lighting, and advanced displays. APT was exhibited as a representative enterprise at HKUST’s first Unicorn Day in 2023^※. Its listing status is noted in crowd‑sourced encyclopaedias (which cite stock code 2551.HK), but that detail originates from secondary sources and has not been confirmed directly by HKUST; it is recorded here for reference only, not as a verified exit entry.

To be candid, the number of exit cases that can be publicly ticked off one by one falls well short of the official “17” aggregate — many M&A transactions are kept low‑profile, and some earlier exits are scattered across the companies’ own announcements rather than being held in a unified HKUST ledger. The sensible way to read the “17” total is therefore as an official cumulative figure tabulated from HKUST’s internal records and publicly endorsed at Unicorn Day, not as a complete, fully itemised checklist. Anyone wanting to verify a specific case must still refer back to the relevant company’s own listing or acquisition announcements.

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# What happened on the ground at Unicorn Day 2025 (13 June)?

If the numbers are the text of the scorecard, each Unicorn Day’s live proceedings are the ritual that authenticates it. The third edition, on 13 June 2025, offers a sample of scale and internationalisation worth observing.

According to HKUST’s announcement, the edition showcased more than 100 HKUST startup projects and drew nearly 1,300 investors, industry leaders and government and academic representatives from over twelve countries and regions^※. The public‑sector and diplomatic attendance says much about the platform’s standing: the same release notes that attendees included Mr. Lee Kwok‑bun, Commissioner for Innovation and Technology of the Hong Kong SAR, Ms. Bonnie Y Chan, Chief Executive Officer of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX), as well as consul‑generals or senior officials from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Pakistan, the UAE, the UK, Vietnam, South Korea, and others^※. That a university entrepreneurship exhibition can simultaneously gather the head of a stock exchange and a corps of consuls from more than ten nations is itself a side‑profile of the ecosystem’s “external connectivity.”

The signing component was the edition’s concrete output. According to HKUST, the major collaborations sealed on the day included: a memorandum of understanding with AstraZeneca on applying AI to healthcare, metabolic diseases, cancer, and rare diseases; a partnership between the HKUST Redbird Innovation Fund and Gobi Partners; and incubation support for commercialisation in the Yangtze River Delta from NICE (the National Centre for Excellence in Innovation in the Yangtze River Delta)^※. Agreements of this kind constitute the other function of Unicorn Day — it not only counts past achievements but also lays the capital and industry‑linkage pipes for the next cohort of startups, right there on the spot.

The edition also plugged in an international competition: according to HKUST, towards the close of the day it hosted the Hong Kong regional final of the Startup World Cup 2025, with twelve shortlisted teams competing in areas such as biomedicine, robotics, AI coding, data processing, and sustainability, vying for a slot at the global finals in the United States in October 2025^※. Xinhua News Agency also covered the event under the headline “Innovations from over 100 startups displayed on HKUST ‘Unicorn Day’”^※, offering a second source that can be read against the university’s own account.

On the positioning of this edition, the Vice-Chancellor and President of HKUST, Prof. Nancy Ip, said in her remarks:

“At HKUST, we champion innovation, entrepreneurship, and ideas that address global challenges.” (HKUST official news, June 2025)^※

The statement elevates Unicorn Day’s significance from “tallying numbers” to “university mission” — the scorecard is the fruit; entrepreneurship education and research are the cause.

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# Beyond the numbers: what else does Unicorn Day disclose each year? The signing ledger

If the three statistical snapshots report the “past‑tense” score, the signing ceremonies that close each edition reveal the “future‑tense” capital and industry connections. These agreements form a second, equally important information thread — also publicly disclosed, year by year, and fully trackable.

The 2024 signing round in particular shows how capital flows back into HKUST’s own incubation funds. According to HKUST, at the 2024 Unicorn Day, the HKUST Redbird Innovation Fund received strategic investments from Lee Kum Kee Group, Nan Fung Life Sciences, and Sun Hung Kai & Co. Limited; simultaneously, HKUST signed agreements with the Shanghai Caohejing Hi‑Tech Park on AI education and joint incubation, and entered a partnership with the Saudi deep‑tech venture capital firm Bête Lab^※. Industrial capital injecting into a university’s own venture fund amounts to a two‑way endorsement: corporations are placing hard‑currency bets on HKUST’s deep‑tech pipeline, while HKUST amplifies its incubation capacity with external capital. Information on such “fund injections” says more about the ecosystem’s capital depth than how many startups appear on the exhibition floor.

By the fourth edition in 2026, the geographic and industrial radius of the signings had widened further. According to HKUST, the 2026 Unicorn Day saw strategic cooperation agreements signed with six parties, including the Samsung Guangzhou Institute, CalmCar, and China Everbright Water, while the participant tally grew to over 1,800^※. Read across successive editions, a clear trajectory emerges: partners have extended from local‑and‑mainland (Shenzhen Angel Fund of Funds, Caohejing) to international (Saudi Bête Lab, South Korean Samsung, multinational pharma AstraZeneca) — consistent with the logic of HKUST’s overall internationalisation radiating outwards in concentric circles. The full list of signings edition by edition has been tabulated in the ecosystem mechanisms piece^※; this section only interprets their nature as “capital‑connectivity disclosures” and does not reproduce the line items.

It is worth pointing out that the signing information and the statistical numbers play complementary roles: the numbers tell the outside world “what the ecosystem has already produced,” while the signings signal “what resources the ecosystem has just plugged into for the next phase.” Together, they make Unicorn Day not merely an occasion for self‑congratulation but an annual disclosure that looks both backwards and forwards.

# What coordinates should you use to read this scorecard?

Taken in isolation, “over 1,800 startups, 10 unicorns” is a set of large, abstract numbers; placed in a comparative frame, their heft becomes clearer. According to third‑party data cited in the representative‑companies piece^※, HKUST was once ranked second among mainland Chinese universities in “deep‑tech unicorn incubation capability” by mainland media. HKUST’s peculiarity is the time it took to amass that record — founded in 1991, it was only thirty‑four years old by 2025, and its full‑time student body has long remained under 20,000.

Measured by “ecosystem density,” over 1,800 active startups, 10 unicorns, and 17 exits, mapped against a university of under 20,000 enrolled students, yields a unicorns‑per‑thousand‑students ratio that sits in the top tier among Asia‑Pacific universities. This density lens conveys the ecosystem’s efficiency more tellingly than absolute counts — the totals are achieved not by sheer mass but by a high conversion rate per head. Cross‑university comparisons must be approached with caution: institutions’ definitions of “alumni‑founded startups” differ. Some only count ventures launched during study; others include companies founded years after graduation. Such definitional differences can meaningfully shift absolute numbers, so rankings and density comparisons should be treated as directional pointers, not precise yardsticks.

The broader coordinate is the regional innovation cluster. As HKUST noted in a 2025 announcement, the “Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou” innovation cluster topped the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2025 ranking of the top‑100 science and technology clusters^※, having previously been ranked second for five consecutive years. The index, calculated per million population over a rolling five‑year window, also recorded, per the same source, roughly 2,292 Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications, 3,775 scientific publications, and 135 venture‑capital deals^※ for the cluster. HKUST embeds its own scorecard into this regional narrative: the same announcement states that HKUST’s patent utilisation rate stands at 30%, it ranks first among Chinese universities in the Nature Index for patent influence, and it operates four incubators across the Greater Bay Area^※. Nesting the startup scorecard inside the story of “the world’s number‑one cluster” is a consistent element of HKUST’s external positioning — it seeks to show not “one institution fighting alone,” but “one university embedded in a globally leading regional innovation chain.” This also explains why so many HKUST‑linked unicorns register and operate in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Zhuhai: the Greater Bay Area’s manufacturing and supply chains are the physical vessels that turn HKUST laboratory results into products at speed.

Another layer of Unicorn Day’s value lies precisely here: it provides institutionalised, trackable, public data disclosure. Compared with many universities’ scattered and irregular announcements of entrepreneurial successes, HKUST uses a fixed platform, consistent definitions, and a fixed annual rhythm to publish these numbers consecutively, giving the quantitative scorecard relatively high comparability and verifiability. For a detailed account of the support mechanisms behind the ecosystem — the Office of Knowledge Transfer, the HK$500‑million‑scale Redbird Innovation Fund, the TSSSU government matching scheme — and how they carry laboratory results all the way to unicorn valuations, see representative companies and support mechanisms^※.

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# What definitional nuances should one watch when reading this scorecard?

A set of official figures published year after year is most easily misread in its small print. A few points of caution for those citing the data:

First, “active” is a time‑sensitive, dynamic definition. “Over 1,800 active startups” counts only companies currently in operation. Shuttered, deregistered or dormant projects drop out of this column. The figure is therefore neither “all startups ever born in HKUST’s history” nor one that can expand indefinitely — it is a stock snapshot at a specific point in time (May 2025).

Second, “unicorn” floats with valuations and market conditions. The US$1‑billion valuation threshold is pegged to the most recent funding round or market appraisal. In a cold market, some companies may slip below the line; in a hot market, new faces cross it. Plus, listing triggers a transfer out. So the “10” may correspond to a different set of specific companies from year to year; it should not be treated as a fixed, static directory.

Third, “founded by members” has a much wider boundary than “university‑run enterprise.” This tally includes companies led by faculty, staff, students, and alumni and does not require university equity ownership. That is both the reason the number is substantial and a reminder that what is being measured is the entrepreneurial radiation of HKUST people, not the university’s direct institutional assets. In cross‑university comparisons, one must check whether the comparator institution uses an equally broad definition.

Fourth, the numbers bear a clear time‑stamp — always check when you cite. This piece uses the May 2025 snapshot disclosed at the June 2025 Unicorn Day (over 1,800 / 10 / 17); a year later the 2026 snapshot had already moved to over 1,900 / 11 / 22. Any citation should specify “as of [month, year], per the [year] Unicorn Day announcement,” and should be cross‑checked against the latest HKUST release to avoid passing off stale figures as the current state of play.

Taken together, Unicorn Day’s scorecard is a piece of honest — but definition‑aware — official disclosure: it does not exaggerate (numbers can fall as well as rise, exits can be traced case by case), and it is not vague (boundaries, cut‑offs, and sources remain consistent from year to year). For researchers, its value lies less in any single absolute figure than in offering a verifiable time series on the entrepreneurship ecosystem, maintained continuously by the same organiser on the same definitions.

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