The HKUST "Unicorn" Ecosystem and Unicorn Day — a report card of 10 unicorns and nearly 1,900 active startups

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

A university barely three decades old, with fewer than 20,000 full-time students, recalibrates its entrepreneurial ecosystem every year with the same set of figures — how many active startups, how many are valued at over US$1 billion, how many have gone public or been acquired. These numbers are not market gossip but the official, annually updated tally that HKUST releases at its yearly "Unicorn Day" (HKUST Unicorn Day). This article will not retell how the entrepreneurship centre operates or how DJI and Googol got started (those two threads are covered separately in HKUST Entrepreneurship and the Unicorn Ecosystem (Part 1)^※ and (Part 2)^※). Instead, we focus on a more basic question: how exactly are these "report card" numbers counted, where are they published, how have they changed year on year, and how should they be read?

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# How are the figures "over 1,800 startups, 10 unicorns, 17 exits" arrived at?

The latest report card HKUST presented at Unicorn Day on 13 June 2025 was: as of May 2025, active startups founded by HKUST members numbered over 1,800, of which 10 were unicorns and 17 had exited via IPO or M&A^※. These three numbers need to be unpacked separately, because each has a different statistical boundary.

The first figure, "over 1,800 active startups", is bounded by "founded by HKUST members". "Members" covers three groups: HKUST faculty and staff, current students, and alumni. "Founded" includes both ventures begun while they were at the University and companies set up years after graduation. In other words, this is not a list of university-run enterprises or university-held equity stakes; it counts every company led into existence by someone from HKUST that is still in operation today. This definition explains how a small, STEM-focused university can report a four-figure stock of startups — it measures the reach 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 more. HKUST's count of 10 refers to those companies among the "member-founded active startups" that have crossed that line; many of them appear simultaneously on third-party lists, which allows cross-verification (detailed below). One caveat: valuations are dynamic, fluctuating with funding rounds and market conditions, and a company that goes public or is acquired moves out of the "unicorn" column into "exits" — so this figure does not only go up.

The third figure, "17 exits", records realisations at the capital level. In venture-capital parlance, an exit means one of the two main ways an investment yields a return: an initial public offering (IPO) on a stock exchange, or an acquisition (M&A). HKUST counts, cumulatively, the member-founded startups that have completed either. Unlike "active startups" and "unicorns", exits are a cumulative stock — they only increase — and so they best reflect how many companies have run the full course.

Taken together, the University is using three dimensions — stock (active startups), peak (unicorns) and realisation (exits) — to build a public, year-on-year-comparable dashboard for an ecosystem that would otherwise be hard to quantify at all.

All three rows share the same boundary — "founded by HKUST members" — with a reference date of May 2025, as published in the University's announcement just before that year's Unicorn Day.

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# Where and how are these figures released each year? Unicorn Day as the disclosure platform

To understand the report card, you first need to understand the platform that carries it. Unicorn Day is an annual innovation and entrepreneurship gathering that HKUST has held since 2023, co-organised by the Office of Knowledge Transfer (OKT) and the Entrepreneurship Center, hosted on the Clear Water Bay campus each early summer. Its most distinctive function for the ecosystem is not the number of pitch sessions it stages, but rather the institutionalised, once-a-year public release of the three statistical aggregates — around each edition, HKUST issues an official press release updating the "active startups / unicorns / exits" figures. This gathers achievements that would otherwise be scattered across individual companies' funding announcements into a single, trackable, year-on-year-comparable public ledger.

According to HKUST's own records, the first Unicorn Day was held on 23 May 2023^※, with some 600 guests from business and government, nearly 90 HKUST startups and about five unicorns or listed companies on display, and the announcement that day of the "HKUST Founder's Club", which offers graduates training, investor introductions and business-matching services. At the same event, 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-affiliated startups had received a cumulative total of about HK$400 million, benefiting nearly 500 startups^※.

The format has since settled into a pattern: morning innovation forums and keynote speeches, parallel investor pitch sessions in the afternoon, a batch of major cooperation agreements signed towards the close, and connections to international startup competitions. This fixed structure of "forum + pitches + signings + competitions" makes Unicorn Day both a shop window for external investment and an annual stocktaking of the ecosystem. For how the Entrepreneurship Center and its HK$1-million Startup Competition act as the "funnel entrance" before this stocktaking, see HKUST Entrepreneurship and the Unicorn Ecosystem (Part 1)^※.

# What does the name "Unicorn Day" itself say?

Naming a university event after the unicorn is a deliberate act of self-positioning. The unicorn is the venture-capital world's term for a private company valued above US$1 billion — by definition rare; calling the annual showcase "Unicorn Day" elevates the fact "we have produced unicorns in quantity" from a line in a press release to the event's banner and promise. It is at once a declaration of existing achievement and the setting of a high bar for the annual report card: the event's name reminds the outside world that the scale for measuring this ecosystem is not "how much training we ran" but "how many billion-dollar companies we have produced." This "naming by results" approach stands in contrast to mechanisms named by process, such as the Entrepreneurship Center and the HK$1-million Startup Competition: the former counts the fruit, the latter cultivates the soil.

# The Founder's Club: linking the report card back to ongoing support

Unicorn Day is more than a one-off disclosure of numbers; its first edition also hatched a standing mechanism. According to HKUST, the 2023 inaugural Unicorn Day announced the establishment of the HKUST Founder's Club^※, serving HKUST alumni entrepreneurs with training, investment-matching and business-brokering services. This design fills a gap in the ecosystem: the HK$1-million Startup Competition mainly serves early-stage teams "not yet formed up", while the Founder's Club serves graduate entrepreneurs "already on the road" — the two sit back to back, extending support from campus into the alumni phase. In other words, Unicorn Day does double duty: on stage it takes stock of the report card, and behind the scenes it re-organises the entrepreneurs who have already made it, so that this year's unicorns can become next year's investors and mentors for new startups. This closed loop of "alumni giving back" is one institutional reason the stock of active startups keeps growing.

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# Three years on, how much has the report card grown?

Laying the figures disclosed at successive Unicorn Days side by side reveals the dashboard's growth rhythm. According to HKUST's announcements across the years, the first edition (May 2023) reported 1,645 active startups, 9 unicorns and 11 exits^※; the second (2024) rose to about 1,747, 10 unicorns and 13 exits^※; the third (May 2025 figures) came in at over 1,800, 10 unicorns and 17 exits^※. Of the three dimensions, the most solid growth is in exits — from 11 to 17, six more in two years — showing that the number of companies running the full course is steadily accumulating.

The active-startup stock rose from 1,645 to over 1,800 in two years, an increase of roughly a hundred a year — a gentle but sustained upward line. The unicorn count has wobbled between 9 and 10, which exactly bears out the point made earlier that "unicorn" is a dynamic, transferable category: new companies cross the billion-dollar line, while older unicorns leave the column by going public and are re-recorded as exits. Extend the view one more year, and according to the 2026 Unicorn Day announcement^※, the same metrics rose further to over 1,900 active startups, 11 unicorns and 22 exits, with five more exits in a single year. A full comparison table of the yearly figures has already been laid out in the mechanisms article^※; we will not repeat it here.

The significance of this growth curve is not that any single absolute value is astonishing, but that it has been published continuously by the same organiser, on the same basis, at the same annual rhythm — which turns "HKUST's entrepreneurial ecosystem is expanding" from a description into a time series that outsiders can verify and compare year by year.

One nuance worth noting is the slight variation within a single year. The June 2025 Unicorn Day reported "over 1,800 as of May 2025"; just a month or two later, HKUST updated the figure in another announcement to over 1,900 active startups founded by HKUST members as of July 2025, with 10 unicorns and 17 exits^※. The two numbers do not contradict each other — the unicorn and exit counts are unchanged; it is simply that the active-startup stock crossed the round thousand mark from "over 1,800" to "over 1,900" in the space of two months. This neatly demonstrates that "active startups" is a frequently-updated dynamic stock: different months in the same year can land in different hundred-mark bands. If you cite the figure without dating it (the May Unicorn Day basis versus the July basis), you can easily end up in a pointless "1,800 or 1,900?" dispute.

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# Who are the "10 unicorns"?

HKUST's official announcement gives only the number of unicorns, without naming them. Matching the ten slots to specific companies requires cross-checking against third-party lists. The most frequently cited is the "Unicorns HK 2021" list published by the Hong Kong X Foundation (affiliated with Sequoia Capital China). According to a March 2022 report by the HKUST School of Engineering^※, of the 18 companies on that list, six were directly connected to HKUST School of Engineering faculty members or alumni. These six, added to the companies that have appeared over the years as "unicorns" on the Unicorn Day exhibition floor, broadly sketch the main faces of the HKUST unicorn cohort.

The full founding stories of the companies above — how Frank Wang started out in an HKUST dormitory, Li Zexiang's personal hand in incubating five unicorns, SmartMore's dash to unicorn valuation in 18 months — are told company by company in the representative-companies article^※; here we only note them for cross-referencing and do not repeat the narratives. Two statistical points deserve emphasis. First, the official "10" is a dynamic snapshot: one year's list need not coincide with another's (after Googol's listing, it moved from unicorn to exit). Second, the "HKUST connection" criteria of third-party lists may differ slightly from the University's own "member-founded" definition — for instance, a founder with affiliations to both HKUST and another institution leaves room for interpretation in attribution, so cross-referencing requires care.

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# In the "17 exits" ledger, which entries can actually be verified?

Of the three figures, exits are the "hardest" — an IPO or acquisition is a public capital event that can be traced case by case. But HKUST likewise publishes only the cumulative total (17), without an itemised list. Of the representative entries that independent records can confirm, the clearest is Googol Technology.

Googol Technology was co-founded in the late 1990s by Professors Li Zexiang and Gao Bingqiang of the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, positioning itself as the first high-tech enterprise in the Asia-Pacific region focused on motion controllers and control systems. According to a report from the HKUST School of Engineering, Googol listed on the ChiNext board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange on 15 August 2023^※, about 24 years after its founding — an HKUST-affiliated IPO exit with a clear, publicly verifiable timeline. It also confirms the "column transfer" logic described above: the moment Googol became a listed company, it moved out of the unicorn/active-startup valuation statistics and into the cumulative "exits" column.

Another hardware firm often listed among HKUST-incubated ventures is APT Electronics. According to a third-party encyclopaedia entry^※, APT is a high-tech enterprise incubated at HKUST, founded in 2006, with its technological lineage traceable back to Micro Crystal Advanced Optoelectronics, established at HKUST in 2003; its main business covers LED optoelectronic products for smart automotive vision, high-end lighting and advanced displays. APT exhibited as a representative company at the inaugural Unicorn Day in 2023^※. Its listing status appears in public encyclopaedic sources (citing ticker code 2551.HK), but that detail comes from a secondary source and has not been directly confirmed by HKUST, so we record it only as pending verification, not as a confirmed exit.

To be honest: the number of exits that can be individually verified from public records is far smaller than the official aggregate of "17". Many M&A deals are not trumpeted, and some early exits are scattered across individual companies' own announcements rather than in a unified HKUST ledger. The sensible reading of "17" is therefore as an official cumulative value that HKUST aggregates from its internal records and endorses at Unicorn Day — not as a complete checklist that can be ticked off one by one. To verify any particular case, one still has to go back to the relevant company's own IPO or acquisition announcements.

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# Unicorn Day 2025 (13 June): what happened on the day?

If the numbers are the body of the report card, the live event of each Unicorn Day is the ceremony that endorses it. The third edition, on 13 June 2025, offers a good observation sample in both scale and internationalisation.

According to HKUST's announcement, that edition showcased over 100 HKUST startup projects and drew nearly 1,300 investors, industry leaders and government and academic representatives from over twelve countries and regions^※. The calibre of public-sector and diplomatic guests says a great deal about where this event sits: per the same announcement, attendees included Mr. LEE Kwok-bun, Commissioner for Innovation and Technology of the HKSAR; Ms. Bonnie Y Chan, Chief Executive of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing; and consuls-general or senior officials from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Pakistan, the UAE, the UK, Vietnam, South Korea and beyond^※. A university startup fair that can simultaneously draw the head of a stock exchange and more than a dozen consular missions is itself a side-portrait of the ecosystem's external connectivity.

The signing session was that edition's substantive output. According to HKUST, the major collaborations concluded on the day included: a memorandum of understanding with AstraZeneca on applying AI to healthcare, metabolic diseases, cancer and rare diseases; an agreement between the HKUST Redbird Innovation Fund and Gobi Partners; and incubation support from NICE (National Innovation Centre par Excellence, Yangtze Delta) for commercialisation into the Yangtze River Delta^※. Agreements like these constitute another layer of what Unicorn Day does — it does not merely take stock of past achievements; on the spot, it lays the capital and industry pipelines for the next batch of startups.

That edition also connected to an international competition: according to HKUST, before the close of the day the Hong Kong regional final of the Startup World Cup 2025 was held, with 12 shortlisted teams competing in biomedicine, robotics, AI programming, data processing and sustainability for a place at the global final in the US in October 2025^※. Xinhua also covered the event under the headline 《逾百家初创亮相科大「独角兽日」》^※, corroborating the University's own account.

On the positioning of that edition, HKUST President Prof. Nancy Ip's remarks in her address, in the official original:

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

Which is to say: at HKUST, we champion innovation, entrepreneurship, and ideas that address global challenges. This statement lifts the meaning of Unicorn Day from "counting numbers" to "university mission" — the report card is the effect; 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 aggregates are the "past tense" report card, then the signing ceremonies before each edition's close disclose the "future tense" of capital and industry connections. These agreements form another thread of information from Unicorn Day, equally public and trackable year by year.

The second edition's signings in 2024 are especially revealing of 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 investment from the Lee Kum Kee Group, Nan Fung Life Sciences and Sun Hung Kai & Co., while HKUST signed an agreement with Shanghai Caohejing Hi-Tech Park on AI education and joint incubation, and a partnership with Saudi deep-tech VC Bête Lab^※. Industrial capital injecting funds into a university's own venture fund is a two-way endorsement: companies bet real money on HKUST's deep-tech pipeline, while the University leverages external capital to amplify its own incubation capacity. This kind of "fund injection" information says more about the ecosystem's capital depth than how many startups are on the exhibition floor.

By the fourth edition in 2026, the geographic and industrial radius had widened further. According to HKUST, the 2026 Unicorn Day signed strategic partnerships with six parties including Samsung Guangzhou R&D Center, CalmCar and China Everbright Water, with participation expanding to over 1,800 people^※. Lining up the signings across editions, a clear trajectory emerges: partners extend from local and mainland China (Shenzhen Angel FOF, Caohejing) towards international players (Saudi's Bête Lab, South Korea's Samsung, multinational pharma AstraZeneca) — consistent with HKUST's wider "concentric circle" logic of internationalisation. The complete list of signings across editions has already been tabulated in the mechanisms article^※; here we only interpret their nature as disclosures of capital connectivity, without re-listing the details.

It is worth noting that the signing information and the statistics are complementary in function: the numbers tell the outside world "what the ecosystem has produced", while the signings announce "which resources the ecosystem has connected to next". Together, they make Unicorn Day more than an act of self-congratulation — an annual disclosure with both retrospective and prospective dimensions.

# What coordinates should this report card be read in?

Viewed in isolation, "over 1,800 startups, 10 unicorns" is an abstract set of large numbers; placed in comparative coordinates, its weight becomes visible. According to third-party data cited in the representative-companies article^※, HKUST has ranked second among mainland Chinese universities in media listings of "deep-tech unicorn incubation capability"; what makes HKUST distinctive is the time it took to achieve this record — founded in 1991, a mere 34 years by 2025, with a full-time student body that has long stayed under 20,000.

Measured by "ecosystem density", over 1,800 active startups, 10 unicorns and 17 exits from a university with fewer than 20,000 enrolled students puts its unicorn incubation rate per thousand enrolled students in the top tier among Asia-Pacific universities. This density perspective says more about the efficiency of the HKUST ecosystem than absolute numbers ever could — the total is not built up by sheer scale but by a high conversion rate per head of population. Cross-university comparisons must of course be handled with care: institutions define "alumni startups" differently, some counting only ventures founded during study and others including companies set up years after graduation, and that variance materially affects the absolute figures. Rankings and density comparisons are therefore directional references, not precise calibration.

The larger coordinate is the regional innovation cluster. According to a HKUST announcement in 2025, the "Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou" innovation cluster rose to first place globally in the 2025 Global Innovation Index (GII) top-100 clusters ranking^※, after five consecutive years in second place. On the ranking's basis of per million population and five-year accumulation, and per the same source, the cluster's relevant metrics include approximately 2,292 Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications, 3,775 scientific papers and 135 venture-capital deals^※. HKUST frames its own report card within this regional story: per that announcement, HKUST achieved a patent commercialisation rate of 30%, ranked first among Chinese universities in patent influence in the Nature Index, and operates four incubators in the Greater Bay Area^※. Embedding the startup report card in the narrative of "the world's top cluster" is a consistent move in HKUST's external positioning — the point is not "one school fighting alone" but "one university embedded in a world-leading regional innovation chain." It also explains why so many HKUST-lineage unicorns are registered and operate in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Zhuhai: the manufacturing and supply chains of the Greater Bay Area are the physical vehicle that turns HKUST laboratory results into products at speed.

This is precisely Unicorn Day's other value: it provides institutionalised, trackable public data disclosure. Where many universities publicise entrepreneurial achievements sporadically and at irregular intervals, HKUST publishes continuously on a fixed platform, with fixed definitions, at a fixed rhythm, giving this quantitative report card a relatively high degree of comparability and verifiability. For the supporting machinery behind the ecosystem — the Office of Knowledge Transfer, the HK$500-million Redbird Innovation Fund, the TSSSU government matching — and how it carries laboratory results all the way to unicorn valuations, see the representative-companies and support-mechanisms article^※.

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# Reading this report card: which definitional pitfalls to watch for?

With an official number published year on year, the most frequent misreadings tend to hide in the details. Here is a summary of points to check when citing.

First, "active" is a time-sensitive, dynamic definition. "Over 1,800 active startups" counts companies currently in operation; failed, deregistered or dormant ventures drop out of this column. The figure is therefore neither "every startup HKUST has ever produced" nor a number that accumulates without limit — it is a snapshot of the stock at a given point (May 2025).

Second, "unicorn" fluctuates with valuations and market conditions. The US$1 billion threshold is judged by the most recent funding round or market assessment; when markets turn cold, some companies may slip below the line; when they heat up, new names cross it. Add the fact that listing removes a company from the column, and "10" will map to a different list of companies from one year to the next — it cannot be treated as a fixed roster.

Third, the boundary of "founded by members" is far wider than "university-run enterprise". This statistic counts companies led by faculty, students and alumni, without requiring university equity. This is both why the number is as large as it is and why it measures the entrepreneurial reach of "HKUST people" rather than the University's direct assets as an institution. In cross-university comparisons, it is essential to check whether the other party uses an equally broad definition.

Fourth, the figures carry explicit reference dates; always check the date when citing. This article uses the May 2025 basis disclosed at the June 2025 Unicorn Day (over 1,800 / 10 / 17); one year later, the 2026 basis had risen to over 1,900 / 11 / 22. Any citation should state "as of month/year, per the announcement of the Nth Unicorn Day" and be checked against HKUST's latest release, so that outdated numbers are not passed off as current.

Put these four points together, and the Unicorn Day report card is an honest official disclosure that must be read with its definitions in hand: it does not exaggerate (figures can go up or down; exits can be traced individually), and it does not blur (boundaries, dates and sources are consistent year on year). For researchers, its value lies not in any single absolute number but in providing a verifiable time series of an entrepreneurial ecosystem, continuously maintained by the same organiser on the same basis.

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