Meet the 13 new European 'unicorn' startups that were valued over $1 billion in the last year

A French rideshare service, BlaBlaCar lets users coordinate on lifts — setting up travellers who are going in the same direction. The rider gets a cheap trip, and the vehicle owner saves on petrol — but they don't make enough off petrol to fall foul of taxi regulation like Uber.

In July 2014, it raised $100 million in a round led by Index Ventures, which was at the time the biggest French VC funding round of all time.

Delivery Hero is going from strength to strength, and closed a fresh $110 million round of funding in early June — making up $1 billion of funding overall, $600 million of which came this year alone. The company is now worth $3.2 billion.

So what does the German startup do? Well, it has a series of apps and local websites that partner with local restaurants in different countries — 34 at the last count. In the UK, it operates as Hungry House, for example, while in Korea, it's YoGiYo. It now enjoys $165 million monthly sales.

CEO Niklas östberg hails from Switzerland.

This Scottish fantasy sports company differentiates itself from others in the industry by focusing on one-off games, rather than entire leagues. It's a model that is clearly working: In February, Fortune reported it was chasing a fresh $100 million funding round.

Farfetch is a London-based fashion startup that raised $86 million in March 2015 at a $1 billion valuation. It acts as an online storefront for more than 300 boutiques around the world, able to keep overheads low by not holding any stock itself.

The round was led by DST, a VC firm that has previously invested in Twitter, Facebook, Xiaomi and more. Condé Nast and Vitruvian Partners, both previous investors, also returned.

Funding Circle is a peer-to-peer lending service based in London. In April 2015, it scored a $150 million funding round that catapulted the startup into unicorn territory.

Home24 is a German online furniture store that also attained unicorn status over the last 12 months. According to Tech World, it has taken $20 million equity funding overall.

Another Berlin-based company, Rocket Internet has the stated aim of becoming "the world's largest internet platform outside of the United States and China." According to its site, "we identify and build proven Internet business models and transfer them to new, underserved or untapped markets where we seek to scale them into market leading online companies. Rocket started in 2007 and has now more than 30,000 employees across its network of companies, which are active in more than 110 countries across six continents."

The company is publicly listed in Germany, with a market cap of more than $5 billion.

Another UK unicorn, Powa builds payments technology and — following a June 2014 acquisition of a rival — the company was valued at $2.7 billion. In a recent interview, CEO Dan Wagner told Bloomberg that he is "making a bigger business than Alibaba."

Skrill is an online payments company that offers money transfers as well as online payment solutions with partners including eBay, William Hill, Bet365, and Skype. According to the FT, it was acquired by Optimal Payments — based in London — for €1.1 billion.

One of London's more prominent unicorns, TransferWise also has a large office in Talinn, Estonia, where its founders originate. It is a money transfer service that cuts down on fees by using a peer-to-peer system that means money rarely actually has to leave the country. Someone in the UK trying to send their French friend some money might instead have their funds rerouted to a Brit receiving a similar amount from abroad. The French friend, meanwhile, is sent the amount from someone within France — all automatically.

In January 2015, it raised $58 million in a funding round led by respected US VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Shazam is probably the new unicorn with the strongest name recognition with ordinary consumers. It builds an app that automatically recognises songs for the user based on a short snippet — letting them identify a song playing in a club or on the street. It raised $30 million with a roughly $1 billion valuation in January 2015 — twice what it was worth a year prior.

CEO Rich Riley has ambitious plans for the future, hoping to move beyond music identification alone. "Our vision is to connect people to the world around them," Riley told the Wall Street Journal. "It is still early days. People aren't yet used to 'Shazaming' print ads and soda cans and that kind of stuff, but we think that is where the world's going."

Ve Interactive is a London-based b2b technology company that provides solutions for e-commerce clients, boasting it can improve online conversions by an average of 25%.

These 9 startups you've never heard of could be worth $1 billion very soon »