Qudian
- 🦄Became a unicorn2017
- 📈Peak valuation$8 Billion ’17
- 💔Became a Unitard2019
- 💸Last valuation~$640M
How it happened
Qudian was a Chinese consumer micro-lending company, backed by Ant Group, that grew explosively by extending small short-term loans — initially to college students. Its October 2017 NYSE IPO was one of the year's splashiest, valuing it near $7.9B and briefly pushing it toward $10B on its first day. Almost immediately, Beijing launched a sweeping crackdown on online consumer and payday lending that hammered Qudian's core business and forced repeated pivots. The stock fell roughly 92% from its IPO, leaving the company a sub-$1B shell sitting on cash, periodically flirting with delisting.
Source: CNBC / TechNode / Seeking Alpha (Ant-backed Chinese consumer micro-lender that began with campus loans; Oct 2017 NYSE IPO at a ~$7.9B valuation, touched ~$10B on day one; China's crackdown on online consumer lending gutted the business; market cap ~$0.7B, down ~92% from the IPO)
