At the dawn of big data, data scientists were the unicorn of the hour. Talk to any one of these rarities, and they would say there were only about 100 of them in the world. When executives woke up to the potential of big data, it was also at the same time we were dealing with financial collapse. Balancing between the data economy and keeping regulators at bay created a new unicorn, the chief data officer. Digital has had its own unicorn story.

What it does: Despite remaining in stealth, Zoox has already raised $290 million for its unseen product. The only hint founder Tim Kentley-Klay has given was at a conference in October, when he described it as "Disneyland on the streets": "At Zoox what we're creating ... is not a self-driving car any more than the automobile is a horseless carriage. We're not building a robo-taxi service -- we're actually creating an advanced mobility service," Kentley-Klay said, according to The Wall Street Journal. "You can really think of it as Disneyland on the streets of perhaps San Francisco, and that means a vehicle which is smart enough to understand its environment but it's also importantly smart enough to understand you, where you need to be, what you want to do in the vehicle, and how you want to move around the city."