VillageMD’s 2020 deal with Walgreens was the moment Chicago’s unicorn story shifted from possible to likely. The year that broke so much else turned out to be the year Chicago’s startups finally got a fair shot at big money, and a primary-care company was the headlining act.
The pandemic leveled the field
For years, Chicago founders carried a quiet disadvantage: the biggest checks lived on Sand Hill Road, and you often had to be in the room to get them. In 2020, the room disappeared. According to TechCrunch, when venture capital moved to Zoom during the pandemic, Chicago startups were suddenly able to raise the kind of large, rapid-fire rounds that geography had previously slowed. Distance stopped being a penalty, and a city full of undercapitalized good companies started getting properly funded.
VillageMD’s marquee moment
The standout was VillageMD, a company building technology and operations to help primary-care physicians deliver better care. In 2020, Walgreens made a significant investment that effectively crowned VillageMD a unicorn. That partnership would later deepen with a reported $5.2 billion commitment in 2021. According to Fast Company’s reporting, VillageMD was one of a select few Chicago companies to achieve unicorn status in 2020, the warm-up act before the larger wave that followed.
The setup for the boom
What makes 2020 important is less any single deal than the shift it represented. The Tempus moment in 2018 proved Chicago could build a unicorn. 2020 demonstrated it could fund several simultaneously, on the same competitive terms as coastal cities. That combination made the following year possible.
Every so often, an external shock quietly rewrites who gets to win. The pandemic was awful in almost every way, but for Chicago’s startup scene, it knocked down a wall that had stood for a decade. The founders were already here and already good. In 2020, the money finally came to them. That change altered everything about the year that followed.