When it comes to liquid assets, a Chicago startup is finding that stocks and bonds may have nothing on bourbon.

Unicorn, a five-year-old online auction platform for wines and spirits, has quickly established itself as the eBay of imbibing, authenticating, digitizing, storing and auctioning more than $125 million worth of prized booze since inception.

More than 100,000 customers have been raiding their liquor cabinets to trade everything from the bargain bin to rare single-barrel bourbons. The weekly auctions have turned more than a few dusty but unopened bottles into five- and six-figure windfalls.

“We serve serious collectors and first-time buyers alike,” said Phil Mikhaylov, 34, CEO and co-founder of Unicorn. “In every auction, you can find bottles that are $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, but you will also find thousands of bottles under $100. That’s why we’ve grown so vastly.”

A first-generation Russian immigrant raised in Northbrook, tech veteran Mikhaylov joined forces with Chicago bar owner Cody Modeer to launch Unicorn in 2020. The online auction platform, which includes a Unicorn app, moves thousands of bottles worth potentially millions each week.

All the bottles are digitized for trading and sold on consignment by Unicorn for customers across the country. The bottles are then picked up, shipped to or stored for the winning bidders, a percentage of whom simply trade them again as digital assets.

Operating out of a two-story, 30,000-square-foot industrial brick building in Ravenswood on Chicago's North Side that formerly housed a brewery, Unicorn has devoted the first floor to processing the active bottles to be traded on the platform. There’s a small receiving room for customers to pick up or drop off bottles and a loading dock for the larger orders.

Behind a locked door is a storage area known as the vault, which is lined with shelves packed to the rafters with 25,000 to 30,000 bottles. Warehouse workers roam the aisles, keeping tabs on the inventory, adding and pulling a menagerie of unusual and valuable bottles. Each week, the auction sells 4,000 to 6,000 bottles, meaning the stock changes over every two months.

Each auction generates between $1.2 million and $2 million in sales, Mikhaylov said. Unicorn takes 20% of the revenue, with the seller paying a 5% fee and the buyer 15% on each bottle sold.

Most auctions have no set minimum bids and a 100% sell-through, he said.

The company has raised $5.8 million in funding to date, with a mix of investors including venture capital, NBA players, large wine and spirits collectors and others. Profitable since inception, Unicorn is planning another round of fundraising soon, Mikhaylov said.

The fast-growing Unicorn has 75 employees and two Chicago locations, including a 70,000-square-foot warehouse in Bridgeport for longer-term storage of wine and spirits bottles.

Unicorn moved into the Ravenswood headquarters from a smaller nearby office last year. The facility, previously home to Empirical Brewery, which closed during the pandemic in 2022, underwent extensive renovation, including the installation of a second floor where a maze of brewing equipment once towered.

Upstairs at the Ravenswood headquarters is the tech side of the business, where bottles are authenticated, photographed and digitized for the auction platform by dozens of employees scattered at workstations across the open office.

Bottles must be fully intact, unopened and in good condition to make the cut. Unicorn does not exclude spirits based on the perceived quality or original cost, letting the market set the value.

The facility is dotted with memorabilia, from framed vintage liquor ads and novelty bottle displays to a 1910 Harley Davidson Model 6 motorcycle on the second floor picked up from a Los Angeles collector during a sales call, along with more than $1 million of whiskey for the auction.

There’s also a giant safe upstairs where the company keeps its most valuable bottles, including a rare Rip Van Winkle 20-year-old bourbon bottled in 2003 exclusively for the erstwhile Chicago-based Sam’s Wines & Spirits, which sold out to Binney’s during the Great Recession.

Only 60 bottles of the single-barrel bourbon were ever produced.

“Think of it as the Mickey Mantle of bourbon bottles,” Mikhaylov said, carefully removing it from the safe and cradling it. “This bottle is worth $150,000.”

Above the safe, a big video screen displays the progress of the current auction, with a running count of total sales, bids and dollars that will be paid out to consigners. A heat map shows where the bids are coming from across the U.S., and what bottles are drawing the most action.

Meanwhile, on the ground floor, auction customers trickle in for scheduled appointments to drop off or pick up bottles.

On Wednesday, Robert Drousth of Madison, Wisconsin, made the trip to Unicorn to sell 18 bottles he had accumulated over the years. He paid about $1,500 to build his collection, which was appraised at $31,000 to $39,700.

A retired mechanical designer, Drousth, 74, assembled his collection between 2000 and 2013, mostly by visiting local retailers in Illinois and Wisconsin, with occasional sojourns to the annual Kentucky Bourbon Festival.

He stopped buying bottles as bourbon became trendier and more expensive and recently made the decision to liquidate the bulk of his collection. The bottles will go up for auction Sunday.

“I didn’t collect to sell — it was never an intention,” Drousth said. “The reality is that many of the bottles I collected became very valuable to people that weren’t alive or didn’t know that it was available back when I bought it.”

Drousth became “vaguely” aware that his bourbon stash had appreciated in value before reaching out to Unicorn several weeks ago for an appraisal.

For years, he “bunkered” his aging whiskey collection in his basement. As the bottles grew in value, he found it harder and harder to justify cracking them open for a sip.

“It just got to a point where I don’t get so much pleasure out of something that is outrageously valuable,” he said. “It’s really hard to pull the trigger on popping the cork.”

Back in the day, Drousth would host whiskey tastings with a modest cover charge to help defray the cost of his collection.

The return on investment has since grown significantly. The most valuable of the 18 bottles Drousth plans to put up for auction is a limited release E.H. Taylor Old Fashioned Sour Mash bourbon that Mikhaylov said should fetch between $9,000 and $11,000.

Drousth paid about $75 for it newly released in 2011.

On Wednesday, he made the drive to the Unicorn offices, the bottles carefully boxed up in the back of his Honda, ready to sell.

With his collection authenticated, digitized and safely in Unicorn’s custody, Drousth can sit back and watch the weeklong online auction with a vested interest. Seven days later, he’ll collect the proceeds and a projected 2,000% return for his whiskey investment.

“Obviously, there’s a demand for it, and people want to buy them,” he said. “And some of us want to sell.”

One of those buyers, Jake Marquis, showed up at the Ravenswood office during a subsequent time slot Wednesday to pick up a previous auction purchase on the lower end of the price scale: a bottle of Heaven’s Door 10-year bourbon for $50 — below retail price.

While Unicorn is becoming a high-end investment platform for some, Marquis, 36, a bartender at the Franklin Tap who lives in Uptown, is using it more like an exotic corner liquor store and has multiple bids in this week’s auction.

“I just found the app three weeks ago and I bought three bottles so far,” he said. “I’m finding stuff I didn’t know existed, vintages I didn’t know existed. It’s cool.”

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