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25 potential billion dollar startups
This list represents the 25, in alphabetical order, that we think to have the best shot of reaching a billion-dollar mark.
Forbes has teamed with TrueBridge Capital Partners for the sixth year in a row in search of the country for the 25 fastest growing venture-backed up startups the valuation of which is most likely to reach $1 billion. On one hand, Forbes reached to more than 100 startups directly and on the other hand true Bridge has asked 300 venture capital forms to nominate those companies that they think will most likely become unicorns. Then came the deeper look, as we analyzed finances for roughly 140 of them and interviewed founders. This list represents the 25, in alphabetical order, that we think to have the best shot of reaching a billion-dollar mark.
1. Acorns
Founder(s): Jeff Cruttenden, Walter Cruttended
CEO: Noah Kerner
Equity Raised: $257 million.
Estimated 2019 revenue: $50 million.
Lead investor(s): Bain Capital, e.ventures, Greycroft, NBCUniversal, PayPal, TPG Capital
Malta Cruttenden formerly ran the E-trade investment banking arm and his son Jeff established fintech Acorns in 2012. the idea was to roundup customers’ extra change from debit and credit card purchases and invest them automatically. The focus is on ETFs, build an algorithm taking help from Nobel Prize winner economist Harry Markowitz. In 2014, this duo brought in and launched a 42-year-old serial entrepreneur as Noah Kerner as CEO. Acorns, charges $1 a month for investments which have 7.7 million users and $2.3 billion of assets under management. Acorns offer retirement and checking accounts too for $3 a month. Acorns saw its biggest gush of new customers in a day on March 18, 2020, as the S&P 500 dropped 5%. Kerner says, “Every downturn has ended in an upturn.”
2. Algolia
Founder(s): Nicalas Dessaigne, Julien Lemonie
CEO: Bernadette Nixon
Equity Raised: $184 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $50 million.
Lead investor(s): Accel, Alven, SaaStr Fund, Salesforce Ventures
Checking out and online class on Coursera’s website or looking for an NPR for your favorite radio show? Unknowingly you might be using Algolia’s software. To increase the online engagement and revenue those companies and the likes of Twitch, Under Armour, and Slack are amongst 9000 businesses that completely rely on Algolia power search boxes on their sites. With the help of San Francisco- based firms help visitors make 3 billion searches a day. The startup is now also offering to personalize websites automatically for every visitor and provide analytics of what happens after a search like whether it leads to a purchase. Dessaigne, 43, a co-founder says, “The bar of expectations of a great experience is a set by Google Netflix Facebook and it’s only getting higher.” “99.9% of companies can’t Bridge that gap between what they could do internally and expectations of the users that’s where we fit in.”
3. Andela
Founder(s): Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Ian Carnevale, Nadayar Enegesi, Jeremy Johnson (CEO), Brice Nkengsa, Christina Sass
Andela works from its headquarters in NewYork to solve the shortage of tech workers in the United States. This is done by identifying and training software developers in Africa. After the training, they are embedded in the remote engineering teams of companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Two months after taking his first startup, an online education firm 2U, Johnson, 36, confounded the company, public in 2014. He says, “We have become the primary pipeline connecting the technology ecosystem across Africa with the US.” the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly slowed down Andela’s plan for expansion as the companies freeze the hiring, over the long-term it will increase companies comfort with hiring workers thousand miles away Johnson urges.
Lead investor(s): Alkeon, Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark, Menlo Ventures, Thrive Capital, Y Combinator
To help the scientists, the CEO, Wickramasrkara came up with this idea of a cloud-based Crispr design tool. He was an undergrad at MIT back then. Regeneron, Gilead, and hundreds of other companies used are collaborative R&D software 8 years later. Benching is on call as needed and has stopped those software updates to those whose projects require complete lockdown as many customers come up with vaccines and treatments for Covid-19.
5. Capsule
Founder(s): Eric Kinariwala (CEO)
Equity Raised: $270 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $100 Million
Lead investor(s): Glade Brook Capital, TCV, Thrive Capital
Kinariwala had to wait in a line nearly for an hour at his Duane Reade to get medications for his sinus infection only to find it was out of stock nearly 5 years ago. this experience which he had provoked him to start Capsule, New York city-based which offers pharmacy services by app or text at your doorstep within 2 hours and free courier charges. At the time of the ongoing coronavirus crisis, Kinariwala says, “(Capsule) went from something that was convenient to essential.” The CEO, Kinariwala, 37, is an MBA from Stanford and was formerly working as a retail and healthcare investor. having achieved success in the New York City market and with cash inflow, Capsule is now planning out future expansion. Kinariwala says, “We’ll be everywhere in the next 18 months. We’re not going to launch one at a time. There will be a bunch of places.”
6. Coalition
Founder(s): John Hering, Joshua Motta (CEO)
Equity Raised: $125 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $27 Million
Lead investor(s): Hillhouse Capital, Ribbit Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital.
Coalition, cybersecurity Insurance firm helps companies in the recovery of losses from extortion, fraud, security breaches, and ransomware attacks up to $15 million. it helps in preventing those losses by scanning the internet detecting vulnerabilities and allows users to potential threats as well. The 36-year-old CEO, Joshua Motta, who formally fought against cyberspace adversaries at the CIA joined hands with Herring, 37, former CEO of Lookout a mobile cybersecurity Unicorn to launch San Francisco-based firm. Motta says, “When I was walking for the government there was no mandate to protect companies. With Coalition we can protect American business is particularly those that are big enough to afford comprehensive cybersecurity technologies.”
7. Cockroach Labs
Founder(s): Ben Darnell, Spencer Kimball (CEO), Peter Mattis
Equity Raised: $195 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $5 Million
Lead investor(s): Altimeter, Benchmark, Bond, GV, Index Ventures, Redpoint
Basically, cockroaches are extremely tough to be killed, they are notorious. The 46-year-old entrepreneur of Cockroach Labs, Kimball likes the analogy of his startup. He says, “Companies run of the startups’ cloud-based relational databases is more resilient shielded from outrageous or system failures. You’re not doing post-mortems.” Cockroach Labs, the New York-based start-up, has built a splendid clientele, of nearly 100 clients which include Bose, Comcast, and Netflix. The company raised $87 million in May valuing it at $850 Million. Kimball says,
“We’ve brought the category into the cloud era.”
8. Expanse
Founder(s): Tim Junio (CEO), Matt Kraning, Shaun Maguire
Equity Raised: $136 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $30 Million
Lead investor(s): Founders Fund, IVP, New Enterprise Associates, TPG Capital
While serving as consultants to Darpa, the Department of Defense’s research, coFounder(s) Junio and Kraning came up with the idea for Expanse. The San Francisco-based startup provides customers such as CVS and PayPal, an overview of the internet-connected assets including domains, IP addresses, and cloud infrastructure which allows them to monitor online vulnerabilities and cyberattacks. Junio, 36-year-old Cofounder says, “I realized that with the declining cost of computation, bandwidth and data storage startups could now index the internet for exposures the same way government with huge budgets could.”
9. Fivetran
Founder(s): Taylor Brown, George Fraser (CEO)
Equity Raised: $60 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $15 Million
Lead investor(s): Andreessen, Horowitz, CEAS, Matrix Partners, Y Combinator
The co-Founder(s) of Fivetran’s, Fraser and Brown, initially launched an automated data integration company in 2012, saw little interest from the investors. As time passed, the value of data integration has become clear. 36-year-old CEO, Fraser, who was previously a scientist at Emerald Therapeutics says, ‘It is a really valuable form of infrastructure if you could do it well, like coming out of a wall.” Fivetran, a name which is a play on IBM’s 1950s coding system, Fortran, centralizes an organization’s data from siloed sources. So that the data is complex data analytics, it uses prebuilt connectors. To date, Fivetran has built more than 130 automated connectors two data sources which include Salesforce Oracle and Dropbox. The customers included are Square, DocuSign, and ClassPass.
10. Gong
Founder(s): Amit Bendov (CEO), Eilon Reshaf
Equity Raised: $133 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $30 Million
Lead investor(s): Battery Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Sequoia
A user’s communications with customers are scanned and ingested by Gong’s software automatically. Be emails, phone calls, or video chat which detects who is at risk of closing the account or who is ready for an upgrade. CEO Bendov says, “The time savings make the Big Brother-like the discomfort of being so closely tracked an easy trade-off. It’s like having Google versus a human-curated dictionary.” Bendov, 55, who was previously a CEO of business-intelligence software setup SiSense who teamed with a 48-year-old, Eilon Reshef, who formerly co-founded software firm WebCollege to launch Gong in 2015. due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, some businesses have struggled as workers prefer to stay home but San Francisco based Gong is benefited. Bendov says, “Trends that we thought would take years, for people to work more remotely, are happening in weeks.”
11. Homebound
Founder(s): Jack Abraham, Nikki Pechet (CEO)
Equity Raised: $53 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $10 Million
Lead investor(s): Atomic, Fifth Wall, Thrive Capital
After the wildfires devastated California’s wine county in 2017, (where both the Pechet and Abraham each have homes), these two co-founders started Homebound to help other homeowners rebuild, to manage each step from building permits and insurance claims to design and construction in nearby Santa Rosa. CEO, Pechet, 38 says, “As we watched people try to navigate the process and complexity of everything they had to do to rebuild a home, we knew there were really simple technology tools that were used in other industries that could make the process simpler.” Presently, Homebound is rebuilding 150 homes that were lost in the fires.
12. Ironclad
Founder(s): Jason Boehmig (CEO), Cai GoGwilt
Equity Raised: $84 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $10 Million
Lead investor(s): Accel, Sequoia, Y Combinator
Co-founder of Ironclad, Boehmig says, “Contracts are the atomic unit of business but they’re slow, inefficient, and uninteresting to make.” Ironclad steps in there. The software of this San Francisco-based startup allows businesses to process share, edit, and refer contracts with ease. including MasterCard, Staples, and Reddit customers work closely with Ironclad’s team of legal engineers to customize Ironclad for their needs. GoGwilt, the 31-year-old Chief technical officer is an ex- Palantir engineer who owns three degrees from MIT; Boehimg, the 38-year CEO, was an investment banker and corporate lawyer previously.
13. Lyra Health
Founder(s): Dena Bravata, David Eberdman (CEO), Bob Kocher, Brayn Roberts
Every year in the United States, about 50 million people suffer from mental health issues and the biggest obstacle is not the treatment of mental illness but it is its access. In 2014, Ebersman, 50, quit his job as the chief financial officer at Facebook, handle the problem. Lyra’s solution is to offer help to companies to help their employees with mental health benefits. Around 40 companies are already on board which includes Pinterest Starbucks and eBay. More than a million people are getting access to Lyra’s 3000 coaches, physicians, and therapists. The presently ongoing coronavirus pandemic is stressing Americans and getting mental health into the limelight. This year, the Burlingame California-based company is expecting the revenue to double to $100 Million. Ebersman says, “Today more than ever, companies are aware this is an important part of the puzzle.”
14. Mirror
Founder(s): Brynn Putnam
Equity Raised: $72 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $45 Million
Lead investor(s): Leree Hippeau, Point72 Ventures, Spark Capital
Mirror was launched 2 years ago by Putnam, 36, previously a ballerina and founder of boutique fitness studio Refine Method. It’s $1495 tech-enabled mirrors serve as home gyms. Customers later pay another $39 for unlimited exercise classes for a month including everything from cardio and strength to yoga. It was fast growing before the gyms were closed and workers were sent home due to the coronavirus pandemic. New York city-based Mirror is “seeing Christmas in April.” she says
15. Moveworks
Founder(s): Jiang Chen, Vaibhav Nivargi, Bhagvin Shah (CEO), Varun Singh
Equity Raised: $105 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $10 Million
Lead investor(s): Bain Capital, Iconiq Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed
Using natural language processing the company automates IT support with the help of AI so that tasks such as adding colleagues to email groups or unlocking accounts can be resolved technologically rather than with the help of an actual IT person. CEO Shah says, “On average, it takes at least three days for an IT ticket at a large enterprise to get resolved which is not fast enough for a modern economy. With Moveworks’ natural language processing we can resolve these same issues in minutes or even seconds.” California based startup the Mountain View launched in 2016. it’s custom-built an I was able to resolve just 5 to 8% of companies’ IT tickets 2 years later. Thanks to sophisticated machine learning, the number has raised up roughly 40% gaining customers including Broadcom and LinkedIn today. A positive-year-old serial entrepreneur Shah is now hoping to expand beyond IT to human resources, legal, marketing, and finance now.
16. Rippling
Founder(s): Parker Conard (CEO), Prasanna Sarkar
Equity Raised: $100 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $10 Million
Lead investor(s): Initialized Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Y Combinator
Founder Conard resigned under pressure, four years after Zenefits’ controversial, he comes back with Rippling. This startup’s software manages benefits, employee’s payroll, application, and hardware all under one place also make sure onboard employees are going on smoothly, saving small and medium-sized businesses with timely administrative work.
17. Shipwell
Founder(s): Gregory Price (CEO), Jason Traff
Equity Raised: $47 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $30 Million
Lead investor(s): Fifth Wall, First Round Capital, Georgian Partners
Traff, 37, a serial entrepreneur learned about shipping with the previous startup Copycat paintings, Hong Kong based art reproduction business. He recalls, “We dealt it with extortion, one kidnapping, and blackmail. We solve all the problems except for shipping.” He teamed up with Prince, in 2017 a 38-year McKinsey consultant previously, who focused on supply-chain issues, to start Shipwell. Texas-based Sleepwell offers to track freight and analytics that improves efficiency and saves customers like Premier Packaging and Crystal Geyser millions of shipping costs. “With the global pandemic, companies realize the supply chain is no longer back-office. It is mission-critical.” Traff says.
18. Signal Sciences
Founder(s): Nick Galbreath, Zone Lackey, Andrew Peterson (CEO)
Equity Raised: $62 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $30 Million
Lead investor(s): CRV, Harrison Metal, Index Ventures, Lead Edge Capital, OATV
As developers, all the 3 Founder(s) met each other at Etsy. At Etsy, for The E-Commerce operations of the site, they designed cybersecurity. The Los Angeles-based Signal Sciences which was founded in 2014 protects companies’ web apps from cyberattacks. There is huge demand as the work that happened on intranets now happens over open web employees work from home. CEO Peterson, 36-year-old is expecting the remote work trend to fasten in future.
19. SmartRent
Founder(s): Lucas Haldeman (CEO)
Equity Raised: $102 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $35 Million
Lead investor(s): Bain Capital, RET Ventures, Spark Capital
SmartRent gets technology home making it a smart home for example thermostats and smart locks to multi-family properties. The charges of this Scottsdale, Arizona start-up for installation and hardware are up to $1000, per month charges being $5 to $10. A service that is most expected during this pandemic is self-reliance and the smart locks allow prospective tenants to take a private self-guided tour of the vacant apartments. SmartRent has tied up with nearly 100 owners which includes Essex Property Trust (an investor as well) to get home-tech in almost 90,000 units and by the year-end, a goal to hit 300,000. 42-year-old CEO Haldeman, who was formerly chief technology officer at Colony Starwood Homes (now Invitation Homes) knows the pain property owners go through. He says, “We’re really operators. We are not tech guys. We are not in the Bay Area.”
20. Solugen
Founder(s): Gaurab Chakrabarti (CEO), Sean Hunt
Equity Raised: $80 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $12 Million
Lead investor(s): Fifty Years, Founder(s) Fund, Y Combinator
Both 31-year Founder(s), to turn corn sugar into chemicals that are usually made by breaking down oil, the duo has developed strains of gene-edited bacteria with an enzyme. Biologically, the Houston outfit can produce ingredients for clean-up wastewater and hand sanitizer. CEO plans and hopes to develop fertilizers for farmers which are sustainable.
Lead investor(s): Andreessen Horowitz, First Round
G-mail and iPhone users pay $30 per month to Superhuman claims that it helps users to get through the emails twice as fast in the activity of “inbox zero. “Inbox Zero is an inbox clear of messages requiring a response. In 2012, the Founder(s) sold their plug-in, Rapportive their former startup to LinkedIn.
22. Tally
Founder(s): Jason Brown (CEO), Jasper Platz
Equity Raised: $92 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $20 Million
Lead investor(s): Andreessen Horowitz, Cowboy Ventures, Kleinee Perkins, Shasta Ventures
Brown, 40, a serial entrepreneur has been thinking about helping people overcome debt, ever since he was a teenager in a household where money was tight. He says, “Especially among the educated elite in America, there’s a big lack of empathy for people who don’t reach their financial goals.” He never thought that giving people the context and tools to handle debt was enough to solve the problem. With Platz, 40, he founded Tally, in 2015 an automated application that helps which helps people pay off their credit card debt. With the help of Tally, users take photos of their credit card and in case they qualify (they must have a FICO score of 660 or higher) then Tally offers a new line of credit for them. The algorithm determinants a lump sum monthly payment and prioritizes payments based on the interest rates. The debt of credit card is expensive (with 15.05% as an average according to the Federal Reserve last year) and Tally says it can typically save users 5 percentage points on their rates. This San Francisco-based company presently manages $500 million of debt, and as the consumers’ debt mounts, this number will grow too.
23. Tray.io
Founder(s): Dominic Lewis, Alistair Russell, Richard Waldron (CEO)
Workflow automation tools in Tray’s help businesses to generate marketing leads and process payments. In London, 2012, British ex-pats Russell, Lewis, and Waldrom started Tray and bootstrapped for 5 years (sometimes reselling who is on eBay to raise cash) before they got substantial funding from investors and then relocated to San Francisco. Including Zendesk and GitHub, now customers pay $595 and more for a month. Tray aids marketing by integrating applications through a graphical interface, automatically generating, and contacting leads sparing the IT Department from hours of slogging through boilerplate code. CEO, Waldron, 35 says, “We’ve written Tray to allow people to get ahead.”
24. Trusted Health
Founder(s): Matt Pierce, Lennie Sliwinski (CEO)
Equity Raised: $25 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $28 Million
Lead investor(s): Craft Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Founder Collective
Trusted Health matches the hospitals and the nurses that need them. Founder(s) Sliwinski and Pierce 33 and 32, respectively. They met at Hired where they learned about marketplaces and adopted knowledge of nursing, spurred by Sliwinski’s mother’s knowledge, a nurse. even before the coronavirus pandemic three-year-old company’s business was growing. The US faces a shortage of nurses. then San Francisco based Trusted has been keeping up with the demand. “We’ve seen an unprecedented increase in the signups and a threefold increase in open roles on our platform (at the pandemic’s peak),” says Pierce who has noted that 1500 hospitals have signed up on the site. This year is for meeting the demands in nursing and in the long-term Trusted figures the business model that could be adopted to other Healthcare workers
25. Weave
Founder(s): Clint Berry, Brandon Rodman (CEO), Jared Rodman
Equity Raised: $152 Million
Estimated 2019 revenue: $50 Million
Lead investor(s): A.Capital Ventures, Catalyst Investors, Crosslink Capital, Lead Edge Capital, Tiger Global Management
Recall Solutions was started by Brandon Rodman in 2008 to help dentists schedule appointments over the phone and very soon he realized texting could be much more efficient. Rodman, 39 says, “The phone is still super important [but] nobody has made it more powerful.” Rodman decided to start Lehi, Utah-based Weave in 2011. At first, his focus was on dentists then added clinics, optometrists, veterinarians, and other professionals as well. The majority of whom $595 per month for its products which includes VoIP phones. They pay terminals and two-way texting. Weave has also added a “curbside waiting room” which lets businesses respond when they are ready and lets the patient text when they have arrived.
