Patrick Collison and Stripe are at the forefront of a new wave of cloud leaders.
The world is moving online, and business is going with it. The companies that make that journey possible – providing everything from infrastructure to security, chat tools to marketing and HR – make up the wide-ranging and red hot category of cloud computing.
For the second year, the Forbes Cloud 100 recognizes the best and brightest of the cloud. Compiled with the help of partners Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, the list tracks candidates by operating metrics such as revenue and funding, with the help of 25 of their public cloud CEO peers.
The companies of the Cloud 100 have worked with the world's largest corporations and solved small business headaches alike, fixed people's grammar online and traced government sponsored hacking attacks. They're led in 2017 by Stripe, the online payments company founded by Irish-born Patrick Collison and his brother John, valued at $9.2 billion. Hundreds of thousands of businesses use Stripe's software to handle sales and other transactions on their sites, including Facebook, Lyft, Target and Unicef.
Stripe's joined by three other San Francisco companies in the top 5: file sharing and collaboration company Dropbox (No. 2), messaging platform Slack (3) and digital signatures unicorn DocuSign (4). But rounding out the group is a challenger to Stripe with sneaky-big revenue and its own multi-billion dollar valuation, Adyen (5). On a list still dominated by Silicon Valley, cofounder and CEO Pieter van der Does has quietly built his own would-be payments juggernaut. Adyen works with Facebook, too, but also Uber, Netflix and Spotify, processing $90 billion in transactions last year on $727 million in nearly-doubled revenue. The company bills itself as more international friendly than its California competitors, in part due to its scrappy Dutch roots. "We [have taken] it on as a badge of honor: Adyen, the unknown unicorn," van der Does says.
A handful of last year's Cloud 100 companies were ineligible this year due to exits.
The list features 25 newcomers from 2016's inaugural list, led by billionaire Tom Siebel's second act providing app-making software for the Internet of Things, C3 IoT (19). Siebel's joined by another repeat entrepreneur, Groupon cofounder Brad Keywell, in the fast-growing category that helps process vast amounts of data for businesses in aerospace, energy, manufacturing and more -- Keywell's Chicago startup Uptake now churns out four million predictions for its customers each week, good for a $2 billion valuation and a debut at No. 22.
Data and analytics companies make up the most list companies of any category with 15%, led by Utah experience management leader Qualtrics (6). Despite a population less than half of the Bay Area and New York, Utah's emerging cloud scene accounts for six companies on this year's list, and three in the top 20 as a model ecosystem for outsized tech success forms around the pre-IPO leaders with CEO friends, Qualtrics, Domo (15) and Pluralsight (20).
How the Cloud 100 breaks down by category.
With strong showings by IT operations firms, security shops, marketing companies and more, the Cloud 100 is at its best in the diversity of its offerings. At cyber firm CrowdStrike (30), business is booming after the company linked Russian government-affiliated hackers with the Democratic National Committee hacks. In health tech, Nat Turner and Flatiron Health (51) are looking to manage every oncologist office in the U.S. as well as help with clinical trials; Jennifer Tejada and PagerDuty (41) help spot operational failure before a website goes down for the count. Toast (68) helps restaurants manage their businesses, while Grammarly (90) offers a Chrome plug-in that can help writers use better vocabulary and catch grammatical errors.
Canva (100) CEO Melanie Perkins speaks for the mindset of many of the companies on this year's Cloud 100 list. The Australian design software maker already has 10 million users, but has her eyes firmly fixed on the future. "We have so much more to do. We feel like we've only done 1% of what is possible," Perkins says.
View the full list here
No comments:
Post a Comment