Billion-Dollar Corporations You’d be Surprised Didn’t Exist a Decade Ago
January 3, 2022
Technology moves fast these days and with that comes the fast rise of companies in the sector as well. It used to be the case that it took decades for businesses to reach a billion-dollar valuation.
That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore today though. With Moore’s Law, the observation that computing power doubles every two years, proving to be correct in this case, tech businesses also progress twice as fast. Here are some great examples of fast-rising companies that didn’t even exist 10 years ago.
Uber
Founded in 2009, Uber has proven itself as one of the leaders in the rideshare sector. It currently holds a reported 67% market share in the United States, an impressive feat considering it has many competitors.
It became a publicly traded company in 2019. Unfortunately, its IPO is considered to be among the worst ever for a tech company as its shares dropped 11% on its first day of trading. Still, it managed to maintain a market cap of $52.77 billion.
Pinterest
Another popular tech company launched in 2009 is the image-sharing social networking platform Pinterest. The website boasts of 335 million monthly users, 70 million of which it gained in 2019 alone. It currently has a market cap of $13.57 billion, which is almost a billion above its valuation during its IPO just last year.
Slack
The Slack software has become one of the go-to ones for workplaces and employees. It serves as a platform where people can collaborate and message each other in real-time wherever they are in the world.
The company was founded in 2009 and had its IPO a decade later. While its valuation reached $23 billion, it didn’t escape the fate of similar tech companies which value plummeted after. It now has a market cap of $11.32 billion.
Snap Inc.
Snap Inc. is the company that owns and operates Snapchat, a popular image-sharing app, as well as Spectacles and Bitmoji. It’s one of the fastest-rising tech businesses on the list after it became a publicly traded company just six years after its founding in 2011. And although it has fallen on hard times since its IPO in 2017, Snap Inc. still has a market cap of $20.6 billion.
Robinhood
The financial service platform Robinhood is the youngest company on this list. Founded in 2013, the company has managed to climb and reach a valuation of $7.6 billion by 2019.
The company offers a way to make buying and trading stocks easier and without the commission fees for its mostly millennial user base.