10 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America
In the cathedral of business, little is more sacred than revenue and profits. But growth may well be just as vital. At Inc., we pride ourselves on celebrating America’s fast-growing companies, because we know nothing inspires like success. Click through to see how the top 10 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. have reached their exemplary heights. –Will Yakowicz
3-Year Growth Rate: 16,192%
2013 Revenue: $26.3 million
Inc. 5000 Rank: No. 9
Portland, Oregon’s Vacasa is a full-service vacation rental and property management company with more than 1,100 properties across 30 western U.S. cities–from Kihei, Hawaii to Vail, Colorado. CEO Eric Breon and COO Cliff Johnson co-founded Vacasa in 2009 to connect vacationers with homeowners who want to rent out their homes. And rather than rely on homeowners to set their own prices, the company lets its systems do the work. “Our software also runs a rate optimization system. We vary the rates up to four times a day for our homes; we treat the homes more like a commodity,” Johnson says.
3-Year Growth Rate: 16,457%
2013 Revenue: $159.9 million
Inc. 5000 Rank: No. 8
Mary Kay, eat your heart out. Also finding success with the direct marketing model is weight-loss product seller, Plexus Worldwide. Four years ago, the company’s CEO, Tarl Robinson, reports having just 2,000 “ambassadors,” people who sell the company’s products in exchange for a commission. Today, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company boasts a fleet of 175,000. “We have a philosophy of treating people first-class,” says Robinson, who bought the company in 2008. “The last time your average 45-year-old had a round of applause for them was when they walked across a high school or college stage to receive their diploma. Recognition is key.”
3-Year Growth Rate: 18,375%
2013 Revenue: $27.3 million
Inc. 5000 Rank: No. 7
Rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory diseases are often difficult to detect, for a variety of reasons. Among others, symptoms can materialize differently in different people. Adding clarity to this catch-as-catch-can process has been goal No. 1 for Michael Centola, who has a PhD in molecular biology and biochemistry from the University of California, and who founded in 2002Crescendo Bioscience, a molecular bioscience company in San Francisco. “We have developed sets of quantitative objective tools to help doctors know what’s going on in the biology of a patient in a given point in time,” says William Hagstrom, Crescendo’s president. “There is a tremendous unmet market need in that regard.”
Revenue Growth Rate 2014: 19,876 percent
2013 Revenue: $138 million
Inc. 5000 Rank: No. 6
Provider Power, which made the Inc. 500 last year at No. 32, is an electricity supplier based in Auburn, Maine, and is licensed in Massachusetts’, New Hampshire’s, and Maine’s deregulated energy markets. Touting the ability to save customers $100 a year via a massive TV, radio, and social media campaign, Provider Power’s message went viral, and the customers kept coming. “A big part of it was that we gave people a choice to get out of a broken, old system,” says co-founder Kevin Dean. “There’s not much creativity in the utility industry, with old computers designed to crank out the bills. If you apply new stuff to it, you get different results.”
3-Year Growth Rate: 20,690%
2013 Revenue: $77.7 million
Inc. 5000 Rank: No. 5
Acacia Communications manufactures intelligent subsystems for ultra-high-speed fiber-optic transmission. And with clients who supply infrastructure to companies like Verizon and Comcast, business has been swift. The Maynard, Massachusetts-based company isn’t slowing down its research and development. Acacia’s newest product, a small transceiver–that is, a transmitter and receiver in one–is expected to help tech giants like Apple and Facebook compete against more traditional Internet service providers. CEO and President Raj Shanmugaraj proudly proclaims: We’re “offering protection against the ‘net neutrality’ threats.”
3-Year Growth Rate: 26,042%
2013 Revenue: $35.3 million
Inc. 5000 Rank: No. 4
Superfish, a Palo Alto visual search company that’s behind the wildly popular app PetMatch, is bullish about the applications of its technology. Just as with PetMatch, which can analyze pictures of dogs and cats and locate similar breeds up for adoption nearby, Superfish thinks it’s cracked the code on discovering the genesis of images online. “If you take a picture of something, our algorithms will tell you more information about it,” says Adi Pinas, the company’s CEO and co-founder. He notes that some clients are using it to trigger online sales. “We are helping people connect with the world around us.”
3-Year Growth Rate: 55,460%
2013 Revenue: $85.1 million
Inc. 5000 Rank: No. 3
It’s controversial, but the energy-extraction process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has its beneficiaries. Among them is modular-building sellerReliant Asset Management. Remote-workforce housing at oil and gas sites is the Arlington, Virginia-based company’s bread and butter. “The demand in Texas, North Dakota, and the Athabasca oil sands in Canada, where our modular buildings are, [is] everything,” says Barry Roman, Reliant’s co-founder and president. The structures are 12-by-60-foot boxes that can be put together in any configuration. “Think of them as giant Lego blocks that can be delivered and installed on a foundation very quickly,” he adds.
3-Year Growth Rate: 57,347%
2013 Revenue: $82.6 million
Inc. 5000 Rank: No. 2
Quest Nutrition, of El Segundo, California, makes protein bars that taste like junk food but are actually nutritious and healthful. “We wanted to make something that acknowledges human behavior–people eat for pleasure, not for sustenance,” says Tom Bilyeu, Quest’s co-founder. “But we were told the product we wanted to make couldn’t be made.” Seizing the challenge, the trio went to work–using natural ingredients with no added sugar. The result? Chocolate chip cookie dough protein bars, BBQ-flavored protein potato chips, and low-carb pasta.
