Last year’s Next Billion-Dollar Startups list featured (left to right) Tally’s Jason Brown, Homebound’s Nikki Pechet and Solugen’s Gaurab Chakrabarti
Illustrations by Jaya Nicely for Forbes
This fall, for the seventh year in a row, Forbes will shine a spotlight on the innovative and fast-growing startups that we believe have the best shot of becoming unicorns with the Next Billion-Dollar Startups list.
Compiled in conjunction with TrueBridge Capital Partners, this Forbes list showcases 25 companies that are well on their way to becoming billion-dollar startups and profiles the entrepreneurs behind their success.
Doordash’s Tony Xu: The food-delivery company made the cut for Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups list in 2015, and is now worth more than $50 billion.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Past lists have included DoorDash (back in 2015), Opendoor (2016), Ginkgo Bioworks (2017), Lemonade (2018), Rothy’s (2019) and Lyra (2020). You can see last year’s list here, or the 2019 list here.
Given the liquidity in the market today, the most successful alumni of the list have easily soared past the $1 billion mark. DoorDash, for example, went public last December and trades at a recent market cap of more than $50 billion, while Ginkgo Bioworks is listing its shares via a SPAC deal that values it at $17.5 billion. With this year’s list, we’re looking for the next DoorDash or Ginkgo in their nascent days.
Mirror’s Brynn Putnam: She sold her home-exercise startup to Lululemon for $500 million not long after appearing on last year’s Next Billion-Dollar Startups list.
Jamel Toppin for Forbes
Know a company that we should consider? We’re currently accepting nominations online, and we want to hear from you. Women, Black founders, immigrants, entrepreneurs who live outside of Silicon Valley, we hope you’ll get in touch. There is no fee to apply.
Here are the basic qualifications:
1-All companies must be based in the United States.
David Ebersman’s Lyra Health soared past the $1 billion valuation mark in the year after making the cut for the list.
Illustration by Jaya Nicely for Forbes
2-All must be privately held, and venture backed with current valuations below $1 billion.
3-No company that has been on the list before is allowed to be on again.
For more information, check out the application link. The deadline to apply is June 25, 2021.
TrueBridge will run a quantitative analysis of all companies based on the information in the nominations, and Forbes reporters will be in touch with all finalists.
We look forward to hearing from you!
