Fastest Growing Companies from Q1, 2022
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PrivCo harnesses the power of our proprietary machine learning to deliver comprehensive private market intelligence. Search PrivCo's platform to discover U.S. private companies with $1MM or more in revenue across 110M+ data points and 780K+ company profiles.
Methodology
PrivCo 50 determines the fastest-growing startups in the U.S. and ranks them based on their performance in a given period. To generate this report for the first quarter of 2022, we looked at the data from PrivCo and evaluated startups by their employee and revenue growth and funding raised in Q1 between January 1 to March 31, 2022.
The PrivCo 50
A lot has changed since our last PrivCo 50 ranking in Q2 of 2021. Since then, the leading company, Epic Games, has doubled its last investment round, bringing in a $2BN funding round in April of 2022. Formerly bullish public markets are undergoing a market correction, setting back IPO dates and reconfiguring valuations for private companies. This time last year, we saw strong growth in fintech (14.2% of Q2, 2021 funding), SaaS (14.4%), and aerospace/defense (9%). So what does the data show us about the new year?
2022 Growth Markets
Since the start of the new year, we've seen continued interest in the post-pandemic demand for beauty and personal care products like Harrys and IL MAKIAGE New York. The war in Ukraine has heightened our sense of urgency toward cyber security as the new frontier of wartime defense leading to huge investments in Securonix and BlueVoyant. Overall, Q1, 2022 demonstrated a concentration of interest in e-commerce (both brands and tools), fintech, analytics, crypto, and SaaS companies.
Hiring Sprees
Headlines from the start of the year showed us what happens when rapid growth can't be sustained. Pandemic darling Peloton laid off 2,800 employees in February, and Better.com has had three rounds of layoffs after seeing a slowdown in mortgage applications as interest rates rose. Still, for some companies, their growth trajectory is just beginning. These companies were onboarding new employees at a lightning pace.
Veho raised a $170MM Round B in February from Tiger Global and SoftBank to fuel hiring for their package delivery logistics company. E-commerce brands Allbirds, Everlane, and Harryssee the value and joined in on the deal.
Celebrity Endorsed & Founded
Skims, if you haven't heard, is the shapewear brand headed by Kim Kardashian. Much like another frontrunner on this list, Savage X Fenty headed by Rihanna, it helps when your founder is a celebrity. Both have achieved unicorn status and Rihanna is exploring taking the company public as of March.