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The startup world is changing fast.
Higher interest rates, lack of VC funding and a slow economy means that many startups need to change how they operate.
Despite the challenging environment, a small number of new companies are seeing rapid growth.
From tech to ecommerce, this is our list of the fastest-growing startups in 2024.
1. Perplexity AI
5-year search growth: 9,200%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2022
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $165M (Series Unknown)
What they do: Perplexity has developed a generative AI-powered conversational search engine that directly answers user queries, similar to an AI chatbot. Users get access to various AI models (GPT-4o, Claude 3, and Sonar Large), up-to-date information, and exceptional accuracy and contextual awareness.
The AI tool currently has 10 million monthly active users and $20 million in ARR (up from $5 to $10 million in January). The AI search engine startup is in the process of raising an additional $250 million in funding at a valuation between $2.5 and $3 billion.
2. ZeroTier
5-year search growth: 525%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2015
Location: Los Angeles, California
Funding: $17.2M (Series A)
What they do: ZeroTier is a platform used to deploy and maintain secure peer-to-peer networks. The virtual networks are encrypted, and only the owner has access to the encryption keys, adding another layer of security to the network. According to the startup, they currently support more than 2 million monthly active devices across 220 countries and territories.
In June 2024, Zerotier raised $13.5 million in Series A funding to scale operations into new markets while continuing innovative product development.
3. Deepgram
5-year search growth: 99x+
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2015
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $85.9M (Series B)
What they do: Deepgram is an automatic speech recognition and voice AI platform. The company’s key products include speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and audio intelligence AI models. In March 2024, Deepgram released Aura, their newest (and most advanced) real-time text-to-speech API for building conversational AI agents and voice bots.
Aura can render speech in under half a second, only costs $0.015 per 1,000 characters generated, and replicates authentic human dialogue with proper cadence, pauses, and filler sounds. Some of Deepgram’s notable customers include NASA, Sharpen, and Five9.
4. Scale AI
5-year search growth: 1,314%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2016
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $1.6B (Series F)
What they do: Scale AI provides high-quality training data and digital infrastructure for AI applications. The company’s core service is annotating and labeling large datasets (images, videos, text, audio, and 3D sensor data) to train AI models. In May 2024, the startup raised $1 billion in Series F funding at a $13.8B valuation.
5. Cradlewise
5-year search growth: 7,500%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2019
Location: San Fransisco, California
Funding: $7M (Seed)
What they do: Cradlewise sells smart bassinets with built-in baby monitors. Their bassinet monitors sleep depth and can automatically soothe the baby as soon as they display signs of waking up. Last year, the startup generated $8 million in revenue in 2023, only one year after they started shipping across the United States.
6. Photoroom
5-year search growth: 9.300%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2019
Location: Paris, France
Funding: $62.1M (Series B)
What they do: Photoroom is a photo and video editing app that offers a suite of AI editing tools. Users can easily remove image backgrounds, choose from 1,000+ new backgrounds or templates, retouch images, and much more.
Since launching in 2019, the startup has grown to 30 million active users (up from 3.1M in January 2023) and 150 million app downloads. Photoroom also raised $43 million in Series B funding at a $500 million valuation.
7. Preply
5-year search growth: 1,150%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2012
Location: Brookline, Massachusetts
Funding: $170.1M (Series C)
What they do: Preply is a fast-growing one-to-one language tutoring service. Built on a marketplace model like Upwork, it allows students to select tutors from over 200 countries to help them learn anything from Chinese to English.
Preply has 32,000 tutors signed up to teach and has an impressive user base of over 1 million active student learners.
8. Airalo
5-year search growth: 99x+
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2019
Location: Singapore, Singapore
Funding: $67.3M (Series B)
What they do: Airalo is an eSIM service provider for travelers in over 200 countries. Users can purchase and activate 7 to 180-day eSIM data plans ranging from 3G to 5G speeds. The startup currently supports more than 10 million users worldwide.
9. Oura
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2013
Location: Oulu, Finland
Funding: $148.3M (Series C)
What they do: Oura’s sleek rings have started to permeate the globe. But their creation all started from a small city in Finland by a trio of Finnish entrepreneurs. Less noticeable than many other wearable competitors, Oura monitors heart rate 24/7, sleeping patterns, and body temperature via their smartphone app.
Publications like Wired have given Oura rave reviews for its accurate data and lightweight design. As of March 2024, the company has sold more than 1 million rings since its inception. In total, users have logged over 2.3 billion hours of sleep and 3.4 trillion steps using Oura rings.
10. Tailwind
5-year search growth: 646%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2012
Location: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Funding: $10.7M (Series B)
What they do: Pinterest and Instagram are loaded with content creators. Which makes standing out from the crowd hard to do. Tailwind’s visual creation platform is used by over 1,000,000 brands and influencers worldwide largely because it makes sticking out easier than attempting to create content from scratch. Automating the most annoying parts of the creation process, like hashtagging, color schemes, and scheduling, lets brands focus on the idea behind the posts.
Over 1 million small businesses, such as Article, Serena & Lily, Jenny Yoo, and even giants like Shopify, utilize Tailwind.
11. Gumroad
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2012
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $16.1M (Equity Crowdfunding)
What they do: Digital creators have traditionally struggled to monetize their audiences. Gumroad is the answer for over 179,000 creators who have sold more than $979 million on the platform. Their platform lets creators sell anything from blog posts to cookbooks.
Thanks to the explosion in interest in the platform, Gumroad has launched a blog, a “university,” and a podcast.
12. Clockify
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2017
Location: Palo Alto, California
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: Project managers everywhere despise one thing more than any other: tracking their time. Clockify is a free time tracking tool used by several top-tier companies like Disney, Sony, Amazon, and more. In 2023, the company grew revenue to an estimated $26.4M (a 264.6% YoY increase) while serving millions of users, including top-tier companies like Disney, Sony, Amazon, and more.
13. Cohere
5-year search growth: 1,138%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2019
Location: Toronto, Canada
Funding: $934.9M (Series D)
What they do: Cohere is an AI company developing large language models for enterprise use. They’ve developed three core models (Command, Embed, Rerank), a fine-tuning product suite, and a Developer Playground. In July 2024, the startup raised $500 million in Series D funding at a $5.5 billion valuation. Notable lead investors in the funding round included Cisco, AMD, and Fujitsu.
14. Brightwheel
5-year search growth: 179%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2014
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $88.8M (Series C)
What they do: Running a daycare or preschool is not an easy task in the slightest. Between managing attendance, juggling learning plans, and keeping anxious parents at ease, daycare center staff have to do it all. Brightwheel sensed an opportunity and developed its SaaS solution to handle essentially everything involved in running a childcare facility.
Brightwheel claims that 85% of users end up recommending them, 100% of parents are more satisfied with their child care, and tens of millions of moments have been recorded and shared.
15. Anthropic
5-year search growth: 4,300%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2021
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $9.7B (Series D)
What they do: Anthropic is an AI research and safety startup responsible for developing Claude and various supporting large language models. The company uses constitutional AI in its Claude models, meaning they’re trained on a set of predefined principles and rules. Compared to other chatbots, Claude’s responses are safer and more appropriate, and the context windows are larger.
Anthropic is one of the most well-funded companies ($9.7.6B) in the space today, with $4 billion in investments from Amazon and over $2 billion from Google.
16. Shiprocket
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2017
Location: New Delhi, India
Funding: $399.1M (Series E)
What they do: Shiprocket is an end-to-end e-commerce logistics platform based in India that enables businesses to streamline their shipping and delivery processes. The platform offers a range of shipping solutions, including domestic and international shipping, multiple courier integrations, and advanced tracking and analytics tools.
Shiprocket has become a leading player in e-commerce logistics due to their affordable pricing, seamless integration with popular e-commerce platforms, and focus on simplifying shipping for small and medium-sized businesses.
17. Saie
5-year search growth: 629%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2019
Location: New York, New York
Funding: Undisclosed (Seed)
What they do: Saie is a beauty brand that offers clean, natural, and sustainable makeup products. The company’s products are made with high-quality ingredients and free from harmful chemicals, with a focus on ethical and sustainable sourcing.
Saie’s commitment to transparency and eco-consciousness has earned it a loyal following among consumers looking for natural and ethical beauty products. The brand has also seen a surge in sales, growing retail sales by 140% from 2022 to 2023.
18. Airbyte
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2020
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $181.2M (Series B)
What they do: Airbyte is an open-source data integration platform that allows companies to consolidate data into data warehouses, lakes, and databases. Unlike competitor platforms, Airbyte lets users access, modify, and extend the platform’s codebase. Currently, the startup has more than 20,000 users across 7,000 active companies.
19. Liquid Death
5-year search growth: 1,011%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2017
Location: Santa Monica, California
Funding: $267.6M (Series D)
What they do: Liquid Death is a canned water DTC startup known for its unique branding and marketing approach. Since its inception, the company has branched into other product categories, including flavored sparkling water, hydration mixes, and iced tea.
Because of the startup’s rapid growth (revenue increased from $110M in 2022 to $263M in 2023), it raised $67 million in new funding at a $1.4 billion valuation.
20. Printify
5-year search growth: 1,117%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2015
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $54.1M (Series A)
What they do: Printify is an on-demand printing service that makes adding custom designs to physical products relatively easy. Mugs, socks, coffee cups, shirts, and a catalog of over 800 products are available on-demand for whatever designs that users draw up.
21. Melio
5-year search growth: 717%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2018
Location: New York, New York
Funding: $504M (Series D)
What they do: One of the banes of a small business’s existence is keeping the books, especially paying and invoicing vendors and contractors. Melio seamlessly syncs with Quickbooks and lets business owners create workflows that streamline the payment process. At the end of 2023, the startup had 119,000 customers (up from 94,000 the previous year).
22. Adalo
5-year search growth: 4,150%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2018
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
Funding: $9.8M (Series A)
What they do: Creating an app can seem like a scary task when you don’t know how to code or where to start. Luckily, Adalo is solving that problem with its seamless no-code app builder. Adalo’s easy-to-use interface lets app creators drag and drop simple blocks to create their dream application without a single line of code. According to the company’s CEO, more than 100,000 people have built an app with Adalo.
23. Ryze Superfoods
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: Boston, Massachusetts
Location: 2020
Funding: $2.2M (Seed)
What they do: RYZE Superfoods is a health and wellness startup offering mushroom-based coffee blends. The company’s flagship product, Ryze Mushroom Coffee, combines organic arabica coffee with a blend of functional mushrooms, including cordyceps, lion’s mane, reishi, shiitake, and more. According to their website, their mushroom coffee products have received over 100,000 5-star reviews.
24. Elegoo
5-year search growth: 507%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2015
Location: Shenzhen, China
Funding: $3.2M (Equity Crowdfunding)
What they do: Chinese manufacturing startup Elegoo is committed to providing STEM students worldwide with affordable robots, 3D printers, and other machinery to help them learn the basics of software and hardware combinations at an elementary level.
Elegoo’s 3D printers have gotten positive reviews from critics for their combination of affordability and functionality. The startup generated $200 million in revenue in 2023, up from $100 million in 2021.
25. Givebutter
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2016
Location: Washington, District of Columbia
Funding: $57M (Series A)
What they do: Givebutter is a fundraising software startup that provides a number of fundraising tools (donation forms, CRM, email management, etc.). Notably, their actual tools are free. The startup generates revenue mainly from tips and transaction fees. The platform has facilitated over $300M in donations by more than one million donors.
In April 2024, the company raised $50 million in Series A funding to scale its nonprofit fundraising and CRM tools.
Conclusion
2024 is proving to be a challenging time for the startup ecosystem.
But these up and coming companies are showing the world that growth is possible in just about any economic environment.
Notably, the fast growing companies on this list come from a wide range of founders, backgrounds, locations, and industries. Which suggests that the right startups can still see growth despite additional challenges and pressure.