Five storage suppliers have been ranked in the top 5000 list of North America’s fastest-growing companies: OwnBackup, Panzura, Komprise, SingleStore and OpenDrives.
Update. Panzura added to the list, 18 Aug 2022.
The Inc. 5000 is an annual report published by the Inc. business magazine and the 2022 edition ranked companies by revenue growth between 2018 to 2021. Inc. explains that the minimum revenue required for its list inclusion in 2018 is $100,000 and the minimum for 2021 is $2 million. Top-ranked BlockFi, a financial services business, achieved spectacular 245,616 percent revenue growth in the period. SnapNurse in second place grew at 146,319 percent. Third-ranked CDL 1000 attained 56,135 percent growth. The numbers decrease rapidly as we go down the ranks.
- Backup services supplier OwnBackup was ranked number 839 with 752 percent growth.
- Cloud file sync-and-sharer Panzura at 1,343 with 485 percent ARR growth.
- Unstructured data manager Komprise came in at number 1,971 with 306 percent growth.
- Database supplier SingleStore achieved the 3,819 rank with 130 percent growth.
- Storage hardware supplier OpenDrives came in at number 4,652 with 92 percent growth.
These are highly respectable numbers.
Panzura said it was growing at four times the rate of its nearest competitors within the survey period. CEO Jill Stelfox said: “Joining the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America is an honor. … Our mission to provide every CIO with rock-solid security, complete visibility, and the advanced ability to put their data to work drives us each day.”
Kumar Goswami, CEO and co-founder of Komprise, said he was incredibly humbled in a statement, and: “Our rapid growth over the past few years speaks to real enterprise pains in managing data growth and discovering a frictionless, safe path to the cloud. We’re excited to help our customers on the next stage of unstructured data management maturity by enabling automated workflows to move the right unstructured data into cloud AI/ML and other big data tools.”
The list’s overall median growth rate was 230 percent, but the median of the top 500 companies was 2,144 percent – up from 1,820 percent for the 2021 list.
The Worldwide Insurance Network came in at 5,000 with 80 percent growth. Can we conclude that storage vendors that were not included in the Ince 5000 were excluded because they had less than 80 percent revenue growth from 2018 to 2021?
Inc, states: “To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2018. They must be US-based, privately held, for-profit, and independent – not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies – as of December 31, 2021.”
There is also a need to apply to Inc. for consideration as a listed business. Here’s what Inc said about applying for the 2021 list: “The application process is also simple: Input your contact information and a few company details, submit your revenue numbers, and finalize your payment. Once we’ve received your application, we’ll ask you to verify your 2017 and 2020 revenue figures. You’ll learn whether you made this year’s list by the end of July.”
The application fee for the 2023 list is $195 – not that much, but think about this: Ince made $975,000 just from the 5,000 successful applicants. If there were 5,000 unsuccessful applicants then it made $975,000 from them as well. (Ed – Perhaps Blocks & Files should run an annual top 1,000 storage company growth ranking report. We could make hundreds of thousands of … dream on.)
Our takeway is that companies in the list nominated themselves and paid Inc a small fee. Thus the Ince 5000 does not review all companies in the USA and rate their growth. We could conclude that storage companies not on the list simply did not bother applying – rather than that they failed to pass the bar to get into the top 5000. That’s why we don’t see companies like Weka and HYCU and many, many more in the list.
Bootnote
The top 500 companies are featured in the September issue of Inc. magazine, which will be available on August 23.
