Forbes Year-End List: Top 15 Best Startups with the Fastest Valuation Growth in 2014

Although some well-known investors have unanimously thrown out bubble theories, this year's capital market is still highly tolerant of excellent start-ups. Just a few weeks ago, sharing economy representative company Uber raised a huge amount of US$1.2 billion, and the company's valuation soared to US$40 billion. Lending Club, which has opened up a new field of P2P online lending business, also completed a US$90 million Series F financing this year and successfully went public a few days ago.

Based on data provided by investment behavior research firm VC Experts, the online edition of Forbes magazine identified the 15 companies with the fastest growing valuations in 2014. Among them, some are familiar companies, such as Uber, Indiegogo and Dropbox, and others are unfamiliar., such as The Honest Company, an environmentally friendly product e-commerce company founded by famous Hollywood movie star Jessica Alba. According to regulatory documents, the valuations of these 15 companies have increased by an average of 4.5 times.

Who are they? Why were they able to maintain such high growth in 2014, when the bubble reappeared? Get to know these companies together.

15. Airbnb

Airbnb is one of the representative companies of the sharing economy. If you give a definition, it is an online short-term rental company, which means sharing a house with others (usually strangers). Usually, travelers (traveling, business trip) come to a strange place, need to stay in a hotel, and are not familiar with the local living conditions. If they want to find a place that is cheap and has someone to chat with to gain knowledge, they can turn to Airbnb for help. Whether it's a semi-formal hotel room, a residential room, or just a sofa, Airbnb users can spend the night in a more humane place for a relatively lower price.

Airbnb was founded in 2008 by three boys, Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. According to information, the company has completed financing of US$794.8 million. Airbnb raised US$200 million in Series C in 2013 and US$475 million in Series D in 2014. The Series D valuation exceeded US$13 billion, and the valuation change between the two rounds of financing reached US$7.8 billion. The company's valuation was raised to $13 billion in October as employees prepared to sell shares to cash in. It is understood that Airbnb is about to go public.

　　14. RelayRides

RelayRides was founded in 2008 and its product was officially launched in June 2010. The company claims to be the world's first and most advanced P2P car rental company. Overall, this mobile app can help people with idle cars rent them to people who need them but don't have one. RelayRides says it is reinventing the car rental industry, although the title usually belongs to Uber.

RelayRides 'investors include Google Ventures, General Motors' investment arm GMV, Trinity Ventures, etc. The company conducted Series B financing this year, and in 2011, it conducted multiple rounds of Series A financing consisting of bridges. The valuation at that time was approximately US$35 million, and the valuation change between the two rounds was US$65 million.

　　13. DraftKings

Overall, you can think of DraftKings as an online gambling platform based on virtual sports competitions. Unfortunately, there is no reference for such a thing in China. This company is located in the United States, and the services it provides are completely legal. Users can enter virtual sports competitions in different forms and contents on the platform for free or for a certain fee. If you win according to the rules on the spot, you can win cash. Yes, it's cash.

DraftKings was founded in 2011 and has currently raised US$76.4 million. In 2013, the company completed a US$24 million Series B financing with a valuation of approximately US$28 million. In 2014, it completed a US$41 million Series C financing, and the valuation change between the two rounds reached US$150 million.# p#pagination title #e#

　　12. AdRoll

Start-ups in the field of advertising technology and advertising platforms have become very popular recently, because several large Internet social platforms that have been in the past few years have begun to monetize advertising or are planning to monetize through advertising. AdRoll is one of them, and its specialized technology provides visitors with retrieval (also known as ad redirection) to re-display products that users have browsed. Obviously, the order conversion rate brought by this kind of advertising is inherently higher than that of ordinary advertising. That is why AdRoll is popular.

AdRoll was founded in 2007 and currently has a total financing scale of US$89 million. The company raised US$15 million in Series B in 2012 and US$70 million in Series C in 2014. The company's valuation has changed to US$480 million in two years.

　　11. Lending Club

This company may be the idol of all running and non-running P2P online lending platforms. Lending Club has thrived for eight years. The platform has operated more than US$5 billion in loans. In the last year alone, Lending Club operated US$1.5 billion in loans, bringing revenue to the company of US$98 million, making it the Internet's well-deserved number one P2P online lending platform. The reason for its success lies in the fact that it obeys management of key points in the online lending business and attaches great importance to conducting business within the framework of financial supervision.

Lending Club just went public a few weeks ago, with a total scale of VC, PE and debt financing of US$392 million. This year's total scale of PE and debt financing has reached US$115 million, and this year's valuation has changed as much as US$3 billion. Lending Club raised $870 million through an IPO.

　　10. Handy

Handy belongs to the on-demand economy and uses mobile apps to help users find housekeeping services, such as cleaners, plumbers, carpentry and bricklayers, etc. The company was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in New York. The predecessor of the app is Handybook.

The company completed a total of US$45 million in venture capital financing, with a financing scale of US$33 million in 2014. This year's valuation has increased by $57 million, doubling last year.

　　9. The Honest Company

More than one Hollywood star has entered the field of technology entrepreneurship. Among them are famous actor/band lead singer/investor Jared Leto and Lenovo chief product manager and famous investor Aston Kutcher. Now, Jessica Alba has also founded a company called The Honest Company. This is an e-commerce company that sells a wide variety of products to consumers, including diapers, children's skin care products, cleaning products, etc. and they are very environmentally friendly from product to packaging. In 2014, the company expects sales to reach US$150 million.

The Honest Company was founded in 2011 and has completed a total of US$70 million in venture capital financing. In 2013, it raised US$25 million in Series B and US$70 million in Series C in 2014. It has well-known institutions such as Guangspeed, GCP and Wellington Management Fund as investors. In 2014, Alba's startup valuation grew by as much as $750 million.

　　8. Pure Storage

#p#Pagination Title #e#

Cloud storage is not just a company that provides enterprise-level cloud storage services, including Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive Pure Storage. The important thing is that this company emphasizes that no matter how fast the physical hard disk is, it does not use it. It uses flash memory, which is generally willful.

But willfulness is useless. Money is the key. Fortunately, investors also pay the bill. In order to increase money for flash memory, Pure Storage has completed a total of 9 rounds of financing of more than US$470 million, and its current valuation has reached US$4 billion.“”… This year, two rounds of financing totaled US$285 million, and the valuation change reached US$2.4 billion, which more than doubled.

　　7. Lyft

Although Uber's business has appeared in hundreds of cities around the world, the most popular Uber taxis in the mobile ride-hailing industry are probably in the United States, and Lyft is their main competitor in the United States. Don't introduce too much about Lyft: If Uber's black elegance seems a little cold to you, then Lyft's fluffy pink beard may be intended to bring you some warmth.

Lyft was founded in 2012 and is also headquartered in San Francisco and is said to be not far from Uber's office. The company has completed a total of 6 rounds of US$332 million in financing, and this year received a US$250 million Series D financing, preparing to go global. This year, Lyft's corporate valuation has increased by $710 million.

　　6. NJOY

Strictly speaking, this is not a start-up company, and their business is e-cigarettes. China readers who are unfamiliar with the situation may find it difficult to imagine that an outdated product such as e-cigarettes has such a large market in the United States. Given that smoking is harmful to health, I won't introduce it here. NJOY was founded in 2006. It has received three rounds of total public financing of US$165 million, all of which were PE. In February this year, it raised US$70 million, which helped increase their company's valuation by US$1.1 billion.

　　5. Cloudera

Big data! Another buzzword of the year (Buzzword). Cloudera is a software provider for big data architecture. It conducts secondary development based on the open source data management software infrastructure Hadoop to provide data management services to enterprises. Even Intel saw the potential of the company (or big data services) and spent US$740 million (US$900 million) to buy an 18% stake in Cloudera.

Cloudera was founded in 2008 and has completed a total of 8 rounds of financing of US$1.2 billion. According to Intel's transactions, the company's valuation is at least US$4.1 billion. Judging from the number and nature of financing rounds, it is basically ready to go public. The company has completed more than US$1 billion in financing this year, and this year alone its valuation improvement level has reached US$3.5 billion.

　　4. ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes provides enterprise users with IT system operating efficiency monitoring services in the cloud computing era, helping users discover problems as quickly as possible and solve problems through collaborative work and intelligent cloud computing resource allocation. The company was founded in 2010 with investors including Salesforce and Sequoia Capital, with a total financing of US$25.7 million. This year's Series B financing scale is US$20 million, which is a good time to catch up with the rapid development of big data, cloud computing and enterprise markets. This year, the company's valuation has increased by US$67 million to US$80 million.

　　3. Uber

#p#Pagination Title #e#

It is also a company that does not need to be introduced much. According to PingWest's exclusive knowledge, Uber has registered a company in China. The strategic cooperation between Baidu and Uber is actually to inject capital into the company and send a VP executive to the board of directors (foreign media reported that the amount of this strategic investment is US$600 million, but we have not yet received confirmation from Baidu). Uber also proposed the concept of Greater China for the first time in China and appointed the general manager of the region. This has never been promoted before in Uber in Southeast Asia, Europe and other places. They generally formulate specific promotion strategies on a city-by-city basis.

Uber has completed two rounds of US$1.2 billion each this year. The investors are established hedge funds such as NEA, Varian Capital Partners, and Blackstone, Qatar sovereign investment funds, and well-known venture capitalists such as Google and Kaipeng Perkins. Currently, Uber's valuation may have exceeded $40 billion, with its valuation increasing by $21.8 billion this year alone.

Drift: Currently, Uber should have become the world's highest-valued startup. If the number one is not Uber, it may be Xiaomi.

　　2. Thumbstack

It is also a representative company of on-demand economy. Thumbstack helps its users find the professionals they need to complete the projects they want to complete, such as building an airplane or dressing up for a child's birthday party. Currently, there are more than 700 types of projects that users can complete on Thumbstack.

Both the on-demand economy and the sharing economy are hot areas for capital chase. Thumbstack was founded in 2008 and has completed a total of US$148 million in five rounds of financing. This year alone, it raised US$130 million, and the company's valuation has increased by US$700 million.

　　1. Zenifits

Zenifits provides cloud-based human resource management services to enterprise users. Simply put, if you are a manager of a startup company and want to adopt the purest lean entrepreneurship principles to guide the company's operation and development, then you must want to hire more full-stack engineers and less HR and administration. This is the entry point for Zenifits's product, where corporate users can use it to manage cumbersome matters such as compensation, benefits, and subsidies. Currently, more than 2000 companies of different sizes are adopting cloud HR services provided by Zenifits.

Zenifits was founded in 2013 and graduated from YC. It has completed three rounds of financing of US$83.6 million. Among the investors are SV Angel, A16Z, and the above-mentioned actor/singer and investor Jared Leto. In June 2013, Zenifits received a seed round of US$2.1 million, and the remaining US$81.5 million in Series A and Series B financing were completed this year. The company's valuation surged to US$650 million, winning Forbes magazine's list of the 15 fastest growing startups. First place