Top Companies

37signals is an independent software company founded in 1999. It started as a web design firm and later shifted its focus to software products, launching Basecamp in 2004. The company also created Ruby on Rails, the open-source web development framework that grew out of the original Basecamp project.

Today, 37signals develops Basecamp, a project management and team communication platform, and HEY, an email and calendar service. Its product lineup also includes Fizzy and ONCE software. 37signals is self-funded and fully remote, with no physical headquarters and employees working across multiple cities and continents.

Affirm is a financial technology company started in San Francisco in 2012. It was created as an alternative to traditional credit cards, offering installment loans with the total payment amount and schedule shown before a purchase is completed. The company expanded through partnerships with online and physical retailers and became publicly traded on Nasdaq in 2021.

Consumers can use Affirm at checkout to split eligible purchases into four interest-free payments or longer monthly plans that may charge interest, depending on the offer and credit decision. Affirm also provides virtual cards and the Affirm Card for using approved payment plans beyond directly integrated stores. For merchants, it supplies checkout financing and payment-network technology. Affirm operates as a remote-first company, while maintaining offices and shared workspaces in several cities.

Ahrefs is a software company founded in 2010 in Ukraine and currently headquartered in Singapore. It began as a tool for analyzing backlinks and grew into a broader marketing platform based on its own web crawler and search data.

Its software is used for keyword and competitor research, website audits, backlink analysis, rank tracking, content research, web analytics, and monitoring how brands appear in traditional and AI-powered search. Ahrefs also publishes free marketing courses and guides and operates Yep, a separate search engine project. The company is bootstrapped and works with a multinational team.

Airbnb is an online travel marketplace that began in San Francisco in 2007, when two roommates welcomed three guests into their apartment during a local design conference. The service officially launched as Airbed & Breakfast in 2008, shortened its name to Airbnb in 2009, and expanded from spare rooms to apartments, entire homes, and vacation rentals. It became a publicly traded company in 2020.

The platform connects hosts with travelers and handles listings, bookings, messaging, and payments. Alongside short- and long-term stays, Airbnb now offers locally hosted activities and bookable services such as chefs, photography, massage, and training. The company introduced a “Live and Work Anywhere” policy in 2022, allowing most employees to choose between working from home or an office, subject to role and location rules.

Buffer is a social media software company started in the UK in 2010. The first version was a small tool for scheduling tweets, and the product later expanded to support additional social networks and a wider range of marketing tasks.

Today, Buffer provides tools for creating and scheduling posts, managing audience engagement, reviewing social media analytics, and building simple landing pages. It mainly serves creators, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. Buffer later became a fully distributed company, and its team now works remotely across several countries. The company also publishes its revenue figures, employee salaries, and other internal metrics through a public transparency dashboard.

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Chili Piper is a software company founded in 2016. It was created after the founders worked with an early customer that needed a better way to distribute meetings among sales representatives, which became the basis of its scheduling and routing products.

Today, Chili Piper builds software for business-to-business sales, marketing, and revenue teams. Its tools qualify incoming leads, route them to the appropriate representative, schedule meetings, distribute customer records, and sync activity with systems such as Salesforce. The company has operated remotely since it was founded, with employees spread across multiple countries.

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CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company founded in 2011 to move endpoint security toward a cloud-based approach. Its Falcon platform was designed around a lightweight software sensor that gathers activity from computers and sends it to CrowdStrike’s cloud for analysis. The company became publicly traded on Nasdaq in 2019.

Falcon is used to detect, investigate, and respond to threats affecting employee devices, user identities, cloud systems, business applications, and data. The platform also includes threat intelligence, managed detection and response, vulnerability management, and security information and event management tools. CrowdStrike now incorporates AI into investigation and response workflows and offers controls for securing AI applications and agents. The company has operated with a distributed, remote-first workforce since its early years.

Deel is a payroll and human resources software company founded in 2019. It began as a Y Combinator startup focused on helping businesses hire and pay contractors in different countries while handling local contracts and compliance.

The platform has since expanded to cover international payroll, employer-of-record services, benefits, onboarding, immigration, performance management, and company equipment. Businesses use Deel to manage employees and contractors across multiple countries without setting up their own legal entity in every location. Deel also has a globally distributed workforce, with team members based in more than 100 countries.

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Doist is a software company that grew out of Todoist, a task-management app created in 2007. What began as a personal project for organizing the founder's studies and work, then developed into a product used by individuals and teams.

Doist now makes Todoist, which organizes tasks, projects, deadlines, and shared work, along with Twist, a discussion app designed around threaded, asynchronous communication. The company has operated as a remote-first business since its first employee was hired in 2011. It is independently owned and bootstrapped, with a distributed team working across many countries.

Dropbox is a cloud storage and collaboration company that started in 2007 as a solution to a common problem: accessing the same files across different computers without relying on USB drives or email attachments. After taking part in Y Combinator, the service launched publicly in 2008 and focused on automatically synchronizing files between devices.

The service lets individuals and teams store, organize, share, and collaborate on files online. Dropbox has expanded beyond storage with products including Sign for electronic signatures, DocSend for controlled document sharing, Replay for media review, and Dash for AI-assisted search across workplace apps and content. Since 2020, Dropbox has operated under a “Virtual First” model, with remote work serving as the normal day-to-day arrangement for employees.

DuckDuckGo is an internet privacy company founded in Pennsylvania in 2008. It started as an alternative search engine and adopted a policy of not tracking search histories in 2010. Over time, the company expanded beyond search into tools intended to limit tracking during other online activities.

Its current products include a web browser for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android, a private search engine, tracker and cookie blocking, email protection, and Duck.ai for accessing several AI chatbots. It also sells a subscription that includes a VPN, personal-information removal, and identity-theft assistance. DuckDuckGo remains independent, earns revenue from search ads and subscriptions, and operates with a fully distributed team.

ElevenLabs is an artificial intelligence company founded in 2022 with the goal of creating AI systems that could generate and translate natural-sounding speech. The company released its first public platform in 2023.

ElevenLabs now develops models and software for text-to-speech, voice cloning, speech-to-text, dubbing, music, sound effects, and conversational AI agents. Creators can use its tools to produce or localize audio and video, while developers and businesses can add its models to products through an API. Its technology supports many languages and is used in areas such as media, publishing, games, accessibility, and customer service.

Figma is a browser-based design software company founded in 2012. Its original product spent several years in development before a preview release in 2015 and a broader public launch in 2016. Unlike earlier desktop-focused design tools, Figma was built around real-time online collaboration, allowing multiple people to work in the same design file.

Figma Design is mainly used to create interfaces, prototypes, and shared design systems. The company has since expanded into FigJam for online whiteboarding, Slides for presentations, and Dev Mode for translating design details into production code. Its newer products include Figma Make for generating functional prototypes and apps with AI, Sites for publishing websites, and Buzz for producing branded marketing materials.

Fivetran is a data infrastructure company founded in 2012 and developed through Y Combinator. It originally worked on a data-analysis tool for scientists but shifted direction after customers showed more interest in the connectors built to move information into Amazon Redshift. By 2014, automated data pipelines had become the company’s main product.

Fivetran connects business applications, databases, files, and event systems to data warehouses and lakes, automatically copying and updating information as source systems change. It also supports database replication, transformations, governance, and reverse ETL, which sends processed warehouse data back into tools such as CRMs and marketing platforms. The company acquired activation platform Census in 2025 and completed a merger with dbt Labs in 2026, combining data movement with dbt’s data-transformation tools.

GitLab began in 2011 as an open-source project with the goal of helping programmers collaborate on code. The company behind it was incorporated in 2014, joined Y Combinator the following year, and became publicly traded on Nasdaq in 2021.

Today, GitLab provides a DevSecOps platform covering source-code management, project planning, continuous integration and delivery, software testing, security, compliance, deployment, and AI-assisted development. Companies can use GitLab as a hosted service or run it on their own infrastructure. GitLab is also an all-remote company with no company-owned offices and team members located in more than 65 countries.

Grafana Labs is an observability software company founded in 2014. It was originally known as Raintank, and was created around Grafana, an open-source dashboard and data-visualization project started in 2013.

Today, Grafana Labs develops Grafana Cloud, a managed platform for monitoring applications and infrastructure through metrics, logs, traces, profiles, dashboards, alerts, and incident tools. It also maintains open-source projects including Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Tempo, Pyroscope, k6, and Alloy. The company is headquartered in New York but operates as a fully remote business with employees across more than 40 countries.

Greenhouse is a hiring software company founded in 2012. It started with an applicant tracking system built around structured hiring, where candidates are evaluated through consistent interview plans and scorecards. The product later expanded to cover onboarding, sourcing automation, and tools designed to reduce bias in recruiting.

Companies use Greenhouse to publish jobs, manage applications, schedule interviews, collect interviewer feedback, send offers, and analyze hiring activity. Its integrations connect the platform with job boards, assessment tools, HR systems, and other recruiting services. Greenhouse also helps teams find and contact potential candidates, manage employee onboarding, and track recruiting performance. The company operates with a globally distributed, remote workforce.

Help Scout is a customer service software company founded in 2011. Its original product used a shared email inbox to help teams manage customer conversations without passing messages between individual accounts. The company has operated remotely since its early days and is headquartered in Boston.

Its platform brings customer conversations from email, live chat, social channels, and SMS into shared inboxes where support teams can assign and manage replies. Help Scout also provides knowledge bases, website messaging through Beacon, customer profiles, reporting, workflow automation, integrations, and AI tools for drafting responses and answering common questions. Its customers are mainly growing businesses that need a central place to organize customer support.

HubSpot is a customer relationship management software company founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2006. It initially focused on “inbound marketing,” an approach based on attracting potential customers through useful online content instead of relying mainly on direct advertising or cold outreach. The company later expanded into sales software, introduced a free CRM, and became publicly traded in 2014.

Today, HubSpot combines customer data with tools for marketing, sales, support, content management, data management, billing, and payments. These products are organized into separate “Hubs” that share the same Smart CRM, allowing different teams to work from the same customer records. Its Breeze product family adds AI assistants and agents for tasks such as content creation, prospecting, data enrichment, and customer support.

Hugging Face is an artificial intelligence company founded in New York in 2016. It originally developed a chatbot app but shifted toward open-source machine-learning tools after the technology behind the chatbot attracted more interest. Its Transformers library later became widely used for working with pretrained AI models.

Today, the Hugging Face Hub lets researchers, developers, and companies publish, discover, and collaborate on AI models, datasets, and interactive applications called Spaces. The company also provides open-source libraries, model training and inference services, hosted computing, and private collaboration features for businesses. Hugging Face has teams in the United States and France and operates as a remote-friendly, distributed organization.

Iterable is a customer engagement software company founded in San Francisco in 2013. It was created as a marketing automation platform and has since expanded into a system for managing communication across different stages of the customer journey.

Marketing teams can use Iterable to organize customer data, segment audiences, build automated journeys, and send messages through email, SMS, WhatsApp, mobile push, web push, in-app, and embedded channels. It also includes campaign testing, analytics, personalization, and AI tools that can assist with audience selection and content. Iterable supports a distributed workforce alongside offices in San Francisco, Denver, London, Lisbon, and Sydney.

Metabase is a business intelligence software company whose product began in 2014 as an internal analytics system for companies in the Expa startup portfolio. Founder Sameer Al-Sakran and the early team released it as an open-source project in 2015, aiming to let people explore company data without needing to write SQL.

Today, Metabase connects to databases and data warehouses so teams can build queries, charts, dashboards, reports, alerts, and shared metrics. It also offers embedded analytics for adding reports to customer-facing applications, along with permissions, security controls, and AI-assisted querying. Companies can run the open-source edition on their own infrastructure or use the hosted Metabase Cloud service. Metabase operates with a remote team and advertises roles across several regions.

n8n is a workflow automation company founded in Berlin in 2019. It started as a personal project after the founder became frustrated with the time required to write, deploy, and maintain small automation scripts. The first version was published on GitHub in June 2019, and a company later formed around the project.

The n8n platform uses a visual, node-based editor to connect apps, APIs, databases, internal tools, and custom code in multi-step workflows. It can automate routine business processes as well as coordinate AI models, agents, and human approval steps. Users can run n8n through its managed cloud service or host it on their own infrastructure. The company is headquartered in Berlin and operates as a remote-first organization.

Nvidia is a semiconductor and computing company founded in 1993, initially to develop 3D graphics technology for games and multimedia. It went public in 1999 and released the GeForce 256, which it marketed as the first graphics processing unit, or GPU. In 2006, the company introduced CUDA, a software platform that allowed GPUs to handle general computing tasks beyond graphics.

Nvidia now designs processors, networking equipment, computer systems, and software for data centers, gaming PCs, professional visualization, robotics, and vehicles. Its GPUs are widely used to train and run artificial intelligence models because they can process many calculations in parallel. The company also provides enterprise AI software, cloud services, simulation tools through Omniverse, and DRIVE technology for automotive computing and autonomous-driving development.

Owner is a restaurant technology company co-founded by Adam Guild and Dean Bloembergen. Guild, who dropped out of high school and later received a Thiel Fellowship, started the business in 2018 under the name ProfitBoss. It first offered reservation tools for restaurant chains, then pivoted to online ordering when the pandemic shut down dining rooms in 2020, and was renamed Owner.com in 2021.

Owner now provides an all-in-one platform that helps independent restaurants compete with big brands online, including AI-powered websites, SEO, online ordering, delivery, branded mobile apps, loyalty programs, automated marketing, and a point-of-sale system. It works with more than 10,000 restaurants and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The company is venture-backed and reached a $1 billion valuation in 2025.

Podium is a software company founded in 2014 to help a local tire shop collect more customer reviews through text messages. The original reviews product developed into a broader communications platform for local businesses, and the company joined Y Combinator in 2016.

Today, Podium brings customer conversations into one system, covering text messaging, phone calls, website chat, social messages, online reviews, contact management, and payments. Businesses can use it to capture and follow up with leads, request reviews, send marketing messages, schedule appointments, and collect payments. Its newer AI tools can answer calls and messages, respond to leads outside business hours, and handle routine sales or administrative tasks.

Printify is a print-on-demand platform founded in 2015. It was built to give online sellers a way to offer custom products without buying inventory or operating their own production and shipping facilities.

Merchants use Printify to add designs to clothing, accessories, home goods, and other items, then publish them to sales channels such as Shopify, Etsy, and Amazon. After a customer orders, Printify routes the job to a third-party print provider, which produces and ships it. Printify merged with Printful in 2024; the two platforms remain separate brands within FYUL, the combined company unveiled in 2026.

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Rula is a behavioral health company founded in Los Angeles in 2019 by Josh Bruno, Gabriel Diop, and Greg Moore. It started out as Path Mental Health, a platform that connected employees, through their benefits programs, with specialized addiction treatment providers. The company later broadened its focus to general mental health care and rebranded as Rula in 2024.

Rula now runs an online platform that matches people with licensed therapists and psychiatric providers for individual, couples, family, teen, and child therapy, along with medication management. It is in-network with more than 120 insurance plans and has a network of over 23,000 providers across all 50 states. Rula handles credentialing, billing, and scheduling for its clinicians, who work as independent providers. The company is venture-backed, with investors including Sequoia Capital, and operates as a remote-first business.

SafetyWing is an insurance company founded in 2018. Based in San Francisco and built by a fully remote team, it was started to address the limited access to health coverage and other benefits faced by digital nomads and people working across borders.

Its main products include Nomad Insurance for individuals and families traveling or living abroad, and Remote Health, a group health plan for distributed companies, employees, and contractors. SafetyWing has also introduced Nomad Citizen, a membership combining health, travel, income, and life coverage with services for people without a fixed country of residence. Its policies are offered through SafetyWing entities and external underwriting partners, depending on the product and location.

Salesforce is a business software company started in a San Francisco apartment in 1999. Its first product moved customer relationship management, or CRM, from software installed on company servers to a subscription service accessed through a web browser. Salesforce went public in 2004 and later expanded through products and acquisitions, including MuleSoft, Tableau, and Slack.

Its platform stores customer and business data and provides applications for sales, customer service, marketing, ecommerce, analytics, integration, and workplace communication. These products are grouped under Customer 360 and share data across departments. Salesforce has also developed Data 360 for combining information from different systems and Agentforce for building AI agents that can answer questions, update records, and carry out business workflows using a company’s existing data and permissions.

Scopic is a software development and digital marketing company founded in Massachusetts in 2006. Started as a one-person business, Scopic later developed into a fully remote company, with team members based across the Americas, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.

The company designs and builds custom web, mobile, and desktop applications for clients in industries such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and e-commerce. Its services now include AI development, cloud solutions, product design, software testing, and ongoing technical support. Through its Scopic Studios division, it also handles work such as search optimization, paid advertising, content, email marketing, and lead generation.

SoFi is a financial technology company that began at Stanford University in 2011 with an alumni-funded student loan program. It initially focused on student lending and refinancing, then expanded into mortgages, personal loans, banking, investing, and other financial services. The company became publicly traded on Nasdaq in 2021 and received approval to operate a nationally chartered bank in 2022.

Through its app, SoFi offers checking and savings accounts, credit cards, investments, student loan refinancing, personal loans, mortgages, and access to insurance products. It also runs a business-to-business technology division, renamed SoFi Tech Solutions in 2026, that provides payment processing, card issuing, banking software, lending tools, and risk services to banks, fintech companies, and other brands.

Superhuman is the company formerly known as Grammarly, the AI writing assistant founded in 2009 by Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmytro Lider. Grammarly started as a subscription tool to help students improve their grammar and spelling, then grew into one of the most widely used writing assistants. In 2025 it acquired the collaborative workspace Coda and the email app Superhuman, and that October it adopted the Superhuman name for the whole company.

Superhuman now offers a suite of AI productivity tools: Grammarly for writing help, Superhuman Mail for fast, keyboard-driven email, Superhuman Docs (formerly Coda) as an all-in-one team workspace, and Superhuman Go, an AI assistant that works across the apps people already use. The company is led by CEO Shishir Mehrotra, Coda's co-founder and a former YouTube chief product officer, and is headquartered in San Francisco.

Vercel is a cloud software company founded in 2015. The business was originally called ZEIT and released a deployment tool named Now before creating the open-source React framework Next.js. In 2020, ZEIT changed its name to Vercel as its focus expanded from individual deployments to a broader platform for building and running web applications.

Developers can connect code repositories to Vercel to create preview environments, deploy updates, manage domains, monitor performance, and run server-side functions without maintaining much of the underlying infrastructure. The company continues to develop Next.js and now also offers tools for AI applications, including an AI SDK, model gateway, managed compute, and secure code-execution environments.

Webflow is a website-building and hosting company. The founders began developing the product in 2012 and joined Y Combinator the following year. Webflow was created to let designers build production websites through a visual interface while still generating the underlying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The platform now combines visual site design, managed hosting, a content management system, ecommerce, localization, and collaboration tools. Businesses can also use Webflow Analyze to study visitor behavior and Webflow Optimize for testing and personalization. It is used by individual designers, agencies, and company marketing teams to create and maintain websites without requiring developers to hand-code every page or routine content update.

Zapier is an automation software company founded in 2011. The idea began during a Startup Weekend in Columbia, Missouri, where the founders built a tool for connecting web services. Zapier joined Y Combinator in 2012 and has operated as a fully distributed company since its early days.

Its core product lets users create “Zaps,” workflows in which an event in one app automatically triggers actions in others. The platform connects thousands of business tools and also includes Tables for storing data, Interfaces for creating forms and simple apps, and tools for AI agents and model connections. Zapier is generally used to automate repetitive work such as lead routing, notifications, data entry, reporting, and employee onboarding.