Multi-Billion Dollar Companies with Less than 50 Employees

WhatsApp had only 35 engineers when it had almost half a billion users and it was acquired by Facebook for $18 billion. 

Whenever we think of a unicorn (a company that is valued at 1 billion dollars or more), we picture 100s of employees spread around the world across different departments.

However, some companies have proven that big numbers can be achieved with the help of a lean team too. As technology improves exponentially, there will be more and more instances of super lean companies that happen to be unicorns.  

Based on data sourced from the Crustdata database, we found the top 10 unicorns – by funding raised—with less than 50 employees and analyzed how they are performing on the basis of other growth metrics like current headcount, YoY employee growth, and monthly traffic.

The above companies are all considered unicorns with >$1B valuations and have less than 50 employees. 

Inflection AI is an AI/ML studio that develops personal AI chatbots. They raised a massive round of $1.3B led by the who’s who of Microsoft, Reddit, and NVIDIA that took their total investment to date to $1.55B.

The Palo Alto based company has only 24 employees!

Taking the same group of unicorns with less than 50 employees, we wanted to show you exactly how many employees each one has. 

Amazingly, Compute North, a digital infrastructure company, has only 10 employees (all on the engineering team). With AI becoming better and better, we expect these types of companies to become more the norm.

We analyzed the sub-50 employee unicorn group by their growth rates. 

Voltage Park is a cloud infrastructure company that provides training and fine tuning of large ML models.

Founded in the 2nd quarter of 2023, the company grew at a whopping 2000% year over year and has 23 employees at present.

With over 2.2 million monthly website visitors, San Francisco based Alchemy leads the pack in terms of monthly traffic.

Alchemy is a Web3 developer platform that helps companies build decentralized applications.

Among the pros of having a lean team are higher productivity, more skin in the game, increased accountability, and generous ESOP (Employee Stock Option Plan) benefits. 

At a time when companies overhire during good times and then fire hundreds of employees during marketing pullbacks, running a billion dollar company with a few dozen employees sets an excellent precedent. We look forward to seeing more companies achieve great results with a lean team.

About the data

The data seen above is from Crustdata - the most accurate realtime LinkedIn data source for growth and private equity investors. It indexes billions of public data points on companies every week to provide an edge over the private market.