Indholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2025 i Inc. Magazine

1 Tekendra Parmar Parmar has worked at Time, Fortune, Harper’s Magazine, and, most recently, Business Insider, as a features editor. For this issue, Parmar writes about the U.S. immigration system and the legal firms seeing growth as they help others navigate its complexities (page 144). The reporting felt “quite personal,” he says, as he’s currently going through the green card process himself. 2 Ellen McGirt Business writer, podcaster, and Design Observer editor-in-chief McGirt profiles the charismatic co-founder and CEO of United Tiny Homes, Gail Kingsbury (page 23), who she says “brings out the best in the kind of talent other people overlook.” The tiny-house-building company’s “remarkable trajectory is a leadership success story in disguise.” “It’s such a thrill to honor the best in entrepreneurial business with this year’s Inc. 5000…

7X Inc. 5000 Honor Roll 45M Patients Served $5B Savings Across Value-Based Contracts HQ Dallas, Texas LIGHTBEAMHEALTH.COM No person or company will singlehandedly fix the U.S. health care system. But Lightbeam Health Solutions is driving measurable improvements with a value-based care operating system that enables health care organizations to provide superior patient care at the right time and a lower cost. So much of a patient’s clinical journey takes place outside of the exam room, explains Lightbeam Health Solutions President and Chief Operating Officer Erin Page. Using prescriptive AI, Lightbeam ingests data from myriad sources-including health plans, electronic medical record systems, and third-party sources for social determinants of health—to provide a holistic view of a patient’s care and suggest actions and opportunities specific to the end user. Lightbeam’s award-winning remote…

Every successful entrepreneur knows that building your own business requires you to go all in, and you count on your friends and family to understand that. But when things have started to go really well for your business, the impulse to spend even more time with the company can be great. When you’re on a roll, why would you take a step back? Yet if you can’t allow yourself permission to take a step back even in successful times, will you ever? Or are you doomed to be like the workobsessed Logan Roy in Succession, literally dying in pursuit of your next big deal? The trade-offs of success and balance have been top of mind for Eli Maloley, founder and CEO of St. Paul, Minnesota-based Vivacity Tech, which has earned…

Andrea Lisbona Vives was into hand sanitizer before it was popular. The Barcelona-born entrepreneur founded the personal care company Touchland in 2016, when only the germ-obsessed kept a bottle of hand sanitizer handy. Lisbona Vives, 39, felt strongly that reimagining the product could move it from an unceremonious bin in the pharmacy to prime shelf space in fashion and beauty retailers. She was right. Touchland hand sanitizers are now sold in stores including Sephora, Ulta Beauty, and Kohl’s. The Miami-based brand is known for its sleekly designed spray bottles and formulations that contain moisturizer but don’t leave hands feeling sticky. Touchland benefited from a Covid bump, but maintained momentum postpandemic. Annual revenue reached over $100 million in 2024, having grown 2,200 percent since 2021. After launching a line of fragrances…

Inc. 5000: 2019 (No. 706) Eric Yuan conceived of Zoom in the late '80s as a college freshman in China. He used to sit for 10 hours on a train to visit his long-distance girlfriend and wished there were another way to stay in touch. Though they married in 1992 and moved to San Francisco, the gears kept turning in his head. After spending about a decade and a half working at web conferencing company WebEx, through the company’s acquisition by Cisco in 2007, Yuan was ready to branch out. In June 2011, he launched Zoom with a vision to create a more user-friendly teleconferencing experience. By 2017, one-third of the 500 largest companies in the U.S. and 90 percent of the top 200 U.S. universities were using the platform.…

Weston Bergmann Kansas City, Missouri Three-year growth rate: 1,063% On television, Weston Bergmann, 40, exudes the kind of relentless personality that’s needed to win a campy spectacle like MTV’s The Challenge . His feisty demeanor has been a regular spark on the show’s dramatic saga for years. But behind the scenes, Bergmann has been focused for over a decade on building BetaBlox, a startup incubator based in his hometown, Kansas City. BetaBlox does more than mentor budding entrepreneurs. Since 2020, Bergmann has used it to produce The Blox, a reality show for startup founders that divides entrepreneurs into teams to compete in a weeklong boot camp. This is in addition to a range of business courses that BetaBlox offers, and its recent foray into the defense sector, which Bergmann likens…

No.1,732 Joy Mangano has always had star appeal. A chance appearance on QVC in 1992 led the then 36-yearold single mom and aspiring inventor to sell 18,000 self-wringing Miracle Mops in just 20 minutes. Mangano and her company, Ingenious Designs, would go on to launch other products, like Huggable Hangers and My Little Steamers, with similar fanfare. The entrepreneur’s status as a hitmaker was sealed with the 1999 sale of Ingenious to USA Networks, then the parent company of HSN, for an undisclosed sum. Her inspiring life was turned into a movie in 2015, directed by David O. Russell and starring Jennifer Lawrence as Mangano. The title of the film didn’t stray far from its magnetic subject: Joy. In 2020, Mangano launched CleanBoss, and announced rapper Pitbull as a co-founder…

Shaun Pace San Antonio Three-year growth rate: 1,419% In 2012, Shaun Pace, 34, moved to Louisville to train as a minister. When Pace and his wife began planning a family, he realized that earning little to no income from the ministry wasn’t going to cut it. Two years later, he landed a temporary position as a customer service representative at the security company Sonitrol. By 2021, Pace was a general manager and had an offer for a million-dollar stake in the company. Instead, he followed his heart to San Antonio, where he founded his own security company, Pace Protection. Pace offers a wide range of services, installing everything from fencing and gates to alarm systems and AI cameras. In 2024, the 25-employee business brought in nearly $4 million in revenue.…

Aakash Shah New York City Three-year growth rate: 1,189% Like millions of Americans, Aakash Shah, 31, has struggled with allergies, leading to itchy eyes and congestion for the software engineer. Over-the-counter antihistamines caused side effects, like drowsiness and rashes. Weekly allergy shots did not fit into his schedule. Aakash vented to his cousin, Manan Shah, 40, an ear, nose, and throat surgeon, who proposed a different option. He could treat Aakash’s allergies with immunotherapy drops typically reserved for his pediatric patients, who were wary of shots. Plus, he could do it by mail. Aakash saw an opening to help his cousin grow his practice, but when they started receiving client inquiries from across the country, the cousins realized they had a bigger opportunity on their hands. The company hit $1…

With lucrative deals from Nvidia and OpenAI and a market value that has crossed $75 billion—as well as over $8 billion in debt—CoreWeave is a driving force in the AI boom. Amid growing competition, does the company have what it takes to sustain its meteoric rise? No. 45 It all started with a warning. As Brian Venturo remembers it, he was sitting at his desk one day in mid-2020 when his mobile phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, but he answered anyway. “This guy calls me and says, ‘Hi, I’m calling from Nvidia, because you’re not supposed to be selling consumer GPUs in the cloud,’ ” says Venturo, 40, co-founder and chief strategy officer of CoreWeave, a tech juggernaut today that was then an obscure startup. “My heart dropped,”…

When he started Piece of Cake Moving & Storage in New York City in 2018, Voyo Popovic says his goal was to be the fastest-growing mover in the U.S. “After the pandemic hit in 2020, a significant number of customers reached out asking if we could move them to other markets, primarily in Florida and California. As a two-year-old business, our attitude was grow, grow, grow.” As Piece of Cake took on those moves, Popovic realized the company had bitten off more than it could chew. Here’s what he learned about managing fast growth without faltering. IMAGINE THE WORSTCASE SCENARIO I start by weighing the pros and cons of a decision. I play out the worst-case scenario, and then look at where it would leave the business. In this case,…

2025 INC. BEST WORKPLACES WINNER 2025 INC. 5000 HONOREE 139 EMPLOYEES HQ: FORT MYERS, FLORIDA VERADATA.COM While many companies race to bolt artificial intelligence (AI) onto their offerings, VeraData stands out for its 20-year history of applying machine learning and AI to achieve exceptional client results. And not just any clients: VeraData helps nonprofits with noble missions increase donors and dollars. In doing so, the company has grown into a data analytics powerhouse with revenue in excess of $100 million with a differentiated approach for achieving continued growth. Founder and CEO Michael Peterman, a data analytics pioneer, credits success to early decision making, laser focus, and a strong, intentional culture built on trust. Early tech foresight fuels nonprofit global reach Peterman started VeraData in 2007 to apply machine learning to…

When I started my business, Ignite Studio, four years ago, I didn’t hope for clients to show up—I built a roadmap. This roadmap wasn’t just a plan. It was a strate gic approach to identifying and attracting people I wanted to work with. This approach is designed to help you focus your efforts, maximize your impact, and build a base of clients that you love working with—and, most important, who understand the value of your work. CREATE A LIST OF DREAM CLIENTS Your best clients don’t find you by accident—they’re the ones you intentionally seek out. Start by brainstorming 10 to 20 poten tial clients or businesses that align with your values and expertise. Think about whom you’d be excited to work with and who needs what you uniquely offer.…

It’s hard not to look around at the world and feel that 2025 is a hinge year in history, capping off a quarter century that has been marked by shock and awe in more ways than one. If you start with the dot-com bubble and move through time to 9/11 and the Iraq War, the invention of the iPhone, and the 2008 financial crisis, you’ve already seen plenty of evidence to call these unprecedented times. And the rate of change seems only to accelerate. “From the pandemic to now, there have been more of these black-swan events,” observes Natalie Gordon, founder and CEO of Babylist (No. 3,370 on this year’s Inc. 5000), based in Emeryville, California. This past year has felt especially hectic. Technology is changing. Society is changing. Our…

No.108 SHENIQUE SPARKS HAD LONG BEEN her family’s go-to vacation planner. But it was in 2019 that she started to think about putting that skill set to use to generate an additional stream of income. Encouraged by a friend, she started a side hustle as a travel agent and, later that year, officially launched Let Sparks Fly, her luxury travel business. “Initially, my goal was one trip a year, make a little extra money, and that would be it,” Sparks says. “But around year two, it had wings.” Though her first trip—an excursion to Dubai with a group of 27 women—was postponed to 2021 because of Covid restrictions, it brought in $200,000 of revenue. The following year, she produced her second international getaway: a 10-day trip to Greece that took…

No.2,498 SHEILA DUKAS-JANAKOS REMEMBERS SEEING THE cigarette smoke stream out from under the closed door of her boss’s office. It was 1988, and she had just returned to her job at the San Mateo County Health Department after being on maternity leave. Because she was breastfeeding, she needed to pump every few hours while she was away from her baby. At the time, there was no regulation that required her employer to make accommodations for nursing mothers. So when Janakos requested time off to pump, she instead got back-to-back field assignments, making it even harder for her to express milk for her baby. “He got time off to smoke, but no one would think of giving you time off to pump, because that was a selfish thing to do,” she…

“We focus on driving cachet and credibility for the brand, but we’re also hyperfocused on bottom-of-funnel results. At the end of the day, we’re trying to lower customer acquisition costs.” Dreamday’s Lauren Kleinman “We’d rather have a small room with the right buyers, as opposed to casting a wide net. We focus on a really specific ecosystem-the people who would miss us if we were gone.” Ladidadi’s Noelle McInerney “Instead of aggressively trying to sell on day one, we offer clients a free analysis. It not only gets us more customers, but also helps us retain them longer.” Adler Local’s Robin Lincoln-Codjoe Digital marketers have had a rough go of it. Between a rocky economic outlook leading companies to cut budgets, the rise of Google Zero (the search giant’s adoption of artificial…

Inc. 5000: 2010 (No. 253), 2011 (No. 391) Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren was an accidental business innovator who infamously described himself as “a musician living out of a van” before launching the music recommendation and streaming platform in 2000. Indeed, Pandora “spent most of its existence on the brink of shutting down,” Inc. magazine wrote almost two decades ago. That includes running out of money in 2002, surviving on credit cards and salary deferrals—a fate from which it was saved by an infusion from Walden Venture Capital in 2004. But by 2007, the company was facing its most existential threat yet: a hike in the fees that platforms like Pandora had to pay music rights holders. The service was “no longer sustainable,” Westergren recalls. Pandora overcame the challenge, in part…

Derek Gwaltney Roswell, Georgia Three-year growth rate: 6,679% It’s never too late to win big. That’s the way Derek Gwaltney, 52, thinks about both life and his event company, Atlas Experiences. A veteran of the Air Force, Gwaltney launched his company in 2019 to design once-in-a-lifetime getaways, primarily for state-operated lotteries looking to give customers more incentives to play. A scratch-off winner may not take home the top cash prize—but they could win a trip to a dreamy destination like a Hawaiian beachfront or a castle in Ireland. Atlas Experiences plans everything for these runner-up prizes, from private concerts to gourmet meals. The draw for Gwaltney is giving people lifelong memories. That passion has helped Atlas Experiences grow over 6,000 percent in three years, to $10.1 million in revenue last…

SHORTLY AFTER PRESIdent Trump took office in January, Vanessa Best received a flurry of emails from federal agencies that her company, Precision HealthCare Consultants, had worked with for years. “The first email said, ‘We need you to confirm that you will cease unlawful DEI practices,’ ” she recalls. Best was puzzled. The founder and CEO had seen the president’s executive order, signed on day one of his second term, terminating all diversity, equity, and inclusion-related work by the federal government and its contractors. But as far as Best knew, nothing her three-decade-old, Baldwin, New York-based company did for the government had anything to do with that. Precision worked with agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services to identify health care deserts and come up with ways to…

200 EMPLOYEES $1.5B IN SETTLEMENTS 150,000 WORKERS SERVED 92% EMPLOYEE RETENTION RATE When Emil Davtyan, founder and managing attorney of D.Law, an employment-focused law firm based in Los Angeles, hired fellow lawyer Brandon Ruiz earlier this year, it was not to take advantage of his litigation skills. After a bright 15-year career as a trial lawyer and eight years as a partner at his previous firm, Ruiz was tired of arguing in court and wanted to focus on mentoring the next generation of legal professionals. Davtyan hired Ruiz to run D.Law’s inaugural summer associate program and act as the firm’s litigation practice manager, overseeing professional development for all its lawyers. Ruiz would have been valuable in court, but to Davtyan, giving a colleague a job he would love was essential.…

Each year at this time, one of the most marvelous experiences for me as a sales leader of the Inc. brand is speaking with and listening to the Inc. 5000 honorees. All of you have such unique stories and journeys, and yet you have so much in common. Your voices lift one another, your customers, your communities, and your colleagues. Your visions and voices collectively reflect grit, uncommon strength, unwavering determination, and ingenuity. But as I listen deeply, what strikes me the most is this: When you’re congratulated on your achievements, so many of you direct that praise to your teams, your customers, your mentors, your families. To anyone but yourselves. Are you being humble? Or does this illustrate a central truth about what it takes for a founder, a…

GOLF IS A SPORT SYNONYMOUS with good taste—country clubs, icons like Arnold Palmer, and, of late, a host of brands pushing the boundaries of what it means to get dressed for the course. Golfers have probably seen ads for some of these newer, fashion-forward labels: Malbon, Kadet, and Eastside Golf, for example. Other menswear companies, such as one-time Justin Rose sponsor Bonobos, have also thrown their hats into the ring, seeking their slice of a multibillion-dollar global pie. All of the aforementioned are hoping to find their footing among more established companies like Nike, Adidas, and Peter Millar. To make noise in this world is not easy, especially for smaller operations without the means to bankroll a PGA Tour member or have a splashy presence in Augusta. But for Bogey…

Jeff Lu Palo Alto, California Three-year growth rate: 37,364% No.1 Jeff Lu spends his days working in the shadows of giants. His company, Akool, operates out of the same building that Mark Zuckerberg first grew Facebook in back in 2005. Like Zuck, Lu has big plans. Since he founded Akool in 2020, he’s shaped it into a nearly $40 million business by providing companies with AI-powered avatars—lifelike digital characters that help with everything from customer support to corporate education. Lu, 35, has spent his entire adult life working at the intersection of AI and video. After starting his career as a Microsoft intern, he earned his PhD from the University of Illinois. In 2018, he scored a job at Apple, where he focused on the iPhone’s Face ID scanning tech.…

No. 564 Vanessa Rissetto Hoboken, New Jersey Three-year growth rate: 731% Vanessa Rissetto’s interest in nutrition began after she’d gained weight following a bad college breakup and then lost it all upon returning home to her Haitian mother’s cooking. Intrigued by how food and nutrition can improve people’s health, she went back to school to become a registered dietitian. In 2020, she co-founded the telehealth nutrition startup Culina Health. The company, which brought in $5.7 million in revenue last year, prides itself on accepting every major insurance carrier and says 93 percent of its patients are covered by insurance benefits. But Rissetto, now 46, became a patient herself after she learned she had breast cancer. Her health crisis arose at an especially challenging time, as she was in the process…

BY THE NUMBERS DATA FROM 2025’S INC. 5000 CEO SURVEY PERCENTAGE OF INC. 5000 COMPANIES’ REVENUE THAT COMES FROM: THEIR TYPICAL SALES TRANSACTION SIZE Sales Teams Are Growing The average size of sales teams at Inc. 5000 companies has more than tripled since last year. One of the factors driving this trend was the strong job market recovery from the pandemic. 77% anticipate expanding their sales team in the next 6 to 12 months. HOW THEIR SALES TEAMS ARE ORGANIZED WHAT THE INC. 5000 LOOK FOR WHEN HIRING A SALESPERSON 64% anticipate increasing their sales tech budget in the next 12 months. HOW MUCH THEY’RE PLANNING TO INVEST IN SALES-RELATED TECHNOLOGY IN THE NEXT 6 TO 12 MONTHS 83% expect AI to help with sales-related tasks. 83% are on track…

No. 145 Ashley M. Fox Atlanta Three-year growth rate: 2,659% Ashley M. Fox knows what it’s like to rebuild after losing everything. In 2013, the then 25-year-old left her six-figure-salary job on Wall Street and took a trip through France and Italy before buckling down and launching her financial wellness company, Empify. Designed to democratize financial education, Fox’s online learning platform provides tools and courses to individuals, schools, companies, and even prison systems. But she quickly discovered the many unexpected costs that come with running a business, and, despite her $30,000 in savings, her money ran out. She gave up her Manhattan apartment and moved back in with her parents in Philadelphia, but refused to sleep in her childhood bedroom for fear she’d get too comfortable and stop chasing her…

BY THE NUMBERS DATA FROM 2025’S INC. 5000 CEO SURVEY HOW INC. 5000 CEOS PLAN TO CHANGE THEIR TALENT STRATEGY THIS YEAR IMPACT OF THE CURRENT ECONOMIC CLIMATE ON THEIR TALENT STRATEGY 22% are increasing investments in talent more than intended this year. 56% are investing in talent as intended this year. 18% are making selective investments in talent strategies but not to the intended level. 5% are substantially reducing or delaying intended talent investments for now. EXPECTED SIZE OF THEIR FULL-TIME STAFF IN ONE YEAR’S TIME INC. 5000 CEOS’ BIGGEST WORKFORCE CHALLENGES Retaining Top Talent Is Key The number-one HR priority among Inc. 5000 companies is holding onto their best employees. THE MOST CRITICAL EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP QUALITIES FOR PEOPLE MANAGEMENT IN THE NEXT YEAR 1 Adaptability and resilience 36%…

ON APRIL 23 OF THIS year, a full-page ad appeared in The Washington Post, featuring a letter signed by the CEOs of a host of baby product companies, including UPPAbaby, Ergobaby, Lalo, and Mockingbird. The ad was paid for by founder and CEO Natalie Gordon’s company, Babylist, an Emery ville, California-based online retailer and baby registry that is No. 3,370 on this year’s Inc. 5000 list. Though the ad came out a couple of weeks before Mother’s Day, it wasn’t a tribute to new moms or part of a campaign selling strollers and car seats. Instead, it was something more unu sual: a request to the U.S. government for a “reprieve” from the tariffs President Donald Trump had put in place, which the ad called a “baby tax.” Almost all…

ON THE MORNING OF June 30, Zaira Solano heads to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Atlanta field office, an austere government building about 30 minutes from downtown. An immigration lawyer who has practiced for over 13 years, Solano is meeting a client preparing for a green card interview after marrying a U.S. citizen. It’s a routine matter—one of hundreds of appear ances in this building over the past decade for Solano, founder of Solano Immigration Law Firm (No. 3,560 on this year’s Inc. 5000). But this time, she has a low-grade sense of nervousness, as she has at every appearance for the past six months, since the immigration legal system has been thrown into turmoil by a flurry of executive orders issued by the White House. She takes…

"There are sectors in which the United States can and should incentivize manufacturing here at home. But we should not be the world’s leading producer of socks or Barbie dolls. We should be focused on incentivizing building the technologies of the future and reshoring critical national security supply chains.”…

"The best thing you can do if you want to grow your company is build a company that can run without you. This is the real secret to scaling rapidly … without all the drama.” Daniel Marcos Co-founder and CEO of Growth Institute, an edtech company that brings executive training for CEOs and their teams Organic growth is achieved when a company looks internally to drive revenue, rather than relying on additional financial resources. It is the essence of the cliché “do more with less.” Here are four tips for doing just that. —Parul Bhandari 1. Use rapidly advancing AI tools to optimize and enhance productivity. 2. Retrain existing employees to fill new needs. 3. Build a product roadmap around what existing customers actually ask for. 4. Use the tools you…