the future 50

Fortune Editors

The global economy today is a tale of two forces: optimism sparked by falling interest rates, and the uncertainty caused by geopolitical unrest. As companies focus on sustainable growth, such a volatile environment inevitably tests their resilience. Since 2017, Fortune has teamed up with consulting firm BCG to produce the Future 50, an index of companies that exhibit that kind of resilience—and are built to deliver better-than-average growth in the long term. This year's list is our first to include venture-backed private companies as well as publicly traded ones. Read on for the 2024 rankings.

Amid the seemingly endless post-pandemic debate over returning to the office, collaboration-software company Atlassian has doubled down on remote work, both internally—it describes its own 12,000-person workforce as “fully distributed”—and in its products. The maker of enormously profitable project-management software such as Jira and Confluence has posted average revenue growth of 30% over the past three years, and generated $4.4&nbsp;billion in revenue in fiscal 2024, as large enterprises rely on its products to help their own far-flung teams cooperate. Atlassian’s own ultra-flexible culture has earned it a reputation as a desirable employer, attracting a strong team of tech talent. That fact, along with its strategic clarity and steady investments in R&amp;D, helped Atlassian earn the top spot on this year’s list, up from No.&nbsp;26 in 2023.

Atlassian

Long before Facebook became Meta, this gaming platform had built a metaverse, enabling users to create and play games, attend concerts, and just hang out in virtual spaces. Roblox claims 89&nbsp;million daily users, and revenue—mostly from in-game purchases and other e-commerce—is expected to top $4&nbsp;billion in 2024. Challenges loom: Profits remain elusive, and critics want the company to do more to fight online predators. (Roblox says its platform is “safe and secure.”)

Roblox

Three years ago, few people outside of Silicon Valley were aware of OpenAI. Today, virtually every business leader is obsessing over how to use, adapt to, or compete with ChatGPT, the large language model OpenAI invented. The protean startup has become almost synonymous with generative AI, and its groundbreaking advancements have earned it unparalleled influence. After an October funding round, the company is valued at a dizzying $157&nbsp;billion.OpenAI and cofounder and CEO Sam Altman have raced to solidify this first-mover advantage: In late October, OpenAI introduced its first AI-powered search engine, and the company is tackling its ever-growing processing needs by developing its own chips in-house. The New York Times has reported that the startup anticipates $3.7&nbsp;billion in revenue in 2024—and more than three times that much in 2025. The trillion-dollar question: How long can OpenAI sustain its leading position, as deep-pocketed competitors like Google, Amazon Web Services, and major OpenAI investor Microsoft strengthen their own AI products?

OpenAI

Law firms and paperwork are practically synonymous, and a forest of startups has sprouted up to help lawyers digitize and automate all those dead trees. Themis Solutions, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, is one of the stronger competitors in the rapidly growing field: Its Clio legal software products are now used by 150,000 legal pros in 130 countries. Launched in 2008, Clio offers case and document management services and payment processing. In October it unveiled Clio Duo, its first generative AI tool for customers. Venture investors have taken notice: In July, the company raised a hefty $900&nbsp;million, at a $3&nbsp;billion valuation, from backers including New Enterprise Associates and Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

Themis Solutions

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi banned the use of TikTok in India in June 2020, in reaction to a violent border clash with China, Mohalla Tech acted fast. According to cofounder Ankush Sachdeva, it took the company’s coders just 30 hours to build Moj, a short-form video platform that now boasts 160&nbsp;million users. Bengaluru-based Mohalla was already a known quantity: Its ShareChat social media platform, which debuted in 2015, has 180&nbsp;million users across India.Mohalla’s last major fundraising round, in 2022, valued it at $5&nbsp;billion. Google and Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund Temasek are among its reported backers. The company’s biggest challenge is its entrenched competition: YouTube and the Meta troika—Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—are all very popular in India and are more experienced at converting user engagement into ad revenue.

Mohalla Tech Private

In the increasingly crowded energy-drink field, Celsius now commands about 10% of the market. The beverage maker, based in Boca Raton, Fla., has positioned its products as fitness drinks rather than caffeine-buzz delivery systems, in part by enlisting athletes and personal trainers in its marketing campaigns. Consumers are lapping it up: Revenue more than doubled in 2023, and the company is expected to notch $1.4&nbsp;billion in sales this year.

Celsius Holdings

ByteDance’s TikTok may be the video-sharing platform that Westerners know best, but in China, Kuaishou is almost as big a presence. Founded in 2011 as a site for sharing GIFs, the platform has become a hit outside bigger cities, and its user base skews older than that of Douyin (as TikTok is known in China). That means they’re more likely to have money to spend, and Kuaishou has built an e-commerce business around its platform; in all, it now brings in about $16&nbsp;billion a year in revenue.Kuaishou has also developed formidable AI capabilities, and this June it introduced Kling, a text-to-video language model that analysts believe could compete with products like OpenAI’s Sora and Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha in the race to bring AI to moviemaking.

Kuaishou Technology

London, a city of narrow, winding streets and omnipresent cyclists, is a famously difficult place to drive. That helps explain why Bill Gates went viral in 2023 when he posted a video of himself touring the city in a self-driving car, powered by Wayve. The autonomous-driving field is crowded, but Wayve’s platform stands out in two notable ways: It can run on just one GPU chip, and it uses an LLM to communicate with drivers about why it’s doing what it’s doing at any given moment. Microsoft and Uber are backers, and SoftBank and Nvidia took part in a $1.1&nbsp;billion funding round in May—the largest to date by a Europe-based AI company. (Wayve has not publicly disclosed its valuation.)

Wayve Technologies

The dual imperatives of fighting climate change and powering the generative-AI revolution have fueled an urgent quest for zero-emissions energy sources. Spun off from an MIT research lab in 2018, CFS has come tantalizingly close to sparking “clean” nuclear-fusion reactions that generate more energy than they consume. (The secret sauce: high-temperature superconducting magnets.) CFS says its first reactor, in Devens, Mass., won’t be operational until 2027, two years later than first planned. But the company has raised more than $2&nbsp;billion in patient capital from investors including Tiger Global, Bill Gates, and Vinod Khosla.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems

This biotech company is best known for its work with Pfizer on one of the vaccines that helped curb COVID-19. As the pandemic receded, BioNTech’s sales dwindled; it expects revenue of about $3&nbsp;billion this year, down from $22&nbsp;billion in 2021. But investors are bullish about BioNTech’s drug pipeline, which includes therapies based on the mRNA research that underpinned the vaccine, as well as immunotherapies for fighting cancer. Treatments for non-small-cell lung cancer and metastatic breast cancer are now in Phase&nbsp;III clinical trials.

BioNTech

Monday.com

HubSpot

SambaNova Systems

Klaviyo

Rippling People Center

Snowflake

Blueprint Medicines

The Top 10

These companies are built to exhibit resilience amid volatility—and deliver better-than-average growth in the long term.

Fortune Future 50 | 2024

To identify the Future 50, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.bcg.com/">Boston Consulting Group</a> examined more than 2,800 publicly traded companies with at least $5 billion in market value as well as more than 175 privately held firms with at least $1 billion in funding since inception. A score of 100 means a firm is one standard deviation better, on average, than others in all of our four dimensions.<o:p></o:p>The ranking is based on a vitality score for each company. The vitality score comprises 24 factors, selected for their ability to predict long-term sales growth. The factors are grouped into four main dimensions:<o:p></o:p>

Overview

BCG’s AI algorithm relies on natural language processing to detect the clarity of a company’s strategy, its purpose orientation, and innovation commitment from earnings calls. We also assess a company’s competitive edge by analyzing its ability to attract talent from other competitive employers, its ability to access funding markets, and its ability to create and share value with its top employees.<o:p></o:p>

Strategy

We assess a company’s capital expenditures (as a percentage of sales) as a measure of internal investment in the future. To account for external innovation, a company’s portfolio of startup investments and acquisitions is compared with the best-performing global venture capital funds. We also determine technology advantage by analyzing the growth in a company’s patent portfolio, the scalability of its technology stack, and by analyzing job postings for markers of advanced analytics and generative AI skills.<o:p></o:p>

Technology

We assess the relative size of R&amp;D and product teams, as well as the size of customer-facing teams in business development, marketing, and sales based on a detailed taxonomy of job titles. We also assess the reported digital skills of a firm’s workforce. Furthermore, we calculate diversity scores for academic studies, gender, and country of origin (inferred from the location of high schools or undergraduate institutions) for company leadership and its innovation teams.<o:p></o:p>

Talent

We assess a firm’s level of organizational complexity by looking at the share of employees in middle management in exclusively internally facing job roles; by assessing the degree of diversification at a firm; and by considering a company’s size (based on revenue). We also assess the level of employee turnover as well as overall employee satisfaction as a proxy for alignment of the organization with its leadership.<o:p></o:p>

Culture

legacy

The Future 50

Databricks

Snap

Zscaler

Cloudflare

Content Square SAS

Datadog

Freenome Holdings

Arctic Wolf Networks

MongoDB

Roku

Tempus AI

Brex

DataRobot

Shopify

WeRide

Scale AI

Verisk Analytics

HashiCorp

CrowdStrike

Elastic

Unity Software

Procore Technologies

Nvidia

Adani Green Energy

Affirm Holdings

SentinelOne

Palo Alto Networks

Xero

DocuSign

Anthropic PBC

Eli Lilly

Reddit

Ionis Pharmaceuticals

Industry

Sector

Fortune 500

Global 500

World's Most Admired Companies

Best Companies

Fastest Growing Companies

Rank

Overall Score

Revenues ($M) (Past 12 Months)

Profits ($M) (Past 12 Months)

Market Value as of Nov. 20, 2024 ($M)

Employees

Fortune 500 Rank

World's Most Admired Companies Rank

Best Companies Rank

Fastest Growing Companies Rank

Fortune Future 50 | 2024 | Fortune

The Future 50

The Future 50 Ranking (2024)