Billionaire club

It's amazing how quickly the modern world is changing. More recently, Wall Street was filled with alarmists who jumped from sinking ships of mortgage banks and real estate insurers, and today the CEO of many companies that have not even turned a year since they were founded choose between buying two Murcielago or one Aventador. In some situations it can be called the choice of the lesser of two evils, because in the Valley, a closed club of very young companies begins to appear, with which they are willingly given money (sometimes, even too willingly) with aerial valuation of $ 1 billion.

And while we are all watching how some of them start to bargain in open markets (LinkedIn, whose business is going well and Pandora, where everything is not so bright), or just getting ready to enter the stock market (Groupon, Zynga, Facebook) There are other fast-growing mushrooms, right behind the larger players. These companies are closing rounds of financing from $ 50 to $ 100 million, and judging by the words of investors who have seen financial details and growth rates, all these companies are healthy enough to attract the money of every capitalist willing to take risks.

Who is in this club?

Airbnb is definitely a member of this club. The crowdsourcing market, ready to turn your apartment into a hotel for one night, has grown by 800% over the past year, serving more than 800,000 customers. There are already more than 60,000 people who provide their housing on this resource, and the reservation is growing at a rate of 40 to 50 percent per month. The subleases will be the next chip of the resource, and the company is one of the most successful graduates of Y Combinator this year.
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Square, too, at the holiday table , raising $ 50 million in each round. In May, the startup stepped over the psychological mark of 500,000 activated card readers and 1,000,000 transactions, processing more than $ 3 million of mobile payments per day. Cate of the company Kate Rabois told Disrupt NYC that this year the company plans to process transactions totaling more than $ 1 billion, and that in his opinion, in terms of profit, the company will be ahead of PayPal (where he was a manager when PayPal itself was still a startup). By the way, recently Vinod Kosla , one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley, Sun co-founder, a close friend of all children of Bill Gates, joined the Square Board of Directors.

Spotify is finally closing a round of financing at a valuation of $ 1 billion, which has been hanging in the air since February. It is attended by DST International, Kleiner fund and Accel Partners - more than eminent funds. Another $ 100 million, or so, the company hopes to get through the service of streaming music in the US market, where it finally lets its tentacles - they are waiting for them there.

Dropbox , another graduate of the Y Combinator incubator, who recently received $ 7.2 million from patrons, may become the most expensive start-up at this club, because today it is estimated at $ 1.5 - $ 2 billion. Dropbox is growing by leaps and bounds and boasts 25 million service users, saving a total of more than 200 million files every day. For 18 months, the application has downloaded more than 21 million users. Surprisingly, many people want to invest in Dropbox, but not everyone can - it grows so fast that the longer the management and current shareholders decide whether to take the money or not, the more the company costs.

Gilt Groupe is another horse in the stable, which received $ 138 million in May, with an estimated $ 1 billion. What is noteworthy is that Gilt was one of the first companies to launch a website-shop entirely made using flash technology in the USA. This year, the company's turnover approaches $ 500 million, and it expands its field of activity from the sale of luxury items to exclusive tourist tours, local deals, etc.

And, of course, the beloved FourSquare, according to the latest reports, also closes the next round of financing, with an estimate of almost $ 1 billion. In fact, the company's revenue and turnover do not yet contribute to such estimates, but it is possible that they have taken over the experience of Twitter and are now focusing not only on financial indicators, but also on the growth figures of the user base. Still, with monetization at FourSquare, things are still worse than other representatives of this closed club, but potentially its ability to earn money will exceed the similar abilities of so many technology companies.

As already mentioned, Pandora (which recently entered the public market, raised $ 2 billion and is now stagnating ), LivingSocial (which costs about $ 3 billion), LinkedIn ( also public , market capitalization - $ 6, 2 billion), Twitter (valued at between $ 3 and $ 10 billion), Zynga (which will cost more than $ 10 billion when going public) and finally Groupon (probably around $ 25 billion). Separately in this series is Facebook, which already costs more than $ 50 billion and plans to capitalize at the valuation level of $ 100,000,000,000.

via TC , Google