The Inaugural Forbes Cloud 100 List

When it comes to creating new technology or a new app, one thing is always certain: It has to be easy to use. This is a guiding principle of all the companies honored on the inaugural Forbes Cloud 100 list, released on September 7^th. Produced by Forbes, in partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, the list highlights some of the best private cloud companies in the world.

Heading up the list at number one is Slack, a team messaging and collaboration software company with 3 million users and a valuation of $3.8 billion. The rest of the top 10 are, in order, Dropbox, DocuSign, Stripe, Cloudera, SurveyMonkey, Mailchimp, Squarespace, AppDynamics and Adyen.

According to Forbes, inclusion on the list “recognizes a company for its financial growth and excellence as recognized by customers and peers.” Companies were evaluated based on qualitative factors and a quantitative financial health score, made up of factors like revenue growth, financing status and size of a company’s slice of the market, among many others. The judging panel was mostly made up of the Cloud 100’s public market peers – CEOs of publicly held cloud companies.

It should come as little surprise that more than half of the companies on the list – 55 – are based in Silicon Valley, with the Greater New York City area (12) and Boston area (7) coming in a very distant second and third. The distribution of sectors was much more even: 14 security companies, 11 collaboration companies, 10 finance companies and so on.

The Cloud 100 highlights some of the most established and fast-growing cloud companies, but many promising companies were too small to be eligible this year. Some of these companies were recognized on the Cloud 100 Rising Stars list – small companies like Classy and Canva that were too promising and fast-growing to ignore.

That isn’t to say there aren’t innovators outside of the country’s three major tech hubs that are poised to make waves in the cloud arena. Based in Wisconsin but with partners around the Globe, Fasetto has been recognized by local and national business groups for being a tech innovator with a very bright future. Read more about our app and stay tuned for details about Link, our revolutionary new storage hardware that is on track to change the cloud game.