The Rocket Ship Startup List: 2018

Graduating students hungry to dive into the startup community (aka StartUpLand) often struggle to select the right, specific opportunity to start their career.

Each spring, I provide a comprehensive list of exciting, growing, hiring startups–both private or recently public–that are worthy of consideration as places to start or continue a career in StartupLand. The criteria for being on the list is subjective but is a mix of fundraising (typically > $10m in the most recent round), scale (typically > 50 employees), momentum (typically growing revenue or users > 50%) and hiring (typically > 10 open reqs, including a number of entry level positions that would be a fit for recent college or business school graduates).

Before we get into the companies themselves, I suggest checking out my posts Getting Your First Startup Job and Are You Suited For A StartUp?, where I give some more detailed advice on how to select the right company for you and position yourself to secure a job.

Once you have reviewed this framework for deciding what you’re looking for, this post will give you a list of over 500 companies to research and approach.

As usual, the list is compiled and organized based on location since I believe in selecting a geography to plug in to (and contribute to) a community and ecosystem. I received fantastic input from angels, entrepreneurs, lawyers and VCs across the world, helping me pressure test and compile this list (note: Flybridge portfolio companies are in blue). I recognize that the list contains no companies from India or China. I hope to cover those geographies in the future but just didn’t feel I had good enough intelligence at this time. I’d also point folks to Stanford’s Andy Rachleff’s terrific list, which he publishes each fall with a similar theme (albeit more Silicon Valley focused).

I’m sure I made many mistakes and omissions, which are all my own. Feedback welcome!

East Coast

West Coast

International

Other Startup Hubs

ATL: Bitpay, Ionic Security, Kabbage, MailChimp

CHI: AvantCredit, bloXroute, BucketFeet, Civis Analytics, Dough, Fooda, Groupon, Iris Mobile, Kapow, Narrative Sciences, Precognitive, Raise.com, ShopRunner, Shiftgig, SpotHero, SproutSocial, Tastyworks, Uptake

CO: FullContact, Ibotta, LogRhythm, Rally, SendGrid, Sympoz, TeamSnap, VictorOps, Webroot, Welltok

DC: 2U, Cvent, Optoro, Sonatype, Vox Media, WeddingWire

SEA: Apptio, Avalara, Avvo, ExtraHop, Julep, Juno, Koru, OfferUp, Outreach, Peach, Porch, Pro, Redfin, Rover.com

UT: Bamboo HR, Canopy Tax, Domo, Health Catalyst, HireVue, InsideSales, Instructure, Lucid Software, Observe Point, Pluralsight, Qualtrics, Solution Reach, Workfront

That’s it! Special thanks to all those who provided me with anonymous input as well as my colleague, Caroline Constable, who did most of the heavy lifting to help me in compiling this list.

The Rocket Ship Startup List: 2018 was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.