The worldwide economic system in 2024 is a story of two forces: optimism sparked by falling rates of interest, and the uncertainty brought on by geopolitical unrest. As corporations deal with sustainable progress, such a unstable atmosphere inevitably exams their resilience.
Since 2017, Fortune and Boston Consulting Group have teamed as much as determine our annual record of Future 50 corporations—these constructed to resist precisely such volatility. Future 50 corporations promise outsize future progress whereas delivering distinctive shareholder returns. At BCG, we name these corporations extremely very important; they’ve the capability to adapt, innovate, and develop amid technological, financial, and political change. This record is designed to be each a software for traders and a information for enterprise leaders looking for companions and function fashions.
This yr’s rating is our first to incorporate not simply public corporations but in addition privately held, pre-IPO corporations with over $1 billion in funding. The Future 50 now higher displays the universe of the world’s most important corporations, which is especially worthwhile as venture-backed and private-equity-funded corporations more and more keep non-public for longer. We’ve additionally up to date our methodology to incorporate new knowledge sources that permit us to evaluate the scalability of a agency’s know-how stack and the composition of its progress and innovation groups. In all, we evaluated 3,000 candidates to generate the ultimate rating.
This yr’s Future 50 honorees have seen four-times-greater gross sales progress and three-times-greater complete shareholder returns over the previous 5 years than the common firm in our pattern group—hopefully presaging comparable outcomes to return. Certainly, the Future 50 has traditionally highlighted corporations whose progress would later launch them onto the Fortune 500 and Fortune International 500 lists. Nvidia, for one, made its International 500 debut this yr, following 5 Future 50 appearances (this yr is its sixth). Intuit, ServiceNow, and Workday have equally been featured right here earlier than laddering as much as the Fortune 500.
Tech leads the pack
As in 2023, over half of the Future 50 corporations are software program suppliers, reflecting the notion that “software program is consuming the world” and the scalability benefits of bytes over atoms. High-performing tech corporations additionally consciously apply high-vitality behaviors to take care of management, together with aggressively recruiting prime expertise, investing closely in R&D, and relentlessly driving go-to-market methods.
Most of this yr’s software program corporations are business-to-business corporations. Cybersecurity and programming help techniques are a serious presence, with collaborationsoftware maker Atlassian occupying the No. 1 spot. The info-infrastructure trade accounts for a number of gamers, together with No. 9 Snowflake and No. 11 Databricks. On the business-to-consumer aspect, gaming platform Roblox (No. 2) and social media giants Snap (No. 12), Mohalla Tech (No. 39), and Kuaishou (No. 41) scored extremely.
AI stays an enormous progress engine, as companies broadly transfer from generative AI exploration to adoption. Almost all our Future 50 tech corporations characteristic AI of their merchandise, and the record consists of a number of core basis mannequin and programming gamers, similar to OpenAI (No. 5), Anthropic (No. 46), and Scale AI (No. 27). Nvidia (No. 34) returns to the record, after a one-year absence, as the corporate uniquely positioned to energy large-language-model builders with its graphics processing models.
Exterior of software program, the record options six corporations driving breakthroughs in biopharmaceuticals and diagnostics. Each power corporations on the Future 50 deal with clear power, with Adani Inexperienced Power (No. 35) pioneering large-scale photo voltaic and wind tasks and Commonwealth Fusion (No. 45) working towards the world’s first fusion energy plant. (On Nov. 20, U.S. authorities indicted a number of executives at Adani Inexperienced Power’s mother or father firm on costs of fraud and bribery associated to the subsidiary. The corporate has denied wrongdoing.)
At No. 40, Celsius Holdings, an energy-drink supplier, is the only client enterprise to crack the highest 50, displaying that advertising and marketing can nonetheless drive outsize worth for patrons and shareholders.
U.S. maintains management
The record additionally reveals that america stays the middle of gravity for the world’s innovators. Thirty-eight of this yr’s Future 50 are U.S.-based. The nation’s giant, growth-hungry enterprise and public capital markets play a serious function in attracting formidable and succesful founders from around the globe.
One other issue on this dominance: Our evaluation reveals that U.S. corporations usually take main positions in industries which might be themselves fast-growing and extremely modern, like media, finance, semiconductors, and medtech. The U.S.’s comfortable touchdown post-COVID has additionally helped: Whereas the U.Ok. and plenty of of Europe’s largest economies have stagnated, and progress in China is slowing, the U.S. economic system has continued to energy forward.
In contrast with the U.S., European enterprise funding lags in all phases. Regardless of this and different headwinds, Europe’s presence on the Future 50 has risen barely, with 5 corporations, up from two in 2023, together with software program corporations leaning into AI: autonomous-driving participant Wayve (No. 44) and BioNTech (No. 50), a biotechnology firm aiming to treatment most cancers.
China’s share in our Future 50 record has fallen sharply. This partly displays the truth that China’s innovation ecosystem has stalled lately, amid broader financial challenges, tight authorities management of the tech sector, stricter financing phrases, and decreased U.S. funding. It additionally displays China’s financial mannequin of innovation, which depends closely on public R&D investments—which in flip usually go to universities or bigger “nationwide champion” corporations.
That mentioned, there’s a scene of promising Chinese language gen-AI upstarts like Moonshot AI and 01.AI that didn’t make our prime 50 however have begun to dominate world open-source rankings for LLMs. And China continues to steer in industries of declared nationwide significance, together with automotive, batteries, and renewable power.
The 2024 Future 50 reveals that speedy progress and substantial worth creation are achievable—even in unstable occasions. Notably, 12 of this yr’s corporations are below a decade outdated. But solely a handful of nations foster the circumstances wanted for such corporations to scale, and even these foundations are susceptible to financial and geopolitical pressures. Supporting the success of corporations with transformative potential and nurturing successive generations are a shared duty for us all—whether or not as founders, staff, traders, or policymakers
Ketil Gjerstad is a managing director and senior associate at BCG and world chief of BCG’s technique enterprise. Johann Harnoss is a associate and affiliate director at BCG and a fellow on the BCG Henderson Institute. Viacheslav Romanov, Marley Finley, Gabe Bouslov, and Mar Martin contributed to the analysis.
This text seems within the December 2024/January 2025 version of Fortune.
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