This San Jose, California-based data-storage provider has more than 5,300 customers, including Toyota, Best Buy, Hyundai, and the U.S. Defense Department. And it's retained them by consolidating servers and storage systems into a single platform, earning it a standout reputation for "ease of use, simplified management, and no-disruptive capacity," according to a 2016 Forrester report. Founded in 2009, Nutanix recorded $445 million in annual revenue by its September 2016 IPO--and it got there with a focus on both customers and employees. As its co-founder and CEO, Dheeraj Pandey, explains: "Ambition and attention to detail have to go hand in hand."

It's easy to miss given all the trouble plaguing Jack Dorsey's other company, Twitter, but Square has had a remarkably good run of late. When Dorsey launched Square eight years ago with co-founder Jim McKelvey, the San Francisco company focused on selling credit card payment systems to small businesses. But now, Square's ever-popular gadget is just one of its many products. "Today, sellers come to Square for much more than payments and hardware," Dorsey told investors earlier this year.

Square is becoming, in other words, a one-stop shop for small businesses: You can get invoices and payroll services there, or even speedy cash through its lending program, Square Capital, which has extended $1.3 billion since its 2014 launch. And Square has even gotten into the on-demand food-delivery business by buying Caviar. New products launched since 2014 now account for a full quarter of the company's adjusted revenue. As John T. Williams, an analyst at Compass Point Research & Trading, puts it, "A lot of the business lines they've added tie in very nicely with Square's original product." --Victoria Finkle

This eleven-year-old file-sharing and content-management company was Inc.'s 2013 Company of the Year--and now it's made the 2017 Founders 10 list by keeping its focus narrow. With more than 71,000 enterprise customers, the Redwood City, California-based company innovates by carefully picking its targets and listening to a select group of customers. "We have a very fast feedback loop with that small set of customers," says co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie. "And as they adopt the next innovation, it will ripple through the customer base."

Concert Pharmaceuticals makes drugs better--literally. The Lexington, Massachusetts–based company takes existing pharmaceuticals and replaces their hydrogen atoms with an isotope called deuterium. The purpose? The heavier deuterium appears to give the medication an effectiveness boost and to reduce side effects, allowing it to stay longer in the patient's system while maintaining its disease-fighting purpose.

Following through has required patience from CEO Roger Tung, who founded Concert in 2006: While clinical trials on a number of drugs have shown promise, the company is still waiting for its first FDA home run. It takes more than a decade, on average, for a medication to go from inception to market--and fewer than one out of 10 makes the final cut. "There are very few businesses as capital intensive and as long to get to product as pharmaceuticals," Tung says. In the meantime, Concert brings in bucks via licensing agreements with other drug companies. Vertex Pharma­ceuticals, for example, recently paid Concert $160 million for the right to take over a cystic fibrosis drug called CTP-656. Tung says his company will use the money to move forward with a treatment for alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss. --Helaine Olen

This San Carlos, California-based biotech company makes non-invasive prenatal tests. Co-founder and CEO Matthew Rabinowitz saw his family devastated by the death of a baby with an untested genetic condition; he founded Natera to develop tests that can pick up on fetal chromosomal issues nine weeks into pregnancy. Natera's flagship test, known as an NIPT, analyzes traces of fetal cells that circulate in the mother's blood. Rabinowitz is tapping into a $665 million-plus global market of non-invasive prenatal testing, according to Persistence Market Research, and expanding: Natera hopes to unveil cancer diagnostics by the end of this year.