Company Profile
Square
How Jack Dorsey's Square has succeeded where Twitter struggles
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
Box
How Box grows by staying small
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
How this company keeps the lights on while awaiting FDA approval
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
Natera
These founders are revolutionizing pre-natal medicine
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.
Twilio
The next big adventure for this cloud communications business? Video
San Francisco-based Twilio already provides the cloud-communications backbone for some 36,000 customers, including Coca-Cola and Nordstrom. Its technology lets you message with your Uber driver, reminds you about appointments, and helps you generate passwords. Now it's expanding its capabilities--and mediums, especially into video. For example, telemedicine provider Doctor on Demand uses Twilio to connect doctors and patients via videoconferencing. "Voice and messaging are the biggest parts of our business, but video is coming on incredibly strong," says Patrick Malatack, Twilio's VP of product. --Kate Rockwood