Airbnb: Renting Air Mattresses to Revolutionizing Travel
Airbnb started in 2008 when founders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk rented out air mattresses in their San Francisco apartment as a way to pay rent. What began as a quirky idea has transformed into one of the most influential travel platforms on the planet. The founders initially sold Barack Obama and John McCain cereal to sustain the business before receiving $20,000 in seed funding from Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital.
Fast forward to 2024, and the numbers tell a truly remarkable story. Airbnb saw its revenues increase by 12.1% in 2024 to $11.1 billion. Hosts booked 492 million Nights and Experiences in 2024, up 9.82% from 2023. The platform now connects travelers with over eight million active listings across more than 220 countries.
The company went public in December 2020, and by 2023, Airbnb’s global market capitalization was valued at over 73 billion U.S. dollars. This expansion didn’t come without challenges, though. Airbnb has faced persistent opposition from several major cities, due to a perceived increase in the cost of rent for locals, with Barcelona, Amsterdam, Paris, Venice and San Francisco enacting regulations specifically targeted at the short-term rental market.
Stripe: From Irish Brothers to Payment Processing Giant
Sometimes the most transformative companies solve problems you didn’t even know existed. Stripe did exactly that for online payments. Founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, Stripe emerged as a developer-first payment platform that made accepting online payments ridiculously simple compared to the clunky alternatives that existed.
Stripe reported a 38% increase in total payment volume to $1.4tn in 2024, having passed the $1tn mark for the first time in 2023. The growth speaks volumes about how indispensable Stripe has become to internet commerce. Stripe owns 68.02% of the e-commerce payment processing market in the US and is used by over 1.5 million live websites globally. Think about that for a second.
The company has moved from being “robustly cashflow positive” to fully profitable in 2024, a state of affairs that it expects to continue into 2025. In October 2025, a tender offer for employees and shareholders valued Stripe at $91.5bn, the closest it has been to its 2021 valuation peak of $91bn after dropping to $50bn in 2023. The company’s ability to bounce back from that valuation dip demonstrates investor confidence in the payment processing space.
SpaceX: Elon Musk’s Rocket Company That Prints Money
SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the initial goal of reducing space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars, beginning by developing its first orbital rocket, the Falcon 1, from scratch, with the breakthrough coming in 2008 when NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract for cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station. What seemed like an insane gamble has turned into arguably the most successful private space company in history.
Here’s where things get wild. SpaceX is the most successful startup with a $350 billion valuation. SpaceX hit $14.2B in revenue in 2024, representing 63% growth from $8.7B in 2023, with CEO Elon Musk projecting the company would generate approximately $15.5B in revenue for full-year 2025.
The real game changer has been Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service. Starlink launched in 2021 and has rapidly grown from 10,000 beta users to 4.6M subscribers in 2024. Starlink revenue grew to $8.2B in 2024, up from $4.2B in 2023, with the customer base doubling last year by adding 2.3M customers. As of 2023, the company holds more than 60% of the global commercial launch market share.
Uber: The App That Changed How We Move
Co-founder Garrett Camp, who with his money made from selling StumbleUpon to eBay in 2009 had a fleet of black cabs available to pick him up from bars and nightclubs, and other co-founder Kalanick had had several bad experiences trying to hail cabs in California and Paris. That frustration sparked an idea that would upend the entire taxi industry worldwide.
UberCab was founded in 2009 and Kalanick joined Camp shortly afterwards, with Kalanick becoming CEO of this company in 2010. The beta version launched in San Francisco, and within just a few years, Uber became synonymous with ride-hailing. Uber generated $43.9 billion revenue in 2024, an 18% increase on the previous year, with $25 billion from taxis and $13.7 billion from delivery.
Let’s be real, though, Uber’s journey hasn’t been all smooth sailing. Kalanick’s tenure brought lots of growth but also controversy, with Uber’s entry into countries and states often coming before agreements had been made with those in power, which led to penalties and bans in some areas, and allegations of sexual harassment and bullying in the workplace led to Kalanick resigning in 2017. Uber made $9.8 billion net profit in 2024, a huge amount of growth on the previous year. In 2024, Uber had over eight million drivers worldwide.
OpenAI: The ChatGPT Phenomenon
If you thought tech startups peaked in the 2010s, OpenAI proved everyone wrong. The artificial intelligence research company exploded into mainstream consciousness with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, and the numbers that followed were absolutely staggering.
OpenAI has become one of the most salient examples of hypergrowth in 2025, crossing an annualised revenue (ARR) of $10 billion by mid-2025, up from about $5.5 billion in December 2024. Think about that growth rate. ChatGPT weekly active users have reportedly reached about 700 million. That’s nearly one in ten people on Earth using a tool that didn’t even exist a few years ago.
OpenAI has raised very large funding rounds and is valued at about $500 billion after secondary share sales involving employees. US AI startups raised USD 104.3 billion in just six months, nearly matching 2024’s total, led by OpenAI’s USD 40 billion round. The company went from research lab to cultural phenomenon faster than almost any startup in history.
