Compass
Founded: 2012
Valuation: $1 billion
What it does: While Compass functions like a traditional broker, the company's promise is using technology to reduce the time and friction of buying and selling a house or apartment. In July, Compass released an app designed to replace "stale" quarterly market reports with more dynamic information. In the app, buyers and sellers can search by things like neighborhood, number of bedrooms, price range, and so on, but they can also look at more advanced metrics, like year-over-year analysis of median price per square foot, days on the market, and negotiability.
SMS Assist
Founded: 2003
Valuation: $1 billion
What it does: The Chicago-based technology company provides software to help property managers supervise everything from electrical work to snow-plow contractors to landscaping. The "no-glamour" company allows property managers to keep tabs on multiple properties at once, and it's already signed on customers from Family Dollar to Colony Starwood Homes.
ForeScout
Founded: 2000
Valuation: $1 billion
What it does: ForeScout's technology helps companies monitor all of the devices that are connected to their network at any given time. For many large enterprises, the number of devices can easily run into the millions — things like PCs, employees' mobile devices, virtual machines used for testing new applications, and now IoT devices — which makes it it hard for network administrators to keep tabs on everything happening on their company's network. Forescout's CEO said that when the company first runs its software with a client, it typically finds 20-30% more devices on the network than the client's IT team expected.
Cylance
Founded: 2012
Valuation: $1 billion
What it does: Cylance built a product that uses artificial intelligence to analyze a file you're about to open, determine if it's malware, and then stop it from executing — all in less than a second. It solves the problem of email phishing scams, which are still a favorite method of hackers, and has over 1,000 customers, it says. Cylance was founded by Stuart McClure and Ryan Permeh, two well-known names in security who are perhaps best known for their work at McAfee.
Opendoor
Founded: 2014
Valuation: $1.1 billion
What it does: Opendoor is betting that homeowners would take a guaranteed sale over a higher price. It calculates a fair market value and pays homeowners before re-selling the home with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.
Anaplan
Founded: 2006
Valuation: $1 billion
What it does: Anaplan offers a financial-planning cloud app that's as easy to use as a spreadsheet, but also does things Excel can't do, like modeling and letting groups work together. A planner can use it to see how adding more employees might affect sales and profitability, for instance. Its claim to fame is that it's a lot less expensive than planning software from giant SAP.
Carbon3D
Founded: 2013
Valuation: $1 billion
What it does: Carbon3D grabbed headlines and attention for its method of seemingly creating shapes out of a liquid resin soup. It's much more complicated than that, but Carbon3D has caught the eye of everyone from Ford to Johnson & Johnson. While Ford imagines a future of speedy customizable parts, like custom-designed cup holders, healthcare operators are looking at Carbon3D for a fast way to create surgical parts. The machines are already being tested less than a year after they launched. In April, it released its M1 printer.
Gusto
Founded: 2011
Valuation: $1 billion
What it does: Gusto offers cloud payroll, insurance, and HR software for small businesses. It was co-founded by Josh Reeves, who says the company now supports 40,000 customers.
Flatiron Health
Founded: 2012
Valuation: $1.2 billion
What it does: Flatiron Health is a software company that organizes the world’s oncology information and makes it accessible for doctors, patients, and researchers. In January 2016, Roche, one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, made a $175 million investment in the company, which valued the company at $1.1 billion.
OfferUp
Founded: 2011
Valuation: $1.29 billion
What it does: OfferUp is making waves as a mobile-only hybrid between Craigslist and eBay. The company is said to have surpassed the early days of eBay in terms of sales volume, and its users are spending the same amount of time on OfferUp in a day as they do on Snapchat or Instagram.
Zoox
Founded: 2014
Valuation: $1.55 billion
What it does: Despite remaining in stealth, Zoox has already raised $290 million for its unseen product. The only hint founder Tim Kentley-Klay has given was at a conference in October, when he described it as "Disneyland on the streets":
“At Zoox what we’re creating...is not a self-driving car any more than the automobile is a horseless carriage. We’re not building a robo-taxi service, we’re actually creating an advanced mobility service,” Kentley-Klay said, according to the Wall Street Journal. “You can really think of it as Disneyland on the streets of perhaps San Francisco, and that means a vehicle which is smart enough to understand its environment but it’s also importantly smart enough to understand you, where you need to be, what you want to do in the vehicle, and how you want to move around the city.”
Quanergy
Founded: 2012
Valuation: $1.6 billion
What it does: Self-driving car startups aren't the only billion-dollar bets around. Quanergy isn't building its own car, but instead specializes in building LiDAR systems — the 3D sensing systems that self-driving cars use to the see the world. Already the startup has struck partnerships with vehicle-makers including Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai.
JetSmarter
Founded: 2012
Valuation: $1.6 billion
What it does: JetSmarter, a private airline firm, has an app that makes it easy for anyone to book a flight on a private jet in a matter of seconds. The company offers three different products: JetDeals, which involves booking a one-way private flight on demand; JetShuttle, which lets you grab a seat on a previously scheduled private flight; and JetCharter, which offers private travel packages that can be completely customized by route and aircraft.
Domo
Founded: 2010
Valuation: $2.1 billion
What it does: Domo offers cloud software for businesses in an area called "business intelligence and analytics." It takes a company's data from virtually any source like Twitter, Facebook, Salesforce, corporate databases, spreadsheets, and over 300 other applications, and turns the data into charts and graphs. If a sales rep wants to see how many likes a post got on Facebook from a certain territory in Nebraska, Domo boasts that it's the place.