The Future 50

Amid the seemingly endless post-pandemic debate over returning to the office, collaboration-software company Atlassian has doubled down on remote work, both internally—it describes its own 12,000-person workforce as “fully distributed”—and in its products. The maker of enormously profitable project-management software such as Jira and Confluence has posted average revenue growth of 30% over the past three years, and generated $4.4 billion in revenue in fiscal 2024, as large enterprises rely on its products to help their own far-flung teams cooperate. Atlassian’s own ultra-flexible culture has earned it a reputation as a desirable employer, attracting a strong team of tech talent. That fact, along with its strategic clarity and steady investments in R&D, helped Atlassian earn the top spot on this year’s list, up from No. 26 in 2023.

Long before Facebook became Meta, this gaming platform had built a metaverse, enabling users to create and play games, attend concerts, and just hang out in virtual spaces. Roblox claims 89 million daily users, and revenue—mostly from in-game purchases and other e-commerce—is expected to top $4 billion in 2024. Challenges loom: Profits remain elusive, and critics want the company to do more to fight online predators. (Roblox says its platform is “safe and secure.”)

Three years ago, few people outside of Silicon Valley were aware of OpenAI. Today, virtually every business leader is obsessing over how to use, adapt to, or compete with ChatGPT, the large language model OpenAI invented. The protean startup has become almost synonymous with generative AI, and its groundbreaking advancements have earned it unparalleled influence. After an October funding round, the company is valued at a dizzying $157 billion.

OpenAI and cofounder and CEO Sam Altman have raced to solidify this first-mover advantage: In late October, OpenAI introduced its first AI-powered search engine, and the company is tackling its ever-growing processing needs by developing its own chips in-house. The New York Times has reported that the startup anticipates $3.7 billion in revenue in 2024—and more than three times that much in 2025. The trillion-dollar question: How long can OpenAI sustain its leading position, as deep-pocketed competitors like Google, Amazon Web Services, and major OpenAI investor Microsoft strengthen their own AI products?

Law firms and paperwork are practically synonymous, and a forest of startups has sprouted up to help lawyers digitize and automate all those dead trees. Themis Solutions, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, is one of the stronger competitors in the rapidly growing field: Its Clio legal software products are now used by 150,000 legal pros in 130 countries. Launched in 2008, Clio offers case and document management services and payment processing. In October it unveiled Clio Duo, its first generative AI tool for customers. Venture investors have taken notice: In July, the company raised a hefty $900 million, at a $3 billion valuation, from backers including New Enterprise Associates and Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi banned the use of TikTok in India in June 2020, in reaction to a violent border clash with China, Mohalla Tech acted fast. According to cofounder Ankush Sachdeva, it took the company’s coders just 30 hours to build Moj, a short-form video platform that now boasts 160 million users. Bengaluru-based Mohalla was already a known quantity: Its ShareChat social media platform, which debuted in 2015, has 180 million users across India.

Mohalla’s last major fundraising round, in 2022, valued it at $5 billion. Google and Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund Temasek are among its reported backers. The company’s biggest challenge is its entrenched competition: YouTube and the Meta troika—Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—are all very popular in India and are more experienced at converting user engagement into ad revenue.

In the increasingly crowded energy-drink field, Celsius now commands about 10% of the market. The beverage maker, based in Boca Raton, Fla., has positioned its products as fitness drinks rather than caffeine-buzz delivery systems, in part by enlisting athletes and personal trainers in its marketing campaigns. Consumers are lapping it up: Revenue more than doubled in 2023, and the company is expected to notch $1.4 billion in sales this year.

ByteDance’s TikTok may be the video-sharing platform that Westerners know best, but in China, Kuaishou is almost as big a presence. Founded in 2011 as a site for sharing GIFs, the platform has become a hit outside bigger cities, and its user base skews older than that of Douyin (as TikTok is known in China). That means they’re more likely to have money to spend, and Kuaishou has built an e-commerce business around its platform; in all, it now brings in about $16 billion a year in revenue.

Kuaishou has also developed formidable AI capabilities, and this June it introduced Kling, a text-to-video language model that analysts believe could compete with products like OpenAI’s Sora and Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha in the race to bring AI to moviemaking.

London, a city of narrow, winding streets and omnipresent cyclists, is a famously difficult place to drive. That helps explain why Bill Gates went viral in 2023 when he posted a video of himself touring the city in a self-driving car, powered by Wayve. The autonomous-driving field is crowded, but Wayve’s platform stands out in two notable ways: It can run on just one GPU chip, and it uses an LLM to communicate with drivers about why it’s doing what it’s doing at any given moment. Microsoft and Uber are backers, and SoftBank and Nvidia took part in a $1.1 billion funding round in May—the largest to date by a Europe-based AI company. (Wayve has not publicly disclosed its valuation.)

The dual imperatives of fighting climate change and powering the generative-AI revolution have fueled an urgent quest for zero-emissions energy sources. Spun off from an MIT research lab in 2018, CFS has come tantalizingly close to sparking “clean” nuclear-fusion reactions that generate more energy than they consume. (The secret sauce: high-temperature superconducting magnets.) CFS says its first reactor, in Devens, Mass., won’t be operational until 2027, two years later than first planned. But the company has raised more than $2 billion in patient capital from investors including Tiger Global, Bill Gates, and Vinod Khosla.

This biotech company is best known for its work with Pfizer on one of the vaccines that helped curb COVID-19. As the pandemic receded, BioNTech’s sales dwindled; it expects revenue of about $3 billion this year, down from $22 billion in 2021. But investors are bullish about BioNTech’s drug pipeline, which includes therapies based on the mRNA research that underpinned the vaccine, as well as immunotherapies for fighting cancer. Treatments for non-small-cell lung cancer and metastatic breast cancer are now in Phase III clinical trials.