Top 10 Tech Companies Of 2012

14 January 2013

2012 hosted many tech companies accomplishing impressive milestones. Being an entrepreneur who co-founded RockThePost, the crowdfunding platform for small businesses and entrepreneurs, I am deeply embedded in the tech scene. There were several companies that stood out and made headlines that I would like to highlight. Below is a list of the tech companies that, from my humble opinion, deserve to be in the “hall of fame” of 2012. The list is based on exits, valuations by A+++ investors and rapid growth.

The popular photo sharing app had one of the best exits this year. The company got acquired by Facebook for approximately $1billion in cash and stock. The company set download records when it was released to the Android market with over 100 million loyal users by September 2012. With no marketing budget, Instagram relied on its fans to spread the word.

The company was created and launched in October 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. By December 2010, Instagram had 1 million registered users. In June 2011 Instagram announced it had 5 million users and it passed ten million in September of the same year.

On December 17, 2012 Instagram announced a change to its terms of use that caused a widespread outcry from its user base. After one day, Instagram apologized saying that it would remove the controversial language from its terms of use.

Airbnb

The website lets people with extra space rent it out to travelers. The company has a simple pricing model where Airbnb takes a 6% to 12% fee from the guest and a 3% fee from the host.

The site was founded in August 2008 by Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. In July 2012, the company had over 200,000 listings in more than 26,000 cities and present in 192 countries with over 1,000,000 hosts and travellers on its platform.

Moreover, this year the company was rumored to have valuations of over $2.5 billion when news of Peter Thiel potentially becoming an investor hit the street.

Github

GitHub is a social coding startup that lets developers share code and offering hosting for projects. GitHub offers both paid plans for private repositories, and free accounts for open source projects.

GitHub Inc. was founded in 2008 and is based in San Francisco, California. During the first year that GitHub was online, it accumulated 46,000 public repositories, 17,000 of them in the previous month alone. At that time, about 6,200 repositories had been forked at least once and 4,600 merged. On 19 December 2012, GitHub announced it had over 2.8 million users hosting over 4.6 million repositories

Andreessen Horowitz, believed in the concept so much that it made its largest-ever investment in the company. The company has over 2 million users that have used its service and over $99 million in venture funding.

Fab.Com

This online retail site handpicks its merchandise, letting shoppers look for items that are a little more unique than mass-market stores. It is the world’s fastest growing e-commerce site, having grown from 175,000 members at launch in June 2011, to over 10 million as of December 2012.

Fab was founded in February 2010 by CEO Jason Goldberg (formerly of XING AG, socialmedian, and Jobster) and Chief Design Officer Bradford Shellhammer. The site was originally created as a social network before pivoting on June 9, 2011 into its current model of daily design inspirations and sales

This year the company was able to raise over $100 million in venture funding.

Square, Inc

Square allows individuals and businesses to accept credit card payments on mobile phones, by using either a plug-in device or entering the card’s details on the phone. Square charges a fee of 2.75% on every credit card transaction.