Unicorn Builders

HighLevel is the second largest CRM by users on the planet — behind only Salesforce — with 2,000 employees and millions of customers worldwide. They got there without venture capital, without an enterprise sales motion, and without ever running an unprofitable growth model. When HighLevel eventually took outside capital, it was two rounds of PE at minority positions — because they didn't need...

Backstory AI — formerly People AI — is building what CEO & Board Member Jason Ambrose calls the "revenue reasoning layer." Even with full CRM visibility, leaders still go ask a person, that person comes back with an answer, and there are ten more questions about how they got it. That trust gap hasn't been solved by RevTech. In this episode, Ambrose walks through the full reset —...

Peregrine Technologies unifies fragmented government data systems into a single, current, complete data asset — then gives agencies the tools to build operational workflows on top of it. In a recent episode of Unicorn Builders, we sat down with Ben Rudolph , Co-Founder of Peregrine , to learn how the company spent its first six months embedded inside a police department before writing a line of pr...

Oyster is a global employment platform built on one core premise: make hiring across borders as easy as hiring locally. Rather than racing competitors toward all-in-one HR stacks, Oyster stayed deliberately narrow — owning the cross-border employment use case in a $30 billion market. In this episode of Unicorn Builders, founder Tony Jamous and newly appointed CEO Hadi Moussa walk through one of th...

Illumio is the cybersecurity company that bet on a thesis the market wasn't ready for: stopping bad actors from getting in is necessary, but no longer sufficient. The real problem is what happens after they're already inside. Founded on that conviction, Illumio spent nearly a decade building, selling, and evangelizing without a Gartner Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Wave to validate the category —...

Henry Schuck built DiscoverOrg on a $25,000 credit card in Columbus, Ohio, bootstrapped to $30M ARR before taking venture capital, acquired ZoomInfo in 2019, and took the combined company public in June 2020. In this episode, Henry shares the exact sequencing decisions — niche selection, customer-funded data expansion, competitor conquest motions — that compounded into a defensible business, and m...

Kin is reimagining how homeowners insurance is bought, priced, and delivered — stripping out the 400,000-agent distribution layer that legacy carriers depend on and replacing it with algorithms, aerial imagery, and address-level direct response marketing. In a recent episode of Unicorn Builders, we sat down with Sean Harper , CEO and Co-Founder of Kin , to learn how he navigated a near-death finan...

Chapter is building what CEO Cobi Gantz calls "the trust layer between seniors and AI" in Medicare navigation. After testifying before the Senate and helping pass regulations protecting seniors from data resale to cold-callers, Gantz scaled Chapter by abandoning direct-to-consumer advertising for enterprise partnerships with health systems, wealth managers, and content creators like Dave...

Eve reached unicorn valuation by identifying a structural market asymmetry: plaintiff attorneys operate on contingency fees with severe resource constraints while defending against well-funded corporate legal teams billing by the hour. In a recent episode of Unicorn Builders, we sat down with Jayanth Madheswaran , Founder & CEO of Eve , to explore how the company scaled from 13 to 120+ employe...

StackAdapt scaled from three co-founders in a studio apartment kitchen to a 1,600-person organization operating across 20 markets. In this episode of BUILDERS, Vitaly Pecherskiy , CEO and Co-Founder of StackAdapt , walks through the reality of building a programmatic advertising platform over ten years—including a payroll crisis that came down to emergency collections, the four-year grind from lau...

Zocdoc has transformed healthcare access in America, powering one in three new doctor-patient relationships in New York City alone. Founded 18 years ago by physician Oliver Kharraz , the company nearly died 10 years in when it was growing just 1% annually and losing money on every customer. The pivot from subscription to pay-per-booking required raising prices 10-100x for existing customers, chang...

Augment Code is pioneering AI tooling for professional software developers in enterprise environments. The company has built infrastructure that understands complex codebases better than individual developers, targeting a massive market undergoing fundamental transformation. In this episode of Unicorn Builders, I sat down with Matt McClernan , CEO of Augment Code, who joined as CRO in November 202...

Fireflies.ai reached unicorn status through a tender offer in 2024 — without raising primary capital since their Series A five years earlier. The company serves 700,000 organizations and reaches tens of millions of users monthly through meeting bot distribution. In this episode of Unicorn Builders, I sat down with Krish Ramineni , Co-founder & CEO of Fireflies.ai, to explore how the company re...

Octane Lending operates in what most VCs would consider an "unfundable" market - powersports financing for motorcycles, ATVs, and UTVs. Yet Jason Guss and his team have built a profitable unicorn that originated over $6.5 billion since inception, is on pace for $2.2 billion in originations this year, and generated $400+ million in revenue with $29 million in GAAP net income. In this episode of Uni...

Florian Douetteau founded Dataiku in 2013 with a contrarian thesis: enterprise AI transformation must come from business operators, not centralized data science teams. While Silicon Valley built for tech companies, Dataiku built the translation layer between fragmented IT infrastructure and the business users who understand actual enterprise processes. With over $850 million raised, $350 million i...

Intersect is solving AI's fundamental constraint: gigawatt-scale power delivered outside traditional grid infrastructure. The company builds behind-the-meter renewable and gas generation paired directly with data centers in locations like West Texas, bypassing the Balkanized regulatory system that makes grid expansion nearly impossible. Currently constructing $9 billion in assets across multiple s...

Cart.com achieved unicorn status in less than three years by pioneering a radically different approach to building a commerce enablement company. Rather than starting from scratch, founder Omair Tariq began with strategic acquisitions - nine companies in the first 14 months - to rapidly assemble the technological and operational infrastructure needed to help mid-market brands sell across multiple...

ClickUp is redefining workplace productivity by converging multiple software categories into one flexible platform. With over $400 million raised and a valuation exceeding $4 billion, ClickUp has grown from a bootstrapped internal tool to serving millions of users globally. In this episode of Unicorn Builders, I sat down with Zeb Evans , Founder & CEO of ClickUp , to explore the company's unco...

Intercom is a pioneer in customer communication platforms, with $241 million in funding and serving thousands of customers worldwide. After 15 years of building horizontal messaging tools, the company made a dramatic strategic pivot in 2022 to focus entirely on AI-powered customer support. In this recent episode of Unicorn Builders, we sat down with Des Traynor , Co-Founder of Intercom , to learn...

Huntress has transformed from a scrappy startup to a cybersecurity powerhouse, approaching $200M ARR while protecting over 175,000 businesses. In this return appearance on Unicorn Builders, Kyle Hanslovan , CEO & Co-Founder of Huntress , shares the brutal realities of scaling from 200 to 550 employees, the costly mistakes that nearly derailed their growth, and the unconventional strategies tha...

Upgrade is revolutionizing consumer financial services through their multi-product platform that helps customers improve their credit while saving money. With over 7 million customers, Upgrade has scaled rapidly since its founding in 2017. In this episode of Unicorn Builders, we sat down with Renaud Laplanche , Co-founder and CEO of Upgrade , to discuss how he built his second fintech unicorn afte...

NinjaOne has emerged as a dominant force in IT endpoint management, recently raising $500 million and positioning itself to become one of the largest IT software companies globally. The company serves two distinct buyer personas: internal IT departments at companies with 100-100,000 endpoints, and managed service providers (MSPs) who act as outsourced IT departments for SMBs. In this episode of Un...

Pilot has transformed how startups and SMBs handle their financial back office operations, combining technology with human expertise to deliver end-to-end accounting and tax services. As a tech-enabled services company serving thousands of businesses, Pilot represents a new category of back office automation that goes beyond traditional software solutions. In this episode of Category Visionaries,...

Gusto has taken a radically different approach to B2B software for small businesses. While most companies serving SMBs treat them as a stepping stone to enterprise markets, Gusto has made small businesses their forever home. Founded in 2012 as ZenPayroll, the company now serves over 400,000 customers with a valuation exceeding $9 billion. In this episode of Unicorn Builders, Tomer London , Co-foun...

Metropolis is transforming the century-old parking industry through AI-powered computer vision technology and an aggressive acquisition strategy. With over $2 billion in funding, the company has become the largest parking operator in the United States, serving over 4,600 locations across 400+ cities and processing millions of transactions daily. In this episode of Unicorn Builders, Alex Israel , C...