Future of Work 100

Excitement and a dose of valuation reality.

While I get to ramble here about theories and ideas, Jason and Jackson spent a chunk of the summer working on the Future of Work 100. There is a robust methodology behind this research, and lot of grind work to gather and analyze the data. Jason goes into some of the details on the Acadian Ventures blog. And the press release is here.

The AI related excitement levels in our space are sky high. Almost all the vendors we see are doing something with “AI” in some cases it is deep, in others it is shallow. But like it or not, AI is dominating the roadmap conversation. It’s an exciting time to be building and investing. There is a lot of marketchitecture, and quite a bit of nonsense, but real use cases are here, and customers are deploying them. Navigating the hype will get harder before it gets easier.

We want the valuations to be as realistic as possible. These aren’t public companies, so we don’t have public market data to go on. But rather than just basing it on what we can find about last round valuations and self reported numbers.

This year, we amended our methodology to include publicly available secondary market data.  We believe secondary market data is best representative of the current private company valuations and is in closer alignment with public company peers.

The result is a dramatic change in the number of unicorn companies, the total aggregate valuation, and the revenue multiples achieved by the companies on the list.  

The numbers are as of 30th June 2024.

If you are an investor, founder, worktech buyer, analyst, academic or simply interested in the space, spend some time with the research, and we would love to hear back from you. We spend most of our waking time learning about the place where work meets tech.

Congratulations to all the companies on the list.

Jason will be at HR Tech in Vegas this week, and in October I’ll be at Unleash. We are both braving November in Helsinki to attend Slush. I’m not doing the the Octoberfest this year….