To put together this list we started with our list of 4,500 marketplaces and filtered to those that had at least $100m in revenue or $300m in funding (which was actually 105 companies). We were able to find revenue data for 85 of them and funding data for 89 of them.
We determined their scaling and seeding strategies by studying interviews with early members of the teams or investors, stalking people’s LinkedIn profiles, and making educated guessing based on how similar companies had seeded or scaled. If you find mistakes or think I got something wrong, please send me a note (marketplaces at elichait.com) or leave a comment here so I can fix them.
Note: This is ranked by the “Score” column which takes the greater of funding or revenue. The goal of filtering down to the top 100 marketplace was to get a sample of successful marketplaces that we could study in more detail than the list of 4,500. The revenue data is not accurate enough to use this to rank the marketplaces, but we think it is directionally correct such that it can be used to compare strategies.
Eli Chait 